Many people asking this question point to the medical school model, suggesting that law schools should adopt one (or two) years of clinical rotations, perhaps followed by additional years of residency. I would not adopt that model wholesale. For one thing, it is far too expensive for the legal profession. Medical education rests upon enormous payments from Medicare, private insurance, government research grants, and private research funding, plus hefty tuition. Medicare alone contributes $9.1 billion a year to teaching hospitals, which helps pay for resident salaries and teaching costs. We don't have that kind of government support or private insurance in law.
But that shouldn't stop us from making legal education more responsive to clients. There are solutions that lie within our grasp, some of which borrow from less well known corners of medical education. I'll limit this post to my first four suggestions.
The first step is simply to embrace client needs as a measuring stick for curriculum decisions. That's a surprisingly radical notion in legal education. We talk sometimes about meeting student needs, and we reflect other times on employer demands. We plot constantly about how to raise our US News ranking. But we rarely ask directly, does this course/program/pedagogical method maximize the value we are providing to future clients? If we candidly examined the law school curriculum from that perspective, we might scratch our heads at many of the things we do. Equally important, we might be forced to admit that we don't have a clue what clients want or which pedagogies address those needs--and we might be forced to find out.
The second step is to bring clients into the curriculum. One of the best features of medical school, in my opinion, is that students practice patient interviews and meet real patients during their very first year. Outsiders, including legal educators, often talk about medical school as two years of classroom instruction followed by two years of clinical rotations. That's true in a very general sense, but medical schools learned long ago that students learn basic science better when they feel clinical context at the same time. Besides, the point of all the classroom training (in law or medicine) is to serve clients. Why not let students meet clients right off the bat?
I would add a client-contact course to the first year of law school, even if one of the traditional doctrinal courses has to move to the second year. This course, like the ones taught in medical schools, would allow students first to practice client interactions with individuals assuming client roles. Medical schools often use students from the university's theatre department or moonlighting actors for these exercises.
During the second part of the client-contact course, I would involve students in client intake at appropriate organizations; legal aid and public defenders' offices often use law students in this role. I would also introduce the students to real clients from other areas of law. Bring a GC to class to talk about what she expects from outside firms. Invite a real estate developer who will talk about his experience with lawyers. Include a personal injury plaintiff and a small business owner who defended against a discrimination claim; there are dozens of client categories to choose from. Introducing students to clients will give their other classroom work context, keep their eyes focused on the purpose of all this legal education, and introduce them to a wide variety of practice areas.
These courses would cost money, but they would not be big-ticket items. The payoff, furthermore, would be significant: students would relate their entire legal education, from the very first day, to the clients we ultimately serve.
Third, I would seek new models to add hands-on professional work to legal education. There are ambitious ideas like Bradley Borden and Robert Rhee's proposal for a law school firm. I can imagine smaller initiatives involving partnerships between law schools and particular employers. While pursuing these ideas, I would also modestly expand our in-house clinical offerings. The in-house clinics are valuable because of the intense supervision and opportunities for reflection that students receive. I don't think students need that degree of supervision full-time for a year, but a single 4-credit experience sets students up for deeper learning in other practice experiences. I have a lot more I could say about workplace experience, clinics, and their relationship to doctrinal education, but this paragraph is the short form.
Fourth, I would rethink the teaching of every doctrinal course. The case method has its place, but not in every law school class. And even in the first year, where learning to read cases and statutes should remain a primary focus, there are ways to make the curriculum more client centered. One of my very creative colleagues begins his fall-semester legal writing course by asking his 1L students to read a 37-page stock purchase agreement to determine whether the purchaser has certain rights against the seller. As often happens in real life, the answer to this question appears within the document itself. My colleague asks the students to work in teams, and they attack the document with great enthusiasm. At the end of class, he makes sure that all of the students have discovered the correct answers. Before the next class each student must compose an email explaining this answer to a hypothetical partner in his or her firm.
This exercise occurs in a legal writing class (and, yes, in the very first week of law school), but it could have been assigned in courses on contracts, mergers, or environmental law (the contractual dispute relates to the costs of hazardous waste remediation). Why do we assign so many cases in law school and so few documents of other kinds? My colleague is not the only professor innovating this way; in fact, I know contracts, mergers, and environmental law colleagues who are doing some equally creative things. We need to spread this type of work much more widely within the law school curriculum.
* * *
Those are my first four ideas for creating more client-centered law schools. Since you know me by now, you can guess that I have a lot more suggestions. A few of the others are (a) academic prerequisites to law school admission; (b) upper-level "uncasebooks" that teach the law without appellate opinions; (c) courses on law practice management and trends in the business of law; (d) law practice shadowing opportunities; (e) introductions to more of the technologies used in law practice; and (f) requiring every full-time faculty member and top-level administrator to demonstrate ongoing proficiency in the rules of professional responsibility. (Ha! Slipped that last one in. But I'm serious. As a professor who occasionally does social science research, I have to take certification courses on research ethics every three years. Just as researchers should be current with the ethical principles of human subjects research, faculty who teach professionals should be fully conversant with the rules governing the profession.)
All of these suggestions revolve around the central question: How can we lay the best foundational education for professionals who will serve clients? The clients will vary enormously in their characteristics and needs, but they will all rely upon their lawyers for critical support.
How will we pay for these changes? Not through increased tuition. I would ask all tenured faculty to recognize the disproportionate amount of time we have devoted to research during the last twenty years and to "give back" some of that time by spending a disproportionate amount of time on pedagogic reform over the next three years. Going forward, I would reduce the amount of time and money we devote to research rather than teaching. I strongly support academic research; despite its critics, research too benefits clients and society. But there were many law professors who produced outstanding scholarship before 1980; indeed, their work still influences us. Those professors generated their scholarship with heavier teaching loads, less research support, and no computers. I think we can match those standards today--and even retain our computers.
Does The Liberal Arts Major Belong In Law?
ReplyDeleteOh and yup: First
Many law professors have, quite literally, never spoken to a client in their lives.
ReplyDeleteDJM, No part of your plan allows law profs to strut like swell-headed poppinjays. If anything, your plan would highlight how little law profs know. That will never be allowed. SVO
ReplyDeleteLOL, "swell-headed poppinjays." Nice.
ReplyDeletenone of this solves anything if there are still 200 law schools. this country can handle about 65 law schools. move them to this type of model and that would be dandy. but let's shake the whole thing up first, put 70 pct of law profs out of work first, put some deans on the bread line first, and make the profession a hard one to get into first.
ReplyDeleteBut these plans will eliminate all the time needed for law school profs and admins to crow and proselytize about social justice before climbing in their BMW 5 series and Audi A7's and driving back to their historic mansions!
ReplyDeleteVery interesting stuff. One of the major problems with the appellate opinion casebook method is that it gets students to think in terms of facts and law (not bad) and then focuses completely on the law aspect rather than the factual aspect. In practice, the real challenge for a practitioner is to gather facts from a client. I don't mean investigative detective style work, I mean just asking a client questions in a manner that will extract legally significant facts. It is very difficult, but can be learned and can be taught. And I've noticed that the most successful lawyers I know are the one's who are the best at assembling facts and getting information from their clients. It dovetails with some aspects of professional responsibility and preparing clients for testimony and is the real meat and potatoes of law practice. Yet, it is 99% absent from the law school curriculum.
ReplyDeleteWhat 7:13 said. Half the law schools need to close. Reforming the curriculum is all well and good, but the glut of new lawyers entering the market each year is the far bigger problem.
ReplyDeleteOf course, neither will happen short of a catastrophic student-debt-bubble burst, as the law school cartel is far too powerful, and will undertake no reforms voluntarily.
The "law school cartel" has something far, far worse than powerful; they have an absolute ironclad monopoly over something that they are epistemically closed off from any meaningful discussion of.
