Do we all really have to be lawyers?

I recently received an interesting question from one of my 2L colleagues: "Do I really want or need to practice law?" Naturally, the first thing that came out of my mouth, "Why on earth would you have spent so much time going through the essential motions only to end up doing something else?" But, upon further reflection, I realize that I may have been slightly narrow-minded. Maybe law students, particularly those who come into law school just because it is the "next best thing to do," need a greater amount of guidance from career counseling offices to navigate the ever-changing and dramatically complex job landscape. Let me explain.

First, there are other "career options" that are quite obvious--eg, public service, non-legal advocacy work, etc. It is obviously not uncommon for politicians to be lawyers, for example (our president is one). But there are many non-obvious career paths for someone who has gone through the intellectual quest that is law school, and in my mind, career services offices ought to expand their knowledge of these areas in order to help students. For instance, one might consider business or entrepreneurship. I did a fairly quick google search for what appears to be dozens of available positions in this field, many of which do not require any special degree other than "some graduate level work." Why aren't students looking at these jobs?

I understand the position of others (including some who write for this blog) who opine that law schools should attempt to narrow the field of applicants, and tailor curriculum in a manner sufficient to more adequately prepare students for legal practice. All other things equal, I would agree. But legal education is a business (a big business) that is expanding and not going away any time soon. It is driven by rankings, and powered by the federal government's continual willingness to foot the bill for thousands of students who have about as much a chance of paying it back within three decades as Gigli does of becoming a cult classic.

So why not change the approach? A J.D. should be a general degree like an MBA, and schools should try to incorporate a wider cross-disclipinary focus into the basic curriculum. Good idea? Mabye, maybe not? Let's hear your thoughts.

Judge Tacha is New Dean at Pepperdine

. . . and the 10th Circuit now has two vacancies.

Law School in America v. Canada, Eh?

From the McGill Tribune:

The situation in Canada is drastically different, and certainly more promising for prospective students. Much of what ails the American market has been preempted in Canada by an entirely distinct system in which there are both fewer schools and less divergence in terms of academic quality.

"The situation's a lot better in Canada because we have far fewer law schools," says Leeann Beggs, director of career services in the Faculty of Law at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario. "The likelihood that you're going to get into your profession is very good."

While there are almost 200 American law schools, there are only 20 in Canada, all of which are highly competitive and prestigious. Because they are essentially "all tier one schools," Beggs says, it is very difficult to be admitted, but students can also be assured they will receive a high-quality legal education once they are there. Before passing the bar, law students are expected to article, or work and learn at a law firm in some sort of legal apprenticeship. Furthermore, there seems to be no sort of legal outsourcing being practised in Canada.

"It's pretty tightly controlled who gets access to legal work here," Beggs says.

This is in direct contrast to the hundreds of American law schools, not all of which are accredited—some of which are online—that graduate thousands of new lawyers each year who must then fight for a diminishing number of entry-level jobs. As a result of the Canadian system, recent graduates in this country have a much better chance of gaining the employment they desire. They have already been singled out as the best and the brightest and are competing against a much smaller pool. Some expectations may have to be lowered in terms of starting salaries, says Beggs, but new lawyers should have no problem getting a foot in the door.

Some things are just better in Canada, I guess.

iPads for Teachers (and Students)

Monterey College of Law gives iPads to all faculty and students. And all I got for my 160K was a piece of paper with my name on it.

The Irony of Law School

From an international perspective.

More Law Schools, Please

Another law school in Texas? Guess Texas lawmakers didn't get the memo.

Fuzzy Employment Statistics for Attorneys

Law schools cooking employment numbers to attract unwary law students for 40K+ per year in tuition. In other news, the sky is blue.

Specter at Penn Law

Senator Specter will join the adjunct faculty at Penn Law beginning in fall 2011.

Law School Lore: Myth or Vestige of History?

It was nice to be on the other side of law school...until bar studying got in the way for some of us. But during that brief post-3L/pre-graduation period in which I had nothing to do but think introspectively about where I started and where I want to wind up, I realized something that had not really crossed my mind before:  almost everything I had heard about law school before I took the plunge--from books, movies, lawyers, you name it--turned out to be grossly overstated at best.

