Law schools are graduate-level academic institutions, not technical schools.  The J.D. exists to prepare scholars for an academic career, and the third year is crucial for that.  If law firms want to hire associates with less formal education, then they can have their state Bars return to the apprenticeship system.

Actually one of the dumbest things about the third year is they don’t prep you for the bar exam, despite being paid tens of thousands of dollars every year in tuition. Most students end up paying to take a separate bar review course.

I suspect this is pure corruption—the bar review courses hire law school professors and pay schools to rent facilities and sponsor events.

BABH:

Actually, it’s the opposite. Law schools are vocational schools. If academics want to teach people to be academics, let’s take away their role in certifying lawyers and see how many law professors lose their jobs.

Dilan:

But it is the legal profession itself that grants licensing power to law schools.  The profession can take that power away if it wants to, by allowing alternate routes to the Bar.  On the whole, it doesn’t seem to want to. 

If you ask me, Bar Associations, law reviews, and legal blogs are a better place for this debate than the New York Times.

The story is dead on, and first year associates really are just highly-expensive trainees… but it doesn’t have to be that way. I’m a patent attorney, and my field is a bit different - law firms hire people before they graduate law school (or even before they attend law school) as patent agents and technical specialists. For about half to two thirds of the cost of a first year associate, a first year patent agent or tech spec gets the same training, and does the same work, saving money for both the law firm and the clients. We end up ahead, too - I just passed the bar, and I’m a third year associate at my firm.

The same could be done in other areas of the law, but for two problems: many top schools lack evening programs or split-semester co-op programs, and many firms look with disdain on hiring associates who were previously paralegals… even in the same firm.
It’s more about snobbery than anything else - paralegals are “support staff”, while associates are “professionals”, and we can’t have the former climbing above their station now, can we? There’s some misogyny, too - most paralegals are women while most attorneys are men.

But again, it doesn’t have to be that way… technical specialists/patent agents are considered junior-junior lawyers. If paralegals were thought of in the same way, then it would be an obvious starting point for a career, rather than a pink collar dead end.

Instead, what do we actually see in the marketplace?  Firms place value on *more* formal education, by placing a premium on LLMs, and even paying junior associates to get an LLM.

Clinics aren’t the answer - they focus too much on litigation, and what fraction of lawyers (let alone junior lawyers) actually ever sees the inside of a court room?  Certificate programs are better, as they give students a head start on the specialization process.

Very few firms care about LLM’s actually. The vast majority of highly paid lawyers don’t have them. Clerkships are much more important.

And yes, I want this debate in the New York Times. These schools, including private ones, get huge public subsidies. The public has the right to insist that its money is not wasted teaching law as an academic discipline to people who just want to be lawyers.

BABH - then have a third-year program for people who want to go into academia.  We produce 45,000 JDs each year, and as of 2008, there were just over 17,000 professors nationwide: http://www.nationaljurist.com/content/law-school-faculties-40-larger-10-years-ago There. are obviously far fewer openings than that each year.

If we’re having a mandatory third year of law school so that a few hundred students out of each year’s crop of graduates can eventually become professors, that would seem to be a tremendous waste of resources.

And yes, I want this debate in the New York Times. These schools, including private ones, get huge public subsidies.

Gee, I wonder if the Chinese subsidise training lawyers more than they do engineers?...

The third year of law school could be useful, if it focused on practical training, in which students worked on real-world or realistic scenarios that involved drafting motions and responses, advising clients, learning the mechanics of introducing evidence in court, reading and evaluating contracts, etc.  The best class I ever took was called Practical Trial Evidence, and literally, all we did was write motions advocating for or against the introduction of evidence and then actually introducing that evidence in a courtlike setting.  Legal clinics or pro bono projects are likewise useful, but not required. 

Students who intended to go into academia could take relevant classes, but students who intended to practice could take classes that actually taught them about practicing law.  I agree—legal research and writing is taken in the first year, but not treated as serious or important.  I think there should be a legal research and writing requirement every year, since 90 percent of what most attorneys do is research and write about the law. 

And LLMs are actually not all that valued except in specialized fields, like tax.  Most practicing lawyers don’t bother to get one.  A federal appellate clerkship is far more valuable (and useful, frankly).  Most students go to law school to become practicing lawyers; only a few go to become academics.  A split-track third year would seem to be the best way to address that.

Best thing I learned in 3rd year was something they should have told us on day one of the first year ... that the first thing you should do when reading a case is ask yourself, “Why is this in the book?”

Best book I read that year was, “How To Go Directly Into Solo Practice Without Missing A Meal.”

Best thing I did after decades of legal and pre-legal education and actual practice after passing the bar was to buy a bar and quit practicing.

This is true of a lot professional degrees.  People with PhDs go on to teach but never have a single class in pedagogy or even how to give a lecture.  MBAs learn a lot about manipulating spreadsheets and nothing about actually producing any product or managing people who do.  They don’t learn basic skills like how to write a memo or how to run a meeting.

A lot of degrees have become a credential that must be presented to enter a field but does nothing to measure ability or training or expertise.