ReplyDelete@7:13 "none of this solves anything if there are still 200 law schools. this country can handle about 65 law schools. move them to this type of model and that would be dandy. but let's shake the whole thing up first, put 70 pct of law profs out of work first, put some deans on the bread line first, and make the profession a hard one to get into first."
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. Focusing on remodeling legal education is very much akin to focusing on a cancer patient's sprained ankle. I fear that focusing attention on models of legal education merely deflects attention to a relatively minor problem and obfuscates the human tragedy that flows from producing more than twice as many lawyers as are needed over a period of at least two and perhaps as much as four decades.
Reforming legal education to be useful would actually be really easy. The only thing you have to do, really to get good at writing briefs is to write a lot of briefs and receive comments on them. The only thing you really need to do to get good at indentures is read/comment on a lot of indentures (etc, etc). The problem is that helping students develop lawyer skills is (1) really boring for professors and (2) would be a lot of work for professors. The easy way to solve this, of course, is just not have law professors teach any classes after the first year. All 2nd and third year courses should be taught by practitioners. Courses should also be cumulative, u know, with prerequisites. So you can actually develop a skill beyond what can be learned in one course. It is easy intellectually to think of how to make legal eduaction better. Fighting the intrenched interests of law faculty is what is difficult.
ReplyDelete6:45 is correct.
ReplyDeleteI like these proposals. The problem with the academy, is that those in charge (i.e. the law faculty) do not know how to do any of these things. We'd have to throw 50% or more of them away.
If we went from an art history to fine arts curriculum, none of the Rembrandt scholars would be capable of teaching budding artists painting technique. So too with law. If we went from a "thinking like a lawyer" curriculum -- whatever that means -- to a "practice like a lawyer" curriculum we'd have to dump most of the dead wood.
You missed the big one: getting rid of ridiculous courses like animal rights law, feminist law, comparative law, 2nd amendment law (if any schools teach that one), art law, etc, etc, etc.
ReplyDeleteAt many schools students struggle to find doctrinal courses that are relevant to: (a) the practice of law; (b)their future clients.
Frankly, I'm surprised this doesn't get more attention.
DJM
ReplyDeleteRant in two parts:
I like you. You are trying. I know that. I admire you for it. But, OMG, I don't where to start.
"The first step is simply to embrace client needs as a measuring stick for curriculum decisions.”
Just how many clients have you served? And, I'm not talking about working for two years in a cubicle in a big Atlanta firm--or swooping in with some students in tow to help indigent clients for three months, only to sweep out again. Have you ever served a client--from start to finish? Varied? You have no idea. You know what they want? A lawyer that went to a school where the school focused on the lawyer's need for skills and knowledge, period. The vast majority of potential clients need one thing: enough money to pay a lawyer that is sufficiently competent to get them out of the trouble they are in. That means the lawyer needs to know how to file a complaint; when to ask the DA to bind the client over to the grand jury; how to conduct a discovery deposition; how to negotiate a DUI with an ADA; how to evaluate a personal injury case; what should go in every contract; etc.
Read a stock purchase agreement? What is that for? For the 10 students at OSU that will join Biglaw? What does that do for the rest of your students--40% of whom will be un- or underemployed? How many stock purchase agreements will they be doing when they join a firm of 10 or less in Lima or Zainesville?
"Bring a GC to class to talk about what she expects from outside firms." Yeah, because when all of your students get to be partners in big, mid-west firms (like that will happen), they are going to need to know "what she expects from outside firms". You don't have to bring a GC in. You can tell them--- they expect you to do their work as cheaply as possible and as quickly as possible; they expect you to carry lots of malpractice when you fuck-up that mergers and acquisition project; (where's MacK--since I'm a little out of my depth on this last one.)
"The clients will vary enormously in their characteristics and needs, but they will all rely upon their lawyers for critical support."
You can say that again. Like when they ask you to lend them $500 dollars to pay their rent that month. Professor, you aren't training social workers or shrinks---or you shouldn't be. That's not what your students signed up for so stop acting like you are. That is not a lawyer's role. A lawyer's role is to at least know how to argue their client's case in front of a jury or know exactly what form she needs in exactly which form book and tailor it to the client's situation.
"Equally important, we might be forced to admit that we don't have a clue what clients want or which pedagogies address those needs--and we might be forced to find out."
Yes. You don't know. You will never know, because YOU PEOPLE DON'T PRACTICE LAW. You don't work with clients on a, sustained basis. THAT IS THE ONLY WAY TO LEARN WHAT CLIENTS NEED, and it takes years to learn this---years. You people will never learn it because you people refuse to practice law for the ten, fifteen, or twenty years it takes to learn it.
"upper-level "uncasebooks" that teach the law without appellate opinions."
Now, you are on to something. There is but one reason I did fairly well in law-school (key word: "fairly"). I didn't study the casebook (beyond being able to mouth something about the case in class, if called upon during some ego driven "Socractic" exercise)---I studied Emanual's outline. I know many of your colleagues hate that---but that is how you do well in law school--chuck the casebook. Give the students a real-life research issue, and have them learn about appellate law in that fashion, if you must.
Part II
ReplyDelete“law practice shadowing opportunities;”
Yeah . . . right. Even if I had the time (which I don't) to explain everything I'm doing to some youngster, I really would be enthusiastic about training more competitors in an already over-crowded profession. Oh . . . and my malpractice insurer would just love the extra person in my office with access to confidential client files and the trust account checkbook.
"I would ask all tenured faculty to recognize the disproportionate amount of time we have devoted to research during the last twenty years and to "give back" some of that time by spending a disproportionate amount of time on pedagogic reform over the next three years."
Are you kidding me? Students are paying the professors exorbitant salaries to TEACH. They are ruining their lives to pay them to TEACH. Curriculum design and teaching is their job . . . it’s THE JOB. I'm too stupefied to go further with this statement. Hopefully, another poster can pick up the baton and further elaborate.
"Going forward, I would reduce the amount of time and money we devote to research rather than teaching. I strongly support academic research; despite its critics, research too benefits clients and society."
These kinds of academic research benefits society: medical research, quantum physics research; educational research; etc.---but not academic legal research. The most important legal research is done by lawyers filing briefs with courts that result in case law. The research done by legal academics is "sound and fury, signifying nothing".
Forgive the length and the rant. It is not meant as a personal attack. You are much smarter than I; I didn't graduate from Harvard or Columbia; I didn't clerk for two Supreme Court justices; I have never written a "Law and . . . " article for the a law review; I don't teach at a big state university. I just practice law---not in some big Atlanta firm, either, but a small Chattanooga firm---not for two years, but for 25 years. But you, a very well-meaning, honest, brilliant professor, understand no more about what clients need than I understand how television works.
8:18 and 8:19: +1
ReplyDeleteI like this blog. I really do. However, when a law professor starts to talk about the practice of law and handling clients, credibility is strained.
ReplyDeleteA few years ago, my alma mater asked me to participate in a legal clinic. I was on a conference call with the professor who was "in charge" of the clinic. He was no one in the field but he had written a law review article which was so esoteric that no one I knew had even read it. I eventually declined participating in the clinic when the professor started barking orders on how to handle the cases. There was no way I was putting my license on the line by following the instructions of a know nothing law professor. Stick to mentally abusing lemmings with the casebook or socratic method but don't go fucking with real people problems.
Business clients aren't interested, for the most part, in long term strategies. They want to make a sale happen, or protect their egos, or accomplish something that has nothing to do with strategies.
ReplyDeleteYet, that is the service lawyers are selling. I work in business. Business is geared towards the sale. It is dominated by short term thinking about the sale.
Pick up a business newspaper. Read about JPMorgan. Hell, ask your friends, if you have any, that work in business whether they care what lawyers do.
So, I find this part of your article, to say the least, amusing:
"One of my very creative colleagues begins his fall-semester legal writing course by asking his 1L students to read a 37-page stock purchase agreement to determine whether the purchaser has certain rights against the seller..."
