<p>I plan on practicing in California, where you are not required to go to law school to sit for the Bar.</p>
<p>After talking to some professors I've learned something intersting about law school: They don't teach you law in law school!</p>
<p>So why spend all that time and money?</p>
<p>You can qualify for the bar exam in California by studying law in a law office during regular business hours a minimum of 20 hours per week for four years under a plan approved with the State Bar. (You actually have to spend the time studying - working for the attorney doesn’t count toward the time requirements.) The time commitment is considerable, both for the student and the attorney. Very few people actually pass the bar in this method - maybe one person per year. </p>
<p>My guess is that most people embarking on this route have a pre-existing personal relationship with the attorney, and have some hope of working with that attorney long-term. </p>
<p>I’ve been practing law in California for 25 years, and have never met an attorney who qualified via this route.</p>
<p>It’s an exageration to say they don’t teach you law in law school. Law school gives you the conceptual framework you need to practice law effectively. </p>
<p>Passing the bar is really the formal end of the beginning phase of becoming an effective attorney. What I learned in law school may be 10% of the legal knowledge I really need to operate effectively in the job I have now. But it made possible the acquisition of the other 90%.</p>
<p>This is the equivalent of saying they don’t teach you law in undergrad so why go to undergrad. </p>
<p>Better yet it’s like saying very few students who do professional work upon graduation (business, law, medicine) do anything related to what they learned in undergrad (a business major will probably learn 30-40% of what they need for the job in undergrad), so why should they go? </p>
<p>I think Greybeard said it best: </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The TTTs will teach you the law and the bar, you should aim for a TTT (The Third Tier) school.</p>
<p>If you can get an undergrad in anything, say engineering for example, then go to law school and learn slim-to-nothing about law, how could one become an effective lawyer?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Actually, I don’t find that to be a ridiculous train of thought, but one that is quite reasonable. For example, the legal and medical educational systems in many nations in Europe such as the UK do not require undergraduate degrees; most students apply to their equivalents of law or medical school right out of high school. While MBA programs do exist within Europe, they are a distinctly niche phenomenon compared to their pervasiveness within the US. Yet I don’t think that anybody would seriously argue that Europe happens to run particularly primitive legal or medical systems, or have business environments that are benighted due to a lack of graduate-school-educated professionals. </p>
<p>The best reason to have students obtain formal graduate law degrees in the US is that that is the system by which the vast majority of hiring for legal positions has evolved. Most law firms, government agencies, and NGO’s will expect you to have an actual law degree, and if you don’t, you will be at a grave hiring disadvantage. Heck, most of the better law firms won’t even grant you an interview. </p>
<p>But that doesn’t mean that the US legal hiring & education system needed to have evolved in this manner. The US could have evolved similarly to Europe.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>That is not what “TTT” stands for. And if it did, the first word of that sentence would be redundant.</p>
<p>You know, one of my friends suggested that our system of schooling essetially developed in response to Washington v. Davis, 426 U.S. 229 (1976).</p>
<p>
I know what TTT actually stands for, but just want to be nice about it.</p>
<p>You certainly do learn about the law in law school. Classes in criminal law, constitutional law, torts, real property, contracts, civil procedure, trusts and estates law, etc. teach you about those substantive areas of the law. You don’t learn everything you need to practice law - by a long shot, but you’ll learn what you need to know to figure it out.</p>
<p>It’s got to be impossible to learn a majority of information you actually need to practice law in law school. Situations vary case by case. School can only provide you the foundation, as with anything else.</p>
<p>In all actuality, the reasoning that occurs in a law school classroom is much more difficult than the reasoning that occurs in practice. Law school reasoning focuses on difficult cases that test the boundaries of the law. About 99% of the cases you’ll handle as an attorney will be pretty straightforward, and appellate cases are actually as rare as a hen’s tooth (despite the fact that the vast majority of cases you read in law school are appellate/scotus ones).</p>