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Lippe: What’s Wrong With Legal Ed & How to Fix It

Posted Jun 22, 2009 12:24 PM CST
By Molly McDonough

In its current state, legal education is growing increasingly distant from the profession and is more like a scholarly pursuit.

So says Legal OnRamp founder Paul Lippe in his most recent column published in the Am Law Daily blog.

From Lippe's perspective, there are a number of things wrong with legal education, specifically that law school is expensive and saddles grads with debt, thus restricting career options. Plus, grads don't enter the marketplace with client-marketable skills.

Observes Lippe, "While law students who get the higher paying law firm jobs achieve good salaries much faster than medical students, their time to professional independence is longer. This is not because law is more complex or riskier than medicine, but because legal training is inferior."

So what can and should change to create a "law school 4.0" model?

Lippe suggests the following:

• Accelerate the curriculum and include: 1 year of case method (only); 1 year of clinical training; 1 year of externship.

• Add more practice-oriented teaching.

• Be smarter about using technology to connect students to practitioners and clients.

• Move back from constituent-centered management to mission-centered management of the school.

Comments

1.

James
Jun 22, 2009 1:34 PM CST

I’d also add, decrease the number of law schools.

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2.

John
Jun 22, 2009 5:48 PM CST

This reminds me of a recent article in my local newspaper.  Referring the legal market, it stated that “most” new lawyers end up working for the BigLaw firm they clerked with over the previous summers.

Similarly, people who complain about overly-theoretical education from law school are actually complaining about most of the schools in the top 100.

Delve deeper and you will find the spirit if practical legal education continues in many Tier 3 schools, as well as a growing number of Top 100.

It astounds me when I talk to recent grads from Top 100 law schools who do not know how to file cases, write the pleadings leading up to trial, and then prosecute the trial itself.

The worst part is that these students often are not failing themselves, it’s the elite law schools they attend who are failing them.  Once thrown into the maelstrom, they pick it up as quickly or quicker than most.

Given the opportunity or requirement to study these points in law school would go a long way to fixing this perceived shortcoming.

Regardless, it’s moaning from BigLaw about the associates they hire from elite law schools who don’t know how to file with courts—perhaps those schools shouldn’t be considered so elite after all?

Or, even better, change the bar exam itself—if you don’t think attorneys are passing the bar ready to practice, change the requirements for passing the bar.

Ultimately, it’s a lot of bluster from people who don’t look at more practical schools, are insulated in their BigLaw/Elite School ivory towers, and don’t see the good jobs done by a large minority, if not majority, of actual law students.

- John

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3.

HBC
Jun 22, 2009 10:36 PM CST

ROFL.  Articles like Lippe’s make one nostalgic for pre-internet days when there were barriers to publishing. 

John:  How long did it take to learn to file a document?  Were you precocious or did your Tier 3 school offer a course in filing?

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4.

atty
Jun 23, 2009 9:29 AM CST

There’s a very simple way to fix legal education: (1) Eliminate the third year of law school. (2) Adopt a matching system similar to residencies after medical school. Any graduate of law school must be required to “match” into a two-year post-graduate job with a government agency or law firm. Failure to do so disqualifies one from practicing law.  This should serve the dual purpose of trimming down the number of job-seekers each year to the number of available openings and provide them with practical training.

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5.

John
Jun 23, 2009 10:56 AM CST

I agree with James, too many law schools with open admission policies. The lawyers could use nursing or any medical related schools as a model. Nursing and other medical programs are very difficult to get into and very few of them around. This keeps demand high, does not water down the degrees and keeps salaries higher and the quality of the grads high.

Also, why is the bar pasing rates over 80% in most states.

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6.

John
Jun 23, 2009 11:32 AM CST

I learned to file cases after working for a new lawyer from a top-tier law school who didn’t know how.  This pre-law school experience as a legal assistant made me realize I could do this.

Worse, though, is the complete lack of any practice skills learned by many law students.  How do you address a judge?  How do you question a witness?  Where do you stand, and how do you know where to stand?

Even so, I relish dealing with self-important BigLaw associates who went to so-called elite law schools.

