Law School Doesn't Prepare Students for Law Practice

Intro

My experiences outside the classroom, including my externship with Catholic Charities, my work with the immigration clinic, moot court, and working for an immigration attorney, have given me the impression that, in many ways, law school falls short in preparing students for the practice of law.

This is not mere bellyaching, nor is it an idle gripe. Rather, I believe I’ve identified a genuine flaw in the system.

I'm not the only one who feels that way. There is some scholarship, including findings from law professors and reports from practicing attorneys, to back that up. For example, Professor Robert Kuehn, of the Washington University School of Law, published a 2017 blog post detailing scholarly research that sheds light on law school’s shortcomings.

One source, an NCBE Job Analysis, found twenty-five “skills and abilities” were deemed more important than the highest rated “knowledge domain.” (See charts below)

"Knowledge Domain."
Notice that the highest domain has an importance rating of 3.06.

"Skills and Abilities."
Notice that 25 skills and abilities have an importance rating higher than 3.09

Yet, according Professor Keuhn, these “skills and abilities” generally are not developed in traditional doctrinal law classes. They are taught in experiential and first-year legal writing courses. But, under the ABA standards, they only are required to account for ten percent of a student’s legal education.

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Professor Keuhn’s post cites more than a dozen surveys. Many of them are published, peer-reviewed journal articles. But you don’t have to read all of the articles from start to finish to see that law school is inadequate in important ways.

A New York Times article, which includes commentary from law school faculty at many universities, has this to say: “The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors... They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”

This isn’t just frustrating for me personally. It indirectly hurts law students’ job prospects: the current law school model means that clients, in effect, underwrite much of new lawyers’ legal education. As a result, many clients refuse to have first- or second-year associates on their bills. “This has helped to hasten a historic decline in hiring.” Id.

Why is Law School Like This?

It used to be that lawyers “read law” under the guidance of a practicing attorney. That’s how Thomas Jefferson became a lawyer. He wrote the Declaration of Independence, so obviously he learned how to write like a lawyer. And he became a U.S. president.

That changed in 1870, when Harvard Law School dean Christopher Columbus Langdell introduced the case method. According to the New York Times, “This approach cultivates a student’s capacity to reason and all but ignores the particulars of practice.”

For example, Contracts and Criminal Law are standard first-year law classes. The NYT describes what students do and don’t learn in those courses:

Here is what students will rarely encounter in Contracts: actual contracts, the sort that lawyers need to draft and file. Likewise, Criminal Law class is normally filled with case studies about common law crimes — like murder and theft — but hardly mentions plea bargaining, even though a vast majority of criminal cases are resolved by that method.

Id. Despite the fact that people, including law school faculty, have known these flaws for years, they are unlikely to change because there are few incentives for law professors to excel at teaching. If a professors want “professional goodies,” like tenure, a higher salary, prestige or competing offers from better schools, they must publish law review articles, “the ticket to punch for any upwardly mobile scholar.” Id.

The irony? “Many of these articles are not of much apparent help to anyone.” The topics can be obscure as “the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria.” Id.

And yet an enormous part of law school tuition is spent for research and writing of law review articles. 

Add to this the fact that, even though some faculty may have some experience as practicing attorneys,  the system actively discourages extensive experience. “It is widely believed that after lawyers have spent more than eight or nine years practicing, their chances of getting a tenure-track job at law school start to dwindle.” Id.

Another one of the flaws I see with law school is that experience is peripheral to academic studies (to its credit, Akron Law does a good job of helping students find experience, which is how I found immigration law, which I discuss below). 

Fortunately, there has been a trend towards growing clinical law programs (Akron Law has several). This helps, but unfortunately, “The majority of law students still graduate without any clinical experience.” Id.

I love learning, so I enjoy the academic aspect to a certain extent. But I think experience should be central, like it is with an apprenticeship.  So, I think the apprenticeship model is one worth considering. One blog discusses legal apprenticeships.

Law School is Indeed a “Paper Chase”

One of my favorite movies is The Paper Chase. Even though it came out in 1973, its portrayal of law school is still spot on. One of the more thought-provoking parts of the movie is when Susan Fields tells her boyfriend, Harvard Law student James Hart, “You'll get your little diploma, your piece of paper that's no different than this [toilet paper] and you can stick it in your silver box with all the other paper in your life.”

An exasperated girlfriend tells her law school boyfriend he's pursuing a piece of paper,
like the one she's holding in her hand.

This may make it sound like I feel a law degree is worthless. That's not true. On the contrary, I think in many ways, it’s priceless. I've learned many things in law school that I treasure.