We are all familiar with the lore--law school, we are constantly told, is where dreams go to die. You'll be studying around the clock, your professors will abuse you in the classroom, and you'll be lucky to have any meaningful social relationships during your (generally miserable) stay. Perhaps I'm embellishing a bit, but the general conception so far as I can tell is that law school is not only hard but very hard--almost to the point of being unmanageable and leading people to serious mental infirmity. Scott Turow's One L is a case in point. So is the old favorite The Paper Chase. More recently, Legally Blonde took a stab at perpetuating the stereotype in depicting a fun-loving sorority girl from California who managed to succeed amidst a class of (seemingly) more boring and neurotically-focused students.

I  found law school taxing and mentally exhausting at times, but I never felt as pressured and anxious as I expected to be based on all I had heard. I don't think my classmates ever really did either--at least not to the extent one would reasonably expect from talking to any lay person or older lawyer about law school.

So, if I am correct that things really are not all that bad, where do these stereotypes come from? I have two theories. First, maybe my observation (if accurate) is a self-aggrandizing phenomenon whereby those who have been through law school feel, after the fact, that it was more arduous than it was simply because it is a past accomplishment. Maybe complaining about how bad it was is a privilege of conquering it. But more likely, I think, is that something has changed in the legal education. Indeed, the horror stories tend to come from older attorneys as opposed to more recent graduates. There are many other tenable explanations for this, but I still think it strong evidence of a change in the educational pedagogy and the (probably) corresponding student mentality. If my hunch is correct, will the shift be good or bad for tomorrow's attorneys?

I leave that question, along with all the others I have posed, to you folks...

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(Please accept our apologies for the slowdown in content. While law school is not as bad as they make it, bar preparation has made it harder for many of us to post as often as we would like.)

Law School Transparency

We urge all of our readers to check out Lawschooltransparency.com. Their goal?

Law School Transparency’s goal is to provide open access to ABA-approved law school employment data and information. Many journalists, legal scholars, law school professors, graduates, and current students have discussed the need for a more comprehensive look at job prospects for recent law school graduates. When schools do go above the minimum standards set by the ABA or prominent third parties like U.S. News, they present the additional employment information in ways that often make it impossible to compare job prospects across law schools and determine the actual range of opportunities available at each school. Accordingly, our mission is to establish a new standard for employment reporting and to assist ABA-approved law schools in improving their reporting methods.

This website aims to become a clearinghouse for employment data from ABA-approved law schools. Additionally, we provide a closer look at how career services and admissions offices work together at ABA-approved law schools to develop relationships with employers and assist students in finding work. We believe that publishing employment lists will supplement, rather than replace, the many job placement summaries already provided by schools, publications, and legal scholars.

Hopefully law schools will embrace this idea. Many already hope for fundamental changes to the system as it is now constituted.

The Blackbook's Second Annual Top Law Prof. Competition

It's that time of the year again! The Blackbook Legal Blog is proud to announce that we're hosting our second annual top law professor competition. Last year's competition was a major success with hundreds of different voters from different schools casting their ballot. In the end, Professor Peter Smith of The George Washington University Law School emerged victorious. We hope this year's competition will be as spirited.

As a reminder, here's how it works: e-mail us or leave us a comment to this posting nominating a professor. Be sure to specify what school the professor teaches at.* In a week or two, we'll put everything together and create a poll. We'll pull the top five professors from that poll into another poll, and will determine--from there--who our readers think should be crowned "Blackbook's Top Law Prof."

*Note that winners from the past year are ineligible to participate. Thus, nominations for Professor Smith will not be accepted in this year's competition.

A Response from UT Law and a Clarification

A few days ago, we posted a story about the relative shortage of practical legal education opportunities at many U.S. law schools, as well as the according need for change. In that article, I cited an op-ed in the Daily Texan written by three University of Texas Law students on how UT Law does not currently offer a mandatory brief writing course for first years. A few other outlets--including the Legal Writing Prof Blog--picked up the story. Well, UT Law has chosen to respond to the articles. Specifically, Wayne Schiess, director of the Legal Writing program at UT Law, said in a statement to the Legal Writing Prof Blog:

It is true that the University of Texas School of Law has a first-year legal-writing curriculum without brief writing. When the law school administration removed credits from the required course five years ago, brief writing was lost. Needless to say, the legal-writing faculty thought it was a mistake. So we’ve been teaching a brief-writing elective that only some 1Ls can get into. We're optimistic that brief writing will return to the required first-year curriculum. Indeed, a proposal to do that comes before the faculty this week.

