Like a job on Wall Street, getting your J.D. was once viewed as a ticket to a new house, fast car, and large sums of money. While many people sign up for law school with hopes of protecting individuals who had little means to help themselves, some run to the nearest law school in the hopes of getting on the fast-track to financial independence. In reality, however, most fledgling attorneys leave law school with loans that essentially ensure their indentured servitude to a law firm.
Moreover, if you believe a recent New York Times article, freshly minted lawyers are finding out law school does little to prepare them for the daily tasks a lawyer is called upon to perform. According to the NY Times piece by David Segal:
“What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”
It may be true that law schools don’t prepare their students to write contracts or draft documents for corporate mergers, but is that what they are supposed to teach? A medical school can teach a future doctor about disease and anatomy, but spending time in a hospital teaches that same doctor to treat specific ailments, and more importantly, to treat a person. The same could be said of law schools. Professors teach students to question statutes and precedents, analyze case briefs, and prepare arguments, but they don’t teach them about the technical aspects of helping clients in specific practice areas. That’s why law firms have associates and hospitals have residents.
With more on the subject, we turn to the experts with real law school (and practice) experience. Kicking things off is Patrick Lamb, partner with the Valorem Law Group and author of In Search of Perfect Client Service, with a brief discussion of why law schools aren’t in any rush to change their ways:
“Yet despite this outcry from the consumers of law school graduates, most law schools continue to look at the line in the door rather than the problems encountered by those walking out the door after three years’ investment of time and substantial sums of money. Those few schools (Indiana, among others) and professors (Mitt Regan, Gillian Hadfield, Bill Henderson, among others) are performing a laudable service, but the difficulty of changing entrenched faculties (most with tenure) is something that cannot be underestimated. And while many schools claim to be changing, the sad fact is that most are changing at the periphery and not at the core. “
Philip Thomas has some similar things to say on his blog, Mississippi Litigation Review & Commentary, but focuses instead on why the students themselves may not want things to change:
“Depending on their practice area, students may not need courses on property, UCC and bankruptcy. But substantive courses like that come in handy when it’s time to study for and take the bar exam. Courses in negotiating, software coding and deal-shaping? Not so much.
So before schools and students jump whole-hog into revamping the curriculum, they need to keep in mind that there is a bar exam to take—and pass—before students can actually start practicing law.”
Next, we turn to one of the LexBlog Network’s heavy hitters, Maxwell Kennerly, an attorney with the Beasley Law Firm in Philedelphia, PA and author of Litigation & Trial. Mr. Kennerly artfully weaves an analogy involving Andy Warhol, copyright law, and practicing law in response to Segal’s article:
“This is complicated stuff. It requires technical mastery of the principles of copyright law and creative, careful advocacy applying that law to artistic contributions so subtle that folks like me refuse to admit they exist at all. There is no way law school will ever prepare anyone to advise an artist or a gallery or the owner of artwork on the line between originality and infringement. Lawyers have to develop that judgment over time. Law is a profession, not a technique.
So when I read David Segal open his article in the New York Times with an anecdote about a first-year lawyer not knowing how to file a certificate of merger, I roll my eyes.”
Last but not least, Kendall Gray, a Houston-based attorney with Andrews Kurth, has a few kernels of advice for aspiring attorneys on the blog, The Appellate Record:
“The article is accurate so far as it goes. But it does not go nearly far enough. It gave me the impression that this is a racket from which no lemming can escape. It focuses too much on gloom and doom and acts as if law students are pawns in a game where they have no control.
But there is a different path.
If you want to be a lawyer, and a good one, nobody is forcing you into that kind of bargain. You can take responsibility for your own outcomes and professional development. If you do, your path will be roughly similar to my own path.”
In my years at LexBlog, I’ve read thousands of blog posts, case briefs, and anecdotal stories from lawyers around the country. For the past 18 months, there has been a fair amount of discussion regarding the high cost of tuition at law schools and the dropping rate of job placement after graduation. In the midst of that, very little has been said about the antiquated, over-intellectualized curriculum at law schools as portrayed by David Segal. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that academia has flaws, and many students come to universities with faulty premises and delusions of grandeur, but that can be said of undergraduate, graduate, and doctorate students. The “problems” facing law school graduates and their employers are by no means specific to the legal industry.