They write poor briefs, they fail to introduce evidence properly in court, they attempt to play motions practice as a nuisance game, and they think they’re entitled to win because they went to Harvard or Yale or some other law school that’s “just better.”

Too bad the law is agnostic, and so are juries and the appeals process.

Let BigLaw remain saddled with associates who have to spend weeks learning to draft complaints, more weeks learning to draft answers, and then more weeks learning how to do it all over again after they get summarily judged.

So, HBC, I was precocious.  So was my law school, and so are many others.  They spend time to teach legal theory as well as legal practice—it’s just that most folks don’t realize it.

Instead the whine about unprepared attorneys.  Perhaps they shouldn’t hire them?

Let the market sort it out.

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7.

William
Jun 23, 2009 2:53 PM CST

Lawyers invent the law. Doctors discover and apply therapies.  That’s why I would argue we shouldn’t compare the professions.  Those three years are spent learning how to think and learning how to negotiate with people who think on the same level.  The where and when and with what-size-font part of trial law is journeyman stuff—you don’t need to be insightful to memorize rules, but you need to be awfully insightful to figure out how to put together a persuasive argument.  I like the English system of requiring practice before license, but then their law degrees are undergrad: my guess is that our JD system allows us to be both more liberal and more inventive.  As a transactional lawyer, I never even took evidence in law school—I can’t tell you how frustrating a year of court practice would have been.  Finally, we need to get rid of all for-profit law schools, or at least make them ineligible for accreditation: how can the public feel confident in the preparation of folks who are taught by a school with a financial incentive to keep them in class? Good lawyers come out of those schools, of course, and many of those schools do not comprise, but the moral hazard is inescapable.

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8.

Laura
Jun 23, 2009 7:25 PM CST

I went to law school long ago, but even then, when tuition was cheap, law clerking during the school year was discouraged.  But I was broke, so I clerked from my first year on.  In the end I had no school debt, and three full years of exposure to how lawyers did their jobs.

Now with the cost of tuition so high, and lawyering positions so competitive, that admonition against clerking must be much more strenuous.  The young lawyers I have seen are babes in the woods their first year out.  They have no clue what a court is, what a client is, much less what it means to prosecute a case.  The hand-holding is a bit much.

I think that law schools should institute an “americorps”- type program.  Ship these new law school graduates out to assist legal aid services and pro per clients.  Make them do it for a year for room and board, and then wipe out a bunch of their school debt for doing so.  Then they can go apply for a job.  The courts and clients, and the OLD lawyers would all be so much happier, and so much better served. And it would remind us all that this is a service profession, not a money grubbing profession.

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9.

Sam
Jun 26, 2009 4:46 AM CST

So law schools should become paralegal schools?

Folks, Supreme Court cases are tough, and how do we expect to prepare people to read and write Supreme Court briefs with one year of case methods?

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10.

Robert
Jun 26, 2009 5:42 AM CST

Sam, what you don’t understand is that not all of us in Law write Supreme Court briefs in the first place.  On the other side of that, I do know two non-lawyers who managed to win USSC cases pro se, who have no legal training at all.

If a person wants to take their career that way, they can learn it from experienced attorneys.

I also doubt you actually learned that in Law School anyway. 

As far as law schools becoming paralegal schools, that might actually be an improvement.  A fresh JD could not generally do the work of a paralegal with two years of hands-on experience.

It’s not much more than a “hoop of fire” one has to jump through to get permission to actually learn something useful.

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11.

anon
Jun 26, 2009 6:00 AM CST

Amen to the new 3-year plan. We desperately request practical, marketable skills upon graduation! And work contacts (eg at externships) would be icing on the cake, as I know plenty of folks working at their former clinical.

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12.