BABH: “The J.D. exists to prepare scholars for an academic career…”  Really?  That would be news to me and pretty much all my law school classmates.  And while I agree that this is a debate that Bar Associations, law reviews, and legal blogs should have, why exactly can’t the New York Times chime in as well?

As for my law school experience, I went to Northeastern, where as 2Ls and 3Ls, all students spend half the year in classes and half the year in full-time internships.  There are certainly drawbacks to that system, but it does provide more opportunity to learn the practicalities of being a lawyer.

There are certainly drawbacks to that system

Such as?

“The J.D. exists to prepare scholars for an academic career…”  Really?  That would be news to me and pretty much all my law school classmates.

Well, a lot of Ph.D.‘s work outside of academia too, but the purpose of academic degrees is scholarship.  The fact that State Bar Associations have made the J.D. a requirement for admission to the Bar doesn’t change that.  I’m sure that practical legal education can be improved, but that’s not really the central concern of research universities.  I support efforts to open up Bar membership to a wider range of people, including people without a J.D. (though some minimum competence controls are of course necessary).

Jesse wrote: If we’re having a mandatory third year of law school so that a few hundred students out of each year’s crop of graduates can eventually become professors, that would seem to be a tremendous waste of resources.

There’s no law that says you have to have a J.D. to practice law.  Better (and easier) to change Bar admission standards than to change academic standards.  I think it would be a fine thing if aspiring lawyers could sit for the Bar after 2L, or after some time (2-5 years?) as a paralegal or apprentice.  Most 3Ls, as you note, are just treading water.

I really know absolutely nothing about law school, but it sounds like you don’t have any internships.

I have an undergrad degree in engineering, and my school program was set up to give me 3 six-month internships.  It really helped me to learn the basics and also gave me a chance to decide if it was the right career choice before it was too late to change.

I guess law firms have interns, but from what I know (admittedly very little), it’s at the undergrad level and they do very little actual law work.  And internship won’t be very helpful if you’re just making coffee and making sure the printer has paper in it.

There’s no law that says you have to have a J.D. to practice law.

I’m curious what you think bar admission standards you want to change are.

I’m curious what you think bar admission standards you want to change are.

I was punning.  Yes, the rules of court are, in a sense, law.  But they are not immutable laws of nature.

Theaetetus @14: “Such as?”

One drawback is lack of continuity.  It can be rough to switch from an internship to classes and back again every three months.  In particular, it’s more difficult to take part in extracurricular activities, particularly in a leadership role, when you’re away from school half the time.

Another drawback is that it’s simply more difficult to find employment when your school runs on a very different model.  Employers in the Boston area, who are used to dealing with Northeastern students, are fairly understanding.  But if you apply to a firm in some other city, you’re going to have to explain things like, “No, I wasn’t on law review.  No, it’s not because I’m stupid.  It’s because my school barely even has a law review, because all the 2Ls and 3Ls who would be running it are only in school for half the time.”

To me, those drawbacks are well worth it, but they’re drawbacks nonetheless.

And Fern points out one of the true difficulties in making any real change to the law school model: employers look for a certain set of criteria in evaluating candidates, and except for maybe the the top ten (and really only the top three) schools in the country, any deviation from that criteria makes your school and, by extension, its students look like a giant risk.

It’s interesting reading the comments.  I went to a third tier law school at night when I was 38.  When I got out I worked odd jobs and took whatever cases I could get.  Within 6 months I spent 40 hours preparing and trying my first case, an appeal into district court from small claims court.  I remember when I made my first objection thinking that I’d only ever seen it done on television.  What an adventure.  Within the first couple years I’d tried small cases in everything from divorce to contracts to property damage to a commercial lease dispute.  Much of the time I was just watching what the other attorneys were doing and improvising on the fly.  As I was older, it was a bit easier to fake it.  I cried in my car when I lost my first jury trial.

To this day, I’m better at figuring out how to prepare a trial brief and get my case together than I am at drafting stipulations or findings of fact.

Law schools are graduate-level academic institutions, not technical schools.  The J.D. exists to prepare scholars for an academic career

Great. Make it an academic graduate program funded by RA and TA fellowships that pay the students stipends and have the students produce original scholarship under the supervision of a mentor, like a Ph.D., then, if that’s the case.

@Tyro: If I were Dean of All Universities, I would do just that.

I would basically make it a trade school with practical training, and have a separate graduate degree in legal theory run out of a separate school for the academic trainees. Because I think law professors will never teach nuts and bolts unless we force them to.

Law school is a joke, and has zero to do with practicing law, unless you are gonna be an appellate brief-writing attorney. It exists for two reasons: (1) to provide financial support for the mental masturbation of law professors and (2) to serve as an expensive weed-out process for law-firm sucke-asses.

The standard law school trope is 1st year they scare you to death, 2nd year they work you to death and 3rd year they bore you to death. Luckily I attended a school with excellent clinical opportunities (Georgetown) and took full advantage—11 years out and I still tell people I learned how to be a trial lawyer in clinic. Several schools also offer extended full-time externships for credit. I’ve hosted a few such students and they get hands-on experience, caseload and all, in the type of law my office practices.  There’s also the scramble for summer internships—for students who look for really challenging experiences (as opposed to a well paid cushy summer associate gig) they are also part of the vocational training.