Composing an email to a partner isn't going to make the law student "client centric"
Asking them to deal with a client who could give a rat's ass what the agreement says, and just want what they want, will make them far more aware of the real world of practicing law.
Bruh Rabbit
These are all well intentioned, well thought out suggestions that unfortunately amount to a precise and orderly arrangement of the Titanic's deck chairs. The other 24 thousand JDs we produce annually who will never sniff a legal job won't benefit from knowing that the training that saddled them with six figures of non-dischargeable debt was more client-centric than that of his predecessors. They'll just know that they can't pay their rent.
ReplyDelete@8:56
ReplyDelete"These are all well intentioned, well thought out suggestions that unfortunately amount to a precise and orderly arrangement of the Titanic's deck chairs."
As we say down here in the South: "Amen, brother!" To keep the ship metaphors rolling, its like getting off the Titanic, only to board the Lusitania. Both of those big suckers are sinking fast.
I like DJM, alot. Who wouldn't? But I wish shewould write about her strategy to persuade the Trustees of Ohio State University to shutter their law school; or her strategies to counsel all first semester students with a GPA of <3.0 to drop out. Or, if she really wants to make me smile, how she is going to escape from the law school cartel and open a law office of her own in Columbus. I most sincerely believe, unlike most law professors, she really could practice law well and make a good go of it.
Her evidence videos are wonderful.
ReplyDeleteTo add to the later comments, my point about the way businesses work versus partners is that you need to be preparing your students for non-litigation and non-attorney positions rather than just attorney positions. Most of them will not be practicing law. Yet, you assume they all will be.
ReplyDeleteBruh Rabbit
I have made up my mind.
ReplyDeleteIt is kind of my belief that based upon a loose analysis of available empirical evidence it would seem, or if I may suggest that it is likely that there is an indication that there should possibly be a special bankruptcy option for law grads.
One would think by now. Maybe? Or not?
What we need is practice-centered law school, not client-centered law school. Frankly, if law school started small, it could help to build skills.
ReplyDeleteWhat do I mean? Well, rather than GCs and Stock Purchase Agreements, etc., focus on small ball. Blocking and Tackling.
First, every course in property should be paired with contracts and should include the review of multiple residential and commercial leases, starting with a simple landlord/tenant apartment lease. It also should include residential and commercial mortgages and conveyances, complete with a field trip to the clerk's office. I remember studying property for the bar and I asked my father, a lawyer, about recorded deeds and notice requirements, etc., and it was clear to him that I had no idea what recording was. He took me to the clerk's office and showed me the books and how you look up property interests. This is very valuable to know.
Second, every tort class is paired with civpro and should include a mock car accident and be paired with evidence and trial ad. Part of the class should be charged with reviewing client interview notes and drafting complaints; the other part should be charged with reviewing client interview notes and the complaint and drafting answers; if in NY, bills of particulars should be discussed, whether the case is removable to federal court should be discussed. Taking/defending depositions in the car accident should be part of the Torts lab. Motion practice, filed in a law school clerk's office, should be done. Judges could hear the motions, including motions to dismiss and for s.j. (Civpro makes sense only when viewed through the eyes of a real case).
Third, commercial law (UCC), corporations, and bankruptcy should be paired up. It could be styled as business organizations from birth to death. Workshops and labs could go over advantages/disadvantages of various business associations. How to incorporate. Our fictional business then will buy equipment and conduct business. Some will be securitized. Is it perfected? If not, why not? If you're a creditor, where do you record? Why is recording important? Then the business dies. Labs should talk about restructuring plans, priorities, the implications of your corporate structure, which contracts to keep, which to reject. Which preferences are troublesome, etc. (Only when there isn't enough money to go around does any of the UCC make sense).
ReplyDeleteFourth, crimpro, crimlaw, and evidence should be paired together using a simple drug possession case as the model. There will be model materials with Terry stop issues, Brady material issues, bad act and mens rea issues, and a mock trial (with jury selection -- faculty and other students to serve as jurors). Evidence procedures must be followed (crimlaw is where evidence really becomes important).
The only class taught well under the current Law School model is conlaw, because it is what profs care about and is well suited to naval gazing. But it is such a tiny component of the practice that it should be the exception, not the rule, for how law is taught.
My four large courses plus conlaw just ate up the first two years of law school. The final year of LS should be spent on a combination of clinic work, advanced law classes (e.g., conflicts, labor and employment, first amendment, fed courts, securities regulation, admin law, antitrust, etc.)
ReplyDeleteEach class would have to shrink by 50% to accomodate the hands-on oversight needed to administer the practioner's curriculum, but isn't that a good thing?
Why would you want to teach people to practice law when there aren't enough jobs or clients available to pay them?
ReplyDeleteWhy would you focus on certain areas of law- which seems to be the pet approach of both the author of the article and the proposals by those with alternative "theories"?
Like I said, you need to be preparing people if they are in the law school for the fact that they may not be practicing law. I agree with the "client" approach, but only in the sense that you need broaden the definition of what the skills may actually be used to do for a living after graduating.
Why is this guy posting about con law like this is true of every other school out there?
ReplyDelete9:46 --
ReplyDeleteYou focus on certain areas of law b/c they constitute 90 percent of all law and are on 100 percent of the bar exams. Just teach them in a non-case method, lab heavy way. And don't keep them separate from each other. Pair the classes that naturally go together (property and contracts, torts and civ pro, UCC/corporations/bankruptcy, and crimlaw, crimpro, and evidence.
I've always disliked talking about curriculum reform as opposed to tuition reduction and closing law schools because I feel as if this is a familiar battlefield for the academy. They're consistently fighting this battle and have been doing so successfully for many years now in the face of both good and bad job markets. There has really been no progress on this front because we all know who runs the show in law school (full tenured profs) and the proposals floated by curriculum reformers would cut into their scholarship and research time. They may allow clinics or practical seminars on the periphery, but the dominant method of teaching will always be the case method because it best serves the goals and interests of the people in power.
ReplyDeleteThey comments above that "since law professors don't know how to practice law a practical legal education won't be effective" actually play right into their hands on this front. If law professors don't know how to practice law, and employers won't value practical education in law school, what's the point of changing the curriculum? How will that help the students get jobs? As a recent graduate, while I understand that no law school curriculum can ever substitute for practical experience, the proposals floated by DJM would be much better than what I experienced. If they could be done for the same cost I do not think I would have spent as much time as possible interning and working outside of the school to try and gain experience. Although it might not have been perfect it definitely would have been more valuable than the case method. These proposals might also serve to reduce some of the stress brought about partly by the Socratic method and the two weeks of finals hell that contributes to the frightening rates of anxiety/depression among students.
However, I think the focus should remain on 1) tuition reduction and 2) lowering the numbers of law students, law schools, or both. If the academy can't accomplish this on their own, we should go outside the academy. It's amazing that applications have plummeted to record lows in the midst of a 75% unemployment/underemployment rate for new BAs. The pressure is on and people would do well to keep the focus on that front.
And throw out the one essay exam method of evaluation! Make it criterion based. Give feedback on a weekly basis. Yes, I know, using a citerion based/lab based method means the law professors actually have to give value for the money and work forty or fifty hours a week---just like most real lawyers. (some work more hours than that, so feel blessed)
ReplyDeleteAnd while you are at it, no law professors with less than ten years actual experience in his or her legal specialty.
8:56 here: just to clarify, I don't mean to denigrate DJM's contributions, and I absolutely agree that law schools should reform the way they teach their students. However, that is something like eleventy-millionth on the list of things that need to change; the bigger priorities by a country mile are that they need to close en masse, reduce tuition to a level somewhere rationally in line with the professional outcomes they produce for their students, stop outright lying regarding what those true outcomes are, and - while this ball is not in their court - permit bankruptcy discharge of student loan debt for a generation of students so far out of the money on the American dream that they'll never have any reason to buy in to the social construct.