But think about it, you have many important pieces of paper, and pieces of plastic, in your life: your birth certificate, your social security card, your driver’s license, your student ID, your credit card, your health insurance card, etc. Each of these usually require a lot of work and/or money before you can obtain them. But remembering that none of them is be-all-end-all of your existence can keep things in perspective. There’s more to life than those pieces of paper and plastic.

So, too, with a law degree. It symbolizes three years of toil, and potentially hundreds of thousands dollars spent on tuition. I’m positive that most law graduates have earned their law degrees well. 

I just think that, for our time and money, it’s reasonable to expect that law school can do better.

Why I Stay

You may be wondering, reasonably, why I would stay at law school when there’s so much I find wrong with it. After all, I wanted to become a lawyer, so isn’t this what I signed up for?

Well, as I stated in my previous blog post, I seriously considered dropping out. If I hadn’t found my calling in immigration law, I would have done so. 

But discovering what I’m meant to do has given me the “light at the end of the tunnel.” It has given me the perspective I needed to quit fretting about grades. I don’t plan on being a cog in the machine. Rather, when I consider all the people I can help, I’m motivated to earn my law degree so I can use my legal skills to help people. And given the country conditions some immigrants come from, it’s no exaggeration to say that I can help save lives as an immigration attorney. 

I’m not trying to change the world with this blog post. I’m under no illusions about how much influence it wields. I don’t anticipate that anything I say here will cause the system to fundamentally shift (after all, it’s been that way since at least 1973). Even Susan M. Case, the author of the NCBE Job Analysis cited above, said that there is “by necessity a long period of time between identifying needed changes to the bar exam and implementing those changes.” So even if I successfully persuaded the powers-that-be that change needs to happen, that change probably wouldn’t happen before I graduate.

So, I’m simply tossing this blog post into the ether like a pebble in a pond, and hoping it makes some waves.

My blog post in the sea of information that is the internet.
Image source.

Law School is Unfair

Law School is Unfair

I came to law school expecting a challenge. I did not fear it. In fact, I welcomed the learning opportunity that was sure to come from being challenged in new ways.

However, I was not expecting it to be fundamentally unfair. 

Granted, my feelings may change by the time I graduate, but I think most people will agree with me when they look at the structure of law school. Plus, I want to open up about my own discouragements, and the wonderful realizations, I have had in the journey that is in law school.

Caveat: To any faculty reading this, know that I esteem you highly. You have consistently impressed me with your willingness to help students learn and succeed. It’s one of the many reasons I picked Akron Law over other schools that I was accepted to. The stuff I complain about are the flaws inherent in the system (law schools everywhere have always been like this), and not about you.

I. The Socratic Method

You may have heard law students speak of the dreaded Socratic method. It is “a teaching method heavily used in law schools today, based upon the technique used by Socrates in ancient Greece, in which students are led to analyze legal issues and principles through a series of hypothetical questions... from the teacher.” Socratic method, random house webster’s pocket legal dictionary (3d ed. 2007).

A typical law school class goes like this: you’re given 20-50 pages of case law to read before each class lecture. In class, rather than doing all the talking himself or herself, the professor enlists the aid of the students in discussion. The professor selects a student at random (unless there are volunteers, which rarely occurs) to discuss the cases in the reading. The professor asks what the background of the case is, what each side argued, how the court ruled, and why. Sometimes a professor really wants to drive a point home, and asks multiple pointed questions about one particular thing. 

The idea behind this method is that you teach yourself the most important nuggets of legal wisdom from important cases in the area of law that your class covers (and maybe it gets you prepared for the final, but that’s debatable). Every student is required to participate in the Socratic method multiple times throughout the semester.

On the one hand, I enjoy the Socratic method because of the way it engages students in classroom discussions. I’m a bit of a nerd, so I often volunteer to get called on, and my professors have consistently told me that I am a good class participant (volunteering has the benefit of relieving the other students from getting called on, so they don’t mind, either).

On the other hand, people rightfully dread the Socratic method because of the way the professor grills you in front of the whole class, and it can be unnerving when the professor hits you with a rapid-fire series of questions where it’s unclear what they want. It’s doubly embarrassing if you haven’t done the reading or didn’t fully comprehend it.

But love it or hate it, the Socratic method is a waste of time. Most of the topics of class discussion are rarely on the exam, which means class participation is poor exam prep (and, in turn, exams are poor preparation for law practice, which I vent about below). The time spent studying cases is often disproportionate to the material covered in the exam. It’s made worse when the discussion goes down “rabbit holes” of topics that aren’t relevant to any of the course objectives, but which the students or the professor find interesting.

