<p>Check out the following article that appeared in the NY Times. Essentially, they are recommending that legal education needs a big revamp and should become more practical in the training provided.</p>
<p>What’s the Times trying to do–put the Bar Review courses out of business?</p>
<p>This exact same article could have been written 30 years ago. Indeed, it was much more true then than it is now.</p>
<p>Hunt I was thinking the same thing. When I was at law school some 30+ years ago, all we did in legal writing was to prepare an appellate brief for the moot court. We never drafted any legal documents. I found that strange that in such courses as contracts, we never saw a contract in addition to never drafting any.</p>
<p>Perhaps law schools could add a fourth year – a sort of legal intenrship/coop program?</p>
<p>I remember a group of students asking our Torts professor if we should take Evidence. “I never needed it,” he replied.</p>
<p>I think this whole problem is overstated, though.</p>
<p>I enjoyed the letter in today’s NY Times from a law professor insisting that his course IS TOO useful in practice. I wonder how many associates he’s hired. :rolleyes:</p>
<p>The criticisms leveled in the article are very valid, but could be applied to just about any university degree. The academic study rarely prepares one for all the skills required to perform in the “real world.” </p>
<p>However, the difference is that for some time top law graduates were billed out at rates that would suggest they were properly trained to add that level of value to their clients.</p>
<p>Nobody expects to pay a brand new engineer $150k and bill them out at $400 an hour. New physicians don’t make anywhere close to six figures for years after graduating medical school (residency). Some top MBAs can make a good six figured salary, but they also usually have quite a few years of solid experience under their belt pre-biz school. </p>
<p>So why should a firm expect to be able to bill out freshly minted law graduates at rates that justify the sorts of salaries still get tossed around? </p>
<p>It doesn’t make sense and now a lot of clients are simply calling firms’ bluff.</p>
<p>My recollection was that new associates generally did add value–what they mostly did was legal research and document review, which they already knew enough to do, especially legal research.</p>
<p>It is odd that the NY Times article appeared on the front page since it offers nothing new, or nothing that anyone who is familiar with professional schooling and law in particular didn’t already know.</p>
<p>Law school does provide a basic grounding in law, and that includes the history and foundations of the field. Obviously, knowing how property rights developed in pre-modern Europe will not provide the template for a recent law school graduates to oversee a real estate closing in 2011. However, they can get a set of documents from any number of sources nowadays and cut and paste them if they want to. That’s the easy part. Why spend the time in law school going over a process that may take an hour or two to master? What students do learn instead are the principles which allow them to analyze the needs in a given situation and devise the proper response to those needs. </p>
<p>Of course, there is on-the-job training in any field, and that is not simply true of the first year or two on the job. I’m not a lawyer–so if the illustration I used above is not precisely correct, don’t flame me–and I’m constantly having to learn new things about my field.</p>
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<p>The Canadian system requires an articling year after law school graduation as one part of the licensing process. The law schools aren’t a part of that, though.</p>
<p>Back in the days of our founding fathers, lawyers would become lawyers by being an apprentice with a practising lawyer.</p>
<p>Then they would be interviewed by leading lawyers in the community, who would decide if the person was good enough to practice on his own.</p>
<p>In any case, there is a VAST oversupply of lawyers.</p>
<p>They should shut down 1/2 the law schools, and use those financial resources to better train the other 1/2.</p>
<p>Better that there would be 1/2 as many lawyers, but lawyers who are well trained.</p>
<p>Now, just about anyone can become a lawyer.</p>
<p>When I was in law school 30+ years ago, my contracts professor had actually practiced law. One of our assignments was to divide into teams and negotiate and draft a contract. We had certain parameters but most of it was open. I worked very hard and did a good job and got an A and an appreciation of how tough it is to draft a good contract from scratch. Fortunately, much of the basic work was done decades ago and incorporated into forms. The real skill is being able to determine which parts of the standard form you need to try to get rid of and what you need to add custom for your needs. In my practice, I do not draft contracts, but I do read, evaluate, interpret and try to enforce or defeat them.</p>
<p>I also agree that law school now seems to have a much bigger focus on clinical training than when I was in school. My law school runs a number of clinics where students can get experience in family law, criminal law, bankruptcy, debtor-creditor and other areas. When I was there only crim law was offered and you had to actually work through a different school’s clinic.</p>
<p>I don’t know that I would actively encourage any of my children to follow our paths (I met my husband at the law school library) but if any of them chose to go to law school, I would support their decision.</p>
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I happen to be listening to a biography of Andrew Jackson, and this is how he became a lawyer. The book suggests that neither he nor the examining lawyers knew much actual law.</p>
<p>I saw actual contracts in two classes in law school, one of which was taught by Edward Rubin, quoted in the article.</p>
<p>That’s about one fifth the number of contracts I have drafted or revised in the last twenty-four hours. Then again, I’ve practiced law longer than all of my first-year law professors combined.</p>