So it is possible to get real hands-on experience as a law student, if you know where to look.

I feel a rant coming on. Law school is a crock and I agree: There is no practical reason whatsoever that a JD needs to be a 3-year program.* It would be far more efficient to study law at the undergraduate level and go straight into the practice of law. Three more years of school are just ... expensive. The setup keeps you out of the job market for that much longer. The field is in need of drastic reform.

My first-year torts professor summed up one of the main problems very well right before our first semester finals: “It has been a pleasure teaching you, you’ve been a great class. Enjoy this time because it’s the last time you will be on equal footing. After this you will be ranked and set on different paths.”  I was deep in denial and angry, because it turns out that it’s true. If you don’t excel on your first-year law exams it will haunt you for the rest of your career. Trust me, I’m six years out and I know.  The elite students get their obscenely high paying job offers after their second summer and the rest of us are SOL. No one tells you how useful clinics are—you just have to luck out and stumble into doing one. Your career path is largely (OK, not entirely, but largely) determined on a series of three-hour final exams in your first year. And no midterms, no other feedback, maybe practice tests if you’re lucky.

1L year you’re in a huge section (50-100 students) and your professors will just treat you like a moron if you seek them out for clarification on new concepts. Second and third year you can at least take clinics and seminars which get you more hands-on mentoring. 1L exams, while marginally helpful for giving you a feel for what the bar exam will be like, are absolutely unlike anything you will ever do as a practicing attorney (as is the bar exam).

*For that matter, it should NOT be treated as a graduate-level degree. It made more sense when a law degree was an LLB rather than a JD. A cousin of mine is a newly minted lawyer and inwardly I cringed every time I heard her mother brag about how my cousin was getting a doctorate in law.

It would be far more efficient to study law at the ungraduate level and go straight into the practice of law

As someone who studied law at the ungraduate level in England, I can tell you that that ain’t how we do it.  After your law degree, you have to do a year’s vocational training (called the Legal Practice Course) and then you have to do two years as a Trainee in an actual firm, before you finally qualify.  No exams after the LPC though.  If you don’t do an ungraduate degree in law, you can still be a lawyer by doing a year called a law conversion course (GDL - don’t ask me why), and then the LPC and then the Traineeship.

You simply can’t go straight out of an undergraduate degree, even one in purely law, and straight into practice, is what I’m saying.

PS different processes apply for people who are going to be barristers rather than solicitors, a distinction I know doesn’t apply in the US, but the basic principle is the same - vocational study, followed by practical apprenticeship.

PPS Many jurisdictions have longer processes than this of course, but my single point is you can’t practically go straight from college to practice.

One of my oldest professors at Texas Law in the 90s probably had to take one year of law school, or some kind of apprenticeship program (in the 30s). So I felt three years was kind of a scam, although my debt was about one-fifth of what current graduates are racking up thanks to “tuition deregulation” (i.e. the State of Texas abandoning its share of higher education financing).

But if you’re there, you might as well dick around for the last two years before executing a memory dump and taking the bar exam review course (whose lessons themselves are memory-dumped after you found out you passed).

@ #29 Katherine: Point taken—one shouldn’t go straight into the practice of law from undergrad. That doesn’t solve the problem of untrained lawyers. US jurisdictions would do well to adopt the apprenticeship model you describe. Though according to the NYT article, the law firm they profile seems to be adopting a sort of trainee program for “baby lawyers.”

Libertarian @32: I mostly enjoyed law school too - even 1L year.  I think it helped that I took classes that interested me, rather than focusing on classes that were supposed to help me when I took the bar.

I’m in my late 50s and I recall a lawyer making this exact same point in some junior high school career day presentation (circa 1965)—which suggests that the information gap you describe is a longstanding and widespread source of disappointment among law students.

(Forgive the kibbitzing, but if you don’t feel really prepared to practice law, have you considered politics? [For all we know, this may be why Obama picked the career path that he did.])

I agree with Nutella, this isn’t so different from other professions (excepting medicine where internship is mandatory).  I spent 4 years in school doing accounting problems and after graduation, no one ever asked me to do another one.  My first day in an accounting firm, the partner on the audit asked me to to a “4 column proof of cash.”  When I asked “What’s that?”, he remarked it was something that they should teach in school, but don’t.  So, almost everything about actually doing the work of an accountant was learned in that first year out of school.

Also, there’s quite a discussion going on over at Lawyers Guns and Money questioning the value of a law degree at all and whether law schools are misleading applicants about their future job prospects.  Even if schools taught law practice, it seems there aren’t a lot of jobs for people who don’t graduate from top-tier schools.

  My contracts professor openly boasted to my class that law school teaches you how to be a law school professor rather than how to be a lawyer. There is something of a trick to get around this problem. You take courses with professors that have at least five years of practice as an actual lawyer. These professors tend to make their courses a bit more practical in nature than others but not as much as they should.

    I work as an immigration lawyer, nearly everything I need for my job I learned by doing it on the job rather than in law school, where I didn’t even study immigration law.