Dan
Jun 26, 2009 6:12 AM CST

The biggest problem with law school is what they teach more than how it is taught.  Professors teach what interests them, even if its not on the bar or even relevant to real life practice.  That is ok in an elective course, but in the basics it can be a disaster.  For example, at my law school one of the professors who taught criminal law spent most of the course talking about buggery, “crimes against nature” and wrongful convictions.  None of these subjects are on the bar, nor are they very practical to your average attorney.  So students were forced to learn information that was of no use to them.  Law school curriculum needs to be more tailored to practical concerns so that new lawyers have a clue of how things are done before they have to do them.  I worked for 2 different firms while I was in school, and by the time I graduated I already knew a good bit about how litigation worked in my state, and was well prepared for my first job as a judicial clerk.  That is what judges and employers expect, and they often complain about how unprepared new attorneys are for the real world.

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13.

silencedogood
Jun 26, 2009 6:21 AM CST

1) Put the practical knowledge first, then move onto higher level thinking—you have to walk before you run

2) Change the way performance is measured.  I went to a top 10 school and felt I learned nothing, or less than nothing, in some classes because I didn’t know until the end what my grade would be (and then didn’t care because I was onto the next course) and never had a chance to readjust my approach.  The best class I ever took was Criminal Law which was small, had multiple exams, and was not graded on a curve.

3) Be willing to fail students.

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14.

Dan K.
Jun 26, 2009 6:56 AM CST

Once again, tactics my supposedly “second tier” (ranked in the 60s) law school has been doing for years.  Pretty much everyone at my school does either clinics or externships, depending on their preference.

I like that HBC belittles the learning of proper procedure.  I take it he doesn’t practice in a state like NY, where judges have their own little fiefdoms and forgetting to cross 1 “t” will result in dismissal.

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15.

riverside
Jun 26, 2009 7:17 AM CST

14:  local counsel usually provides such information

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16.

In H
Jun 26, 2009 7:32 AM CST

John has a very serious case of late-stage short guy syndrome.

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17.

B
Jun 26, 2009 8:14 AM CST

Call me old-fashoined, but I don’t really think law school curriculums need changing.  It is the years after law school that need changing (not that I’m suggesting that there is any practical way to force law firms to give associates greater exposure right out of law school).  Doctors spend as much time learning theory as lawyers do; in my opinion, the significant difference is that they go on to a residency where they are thrown into actual practice, rather than asked to hold the gauze, count the forceps, learn how to use the order forms, etc. for the first three-four years. 

The fact is, lawyers today spend years on document review, adapting form documents to fit a new client, updating case citations in briefs they didn’t write, and hunting for the facts used in depositions and trials.  It’s no wonder that it takes another four years after that before any reputable firm might reasonably call you a partner and entrust its clients to you:  for the first four years, you have very little, if any, actual control over the most important part of being a lawyer, namely figuring out how to advise and serve the client.

Unfortunately, as I’ve already mentioned, no practical solution to this model comes to mind if associates are to be employed by law firms right out of lawschool.  But without practical on-the-job experience where the associates are expected to actually make the decisions and learn from their successes and failures, there is very little hope of them achieving the same level of professional independence as a third-year resident.

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18.

Paul F. Morgan
Jun 26, 2009 8:15 AM CST

There is too little correlation between what is taught [and examined on bar exams] and the % of actual legal issues in the real word.  In particular, at least 90% of legal issues on contracts are due to ambiguous language, which is rarely even discussed in law schools, much less addressed by any training.

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19.

Harvard Grad
Jun 26, 2009 8:37 AM CST

18 - What’s a contract?

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20.

Here is the Rub
Jun 26, 2009 8:45 AM CST

I can only speak for MYSELF, but my most valuable experiences in law school were (a) working over the summer, (b) Journal work, and (c) studying abroad. 


Legal education is leaving many of us unprepared and in debt.  The present legal education model is not working. 


At best, again at best, the current model is effective only at creating law professors and, I regret to say, not legal professionals.

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21.

Engineer turned Lawyer
Jun 26, 2009 8:49 AM CST

Same arguments have been made against engineering schools for 30+ years.  The top schools are very theoretical, the lower tier schools tend to be more practical.  Most engineers learn how to really design stuff once they get a job.  It’s a free market - students pick their schools and employers pick their employees.  If employers and students make bad choices, that’s their right to do so in a free economy.  It leaves room for innovation.  I don’t know why people feel the need to socially engineer everything.

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22.