ReplyDeleteMoreover, as boredJD so eloquently put it, curriculum reform is turf they know and love and can spin their pedantic wheels about all day. All it does is distract from the bigger issue: they're producing twice as many graduates as there are jobs, and charging them all an average rate that is justified only by the outcomes enjoyed by the top 5%. The other 95% get, as they say in French, ratfucked.
Ugh: "social construct" should read "social contract."
ReplyDeleteAh, controversy! I have several thoughts, but first: a stock purchase agreement is simply a contract selling a business from one party to another. The one in this classroom exercise embodied a small corporation purchasing a closely held family business. You don't have to be in BigLaw to handle that type of work.
ReplyDeleteThe comments here are interesting because, assuming they come from practitioners, they parallel the advice that senior professors gave my junior (and, I think, quite creative colleague). They all said, "don't give the students anything so long; pick out the paragraphs that are relevant." Or, "why not use a standard apartment lease or consumer contract?"
Why did my colleague (who is president of a small business association, purchased and sold a business of his own, and was closing deals in practice just before he prepared this exercise) reject that advice? Picking out parts of the contract would have defeated one of the exercise's purposes: to teach students to read an entire document. Apartment leases and consumer contracts, on the other hand, would have been problematic because the disputed issues often require lawyers to go outside the contract--to look at tenant-protection codes, unconscionability challenges, and the like. Students would learn to do those things later in the year. At the start, my colleague wanted to give them an interesting issue that could be resolved within the contract itself.
This was, actually, "blocking and tackling" as I understand that phrase. The exercise didn't try to set students up to close deals the next day! Instead, it introduced them to business concepts and terms; pushed them to read an entire business-related contract; taught them to identify the clauses relevant to an issue; and showed them how to relate those clauses to other parts of the contract (e.g., the definitional section). It seemed to accomplish those goals and, although the students had to stretch their mental capabilities, they both succeeded and enjoyed the exercise.
I posted this comment after a entry from a week back, but in the context of this discussion it seems particuarly relevant:
ReplyDeleteComing into law school with a decade of teaching, tutoring, and curriculum development experience, not a week went by when I didn't find yet another reason to be disgusted by the pedagogical mess that is law school. But in all those heaping mounds of disdain I had for my professors, one thing had a special place in my heart, and it stayed there for all three years: the idiocy of norm-referenced rather than criterion-referenced evaluations.
DJM
ReplyDeletePlease re-read 10:32 and Bored 3L. You are not getting it and you, in my opinion, are beginning to hurt this blog. We are not your seminar students and this is not a class discussion you are leading. This blog is outside academia, but you don't seem to understand that. Real people, some of whom paid your salary and gave you the leisure of leading this "academic controversy" are hurting and the are hurting because you and your colleagues wanted big law pay without big law hours---pure and simple. And how did you do that? You and your colleagues doubled class sizes; stood by mutely as law schools multiplied like bacteria without a care as to how this overproduction of lawyers would affect your students' job prospects specifically and the profession generally.
And while this occurred, did you and your colleagues write academic papers about the effect of the cancerous proliferation of schools and enlarged classes on the profession? No, you didn't.
tdennis239--
ReplyDeletei agree. there are way, way too many law students.
The legal academy are a scourge and a plague on the taxpayers and law students. they make monopoly profits and add little value to anything.
As the crisis of too many law schools and too many law students began (I figure around 1980) and continued to unfold over the past three decades, here is a random sample of what law professors were writing about:
ReplyDelete81 Colum. L. Rev. 1373 (1981)
Towards a General Theory of the Religion Clauses: The Case of Church Labor Relations and the Right to Church Autonomy; Laycock, Douglas
"Some Thoughts about Natural Law," 75 California Law Review 217, (1987); Johnson, Phillip
"The Handmaiden's Revenge: On Reading and Using the Newer Sociology of Civil Procedure," 51 Law & Contemporary Problems 111-134 (1989); Trubeck, David
Ayres on "Markovits and Markets": A Reply, 64 Chicago-Kent Law Review 873 (1988); Markovits, Richard
In the job market bloodbath year of 1992, the legal academics gave us articles like:
45 Vand. L. Rev. 831 (1992)
Competition among Municipalities As a Constraint on Land Use Exactions; Sterk, Stewart E.
I will pay anyone $50.00 dollars who can find a pre- 2000 law review article, authored by a law professor,that contains even a murmur of concern about lawyer over-production.
Many of these proposed reforms in legal education are not new. Several years ago, the Carnegie Endowment issued a lengthy report analyzing/critiquing current norms of legal education and, importantly, making recommendations for preparing law school graduates to be more “practice ready.” I’m not sure if this report is widely regarded throughout the legal academy, although I believe that several schools (Stanford, USC, Maryland, AU, DU, among others) have undertaken to evaluate and implement the Carnegie recommendations. Perhaps DJM and/or others know more about this effort. Is it a worthy undertaking likely to produce meaningful results? Or is it yet another activity which on the surface appears to be doing important work while in the end will yield few, if any, tangible reforms? Thoughts?
ReplyDeleteAn analogy to this line of reasoning (let's change the curriculum to better prepare our students) would be trying to set up a school that trained people to become major league baseball players. Now, there are only, by definition, some 750 to 1,000 jobs in Major League Baseball, give or take a few roster callups, but there are tens of thousands (or hundreds of thousands) of people who want to be ballplayers.
ReplyDeleteMathematically, a single digit percentage can succeed. The rest will fail; this is math.
DJM's approach is akin to saying that the other 90+% didn't take enough batting practice in school. Or if the school used a different weight-training regimen, or taught its pitchers to change their curveball grip ever so slightly, or practiced on turf instead of grass, THEN those students could have succeeded.
Of course, they couldn't have. Or if they had, it would have meant another student's failure. There are only 30 teams, with only 25 players to a team.
Now imagine that the schools claim to produce 95% placement rates on Major League Rosters for their graduates, and charge students more than $100,000 to attend that school. And that debt is non-dischargeable.
Should we really be focusing on what kind of pitching machine they use for batting practice?
I think all of you know that I agree entirely that some law schools should close, that schools must stop making misleading statements, that tuition is too high, and that the loan program should be restructured. But a significant number of schools will continue to graduate lawyers, both because there is an ongoing market for *some* lawyers and because the market is imperfect. I'd like all law schools to do the best educational job they can. If part of the "scam," as originally identified by LawProf, is the way that schools teach, then shouldn't we try to address those problems?
ReplyDeleteThe commenters here raise points similar to ones I have heard over the years. On the one hand, some critics complain that law school clinics can't replicate practice; clinics lavish much more time on each case than a real lawyer could. Conversely, other critics urge us to "start small" and give students just pieces of work to handle. Practitioners, understandably, say they don't have time to let students shadow them (although that's exactly what medical students do for some of their clinical rotations, and I would have the law schools compensate practitioners for their time). Yet opening a law-school affiliated firm to provide all of this training and shadowing in-house would rob some clients from the local bar. It's a knot, but one I'll keep trying to unravel.
I would never make any practice-related curriculum change without asking practitioners for advice. I'm the "newbie" in the clinic I co-teach. My clinical co-professor spent ten years as a successful defense lawyer in private practice before establishing the clinic, which he has now taught for more than 30 years. He's one of the best known figures in the local courthouse, admired by defense lawyers, prosecutors, and judges alike. We take all of our cases from arraignment to plea, with side excursions to mental health court, theft diversion programs, and more. It's fun to see how many of the judges and prosecutors we deal with are former clinic students. I couldn't imagine running a clinic without a real practitioner.
But there are also education-related aspects to these curriculum issues, and there is some excellent research by cognitive scientists on how people learn complex professional tasks. Learning-by-doing is different from doing-when-you-already-know-how. So let's keep up the discussion from all angles while being willing to rethink (in both the academy and practice) some of our long-held assumptions.