    Re Marianne19: The job issue is an interesting one because law schools are operating on the assumption, which is usually correct, that all law school graduates want to work in a high profile corporate firm, as prosecutor, or in a high profile not for profit. However, there are plenty of small to medium level firms in fields like torts, probate, and other less glamorous areas that do need lawyer. The pay and prestiege might be lower but the hours tend to be better.

My great-grandfather became a lawyer in his late 30s after spending a decade or more as a paralegal.  He did not go to a 4 year college, though he took some course-work along the way.  Basically he apprenticed his way into the law.

An apprenticeship with some licensing seems to be a pretty sensible model.  That’s similar to how engineers work.  You get your bachelors degree, get a job and start taking a series of tests.  Pass enough of them and you can sign off on bridge designs or whatever you specialize in.

@21 Jesse:

and except for maybe the the top ten (and really only the top three) schools in the country, any deviation from that criteria makes your school and, by extension, its students look like a giant risk.

That doesn’t sound like a law school problem so much as a law firm problem.  If you can’t get hired because your school approached 3L experimentally, no one will go to your school.  And - kinda like the baseball scouts in Moneyball - if you’ve been successful (or at least not disastrous) as a law firm, there’s little reason to try anything different when your proven-because-no-one-tries-anything-different system continues to make you money.

I should also add that most students with career prospects have an internship or clerkship in their 2L year.  By 3L, many are apprenticed to the firm they’re going to start their careers with.  So this real world training is already sort of happening on-the-side.  It’s just not strictly part of the law school process.

Don’t know much about law school, but I do know that it works this way in many fields; eg, you get your master’s degree in mathematics and then you get your first job, and spend most of the first year learning how to *actually* do it. 

It’s kinda like college is some kind of ... obstacle course ...

Excellent piece. I’ve noticed the Times publishing more pieces regarding some aspect of the higher education scam, specifically with regard to law school in the past year or so, which is a good sign I think, when even enough of the Times readership can no longer bury their heads in the sand about this.

Marianne, the lack of jobs for newly-minted JDs is a separate but probably related problem. Bottom line is that law schools of all calibers have been skewing their graduate employment statistics for years and the ABA requires no independent auditing or verification of any kind. Until the law school scam bloggers really got going, there was no widely-accessible source for the truth, so many, many people got conned into taking on six figures of non-dischargeable debt for a worthless degree.  I have much less sympathy for anyone who enters law school in 2011, with as much information as there is out there about how that’s a bad investment, but it still doesn’t excuse the racket between law schools, private lenders and the government that allows this fraud to continue.

The standard law school trope is 1st year they scare you to death, 2nd year they work you to death and 3rd year they bore you to death. Luckily I attended a school with excellent clinical opportunities (Georgetown) and took full advantage—11 years out and I still tell people I learned how to be a trial lawyer in clinic. Several schools also offer extended full-time externships for credit. I’ve hosted a few such students and they get hands-on experience, caseload and all, in the type of law my office practices.  There’s also the scramble for summer internships—for students who look for really challenging experiences (as opposed to a well paid cushy summer associate gig) they are also part of the vocational training.

So it is possible to get real hands-on experience as a law student, if you know where to look.

This is pretty similar to my experience (I’m in Canada, though, which is, in many ways, different). People who want practical experience get it at my school. The quality of the teachers is generally really good. People complain that many of the courses aren’t all that practical, but there are lots of outdated cases that friends at other schools have to read that we don’t.

I enjoyed law school in a certain way too. But then I’m sort of academic in my interests and didn’t mind all the theory. Basically when I got to 2L and 3L it was all about working on habeas petitions in the clinic and taking elective classes like jurisprudence and genetics and the law and feminist legal theory.

I don’t, however, think that the classes I took in law school, other than the clinic, prepared me either to take the bar exam or to be a lawyer. (I think I would have made a fine law professor though and have published a couple of papers post-matriculation.)

And that’s the problem. You have a trade school run and taught by people who don’t want to admit that it is a trade school. And a legal establishment that lets them get away with it because they just want a process to reduce the supply of new lawyers to keep salaries high.

“You have a trade school run and taught by people who don’t want to admit that it is a trade school.”

Which is really it.  There’s no shame in being a professional vocational school, but most law professors did not practice law, or not for very long, other than judicial clerkships.  The best profs I had were those with extensive actual legal practical experience, because they focused on skills and information you would need when you were actually practicing law.  It’s definitely possible to get practical experience or classroom practice geared towards real-life situations, but it’s not required or even necessarily strongly encouraged.  Summer internships are also really useful (big-law summer associates, less so), although the non-law-firm ones are often unpaid, which makes it a challenge for some students to swing.

The trade school remark really does succinctly illustrate the problem. I do think that some of what is taught in law school, particularly in the first year, is valuable in terms of the “thinking like a lawyer” skill set, and I don’t think that acknowledging that law school IS a trade school means it must be stripped of all academic and theoretical material. Surely there’s a way to throw out the bathwater without the baby. I think some kind of program where the second and third years have a reduced courseload with mandatory internships/apprenticeships, or alternating one semester in the classroom, one in the workplace, etc would be better than what we have now.  Or ditch law as a graduate degree altogether and go the UK route.

I concur that many of the best professors I had were adjuncts or otherwise had spent significant periods of their careers engaged in the practice of law.