Ryan
Jun 26, 2009 9:15 AM CST

I think Lippe is spot on; the amount of pure academic non-sense that gets tossed around in law school is kind of nuts.

I had way too many professors with no practical legal experience or minimal legal experience (1-2 years). Those were the people teaching torts, contracts, professional responsibility and ethics, etc.

It’s a practical profession, I think the training should be practice oriented as well.

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23.

Theodore Seto
Jun 26, 2009 9:23 AM CST

The increasing cost of legal education has at least one simple source: Under US News’ methodology, the more a law school spends, the higher it will be ranked. As a result, it is impossible for any school to emerge as a “best buy.” Our school tried, for several years, to hold down tuition, but discovered that doing so cost us in the rankings. To compete, we had to raise tuition. Eliminate US News’ access to law school cost data and schools will be able to compete on price again.

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24.

law student
Jun 26, 2009 9:27 AM CST

I just finished my first year of law school and was a paralegal in a very small law firm for a year before that.  My Civ Pro class was a joke, and unfortunately about half of the other first year classes were similarly depressing.  I learned more as a paralegal that I did in Civ Pro.  The prof was even flat out wrong several times (and yes, I did look it up).  My Con Law course consisted of entirely canned/scripted lectures with no class participation aside from the prof berating us for not being able to find his favorite synonym in the 3rd paragraph on page 126 of the casebook.  At this point I am absolutely flaming mad over the mountains of debt I am accruing and what little I have to show for it.  I’m being totally ripped off—not just with regard to my wallett, but with my future career.  It is totally unacceptable.

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25.

lee
Jun 26, 2009 9:39 AM CST

They’re on the right track.  90 hours of law school is too damn long.  Shorten it to 45 hours of class and 45 hours of practical training, whether that be legal clinic hours or externships with firms around towns.  The 45 hours of clinic could go a long way toward helping people in the community that need legal services but can’t afford it.  I don’t have the habitual volunteer mentality, but i’d much rather have spent 45 hours doing clinic my last year and a half than trying to figure out which BS classes have the easiest professors and require the least amount of work.  The last half of law school is a total waste of time.

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26.

Seytom
Jun 26, 2009 9:54 AM CST

Amen to this article.  So far as I can tell, the only purpose to the third year of law school is to finance the schools and make the degree SEEM more serious.  A 2-year degree just doesn’t carry enough heft—more like a Masters degree or certificate.

Law schools might actually turn into institutions that support the improvement and advancement of the entire profession, rather than just its theoretical side.

People who deride practical education as ‘learning how to file a complaint’ are ignoring the very complex practical decisions that have to be made in handling a case for which neither the case method nor the general law school curriculum prepares students to make.

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27.

Rafael
Jun 26, 2009 9:56 AM CST

WOW! I have been complaining about this for YEARS!  Many law profesors teach what they WANT and not what the class IS. For example,  when I took Mortgage Law, our profesor spent the entire term teaching about mortgage law in Europe, NOT in our state.  Constitutional Law? In THAT class we learned a LOT about Nixon and Watergate, but VERY LITTLE about Constitutional Law itself. THAT I learned the hard way as a Special Prosecutor. What can we do with such profesors? Nothing: They have tenure….

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28.

inspired
Jun 26, 2009 9:59 AM CST

One law school is trying something new: http://law.wlu.edu/thirdyear/

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29.

nn
Jun 26, 2009 10:06 AM CST

People complain about the elitism here from the top-tiers and about how top-tiers generalize about lower-tiers, but I’m seeing just as much generalization from non-top-tiers about the lawyers who went to top-tier schools.  Here’s a hint: not all lawyers who went to a tier 1 school are elitist, have no life experience, went to fancy private schools, learned no practical legal skills, waste their lives away in BigLaw etc.

I went to a top ten law school. I’m not elitist.  I know and work with very good and bright lawyers who did not go to tier 1 law schools.  I come from a very blue-collar background, went to public school my whole life (until college) and I was the first in my family to attend college, let alone go on to any kind of post-grad education.  My background provided plenty of life experience (though I admit that a lot of my law school classmates seemed not to have that kind of experience).  I’d also like to point out (in response to comments like in post #6), that my law school definitely taught me how to address a judge, where to stand in court, how to question a witness, etc.  When I graduated I went to work for a small firm and was in court and meeting with clients almost immediately.

