Legal Education Reform

[no_hypocrisy]

American legal education is in crisis. The economic downturn has left many recent law graduates saddled with crushing student loans and bleak job prospects. The law schools have been targets of lawsuits by students and scrutiny from the United States Senate for alleged false advertising about potential jobs. Yet, at the same time, more and more Americans find that they cannot afford any kind of legal help.

Addressing these issues requires changing legal education and how the profession sees its responsibility to serve the public interest as well as clients. Some schools are moving in promising directions. The majority are still stuck in an outdated instructional and business model.

The problems are not new. In 2007, a report by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching explained that law schools have contributed heavily to this crisis by giving “only casual attention to teaching students how to use legal thinking in the complexity of actual law practice.”

-more-

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/opinion/legal-education-reform.html?_r=1&hp


During a class of Legal History my last semester at New York Law School decades ago, our professor started a discussion about the utility of law school. Responses ranged from the noble opinion of cultivation of superlative legal minds that would serve society to the pragmatic hope that one could earn a living. Feeling I had nothing to lose with the truth, I maintained that my six semesters had done little more than prepare me to pass the bar exam -- if that.

The professor sputtered a response along the lines that he hoped the school had been able to provide more than that. I held my line and I still do.

I graduated, passed at least one state bar and had to figure out the rest more or less by myself. Jay G. Foonberg's How to Start & Build A Law Practice is a good trade book to give new graduates a foundation. But essentially until you have the experience doing something (drafting a motion that will survive a challenge by your adversary, arguing in court, submitting evidence that stands up to an objection, formulating a strategy), you have to guess. In Law, you have precious little luxury for guessing with the spectre of malpractice haunting your every decision. One mistake that any other "reasonably prudent attorney" wouldn't have made and you're more or less done.

I spent more years than I'd like to admit working as a paralegal, legal assistant, secretary at law firms to apprentice, to learn how to be a lawyer. To be an associate, someone would have to make a phonecall on my behalf to get me into a firm.

I don't regret my training at New York Law School. I kept all my heavy casebooks of Torts, Constitutional Law, Corporations, Environmental Law, the notebooks, the outlines. I still want to be an attorney. I just wish there was an equivalent program like medicine where you are given practical and vocational opportunties like a legal intern and resident before being set into the legal community.

[former9thward]

1. Law school does a very poor job of preparing students.

Of course we have at least twice as many schools as are necessary to fill available jobs. And those jobs continue to shrink as things like doc review is outsourced to India, paralegals do more and there is an ever expanding DIY legal services online. The ABA hs ben very negligent in continuing to accredit new law schools.

I also wonder where law schools get their employment statistics that they tout to prospective students. I graduated from a 'top 50' law school three years ago and I have never been contacted by the school to ask my employment status. I don't know of any other graduate who has heard from them either.