The idea of a trade or trade school seems to have become considered dirty in the last half decade. Educational requirements for many careers seem to be moving toward academia, even though they’re arguably there to teach you how to do the job, or to weed out those who can’t. Several of my journalism professors when I was in J-school started their careers straight out of high school and as much as I enjoyed university, it did beg the question of why the hell I was there). Post-secondary education in general really has become an (expensive) obstacle course.

I don’t think anybody would get too upset if somebody said once I don’t think being gay is right.  Better (and easier) to change Bar admission standards than to change academic standards

“You have a trade school run and taught by people who don’t want to admit that it is a trade school.”

It was probably a reason why they dubbed the first law degree a J.D. rather than what it once was….an LL.B or bachelor of laws.  Doesn’t seem that much different when one compares courses taken and the purpose of that degree for the vast majority…to be practicing lawyers.

This issue causes much snark by friends in MD or PhD programs in which part of the requirement is relevant mandated internships(MDs) and/or a thesis demonstrating the ability to conduct independent research to contribute something new to the field. 

With a few exceptions, the J.D./LL.B seems to falter in both of those areas….lack of emphasis on relevant internships unless students/Profs push for them and from perusing through some law journals….including some in the T-5 Law schools….the articles seem to be weaker versions of journal articles written by academics/grad students in the Arts & Sciences.

I’m just skipping in here, but I’ve noticed that we’ve focused on learning alot of rote details that probably won’t be helpful.  Some law does turn on prior cases - that’s the theory anyhow - but much of what we have lawyers do in real life isn’t to decide cases on prior case law but navigate a series of unending changes in procedure.

I also think law schools want to isolate themselves from the changes in actual law, since it’s constant and unending, and force that teaching into an apprentice type system.  But of course, much law isn’t practiced in large partnerships where one can intern - law includes every interaction citizens have with each other and governmental systems and there’s money at stake.

  Jayn Newell at 45: I suspect that the professionalization and academicization of many professions happened as the general level of education increases. If most people stop going to school after junior high school than you can have lots of journalists who only have a high school level education. It helps that there used to be more papers and that a higher percentage of the population read them daily. When most people do graduate from high school and more than few go on to college than, the careers will require more professional training if anything for status reasons.

Lee: I usually term that ‘education creep’. Not that post-secondary doesn’t have its place, but the idea that you need to have at least a bachelor’s to get anywhere has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.

Crissa, I’ve heard that argument before (the whole “law is constantly changing” line) and while that may be true, there’s a lot more to being a lawyer than being some kind of encyclopedia of black-letter law. In fact, a lot of what the bar exam tests is just rote memorization of that and it’s not very relevant to practicing law in the real world either.  I know a lot of the relevant law in my field, but I’m constantly faced with legal questions I don’t know the answer to—that’s what research skills are for. Law schools could teach a lot of the nuts and bolts of various types of practice, or of course, require a system of apprenticeship/internship/etc so that students would emerge with more basic competence.

I think the 3L year can be useful but it depends a lot on the circumstances.  My goal was to be a litigator with a busy trial and appellate practice (which I, in fact, now have).  I used my 3L year to take trial advocacy classes,  participate in a clinic that actually gave me courtroom experience, and to compete on a moot court team.  Other than a theoretical seminar on the Death Penalty, all of my 3L year experiences were directly applicable to my practice and helped me to hit the ground running when I joined a D.A.‘s office after graduation. 

I also think that the two years of more theoretical training before that was useful and necessary.  I draw on my theortetic understanding of torts, contracts, and evidence every day.  Sometimes, constitutional law, criminal law, and property too. 

That said, I can definitely see how people in different areas of practice would have a very different experience.  As someone upthread pointed out, unless you want the opportunity to appear in court before being admitted to the bar, you don’t need a law school clinical program.  You can get the experience and make money in an apprenticeship.  And law school doesn’t offer much practical guidance in writing a will, say, or negotiating a deal.  Or dealing with discovery disputes.

“That said, I can definitely see how people in different areas of practice would have a very different experience.  As someone upthread pointed out, unless you want the opportunity to appear in court before being admitted to the bar, you don’t need a law school clinical program.  You can get the experience and make money in an apprenticeship.  And law school doesn’t offer much practical guidance in writing a will, say, or negotiating a deal.  Or dealing with discovery disputes.”

Actually, my law school was trying (at the time I graduated) to create a clinic in transactional law—advising small businesses on contracts, for example.  We also had clinics in housing/landlord-tenant disputes, immigration matters, appellate law, etc.  A friend of mine did pro bono work that involved drafting wills.  Clinics could be created to address a wide variety of types of law and legal practice in addition to courtroom practice.  To me, it makes sense to offer more clinical options so that students who know they want to practice law can get some supervised experience.  Those who want to go into academia can take classes that focus more on legal theory.

“Bottom line is that law schools of all calibers have been skewing their graduate employment statistics for years and the ABA requires no independent auditing or verification of any kind.”