Anyway, I, too, am disappointed by the elitism of some people here, but my main point is that I think it’s hypocritical for folks from lower-ranked law schools to complain about the elitism on this board and then go on bashing folks who went to top-tier law schools based on lame generalizations.  The end.

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30.

farrell
Jun 26, 2009 10:10 AM CST

Law shcools are not trade schools and should not become them.  It does require learning a different way to think and theorize.  There is a place and need for both the theoretical and the practical.. I think that adding a year onto law school like a residency or internship is the best idea, not taking away a year.

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31.

daj
Jun 26, 2009 11:21 AM CST

I agree that practical training is very important in law school. MANY students already realize this and focus on intern/externships, clinics, and mock/moot court. The opportunities for practical experience are there.

However, at all law schools across the board, journal membership continues to be the most “prestigious” endeavor, even though it does not teach real skills. So, people scramble for law journals and reviews instead of competing for clinics, etc.

I think that the last year of law school should be eliminated, or consist of an externship, if only for the purpose of lowering the cost of education. Students already learn most of what we need to know for the bar 1st & 2nd year.

I would propose:
1st year - basics
2nd year Fall - more bar courses & a skills course
2nd year Spring - externship or clinic
Eliminate 3rd year or let students study for the bar or continue to participate in and externship or clinic.

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32.

Diana
Jun 26, 2009 11:35 AM CST

I agree that “law schools are not trade schools”  right now they are worse than a trade school because they accept anyone who has the money or is willing to go into debt and upon graduation the student doesn’t even know his/her trade. 

The ABA has allowed the law schools to dictate the rules for accreditation and has allowed the law schools to put the school’s greed before the profession.  Putting the profession first would stop turning out a huge glut lawyers when there are few jobs. Here is my suggestions:

1.  Make law school harder to get into.  Just because a person can buy a prep-course to ace the LSAT and is willing to shell out big money—doesn’t mean they will make a good attorney.  All that does is bring dollars into the law school.  A potential law student must have the intelligence and calling to the profession.  Those who want to be lawyers just for the alleged money should be rejected.  This is a tough profression we need to weed people out before they become the disgruntled.

2.  Eliminate evening division from all law schools.  Hey, the profession is full we do not need more and more unemployed lawyers.

3.  Limit class size.  Again keep law school in line with the number of jobs.

4.  Require teachers to actually work as lawyers.  DUH.  Eliminate the tenured non-teaching teachers who gloss over the subject, only teach one aspect of the topic, or cannot teach.  How can we expect new attorneys to understand the law if the teachers are sub-par.

5,  Put in practical courses, clinic time, pro bono work, or any manner which will actually educate on what a lawyer does.

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33.

Cj
Jun 26, 2009 1:21 PM CST

I actually enjoyed my law school experience. The professors were knowledgeable and very approachable.  I worked for a professor after my first year on several interesting projects and continued to cite check his work during my second year.  I hand ample opportunities to participate in journal work.  I didn’t make law review, but wrote onto a similarly competitive journal.  I participate in my school’s intra-moot court competition and was selected for a travel team to a national competition.  I served on the moot court governing board and took a government litigation position after my second year.  During my third year I had ample clinical experiences taught by faculty who were actual practicing lawyers in the field.  My school is ranked in the top 30-35 each year and costs much less than most private tier 4 schools.  My debt upon graduation about $60k.

Legal education is broken because many schools aren’t doing it right and are lying to their students.  My school did what it told me it would do and I do not feel like I was lied to.  The employment statistics were explained.  The problem is that many Tier 4 schools cannot tell the truth to their students and still fill a class.

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34.

John
Jun 26, 2009 2:08 PM CST

16:  Touché.  I’ll admit being disillusioned towards BigLaw and elite law schools.  Not elite law students, but rather the attitudes of the schools and their BigLaw partners.  Call it short-guy syndrome, call it what you want, but I admit to it.

