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.