I can offer my own anecdote about that—I went to a borderline top-50 law school (sometimes it’s in the top 50, sometimes it’s in the top 60) and got a call from career services about 6 months after graduation begging me to report my employment status—ANY employment, even if it was just waiting tables. That way a school can say 90+% of their graduates are employed, even in “nonlegal” professions (the implication to the reasonable outsider would be that you need to be at least *using* your J.D.). I was not a bit surprised at this news: http://www.nationaljurist.com/content/15-law-schools-threatened-lawsuits-over-employment-data.

You can pass the bar exam without taking many of the so-called bar classes during law school (e.g., like in Texas, secured transactions, commercial paper, and oil & gas). All you need is a prep course. Sure, it’s like an ultracondensed extra semester. But why is it that BarBri explained the law of contracts far more effectively in 2-3 days than my Contracts prof did in two semesters? This adds additional support to the proposition that whichever direction we take (shorter duration of required classroom work? required apprenticeships? no longer pretending that a J.D. is on par with a doctorate? offering a true legal theory degree?), legal education needs to be razed and rebuilt.

And law school doesn’t offer much practical guidance in writing a will, say, or negotiating a deal.

Regarding negotiating deals….I was shocked at how in several cases at a firm I worked for… attorneys on one or both sides of a given negotiation never learned or ignored one cardinal rule in any negotiation: Always start as far away(high/low) from the amount/terms you and your client could actually accept as possible without going so overboard the other party feels you’re not serious and thus, breaks negotiations. 

Far too many either start at or too close to the actual final acceptable amount(Especially common with new attorneys) or give such outrageously high or low starting points that the other party walks out even when the proposing actually wanted to negotiate a settlement of some kind. 

Wondering if the mandate for all law students to practice bargaining on CL deals and/or stores/shops where you can bargain down the price to start get some basic real life negotiating practice would help?

Jayn Newell at 50: The problem is that education creep might be inevitable. Its clearly advantageous that everybody at least finishes high school or at least something equivalent to high school. Its been that way since right after WWII. However, when its clearly advantageous that everybody graduate high school than the value of higher degrees naturally diminishes. When most people only had a junior high school education than it hiring journalists right out of high school made sense, especially since you could start most of them on really local issues and work them up to international war correspondent or reserve the more glamorous posts for the more educated journalists. This sort of journalism doesn’t exist anymore. Not even online.

growlygirl, I went to a T15 and still didn’t understand a damn thing about contracts until Bar/Bri!  I also have never once been asked by my law school one single fact about my post-law school employment. I have also never worked in biglaw. Some of my friends who have been in biglaw were sent surveys at one point or another.  I cannot imagine this is a coincidence. Completely agreed on the razing/rebuilding thing.

exholt, not surprising at all. There should be a CL haggling course in all undergraduate programs, for that matter—talk about real-life skills!  That said, I’m continually *headdesk* at how many successful attorneys I know who can’t negotiate numbers for shit. I know a biglaw partner who bought a used car for sticker price after they told her “we don’t negotiate.”  It hurts my brain.

Lee: I know what you mean, and it’s a rather depressing thought. It wouldn’t be so bad if that education actually gave you job skills, but if you’re learning most of them on the job anyways, then the education is truly pointless. I’m sure any job has its theory aspects that are better learned in a school setting than on-the-job, but there doesn’t seem to be much effort put into getting from theory to practice.

I suspect the current economic climate is only going to make things worse.  With so many people out of work, those that can often take this time to go back to school to try and be in a better position once things are back on the upswing.

The J.D. exists to prepare scholars for an academic career

You really believe that the point of law schools is to turn out law professors?

It’s certainly true that the top-ranked law schools see their job as producing law professors, judges and Supreme Court clerks, rather than people who will actually practice law, but that’s a far cry from pretending that a J.D. is only meant to lead to a scholarly career.

Also totally not following the argument that clinic practice is useless because it’s litigation. Any clinic practice is going to require rather a lot of paperwork. The US doesn’t split into barristers and solicitors.

ayn Newell at 50: The problem is that education creep might be inevitable. Its clearly advantageous that everybody at least finishes high school or at least something equivalent to high school. Its been that way since right after WWII. However, when its clearly advantageous that everybody graduate high school than the value of higher degrees naturally diminishes.

There’s also the factor that a high school diploma is no longer a guarantee its owner is functionally literate, much less reasonably educated due to the widespread variance in the quality of US K-12 education.*  Moreover, this problem affects everyone…even graduates who end up at highly respectable colleges.  A reason why even elite colleges have remedial programs.  This problem is also not limited to the public schools….there are plenty of private schools which do not provide a complete well-rounded education for college…or life period. 

One older college classmate who graduated from a respectable private school on the East Coast was able to graduate without having to take anything more than 2 years worth of joke science courses with no labs, inadequate writing skills, and a pathetically weak grasp of US history.  And this from a school charging tuition only slightly less than many elite private colleges. 

* Due to widespread neglect of US K-12 education, reduction in academic standards for political/other reasons, etc.  Unfortunately, this has a spillover effect in colleges.  Sometimes to the point that some employers/older Profs feel the same way about BA/BS degrees.