29:  You’re right.  Students from top schools aren’t always elitist.  Personally, the most “elitist” folks I’ve met from top law schools tended to be low in their class and their school’s ranking was how they coped.

My problem isn’t with the students of these schools, it’s with the schools themselves and US News & World Report.

I keep hearing about how law school doesn’t teach people how to be lawyers.

Ridiculous.  Many schools do.  Apparently, 29, your school does.  So does 33 - Cj’s school.  As did my lowly Tier 3 school.

Nevertheless, people like Lippe and my state’s bar (Georgia) overlook the competency of the many schools in favor the incompetency coming out of a few elite and prominent schools.

Similarly, BigLaw firms and other lawyers complain about the unpreparedness of graduates from these schools.

The result?  People like Lippe who advocate changing “the way law schools work” when he doesn’t realize many schools have been working the right way for years.

We also get bars like Georgia mandating silly “probationary” periods on their new admissions.  Pass the bar?  Good!  Now you can enter our 1-year probationary period where you have to go through a mentorship process.

If firms and state bars are really worried about this then they should change their own requirements.

If I can pass the bar exam, which you say should mean I am ready to be a lawyer, then you shouldn’t be able to complain about whether I’m ready to be a lawyer.

And yes, new lawyers are always going to need experience, but the complaints always talk about fundamental unpreparedness.

So, change the bar exam to make it reflect what we really need to know as lawyers.

If law schools (be they top-tier or fourth-tier) have students who keep failing it, then they will change the way they teach.

If they don’t change?  Then the market will sort it out.

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35.

Johny Law
Jun 26, 2009 3:15 PM CST

What’s Wrong With Legal Ed: [1] incompetent professors who only offer pointless “discussions” about cases and no instructions on how to be a lawyer - most law professors have less real work experience than the pimple-faced kid at McDonalds [2] petulant and vindictive law professors

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36.

Alex, from Long Beach, California
Jun 26, 2009 4:18 PM CST

I went to a 2nd-3rd tier school, with a good rep for turning out practicing lawyers and some great judges, and it was probably because the school started out as a 2nd career law school and the mission statement was to really teach people a career.  When I studied at the other local 1st tier schools, which I did daily, after class,  I was impressed by their libraries and their beautiful campuses, but the classroom experience was just the same huge auditoriums of students.  The real learning took place in work groups after class.  Class mate support was very helpful, in other words, and it was encouraged.  At my school, we just informally gathered at the local bar and BS’d endlessly about property and torts with our reality-based profs, also there for a drink.  It was actually some of the best learning we had.  That was 35 years ago and the same problem existed then as it does, apparently still now—that law school doesn’t really prepare it’s grads for realities of practice.  About 1/2 of the starting class graduated and some 60% passed the bar, but as for knowing what to do next, we were infants.  It takes years to be able to practice on one’s own and to hold one’s own against experienced practitioners:  I would suggest that there be at least a course in how to deal with the hyper-conflict of a trial situation (not just moot court), how to deal with the protocols of negotiating with a district attorney, or how to approach a judge on a delicate point without embarrassing yourself and your client.  Something about stress reduction would help, as would learning how to manage the urge for escaping into a bottle when emotional distress is high; conflict resolution skills should be mandatory.  There are plenty of areas to improve by mandating hands-on experience.  I ended up interning for legal aid foundation and later clerked for a local Federal District Court judge and loved both positions because the work was real and the mixing with real people enabled me to evaluate my own ignorance of the practice of law and to measure how fast I was on the uptake for procedural matters.  I was also fortunate out of law school to have a mentor who threw me into the deep-end but then wouldn’t let me drown.  Cheers to all new grads and good luck on your Bar exams!

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37.

Kalifornia Arnold
Jun 26, 2009 5:20 PM CST

#5—Not in California—we are lucky to get (in a good year) 40-55%  Bar pass rate.

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38.

