Richmond Law lists tuition at $49,800 per year, $149,400 over three years, about $209,400 once living costs are added. That is the sticker, and at this tier the sticker is unusually negotiable: schools in this band compete hard on price for above-median credentials, which makes your LSAT score the single biggest variable in what you will actually pay.
Line itemFigureNoteAnnual tuition$49,800The pre-leverage numberThree-year tuition$149,400Three years, undiscountedLiving expenses~$20,000 / yrRichmond, VirginiaThree-year cost of attendance~$209,400Total before aidMerit money opensLSAT 157+Where awards begin
Less than the table says, if you bring leverage: merit awards open above an LSAT of 157 and scale from there, and they routinely cut the real cost well under the published figure. Sticker is what the unleveraged pay, treat it as a starting quote.
Strip the sentiment and the mechanism is plain: rankings are built on medians, medians are bought one admit at a time, and Richmond Law’s discount budget is the purchasing instrument. Awards therefore behave like prices, set above the median, escalating with distance from it, and revisable when a documented competitor bids. Treat the process accordingly: numbers in writing, deadlines respected, sentiment omitted.
Withheld Tip: sequence matters more than persistence. The largest allocations go to the early pool, apply by November 1, but your negotiating position is set by the offers you hold when awards are decided. Build the peer-school applications first, so the competing numbers exist before the school prices you, not after.
Model it before you sign anything: scholarship-adjusted annual cost is $49,800 minus your award, plus roughly $20,000 in living expenses, times three, plus interest accruing from day one. Set that figure against the incomes the degree actually produces: regional firms ($65 to 130K), government ($55 to 90K), and BigLaw ($215K) for the slice of any class that lands it. At sticker, this degree costs about 2.1 years of a regional first-year salary, the single most clarifying ratio in the decision. Running this arithmetic after choosing a school is not financial planning, it is accounting for a decision already made.
One non-negotiable: never model on the assumption you will be the BigLaw outcome. Model on the middle of the distribution and let BigLaw be the upside case. Public-interest paths get their own check, verify the school’s current LRAP terms before relying on them, because loan-repayment assistance is a program detail, not a promise.
The published rate is $49,800; the realistic annual budget is closer to $70,000 with living expenses. What you pay depends on the award that open above an LSAT of 157, which is to say, mostly on your LSAT.
Merit aid at this tier is negotiation-responsive, particularly to written competing offers from peer schools. The negotiation is standard practice, not an imposition, aid offices expect it from leveraged applicants.
At sticker, only for specific career paths; at a strong discount, the math changes completely. The honest answer depends on your award and your target market, run the debt model above, then read the school’s employment outcomes alongside it.
Treat tuition as the output of a process you control, not a fact you absorb. The applicants who pay least are not the luckiest, they are the ones who built leverage on purpose: a score above the median, peer offers in hand, and a November application. Price is the last thing the LSAT buys you, and it is usually the biggest.