The thought of eager young law students gleefully attacking a 37-page stock purchase agreement gives me the shakes.
ReplyDeleteIt's been some time since I was in such a practice, and life may have changed since then. But I remember thinking that good indicator of success on the transactional side of big (or even biggish) law firm is that you get past the point where you need to be the one reading these documents. (You have hot and cold running associates to do the proofreading). You're not going to make any serious money until you become the person who already knows what's in the document before it's drafted because you understand the underlying deal.
For me, a practice spent closely reading such documents is the real "shitlaw". You may need to do some of it when you're starting out, but if you don't move on to better things soon, you're not on the right track.
Publius
DJM,
ReplyDeleteI have a question to you, and I do not mean to be flip: what value, if any, do the current legal academic faculty add to the training of lawyers?
I'll say that I like the ideas presented by DJM and am in definite support of a more practice oriented curriclum model so long as it is not a smokescreen for failing to close down law schools or cut class sizes. I've read a lot of law review articles on this topic dating back decades and have agreed with a lot of what was written. That said, I'd like to see more discussion on how specifically this change could be accomplished. From the outside looking in, it seems that tenured faculty are just beginning to become aware of the problem. Getting them to make any changes at all is another step, and forcing them to make MEANINGFUL change (not just adding a couple clinics and freezing tuition for a year or two) is quite a bigger one still. Perhaps a few more years of applicant drops will shake things up, but is there any hope the academy can reform itself from within?
ReplyDeleteDJM
ReplyDeleteThe divide is between those who see teaching practice skills as helping and those who see it as missing the point. I can see why you want to focus on practice skills. You know them.
However, teaching someone and preparing someone in your school for a non-lawyer job since many of them will end up in non-legal jobs?
Not so much.
If you want to change things- admitting most will not practice would be a start.
Yet your advice seems to be more of the same, but changing the subject matter. The problem is that there are not enough legal jobs. So why pretend there are.
Step 1, it seems to me, in any curriculum reform is to change who's teaching it: replace the "T-6 grad-CofA clerk-3 years back-of-big law" group with the "practiced for 10 years in this area" group.
ReplyDeleteThe "Torts" description at my school was super-vague. The person who taught it has never practiced in a courtroom or taken an accident deposition. So what did we learn about? Theory, the philosophical arguments behind causation and contributory/comparative schemes, 200-year old case law about last clear chances and common law assaults. "Economic tort" was how we should allocate risks in a modern civil society and not actual economic torts like interference with contract or business fraud.
A real practitioner might actually teach something useful, like how to take a deposition, what to emphasize to a jury, when to move to dismiss v. answering, how to handle contingency fee clients who call and ask for a status every two weeks, on and on and on.
The privileged academic class (including DJM) doesn't teach these things because, usually, they can't or, sometimes, they don't want to. DJM has a whopping two years of experience in a large firm almost thirty years ago. How in the heck does that qualify her to teach students what it's like on the ground level today?
Has she ever first-chaired a trial in Ohio? I'm guessing not...so why is teaching a criminal defense practicum to Ohio's future lawyers? Why is she competent to write on evidence law? Because she's worked for Sandra Day O'Connor and Ruth Ginsberg? Give me a break.
My point here is not to single out DJM. Resumes like hers are a dime a dozen at so-called "law schools," and that's part of the problem. This class of people should NOT be leading curriculum reform because they should not even be teaching the curriculum. Reforming the curriculum without treating the most basic problem (a hiring and tenure system based on pedigree and getting students to like you rather than actually teaching what will be useful in 3 years) is a disastrous idea.
There are some good ideas here, but without that main problem corrected, it's like getting a whole new car but keeping drunken blind grandma at the wheel: it'll still crash and look ugly. It was a tough battle getting the law professors to realize the system is the problem. Next is getting them to realize the truly-reformed system might not have a place for their prestigious rear ends.
My point here is not to single out DJM. Resumes like hers are a dime a dozen at so-called "law schools," and that's part of the problem. This class of people should NOT be leading curriculum reform because they should not even be teaching the curriculum. Reforming the curriculum without treating the most basic problem (a hiring and tenure system based on pedigree and getting students to like you rather than actually teaching what will be useful in 3 years) is a disastrous idea.
ReplyDelete@12:56: I could not have said it better. I sound much harsher toward DJM than I mean. She is at least putting herself out there, risking the ire of her colleagues, as well as the ire, of posters, like, well me. That takes courage. But you are right. With all due respect, I would rather have a grizzled old trial lawyer who graduated from UT teach evidence than a clerk for a Supreme Court Justice. Sorry, DJM, that is just how I feel because that is what the empiracle evidence so informs me.
Going into my third year of law school, every single professor that I've had for one of the big, doctrinal courses has had at least 10 years (sometimes much more) experience practicing before they became a professor. Of course, I'm going to one of the low-ranked schools that everyone thinks should be shuttered. Given the current and almost-certain-future state of the legal job market, I agree that lots of schools need to be closed, including the one I'm attending. But looking at DJM's post and the responses in this thread just leaves me astounded regarding how upside-down the whole thing is.
ReplyDeleteDJM,
ReplyDeleteYou may have noticed Paul Horwitz's post over at Prawfs which took a dim view of ITLSS commenters' alleged failure to discuss clients' needs sufficiently. (See here: http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2012/05/consensus-at-last.html#more) I made this response over at Prawfs, which I am cross-posting here:
"I thought that DJM's post to which you linked was not only interesting, but one of the best posts ever made on Campos' blog. But I must admit that it had never occurred to me, for this reason: I think that a client-centric model of legal education would require almost entirely replacing the faculty - at least those teaching upper-level courses - with new professors who had at least 10-15 years of experience directly serving clients.
I don't mean to be rude about this. It's just that I'm a felony public defender. I deal with clients who come from difficult circumstances and have been accused or convicted of extremely violent crimes. Often as a product of their life circumstances and mental impairments, these clients can be extremely interpersonally difficult to work with. I took multiple criminal law classes at my T14 law school, and none of my professors had EVER had the client-counseling experiences that I have had.
Yes, I would like for law students who are interested in my field to be taught how to deal with quandaries like how to advise an 18-year-old non-triggerman charged with felony murder for whom the prosecution is offering to drop the death penalty if he will accept a sentence of life without parole. I would like them to learn what it is like to work with paranoid clients who try to fire every court-appointed lawyer they are assigned, sometimes physically attacking the lawyers to trigger their withdrawal, because they believe that public defenders are conspiring with the DA's office to harm them. I would like them to learn how one does postconviction interviews to search for evidence of ineffective assistance of counsel with clients who - once burned by their trial lawyers - are highly resistant to working with another state-funded lawyer and may even refuse to meet with the new attorney. And so on. But these things are so far from the realm of personal experience of every (non-clinical) criminal law professor that I've personally encountered that it had not occurred to me to suggest client-centric classroom education. How can professors credibly teach what they do not know and have not lived? It seems to me that the best they could do is read books about our (practitioners') experience, talk to us, or ask us to come and talk to their classes. And each of these things seems like an imperfect solution to the problem of not having practice-experienced professors in the classrooms in the first place."
1:55 here. Part two of my Prawfs comment:
ReplyDelete"You write: "It is fair to say that blog's commenters are a highly interested constituency; but there is very little interest in or discussion of clients there ... in thinking about law schools, the client comes, if not last, then a distant second."