JD
Jun 26, 2009 5:24 PM CST

as a law student I agree the curriculum needs a massive overhaul.  I can learn the law by reading books and not going to class. I can only learn how to practice by experience, which law school provides very little of.

also, to the comments about there being too many law schools, etc…we have a market economy. The schools exist because people are willing to pay to attend. There is clearly an information gap that needs to be corrected in the marketplace because apparently many students don’t realize that paying $40K per year to attend the school ranked 129th in the nation is a bad investment decision. If I operated a tier 3/4 ranked private (read: expensive) law school, I would seriously question the intelligence of every person who applied.

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39.

4th tier law student
Jun 26, 2009 7:37 PM CST

I attend a 4th tier law school. I participated in a trial admissions program, worked my butt off to get into school. This problem is MUCH larger than the law school setting. The problem starts in high school, moves to college, and then either stops or proceeds into a professional school. I learned absolutely nothing in high school. We attended class and everyone thought it was “cool” to see if they could get away with not doing their homework. Very few parents at home pushing them in the right direction. They somehow make it through high school and apply to college, where they will drink beer, join fraternal organizations, throw the frisbee, lay around, skip class, and somehow manage to pull-through with good grades. The bar has been lowered so that more students are able to go to school. Why? SO THE SCHOOLS WILL CONTINUE TO MAKE MONEY. FOR-PROFIT OR NOT FOR PROFIT. Education in this country is the cash cow of the U.S. “Everyone can go to school.” What a joke. This was my dream. Law school packaged-up a beautiful image and sold it to me. I bought into it. The people who are the biggest victims…the real losers in this entire scheme are the students…..the future LEADERS of this country. So what does the government do? They allow lending companies to give students loans up to $60k per year with 10 years to do the math at 8.5% interest. You do the math. THIS IS ROBBERY. This is the exact same system as the home mortgage crisis. No one else sees this coming, and those that do are turning a blind eye. Give it a few more years and crap will start hitting the fans when these law grads can’t find jobs or pay off the $250,000 worth of undergrad and law loans they owe. As for the discussion on the top tier law schools…the strongest and most resilient students in this world are not the privileged kids who’s mommy and daddy are paying their tuition and having their butts wiped for them. The strongest kids are the ones who have worked their hearts our to get where they are. People will soon begin to realize that “if you help him, you hurt him.” Every law student should have to pay for his or her own degree…or else they will not know how to appreciate what they have. We have entered an era of profound irresponsibility. The law students are vulnerable, young, and stupid—prey for these predatory lenders. The doors are wide-open and the chickens are gonna come to roost sooner or later. Trust me, I AM IN IT. This is NOT the same world that existed 20 years ago. The lower-ranked schools, like mine…we have a C+ grading curve….. Do you know what they does to a 1st year class??? THEY CUT 1/3 OF THE CLASS. I am furious and about to throw in the towel. After finishing my first year of law school, I feel like a fool. I am being taken for a ride by these predatory lenders and I’m sick of it. I’m ready to go learn to be a dang dental hygienist or learn to work on cars. If I’m going to go $250,000 in debt to come out of school making a whopping $60k/year, I’d rather be selling peanuts on the streets of NYC. This is a big mess.

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40.

bg
Jun 27, 2009 11:27 AM CST

#39 - My law school is a second tier law school and had a C curve when I attended 11 years ago and was making moves to install a curve in upper level classes as well.  They now have a C+ curve for first year and a B curve in upper level classes.  And YES, schools SHOULD be cutting the class after the first year.  Too many schools do not, which floods the profession with utterly incompetent attorneys.  You may think it is unfair from the prospective of a law student, but from the prospective of a client, fellow attorney, judge, or the parties upon whom they inflict their incompetence, it is unconscionable.  But the most schools will not cut more of their classes because it is viewed as a negative by the rankings.

Perhaps people are sold a false bill of goods when they go to law school, but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that most people do not understand what is really involved in the practice of law.  TV portrays the profession in a very unrealistic manner.  Most people, however, don’t seem to be willing to do anything to find out just what the profession they want to spend the next 50 years of their life practicing entails.  I worked as a paralegal for several years before going to law school so I could decide whether it was what I wanted to do and think it should be a requirement for anyone going to law school.  I don’t regret the experience for a minute, especially since it still comes in handy 11 years into my career, giving me an insight into how to approach some projects that even those who have been practicing 30 years lack.

