The National Law Journal's Law School Review

Fighting Law School Sprawl - Sustainability in the Legal Profession

A commenter on my earlier blog post stated that “[w]e need fewer law schools and fewer law students being educated at lower cost, not more law students.” 

I wholeheartedly agree that in the realm of big and medium law firm jobs, we have too many lawyers competing for fewer and fewer jobs. But for all this talk of an oversupply of lawyers, we still have a severe access to justice problem in this country, with a substantial portion of low-income and middle-class Americans not getting their legal needs met.  I believe there are untapped opportunities for lawyers who want to represent low-income and middle-class clients, but this type of career does not carry any of the prestige or stability of a traditional law firm job.    

The reality is that lawyers who choose to start their careers representing individual clients in the public sector or as small firm/solo practitioners will make around $45,000 or less, which is similar to a social worker’s salary.  Though social work is also a profession, in comparison to lawyers, social workers have dramatically different expectations in terms of salary, prestige, and status.  Moreover, with debt loads approaching $100,000 or more, most of today’s law graduates simply cannot afford this career path.

How do we re-boot legal education to ensure that we still have lawyers who can serve individual clients in their communities?  At this point, I'll borrow an idea from the environmental movement and say that I’d like to see legal education commit to fostering sustainability in the legal profession.  Sustainability does not necessarily mean shutting all the law school doors, but it does mean changing and redirecting the current untrammeled growth model. It might mean opting out of the U.S. News/ABA model and founding new community-centered schools operating on a smaller scale. Sustainability would also require law schools to start linking admissions decisions and tuition rates to the number of lawyers entering the profession and the types of careers available to them.

Is sustainability in this context a naive idea?  If we frame the issue in terms of resolving the legal education crisis and saving the legal profession, maybe we can persuade law schools to scale down. After all, in order to save the environment, individual consumers are willing to spend extra money to drive Priuses and buy organic food.  But as many on this blog have noted, convincing entrenched institutions operating in a highly profitable system to change may not be possible.

What we have now is law school sprawl.  And our sprawl makes it too expensive for young lawyers to commit to community-centered or public-service careers.  If we continue down this path, the only lawyers left standing will be the credentialed graduates who can secure jobs at medium and large law firms, which primarily represent business and corporate interests. Non-traditional and non-elite law graduates will have nowhere to go. And low and middle-income clients will continue to be underserved.

-Lucille A. Jewel  

 

Enhancing Law School Education: Making A Case For The Possible

[Guest post by Desiree Moore, founder of legal education program, Greenhorn Legal, and Adjunct Faculty Member at Loyola University Chicago School of Law]

I wrote this before reading Professor Moliterno’s post, “Time To ‘Do,’ Not Talk.”  I believe we are aligned in our thinking with respect to practical skills training and this post proposes something similar to (or compatible with) what Washington and Lee has undertaken:

Law students, whether in their 1L, 2L or 3L year, should participate in an intensive “boot camp” of sorts that covers those practical skills not otherwise offered in a traditional law school curriculum.  This is a streamlined and cost effective solution to the lack of preparedness new lawyers face as they embark on their legal careers.  It is far more practical and easier to implement than any proposal to revamp law school curricula entirely.  An intensive boot camp offered separate and apart from our existing law school curricula will also not interfere with the interests and objectives of our tenured professors (who are getting somewhat of a bad name here but who undeniably have defined so many of our law school experiences; they are not, by any means, disposable) or the venerable purposes of a traditional law school education.     

To be clear, “practical skills” in this instance does not mean trial practice, deposition training, negotiations skills, etc.  These are already being taught in many law schools and, while there is certainly a place for such skills courses, as a member of the hiring committee at a national law firm for many years I can assure you that landing a coveted law firm job (or any job in this market) does not turn on the ability to impeach a witness in a mock trial.  (Clinics are useful, too, but can be disjointed and arbitrary in terms of what comes across a student’s desk and thus do not guarantee that all students who participate are exposed to a similar, wide breadth of skills that will prepare them for any job after law school.)

What Law Schools Need: LEPR Colonies

[Guest post from 2008 New York University School of Law graduate Derek Tokaz]

Eliminate first year Legal Research and Writing ("Lawyering"), and add first year Logic, Ethics, and Professional Responsibility (LEPR), and second year practice-specific Lawyering in its place.

While large lectures with Socratic interrogations may be the most intimidating part of your first year of law school, your Lawyering class may be the most overwhelming (even if it's ungraded, as mine was). In your core subject classes, you're asked only to learn the law, while Lawyering tells you to learn the law and learn how to write at the same time. A great deal of time on first year writing assignments is spent learning legal fundamentals that you'll likely pick up in another class, such as what the elements of a contract are or the requirements for a motion to dismiss. Lawyering in the first year is like giving composition assignments to someone in a foreign language 101 class. They're worthwhile assignments, but wait until the students know some vocabulary and grammar.

Moving Lawyering to the second year would make the assignments more like what students will experience in the real world. They'll have an idea of the general legal landscape, but are doing research in to more specific questions they've not yet encountered.

This leaves a big hole in the first year, and you still need a class with a very small number of students, if only to preserve the sanity of 1Ls (and to help them organize flag football teams). Replace it with Logic, Ethics, and Professional Responsibility.

Time to "Do", Not "Talk"

[Guest post from Washington and Lee University School of Law Professor James E. Moliterno]

Are law schools in crisis? Certainly there has been some embarrassment in the revelations about common rankings strategies and student-getting activities. But the relatively easy access to student loans to finance the high cost of legal education, and the remarkable resiliency of student demand for our product have insulated legal education from the harsh effects of the economic downturn. Law schools are not in crisis, at least for now.

Like others, I believe in legal education’s power to open opportunity for graduates. But the market must eventually force a downturn in the numbers of entering students. And the practicing profession, if it heeds the advice of forward-looking prognosticators such as Richard Susskind, will find a way to maintain the economic viability of the law firm.

So, shall we do no more than bemoan the current circumstances and curse the misbehavior of law schools and express surprise at the continued desire of large numbers of students to undertake risk? I think that the time for hand-wringing has passed. The time to do rather than talk has come.

As law faculty, we need to recognize what we can and cannot accomplish. The economy will be what it is and its effects will be felt, no matter how much ink is spilled over it. More transparency is a useful measure. We should pursue it.  I expect it will dampen demand for law school, reducing it to a level more in line with the realistic hope for opportunity that law graduates should entertain. I believe in legal education. It should be engaged by the right number of students, with the right motivation, so that they can realize its marvelous benefits.

What else can we do? We can make legal education better. That is our bailiwick. That is what we are equipped best to do.