Another reason I think it’s a waste of time is that class participation, though mandatory, is such a small part of your grade that it is practically insignificant. That’s a tad frustrating for me personally, because I love participating in class.

But my frustrations with the Socratic method pale in comparison with the ire I have for law school exams.

II. Exams

After the instructional period is over, and after the reading period, students are given final exams. A typical law school exam last for three hours, covering every topic learned over the past sixteen weeks. All of these are graded on a curve. I’m not good with statistics, so the exact calculations involved are a bit of a mystery to me. 

But I know it involves a median and mean that’s used to create a “bell curve.” Strictly speaking, this means it is an indicator of how you did compared to everyone else. If you managed to get more points than everyone else, you get an A. The median means that only a few people are allowed to get an A. The rest are stuck with a lower grade, even if they have a solid understanding of the material.

The absurdities of this setup are best summed up in this gem that I stumbled across in my law school library. It is so accurate that the author is only partially joking. In fact, he is so close to the truth that I can only classify this quotation as “mildly hyperbolic”:

Studies have shown that the best way to learn is to have frequent exams on small amounts of material and to receive lots of feedback from the teacher. Consequently, law school does none of this. Law school is supposed to be an intellectual challenge. Therefore, law professors give only one exam, the FINAL EXAM OF ARMAGEDDON and they give absolutely no feedback before then.

Actually, they give no feedback after then, either, because they don’t return the exams to the students. A few students go and look at their exam after it is graded, but this is a complete waste of time, unless they just want to see again what they wrote and have a combat-veteran-type flashback of the whole horrific nightmare. The professors never write any comments on the exam. That might permit you to do better next time, which would upset the class ranking.

Some professors are kind enough to distribute a model answer for you to look at. You tell the professor that you can’t see any difference whatsoever between your low-scoring exam and the model answer. He replies, “Well, there’s your problem."

James D. Gordon III, Law School: A Survivor’s Guide 46-47 (1994).

This is infuriating for me. Having your entire grade (or almost all of it) depend on a single three-hour window is flawed in many ways:

• It is not necessarily an evaluation of your understanding of the material. It is not even an indicator of your intelligence. It is an indicator of whether or not you are a good test taker. This, in turn, depends on several factors:
• Your ability to match the professor’s subjective criteria of what they’re looking for and how they want it presented.
• Whether you had a good day or bad day on test day.
• The amount of class material you’ve read is no indicator of whether you will succeed on the exam.
• Class participation is no indication whatsoever of success on the exam.
• More important, exam success is not a predictor of success in the legal profession (which makes it doubly unfair that so many employers rely so heavily on GPA).

Because of the way that law school exams are set up, you can work your tail off and still get an abominable grade (see part IV for my personal discouragement with my GPA and class ranking).

III. GPA and Class Rankings

After the professors grade the exams, they crunch the numbers to calculate each person’s grade. The final exam grade is basically your grade for the whole class (which I’ve vented about already), with a little bit of leeway to bump your grade up or down a tad depending on whether the professor was satisfied with your class participation.

In turn, the law school faculty takes each person’s class grades to determine their GPA, and they use GPA to calculate class rankings. Each student may or may not be satisfied with a respectable GPA, but for most students, class rankings are depressing because it means realizing that the majority of your classmates got a better grade than you did (even though you worked hard and suffered long for your grade).

I find GPA and class rankings preposterous because it means that law school is less about education and more about competition. Granted, for many things in life, competition is acceptable. Indeed, it may be the only way you can succeed. For example, sports, games, etc.

But education should not be fundamentally about competition. It should be about learning. If the only way to succeed in school is for others to fail, your education model is severely flawed.

IV. My Personal Experience

My feelings about GPA and class ranking may be biased because I was dissatisfied with mine during my first year. My first semester GPA was 2.97, and my ranking was in the bottom third. It was depressing to me because I didn’t slack off at all during my first semester! I felt like my GPA and ranking were a slap in the face to all my hard work. 

I was especially puzzled because I had followed every bit of advice that I had been given that would allegedly guarantee my success: 

• I did the readings;

• I met regularly with a study group (we called ourselves the Curvebusters);

• I created an outline (a summary of all the essentials learned in class), which I updated regularly; and

• I regularly did “hypos” (practice exam questions) individually and with my group, and I got feedback on my answers from professors, faculty, and other students.