I have personally found that students are LESS willing to work during law school.  I have had more trouble finding clerks for my firm in recent years than ever before.  And you would think that in the current economy they would be stalking me on the street.  Do there need to be more practical skills taught in law school?  Sure.  But some of the basic skills also seem to be falling by the wayside lately.  Research and writing skills have also been on the decline lately as students have become more and more dependent upon electronic researching.  Sure, you may be $200k in debt when you come out of law school, but why should you be paid more than $60k a year when you don’t even have that in the fundamental skills that the school DID try to teach you?!?

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41.

Netochka Nezvanova
Jun 27, 2009 4:08 PM CST

#24 - if you just finished your 1L year, there’s still time to go to art school.

And once again we’re blaming schools for students who don’t take responsibility for their own learning & training. 

Take the skills courses, like Interviewing, Trial Techniques, Advanced Research and Writing, do an internship or volunteer work.

Skip the “interesting” classes like Animal Law or the Legal Systems of the Roman Empire.  Unless you plan to teach them to the next batch of misguided students.

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42.

B. McLeod
Jun 28, 2009 11:52 PM CST

“Legal Systems of the Roman Empire.”  Aye.  Wish I had that one.  Sometimes I yet muse long upon how similar the border is today to the line of the old Roman wall.

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43.

Tony
Jun 30, 2009 3:00 PM CST

The problem is the legal culture that arbitrarily values one lawyer over another based on where they went to school.  I went to law school at a nonaccredited school while working as a VP at a large company.  I had a wife and family and I couldn’t quit my job to go to law school.  I didn’t intend to practice law.  But, once I got into it, I found it interesting and I found I was good at it.  Now, I’m a full time attorney.  Among all the attorney’s I’ve faced off with, some of the smartest went to 2nd and 3rd tier schools.  Likewise, some fo the dumbest went to 1st tier schools.  The schools have to teach you how to think and write like a lawyer.  Trouble is that some of the 1st tier schools don’t teach that.  They EXPECT people to know that when they arrive.  The school I attended made no pretense of training supreme court justices.  It was the equivalent of a legal technical school.  It was taught by lawyers actively engaged in the practice.  Consequently, we learned about the practice of law, including such arcane concepts as how to file papers with the court.  The students weren’t expected to get jobs with biglaw.  We were expected to work as trust officers or start solo practices, so it was thought to be important that we be able to fend for ourselves.  Now, 10 years later, I’ve refused to hire grads from top 10 schools because they were arrogant idiots who came out of school thinking they deserved a secretary to handle all of the tasks they thought to be beneath them.  Lawyers need to pay their dues like every other profession.  If one more tier 1 grad tells me he shouldn’t have to learn to use MS Word because that’s what his legal secretary is for, I’m gonna fire him/her.  What too many schools teach is that breaking and entering is the unlawful entry into the dwelling of another at night with intent to commit a felony therein.  Face it, that’s what the bar exam tests.  The instruction and the test deal with arcane and remote concepts best suited for prospective judges, not concepts that are meaningful to a small business owner who is trying to keep the city from zoning him out of business.  I have often said that a top grad from the top school in the nation who doesn’t take a bar review course has a lesser chance of passing the bar exam, than my wife would if she took the bar review.  The whole system has become nothing but an exercise in hazing.  “I had to go through it, so why shouldn’t you?”  You need schools that teach lawyers how to think and write like lawyers, and also how to BE lawyers.  Then, you need a test that forces prospective lawyers to demonstrate that they have the skills to practice law and effectively represent their client.  Who among those reading this post would rather pay a 1st year lawyer from a tier 1 school $160K to save their business or their life, than a 7 year lawyer from a tier 2 or 3 school (they’d probably charge less anyway)?  Law is a practice, not an academic pursuit.  Your clients expect more from you than your ability to quote passages from arcane cases.  These days, many of your clients know as much or more about the law when they come to you, as you do.  We need to guard against becomming irrelevant.

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