Should law schools have more hands-on learning requirements?
Law students will need to get twice as much practical, hands-on experience before graduation if a proposal by the council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions moves forward.
The Standards Committee released a memo on May 2 outlining recommendations to increase required experiential learning credit hours from six to 12, which would impact Standards 303, 304 and 311. At its quarterly meeting in Chicago on Friday, the council voted it be sent out for notice and comment.
“Three of the 12 credit hours must be in a clinic or a field placement where there is a real client being represented, so students get to learn about the attorney client relationship and managing that relationship,” said Carla L. Pratt, chair of the Standards Committee, at Friday’s meeting.
The current requirement, written into Standard 303 (a)(3), was adopted in 2014 despite significant support for mandating 12 to 15 credits, according to the memo.
Ahead of the May 2 proposal, a survey was sent out in January yielding 83 responses from law schools.
“We learned that we need to have that foundational education in the first third of the legal education for the experiential learning to be maximized,” Pratt said.
Clinics are more expensive than traditional courses to conduct, prompting concerns that more experiential credit hours would mean higher law school tuition. The survey showed 53% of law schools could meet nine experiential learning credit hours without needing to expand current course offerings. An additional 19.3% stated they would need to expand offerings but believed that to be manageable.
The current six experiential credits have scarcely made an impact on bar exam pass rates, according to the memo.
“One of the shocking things is that our increasing credits back in 2014 really did not move the needle in terms of outcomes,” said David Brennan, chair of the council.
But the impending move to the NextGen UBE Bar Exam—which focuses on testing a range of lawyering skills that help newly licensed lawyers perform common entry-level skills without supervision—might change that, the memo states.
“The goal of the Standards Committee’s recommendation is consistent with the goal that led to the development of the NextGen Bar Exam —to increase the likelihood that new lawyers are prepared to enter the profession,” according to the memo.
The proposed changes would bring legal education in line with other professions, the memo states. “The medical, veterinary, pharmacy, dentistry, social work, architecture, and nursing professions each require significantly more experiential learning than legal education currently does,” it says.
After notice and comment, the proposal will return to the council. Once approved it would head to the ABA House of Delegates for a vote.
The proposal states the changes would go into effect three years after being heard by the House. “So, we’re anticipating that schools would not need to come into compliance with this standard until 2030,” Pratt said.
The section’s council is recognized by the Department of Education as the sole accrediting body for U.S. law schools and is an independent arm of the ABA for that function. Most states require applicants of the state bar to be graduates of an ABA-accredited law school.
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