Speaking as a non-lawyer (in Canada), I find it amusing all the times I’m required to get a legal opinion for things that I know our corporate lawyers can provide absolutely zero useful input on. In my particular case, it’s land use contracts I deal with, and after 14 years, I know how the ones we work with work inside and out. The lawyers I do respect are the ones who’ve worked in the field for decades but what they’re bringing to the table isn’t any actual legal knowledge but the practical experience of having dealt with a somewhat similar situation for someone else a while back.

And having been in drafting sessions with assorted lawyers, it’s very rarely about the law with what we’re working on but about grammar.

As a professional myself (albeit a scientist), I understand the logic in having something act as a filter so that you have some assurance a person calling themselves a professional anything have at least some level of knowledge and competence, but it annoys me that, as I said, someone new to our legal group fresh of the bar exam and law school can somehow approve something that I can guarantee they know absolutely nothing about. Or that my opinion of a situation, based on my practical experience, means nothing unless I can get someone with an LLB after their name to replace my signature with theirs, knowing they can contribute nothing useful but the signature.

If lawyers actually did a proper apprenticeship program, I’d probably think law school was more useful.

Speaking of “inadequate writing skills,” legal research and writing simply are not valued at elite law schools: the class is usually pass/fail. Correct me if I’m wrong. And after 1L year (at any type of law school) you can just about get away with never taking a single additional legal research and writing legal education class (except either a required seminar or law journal paper). To its credit, my legal alma mater now requires one practical skills class as a requirement for graduation, and it looks like they have a lot of options now.

  growlygirl at 62: I did not go to an elite law school but this is basically correct, the top law school tends to be pass or fail. Or more accurately, the students learn whether they passed or failed the class. The professors still grade them but never tell them their grades. Louis D. Brandeis was and still is Haravar Law School’s best student and he basically graduate with a D average. Law school grades are very artifical because its done on a curve and your grades are based on how your fellow students do as well, not just how well you do.

“Gee, I wonder if the Chinese subsidise training lawyers more than they do engineers?...”

I always wonder what is meant by these sorts of comments?  I think the answer is no, but…  One reason is China doesn’t have a functioning legal system.  It’s a communist dictatorship. 

There are costs associated with our advocacy system, and I get that people don’t like lawyers much, but I always find it weird that people just accept as given that they get to live in a system where there are oodles of highly-trained officers of the court running around doing things according to the law.  In fact it’s an unimaginable luxury, both globally and historically, and we should guard it jealously.

Speaking of “inadequate writing skills,” legal research and writing simply are not valued at elite law schools: the class is usually pass/fail.

From what I’ve heard from the attorney friends and former colleagues, this depends on the school…even within the elite T-14.  Some offer legal research and writing pass/fail….some offer it for a grade. 

More importantly, its pass/fail basis is not necessarily an indication of its lack of value. 

My LAC used to allow students to Pass/Fail all of their courses if they so chose in an effort to encourage students to get outside their comfort zone when fulfilling distribution requirements(a.k.a. 9-9-9 which has existed long before Herman Cain started his campaign) or taking any other major/minor/elective courses.*  One of the great things about this was it encouraged more classmates to do more interesting/risky major/minor combinations such as double-majoring in violin and biology, poli-sci and chem, Neuroscience and East Asian Studies, etc.  One negative effect of my LAC’s severe curtailing of the once generous Pass/Fail policy according to recent graduates is that the students are less willing to take courses out of their comfort zone for fear of a bad or even failing grade….especially given the current economy/job market. 

That’s not to say that the legal research and writing aren’t valued in many law schools…especially the elite ones.  However, a large part of that from those attorney friends/colleagues is the way it is taught and its applicability. 

Among frequent complaints I’ve heard from them are that such courses tend to be very subjective/arbitrary criteria that is cryptically communicated to the 1L students…assuming the instructor even communicates it at all, little/no helpful feedback….or any meaningful feedback whatsoever from the instructor, and that what is taught in such classes has very little resemblance to the legal research/writing they ended up doing as practicing attorneys.  In short…the legal research/writing courses seem to suffer the same problems with relevance and applicability as law school in general. 

* Contrary to conventional wisdom of those outside my LAC…almost no one takes all/most of their courses pass/fail even with that policy.  After all, doing so tends to be looked on quite dimly by prospective employers and grad school admissions officers.

There are costs associated with our advocacy system, and I get that people don’t like lawyers much, but I always find it weird that people just accept as given that they get to live in a system where there are oodles of highly-trained officers of the court running around doing things according to the law.

I don’t see how this is relevant to a discussion about how poorly the gatekeepers are teaching our advocates and how much they’re charging for that privilege?