I comment at ITLSS because I am highly skeptical of the current state of legal education, and that is for two reasons: (1) the academy's deemphasizing teaching relative to its increasingly interdisciplinary (i.e., not even purely legal) research; and (2) the academy's failure to prepare law students to serve clients. As a provider of direct services to indigent clients, in a field that is both underpaid and emotionally exhausting - but tremendously important - let me assure that the clients come first for me. Every day. And the reason that I don't mention them very much over at ITLSS or here is because I have no hope that the academy will ever take a basic prerequisite step in "caring about clients" - to prioritize in its hiring decisions those aspiring academics who bring at least a decade of practice experience *in the field that they intend to teach* to the table, and who can therefore offer students: (1) strong legal knowledge of their field, its statutes and caselaw; (2) deep experience in using that legal knowledge to advocate for clients; (3) experience of the non-doctrinal challenges inherent in their field of practice (which they can integrate in teaching the doctrine); and (4) ideas for academic scholarship that are strongly grounded in practical reality. With all due respect, I don't think it is possible for a faculty with extremely limited client counseling experience to undertake the task of making legal education genuinely more responsive to clients."
Over at Prawfs, Paul Horwitz is critical of the commenters to this post and their alleged failure sufficiently to consider/discuss client needs. (http://prawfsblawg.blogs.com/prawfsblawg/2012/05/consensus-at-last.html#more) Below is my response, cross-posted to Prawfs:
ReplyDelete"I thought that DJM's post to which you linked was not only interesting, but one of the best posts ever made on Campos' blog. But I must admit that it had never occurred to me, for this reason: I think that a client-centric model of legal education would require almost entirely replacing the faculty - at least those teaching upper-level courses - with new professors who had at least 10-15 years of experience directly serving clients.
I don't mean to be rude about this. It's just that I'm a felony public defender. I deal with clients who come from difficult circumstances and have been accused or convicted of extremely violent crimes. Often as a product of their life circumstances and mental impairments, these clients can be extremely interpersonally difficult to work with. I took multiple criminal law classes at my T14 law school, and none of my professors had EVER had the client-counseling experiences that I have had.
Yes, I would like for law students who are interested in my field to be taught how to deal with quandaries like how to advise an 18-year-old non-triggerman charged with felony murder for whom the prosecution is offering to drop the death penalty if he will accept a sentence of life without parole. I would like them to learn what it is like to work with paranoid clients who try to fire every court-appointed lawyer they are assigned, sometimes physically attacking the lawyers to trigger their withdrawal, because they believe that public defenders are conspiring with the DA's office to harm them. I would like them to learn how one does postconviction interviews to search for evidence of ineffective assistance of counsel with clients who - once burned by their trial lawyers - are highly resistant to working with another state-funded lawyer and may even refuse to meet with the new attorney. And so on. But these things are so far from the realm of personal experience of every (non-clinical) criminal law professor that I've personally encountered that it had not occurred to me to suggest client-centric classroom education. How can professors credibly teach what they do not know and have not lived? It seems to me that the best they could do is read books about our (practitioners') experience, talk to us, or ask us to come and talk to their classes. And each of these things seems like an imperfect solution to the problem of not having practice-experienced professors in the classrooms in the first place."
tdennis--
ReplyDeleteDid they teach writing at your law school?
@115:
ReplyDeleteIt seems true that the lowest-level law schools often provide the most practice-applicable teaching. Specifically, I think I remember BL1Y [sorry if I'm mistaken him with someone else] talking about things he didn't get to do at NYU (I think drafting corporate formation docs was one), and thinking "I did that in a required class, I did that in a major elective," etc.
That prestige thing is a whole 'nother problem. Kid with a 167 LSAT/3.8 GPA gets into Cornell or Columbia or Michigan, takes glorified philosophy classes, finishes at the median, and lands a job fairly easily. Kid with a 167/3.8 GPA takes the full ride to Syracuse or NYLS or Michigan State, studies nothing but litigation techniques, finishes in the top 15%, and can't buy a job.
From tdennis239: "I will pay anyone $50.00 dollars who can find a pre- 2000 law review article, authored by a law professor, that contains even a murmur of concern about lawyer over-production."
ReplyDeleteChallenge accepted: See Peter G. Glenn, Some Thoughts About Developing Constructive Approaches to Lawyer and Law Student Distress, 10 J.L. & Health 69, 76 (1996) (noting that law student distress, due in part to economic pressure and burdensome student loans "is a problem to which there is no easy solution, particularly in the current environment in which too many law schools are literally chasing a declining pool of applicants"). Glenn was a law professor and dean of the Dickinson School of Law; he is now at Washington & Lee. At the time he wrote the article, he was concerned that students borrowed as much as $40,000 to attend law school and were therefore "burdened with loan payments of as much as $500 per month for ten years following graduation," and that many students "almost certainly recognize, mid-way through their law school careers, that the real earning capacity of most young lawyers is not sufficient to comfortably support large loan payments." Among other things, he recommended that law schools make better "consumer disclosures" to applicants.
He wasn’t wrong then, and he is even more right now. You can donate my $50 to Law School Transparency: http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/2012/01/support-lst-in-2012/
Done blogging.
ReplyDeleteMy entire adult life is debt, and is worthless and poor ruined credit garbage.
I will never get my youth back.
There is no hope, or at least not for the likes of me, except to flee the USA and Student Loan Debt.
God how I wish I never went to a lower tier law school.
Painterguy
Good point, 2:40,
ReplyDeleteMeanwhile, I know a married couple (both doctors) that graduated from state schools that aren't ranked that highly at all, and they both have outstanding practices in a major city (neither went to med school within a thousand miles of the city where they practice now) and live in a million dollar home, years in advance if their fortieth birthdays.
They didn't need to go to a "national" medical school. Do you know what makes you appealing in a national market in their field? An M.D.
That's because the vast majority of the posers were weeded out by sophomore year of undergrad.
Law schools: The real world isn't producing enough jobs for our graduates!
Med schools: Every graduate we produce needs to be ready for the real world.
DJM,
ReplyDeleteThank you for at least trying to see this from the other side. Due to some strange circumstances beyond my control, I spent my 2L summer in a public interest job.
I was concerned at the time, but it ended up being the very best thing that ever happened to be. Once I realized that I had learned more in 13 weeks of an internship than I had in four semesters of law school, I was able to see more clearly. I came back and filled my course schedule with adjunct-taught classes.
Two of the best classes I had in law school were during that time period. One was a class I took with a federal judge who had taken senior status. Simply outstanding at relaying both the theoretical and the practical. "This is what the book says. This is what the case law says. This what the law review articles say. But THIS is what it will look like in practice."
The other was team taught by partners in a litigation firm. Trial lawyers with chops. We spent the better part of that semester going over a real case, that had really been tried to a real jury, and we got to divide up into teams and take a swing at it, from motions all the way to closing statements.
And here's the deal folks. Those two classes were taught by people who were every bit as bright (and vastly more well-rounded) as any "brilliant" law professor I've ever had.
It was a phenomenal, and meaningful, third year, and of the little law school instruction that actually informs my practice today overwhelmingly came from that third year.
If that were the model, law school prices would fall dramatically and students would graduate better prepared.
But, but...you can only find so many talented adjuncts that are willing to teach. Well, if there were fewer students to teach in the first place, that wouldn't really be much of a problem, would it?
There are many good points here on both sides. The consensus seems to be to start over. Most law professors did not practice law or have not done so for 20 years. They cannot teach people to do what they cannot do. Plus, as everyone knows, the curriculum is composed of what people who actually did not like law practice find interesting. It's symptomatic of privileged people who think law schools exist for their pleasure. I do not think there is a path from where we are to where we should be. Better to disband and reinvent legal education.
ReplyDeleteThis post ignores the supply/demand problem. It also does not focus on the decreasing supply of jobs for lawyers as they get more experienced because of the pyramidal structure of law firms, the numbers of government programs lasting a few years, like cherkships, assistant U.S. attorneys and a host of other government jobs, and the lack of alternate employment opportunities for the vast majority lawyers over age 45 who actually are well trained but cannot stay in their youthful jobs because the jobs by definition are only for relatively recent law school grads.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that with the numbers of lawyers already in the profession, there will be a severe glut of lawyers relative to the number of legal jobs for the lifetime of anyone going to law school now. You can teach people to be completely client centric. Problem is that the profession cannot absorb 5 times as many client centric lawyers as there is work.