My GPA and class ranking after my first semester left me feeling like I wasn’t an intelligent person after all, that I simply didn’t have the aptitude for law school, and, ultimately, that I wasn’t cut out for the practice of law. That feeling stuck with me for a long time (and I didn’t shake it until recently).

Still, I wanted to be a good student, so I sought feedback from each of my professors. This helped a little—I eeked my way up 3.06, and the bottom 55% after my second semester. In fact, I got two A-’s (Property and Civil Procedure II). But it irked me when I got a C+. I had met with the professor multiple times to get feedback on my answers to his practice questions, and he led me to believe I had a good handle on things. But apparently I was missing the mark so badly, that I got one of the worst grades in the class, and my worst grade so far in law school. I wish I would have known that before the final.

Things reached a head when I took a quiz early on during the first semester of my second year, when I took a ten-point quiz in Constitutional Law. No biggie, right? I was confident I would nail it because I had studied the constitution over the summer (including helpful mnemonic devices to memorize key clauses and amendments), I did all the readings, and I had spent a significant amount of time prepping for the quiz...

...and I got six questions right. Sixty percent.

My initial reaction was, “What gives?!?!” (actually, it was more vulgar than that, but I prefer to keep my blog family-friendly). 

Consequently, I was thoroughly fed up with law school, and I was sick of the perpetual feelings of failure. In a way, it was the straw that broke the camel’s back (and it truly was just a straw, because the points from that quiz didn’t count). I seriously considered dropping out, going back to my old job, or even teaching English in Korea.

This is why I am grateful I discovered my calling in immigration law (I’d like to give a shout out to Camille Gill, the legal staff, the other staff at Catholic Charities, and my fellow extern, Krishna Mahadevan; Professor Knowles and my classmates at the University of Akron Immigration & Human Rights Clinic; and my boss, immigration attorney Farhad Sethna).

I am fluent in Spanish, and for years I have had a deep interest in the Latin American community. This suits immigration law well, because of how many Hispanic immigrants the U.S. receives each year. I also enjoy learning other cultures, familiarizing myself with other languages, and helping the downtrodden. So I was naturally drawn towards: 

• helping victims of gang violence in Central America or political oppression in Venezuela to apply for asylum;

• helping victims of the wars in the Middle East;

• helping people escape the poverty and instability of countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo;

• helping Nepalese nationals make a new life for themselves after spending generations in Bhutanese refugee camps; and

• helping immigrants of all nationalities to apply for green cards or citizenship.

When I found my calling, it finally dawned on me that there’s more to the legal profession (and life) than GPA and class ranking. After all, I don’t think any client has ever asked their attorney, “What were your grades in law school?”

Which makes sense. Think about it, when was the last time you asked your doctor what his or her medical school grades were? It just doesn’t occur to you because it’s irrelevant. You just want a competent caretaker to diagnose your ailments and prescribe a cure or treatment.

Likewise, when you need a lawyer, you don’t care what their grades in law school were, or how they stacked compared to their classmates (you probably don’t even care if they went to prestigious university). You just want a competent attorney who can give you sound legal advice and/or win your case.

So, law school GPA and class rankings are bogus metrics that are based on arbitrary standards. Yet law schools probably aren’t going to give them up any time soon because they’ve been doing it that way for decades, and it helps them justify tuition costs.

But I’d be dumbfounded if a client, languishing in ICE detention and whose family stands to get ripped apart because of an unjust deportation order, asks questions like, “Did you get an A in Civil Procedure? What about Contracts? Leg Reg? Professional Responsibility? Oh, and I need to know your GPA and class ranking, because I’m not letting you anywhere near my case if you don’t have at least a 3.6 or a ranking above 10%.”

My experiences remind me of the ending of "The Paper Chase."

"The Paper Chase" is a movie about a first year student at Harvard Law. In the last scene, the main character receives the letter containing his grades. Without even opening the letter, he folds it into a paper airplane and discards it into the ocean. 

When I first saw that scene, it puzzled me. Now I get it. 

So, when last semester’s grades and rankings were posted, I chose not to look at them for several days. Instead, I enjoyed the serenity of a well-deserved vacation. Incidentally, my GPA and class ranking improved more when I stopped caring about them: I now have a 3.29 cumulative GPA (which includes an A in Con Law, my best grade so far) and I’m in the top 40%.

[Update, Jan. 27, 2018: I just got a letter from the dean's office saying I made the dean's list last semester because I got a semester GPA of 3.85. How about that? Funny how much my grades improved when I stopped fretting about them.]