I can’t comment on the utility of the L3 year. 
However, this is interesting to me because there are voices over here in the UK pointing to the US way as being ‘better’ (for varying values of better).
Up-thread, several commenters talk about how maybe a system ending in an apprenticeship might be a better model and an approving nod is given towards the English system. I’d like to point out that one of the persistent and more imo, justified criticisms of the system here is that the apprenticeship part (pupillage/training contracts) creates an artificial and restrictive bottleneck on the numbers of people who can become qualified solicitors/barristers, and that it does so (to debatable but certainly some extent) regardless of talent.  One of the problems with opening up that bottleneck is that firms/chambers take on the expense/hassle/risk of training the pupils/trainees, and it would be extremely unpopular for an external agency to dictate how many trainees any given group must take on. Certainly the universities and BPTC/LPC providers are unable to influence that outcome. They are also not able to to provide the apprenticeship content themselves, because to legally (and practically) do so, one must be practising as either a solicitor or barrister and handling cases, which means it is impossible to do so en-masse with pupils.  A builder can have each pupil of a class of fifty build a section of a wall; a university cannot have a dozen pupils present in court, or attending a client meeting.  The very individuality of the training needed is, I think, an insuperable barrier to a commercial legal apprenticeship school; at the very least if the school were to turn a profit it would have to be ruinously expensive for the pupils.
With this in mind, very careful planning would have to be given to an apprenticeship style model to eliminate the risk of creating further barriers to entry of the profession.

the apprenticeship part (pupillage/training contracts) creates an
artificial and restrictive bottleneck on the numbers of people who can
become qualified solicitors/barristers,

The USA needs an artificial and restrictive bottleneck on the
number of people who can become lawyer. We don’t have that now, and
it’s making a mess the entire enterprise of law school.

risk of creating further barriers to entry of the profession.

If there’s one thing that the American legal profession desperately
needs, but does not have, is more barriers to entry of the profession.

Does anyone in this thread practice in California? I’m fascinated by its numerous law schools that are either unaccredited or accredited only by the state bar rather than the American Bar Association. That and the fact that a tiny handful of brave souls do ONLY an apprenticeship—no law school at all. I know that non-ABA students have to take the “Baby Bar” to qualify to continue their studies. I have to wonder if that works out. Is this a solid route to entering the practice? It is probably next to impossible to know because presumably the majority of aspiring California lawyers, given the choice, would enroll in an ABA-accredited program.

The USA needs an artificial and restrictive bottleneck on the number of people who can become lawyer. We don’t have that now, and it’s making a mess the entire enterprise of law school.

Dude, what did you *think* the bar exam was for? Testing competence? Then you’d have to explain why every state has its own accreditation, and there’s no national standard, and you can’t practice in a state unless you also take the bar exam *there* or you’re lucky enough to have reciprocity with the state where you are licensed to practice.

The problem isn’t that it’s hard to become a lawyer. The problem is that too many people are going to law school because law schools have, for many years, lied about their employment rates and universities use their professional schools as cash cows.

growlygirl @69: I do, and it’s insane. I don’t mean ‘reading into the law’, which is kind of a cool thing that California still allows (and is not easier than law school). The real problem is that the Bar allows unaccredited schools to proliferate, and almost nobody who goes to those schools ends up passing the bar exam. But if you can’t get into and/or afford an accredited law school….

The problem isn’t that it’s hard to become a lawyer. The problem is that too many people are going to law school

The reason that too many people are going to law school is because there are too many law schools and the fact that just about anyone can get admitted to law school if they apply to enough of them. Shut down lots of law schools and make it clear to people that not everyone can get a law degree, and much of the problem will fix itself. The bar exam is just a certification hurdle. It’s not a bottleneck on the supply of lawyers. After all—there are no limits on the number of people who can pass the bar exam; all one needs is a law degree, and there are too many people with those, more than the market can absorb.

The system is going to collapse, sooner rather than later. We all agree that there is a glut of lawyers in the marketplace. Sally Solo, Esq., still charges jaw-dropping retainers and exorbitant hourlies that Jane and Joe Blow (who are NOT wealthy but make to much to qualify for Legal Aid) cannot afford (heck, *I* couldn’t afford what my fellow lawyers charge). Surely at some point consumers will balk en masse and look to cheaper options. Your average Fortune 500 Multinational, Inc., is beginning to look askance at hourly billing, too. Surely, if one believes in the “invisible hand” of free-market capitalism, this is unsustainable. For example, a lot of what new BigLaw associates do can be (and is) outsourced to contract lawyers doing document review, or offshored, at a significant savings. DIY companies like LegalZoom are thriving. Time to recognize law for what it is: a trade, and not that rarefied a trade. We’re producing more than twice as many baby lawyers each year as baby doctors.

Then you’d have to explain why every state has its own accreditation

One reason is because there are different state/local laws in each state.  In the case of Louisiana, they also use Napoleonic Civil Law which is very different from the Anglo-American common law in the rest of the US. 

Another is to present a bottleneck to protect the attorneys in each of the respective states’ bars from outside competition.  However, this is questionable considering how there’s been a glut of attorneys even in states with the hardest bar exams….like California* or New York. 

* Heard they deliberately made their bar the most difficult precisely to weed out those who attended the non-accredited/state-accredited law school graduates.  While there are some elitist/protectionist motivations….there’s also widespread perception this helps weed out people whose academic/lawyering skills are so woefully inadequate that they had no business going to law school…much less becoming an actual lawyer.  According to several cousins from the California area…including a practicing attorney in the bay area, most people who go to the non-accredited/state-accredited law school route tend to be those with such abysmal college grades and LSAT scores that not even the least competitive ABA-accredited law schools will accept them.  A low bar considering there are some which accept applicants with college GPAs in the 2.x range and LSAT scores at around…or even slightly below the 50th percentile.