It is sort of on the same level as networking. Pretty much a waste when on the macro level you have that 5 times imbalance. A few people will benefit from networking or client centric education. For the masses, it begs the supply demand question. You need to graduate a trickle of lawyers for the next 10 years, little larger trickle for the following 10 years to make even a dent in the imbalance between supply and demand.
Most people even with the best education from the best law schools are going into a pretty bleak earnings and job picture that gets profoundly worse in the second part of their careers.
Your law school idea is a bandaid that will not in any way help today's law students, most of whom will hemmorage in the long-term even if they do great as lawyers before age 45.
I must say I am so disappointed in this post. What you may not realize, DJM, is that many law schools have already incorporated your ideas one way or another into their curriculum. You may not know these schools - it is typically the lower ranked schools that rely on curricula that emphasize practical skills as a means of a selling point in the job market against more prestigious schools.
ReplyDeleteIf the lack of practical skills were truly an issue in the present legal climate, we would see the students from the lower ranked schools where practical skills are emphasized being hired over students from more prestigious schools that de-emphasize practical education. We do not see this at all: graduates from prestigious schools who can quote irrelevant but impressive law review articles are still preferred over practice-ready graduates from lower-ranked schools who come out of law school ready to litigate a case from start to finish.
Such sentiments bother me because they mislead readers into believing that a curriculum change will affect employment outcomes. Furthermore, they detract from focusing on pertinent solutions that address the real issue: an oversupply of lawyers. As a 'lawyer' (I use the term loosely because I have never had the opportunity to work as one) who graduated, along with my fellow graduates, from a lower-ranked school knowing how to litigate a case from start to finish (I did 5 full-length trials by the time I graduated), and had experience writing numerous legal documents including motions, contracts, briefs, court opinions, etc., I watched as the MAJORITY of my classmates ended up either unemployed or working in retail. Our skills didn't matter and they made absolutely no difference in the workplace. In fact, despite being practice-ready, 70% of my fellow graduates and I have never had the opportunity to use the legal skills we learned in a paid setting. That alone demonstrates it's not the skills that count and focusing on changing them will not resolve the issue.
Regardless of what type of education law schools emphasize, graduates will still be unemployed because there just are too many graduates. It is irrelevant if the unemployed graduates can quote William Blackstone or Federal Rules of Evidence #801 in the heat of a trial - they're still unemployed, aren't they?
Most Employers hire what they take to be potential talent, not based on possessing rudimentary skills. That is all a law graduate could have-- that is just the way it is. They have been talking for years about wanting graduates who are better trained, but talk is cheap. They want to hire whom they take to be the smartest people.
ReplyDeleteThe only way to stop this is to end "buy now, pay later" law school. Stop federal loans and the oversaturation of the market ends overnight.
ReplyDeleteNo IBR. Return to caps on Staffords. Make private loans dischargeable In bankruptcy after 10 years.
The trouble with ending student loans and other tuition support for law students is that only the wealthy will be able to go to law school. Do we really want to make law the exclusive domain of the one percent?
ReplyDeleteA more radical approach would be to make law school optional. That is, allow anyone to take the bar exam.
If law school is valuable to employers, they will hire people who graduate from law school. If it is not valuable to them, they will hire people who did not.
Is three years of law school really necessary for becoming a low level grunt at a law firm where one will do the scut work?
If law school is useful to students, they will attend. However, it seems the only reason many law students attend law school in the first place is because it is required to become a lawyer.
If a student believes that law school will increase his value as a lawyer, he should go for it. He should also have the option of taking the bar and becoming a lawyer without attending law school.
Just about everyone acknowledges that law professors don't know ANYTHING about real world practice. Just the fact that they are proposing to teach landlord-tennant disputes or having someone critique a standard form contract is proof of that. (Just try to buy a house using your own purchase agreement rather than the standard form!)
Just about everyone acknowledges that law school does not teach students anything relevant to the actual practice of law. In other words, it is a complete waste of time and money.
This simple change of making law school optional would focus the law schools' attention on providing an education which really matters to students and their prospective employers.
Many of the commenters here have it right, from my perspective.
ReplyDeleteFoundational knowledge is an important first step, but that is only the very VERY base...that first layer of gravel before any concrete is poured.
There is probably not a single major, undergrad or graduate level, that prepares a grad to come out and practice if there has not been a lot of real, hands-on "apprenticeship" type work as part of the education. Because not many fields have that, this has to be provided on the job, and in most cases is (and always was in the legal field).
Now, the legal field is so flooded with folks that already have experience and can't find jobs that nobody is willing to pay to train the new grads. It doesn't matter that some grads had a bit more "clinic" experience or have a bit more practical skill than another--none of them can compare with someone who has been out and working in the real world for a few years.
New grads that don't come from prestigious schools will very rarely get the nod over someone who has experience, but yet there are tens of thousands of new grads popping up each year.
No amount of curriculum reform is going to fix this mess, as "fake lawyer work" done through academia will never equate to actually working.
There needs to be many, many, many less JDs minted each year for many, many, many years to come. Until there are enough firms who can't grab up cheap, experienced (even if only a year or two) un/underemployed lawyers, all of the new JDs are going to have trouble finding paying work.
Shrink schools. Close schools. Wait for the market to show a need for expanding and re-opening. The longer academia waits, the longer the healing will take and the more casualties will pass through the halls of these beautiful new law schools.
I liked this post. First, it doesn't address the major issues for recent grads (lack of jobs, debt levels), but not every post has to belabor the same exact point every date.
ReplyDeleteSecond, people need to distinguish between what clients think they want, and what clients actually want. Clients think they want a lawyer who can win in litigation and give them good legal advice. And they do want that! But they also want a lawyer who can solve all their problems, and they want a lawyer who will stroke their ego, and they want a lawyer who will make them look good to their clients (assuming business/government as opposed to individual client, which is relevant to a significant chunk of practitioners). Learning to deal with clients is valuable.
There are also a lot of different skills necessary for handling clients, and there are some things that a person just needs to be told. For example: "don't trust your client." I'm not talking about clients actively lying, but lots of sophisticated clients don't know/remember important things. Don't trust your client to tell you everything that's relevant or to remember everything that's relevant. When your client says that have the right to do X or they always do Y, always confirm it. When a client says there's no information available about Z, check it out. AND, you have to do all of this while leaving your client with the impression that you hold them in high esteem and trust them completely. That's a skill set.
I have been busy and travelling. This is in multiple parts
ReplyDeleteI have to say that I broadly agree with tdennis' critique of the sentence "I strongly support academic research; despite its critics, research too benefits clients and society." In my practice the only item of US legal research that I ever found somewhat useful was Kimberly A. Moore, Xenophobia in American Courts, 97 Nw. U. L. Rev. 1497 ( 2003). She is now inter alia a judge on the Federal Circuit. However, I had as an associate, done the same research in about 1997-98 in a few days - then focussed on the practical question - where would a foreign company get a "fair shake" from a jury, - and actually that question is not answered in the Prof Moore's article. My research showed by the way that you should stay north of the Mason Dixon line, in certain urban centers - and generally judges were fairer than juries (the odd and dramatic exception being Northern Virginia where at least 10 years ago the judges were more xenophobic than the juries (and this was to a statistically significant degree.) Another useful research project - maintained by law students is www.patstats.org This sort of article, that provides objective evidence, be it of unfairness and mis-operaration of the justice system, or simply information I as a lawyer can use and information that if I bring it to a judge or policy maker would be useful is what I want to see out of the legal academy.
When I was around 16-17 and being taught matrices in High School I remember being told the Arthur Cayley - the academic who worked out the modern theory of matrices had congratulated himself that he had managed to come up with a field of intellectual effort that was incapable of any commercial or practical application, it was a pure playground for the mind (he turned out to be wrong, very wrong - matrices have a huge number of applications.) His peer James Joseph Sylvester went back and forth between Cambridge and various US colleges. On some level they, and the gentleman dabbler more typical of Oxbridge of the period (both Cayley and Sylvester had to dabble in law to make a living) helped establish somewhat of a culture that disappeared from the academy after WW II for a while. It came roaring back though through the efforts of the Modern Language Association whose idiocy was brilliantly exposed when one of the biggest tracts published Sokal's Hoax, i.e., Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity and in particular modern so called legal scholarship, which is, to quote one of my high school teachers, mostly "piffle and nonsense."
MacK
Do I think that law school should be taught by practitioners or mostly practitioners. The answer is complicated. For various reasons I was not entitled to student loans when attending law school, and despite appearances at the time, my family is not wealthy. So I took about a year and a half out between college and law school and in that period earned most of my first years tuition, and chose to go to law school where my parents were then living, which saved me housing cost for two years. In law school I secured a summer associate position paying $1200 a week my first year, a similar one my second year and took a job as a litigation clerk as a 3L which I worked at until 2 weeks before my bar exam (making about $400-800 a week) until one senior partner who was president of the bar at the time suggested that I might need to study for the NY bar (I needed to eat.)
ReplyDeleteThose jobs directed my study in many respects. As the motion guy on white collar crime guy I drafted endless motions in limine which made me learn evidence very thoroughly. I became an expert in securing jurisdiction over foreign parties (or opposing it.) I drafted contracts, ghost wrote chapters in 2 books for various partners (at least one of which is still in print). But, if my legal education had not contained a broad foundation, covering a wide array of issues, there would be dangerous lacunae in my knowledge today.
Even so, in law school it was noticeable that the courses taught by practitioners and professors with a lot of historical experience in practice were massively in demand and oversubscribed - Richard Allen Gordon was highly respected (and had spent more than a decade as a JAG) while Peter Edelman was "Pete-the-prick" (and I have been regaled by former colleagues during his brief period in legal practice with details of his capabilities.) Try getting into Ken Feinberg's evidence class, Freed & Miller's patent class, Bill Patry for copyright, anything but Mike Gottesman or Lynn Stout - but Judy Areen's favourite Yalies' class were always undersubscribed.
I do think there needs to be curriculum reform in the academy - and law professors need to focus on what matters to the law, the discipline we practice. I think most law professors should be practitioners or former practitioners with at least a decade of experience - and those that don't have that experience should move over to sociology departments and be paid at that level too. But none of these things is going to solve the problem of too many legal graduates.
By the way, I was a senior lawyer in a top rated Asian law firm for 3 years, doing international litigation and international project finance as well as a lot of deals - and I am now of counsel to that firm more than a decade later. I got that job because I represented many of that firm's clients in US litigation. Asian firms are looking mostly for lawyers with real experience and otherwise want some credentials they can show off (Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Georgetown.) In addition law school rankings outside the US are different from inside - so those would generally be considered the big 5 US schools outside.
MacK
And I know there are a lot of typos above, but I really do not have time to proofread these posts - I am busy drafting and proofreading documents on deadlines. I typically write these posts as fast as I can.
ReplyDeleteMacK
"A more radical approach would be to make law school optional. That is, allow anyone to take the bar exam."
ReplyDeleteI was laid up yesterday, so had time to watch a movie. I picked "A Lawyer Walks into a Bar..." (It's available for download on Netflix.)
It really emphasized to me how crazy it is that we expect kids to pay $150,000 for an 'education,' only to have them turn around and spend another $3,000 for a course to teach them what should be second nature to them.
As I have noted before, my practice is not nearly as exciting as MacK's, but I'm busy and I make plenty of money in a practice I love.
Ever since I went on my own 19 years ago, I have tried to follow something my father in law told me at the time: Lawyers try to compete on technical competency. "We're the smartest." Clients, though, assume that if you have the degree you know what you are doing. Compete on service.
This probably is not as true when dealing with captains of industry who want Harvard educated folks like themselves, but for the vast rest of us, it's good advice. Treat your clients well, care about them and their cases, and you will set yourself apart from many, many of your competitors.
I have to agree with tdennis, though, that such 'advice' is meaningless for a lawyer with 2-3 people competing for every job.
Most of you guys are way too ambitious in your proposals. These things aren't going to happen.
ReplyDeleteHere's one small proposal: Eliminate 70% of the law reviews (heck, there are already 800 of them). Schools shouldn't reward professors with tenure for writing articles but should emphasize community committee assignments. At least then, law professors would have more contact with practicing lawyers who could hire their graduates.
The few years I taught law I was surprised how little interest there was in law professors knowing any of the practitioners in the community or being involved in anything that wasn't federal.
DJM,
ReplyDeleteConvince 1/2 the law schools to close completely. There is no need for them. They exist only as part of a "scam." Hence this blog.
One thing no one mentions here as a skill lawyers need - the art of billing and getting paid - something most professors are very uninformed about.
ReplyDeleteMacK
MacK, great point. My dad always said it doesn't matter if you're the best lawyer in the world, if you don't have paying clients you won't last long!
ReplyDelete>>>"The trouble with ending student loans and other tuition support for law students is that only the wealthy will be able to go to law school. Do we really want to make law the exclusive domain of the one percent?"<<<
ReplyDeleteDo you really give a fuck if the top 1% is the only "lucky" part of society able to waste their lives and sell their souls in the legal profession?
I say, let them enjoy it!
To CBR:
ReplyDeleteYou bested me. I will do you one better. I'll cheerfully donate $100 in you name (CBR). You are a generous soul.
At my school, Campbell University School of Law, we believe the most important person in the law school is the student's future client, not the student, not the dean, not the faculty members. This perspective helps transition the student from a "student-centered" educational experience in undergraduate school to one that focuses on the professional duties and obligations of the lawyer the student wishes to become. It also guides us in our curriculum offerings, pedagogy, and interactions with students. We try to improve the practice of law one graduate at a time and keeping the needs of the students' future clients' in mind helps us do that. BTW, practice experience is counted as a plus in the faculty hiring consideration. If you haven't represented real clients it is difficult to really prepare others to do so.
ReplyDeleteProf. W. Woodruff
I would certainly hope so, professor, since your school, which might be the fifth or sixth best law school in it's own state, estimates cost of attendance at this illustrious institituion as....wait for it....
ReplyDelete$62,340 per year.
How do you all sleep at night? How do you look in a mirror? Do you like what you see?
I'm sorry, that may have come across harsher than it needed to....
ReplyDeletebut do you honestly think that this is a fair price for the career opportunities that your school is providing? Over $100,000 in non-dischargeable debt for tuition alone?
Half of that would likely be far too much for the career prospects provided.
I don't that some make it just fine. That's inevitably the case anywhere you go. But what about the vast majority? Do you know how they are doing five, ten, fifteen years after graduation. What does the life of the average 2004 graduate look like today? Are they better or worse off for having attended?
With all due respect Prof. Woodruff, that kind of talk sounds good in an admissions brochure, but if they can't find jobs, your graduates will never have any clients to serve.
ReplyDeleteActually, what most clients want is an affordable fee. The bottom line is the bottom line.
ReplyDeleteWhile many people might rattle off a list of qualities they want from an attorney, it is all meaningless if they cannot afford those services. Most people cannot afford $100,000 for a piece of litigation. In fact, most cannot afford $5,000. (Just try asking you typical individual for a $5,000 retainer for a divorce.
This means that most practitioners do not have the luxury of proof reading a document a gazillion times; it's one draft, then out. Similarly, most clients cannot afford research on the law in all 50 states; one cites the leading opinion from the state Supreme Court, and calls it good.
In the real world, outside of big law and big law clients, where 90% of lawyers practice, it's all about delivering a quality product for a reasonable price. Lawyers need to learn how to work quickly and efficiently. Either that, or be prepared to write off most of their fees.
It would really be awesome if this kind of practice will be carried on to the future as well.
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