We applaud the changes the school is making. However, I want to emphasize that the article was not meant to single UT Law out. It is obviously a fine institution that provides its students with fantastic opportunities (so, Hook 'em Horns!). And thus, despite the intimations of numerous posters on message boards around the internet, I do not have a problem with UT Law as an academic institution; I do have a problem, however, with the law school system as a whole. If one takes a full glance at the article I wrote, as well as the February 2009 article it cited, one will see that many of us on this blog believe that we need substantial reform in the current law school model because it is simply failing students.

Informational Asymmetries, the Emperor's New Clothes and More Cries For Value

Early in 2009, we noted that the recession has exposed numerous deficiencies in the current legal education system. Accordingly, we argued for a systematic change in curriculum and focus. It appears that law students elsewhere are yearning for the same at their institutions. From The Daily Texan:

[C]riticisms [of the University of Texas Law School] are well-founded. In a survey of accredited law schools, Texas was the only school without a mandatory brief-writing course. In fact, only about half of first-year students surveyed reported being able to get into a brief-writing course. As a result, they will not be trained how to present arguments to a court — one of the most basic legal skills.

Instead of rectifying the problem by meeting national practical skills standards, UT Law instead chooses to steer law students away from taking practical courses by offering grossly grade-inflated first-year electives on such totally impractical topics as Race and Gender in the Constitution.

The first-year curve in all courses is set at 3.3; the average in these “electives” is a 3.8. A student in Race and Gender in the Constitution commented, “The class is a complete joke and a waste of time, but the professor gives almost everyone A’s.” Since law students’ employment is determined by their first-year GPA, creating such an exception to the curve is unfair to other students and misleading to employers relying on the veracity of student transcripts. . . .

So law students can game the system and come out Order of the Coif, while not knowing a single thing about the basic exceptions to the hearsay rule? I can vouch for the fact that this is an absolutely accurate characterization of the system as it is constituted both at my institution, and as the authors noted, at others.

But more pertinently, law school seems (oddly enough) to present a sort of transparent information asymmetry cogently illustrated by the student in this article: in many respects, law schools fail to meet the demands and expectations students have upon entering and that employers have when hiring. Yet, it seems like we all know a little bit of what we are getting at the outset; the sales pitch is just all too compelling. In this sense, law school is more like an experience good that shouldn't demand any sort of warranty. But the problems are still exceedingly pervasive. As the authors noted with respect to their institution:

[There is a] deeper problem at UT Law that has drawn criticism from all corners of the legal industry: Lax institutional standards have marginalized the law school’s role in society of preparing its students to be competent, ethical lawyers.

I hate to say it, but this problem is not confined to UT Law. We need major reforms soon, because permitting students to become engulfed in massive amounts of debt with little to no guidance on how to be competent lawyers will (inevitably, I think) continue to dilute the profession's quality, and worse yet, harm students' lives. Law students ought to be more vocal in their cries for change like the authors in the noted article.

Bad Year in Legal Employment

The National Law Journal issued its annual Go-To Law School List, and the results reek of the recession. Even the top schools placed little more than half of their respective graduating classes into NLJ 250 firms. The top 10 law schools this year in terms of total percentage of the class placed:

1. Northwestern -- 55.9%

2. Columbia -- 54.4%

3. Stanford -- 54.1%

4. Chicago -- 53.1%

5. Virginia -- 52.8%

6. Michigan -- 51%

7. Penn -- 50.8%

8. NYU -- 50.1%

9. Berkeley -- 50%

10. Duke -- 49.8%

Obviously, schools like Harvard (47.6%) and Yale (35.3%) had smaller numbers because graduates of those schools tend to pursue the clerkship and academia routes more heavily. Check out the full rankings.

Life as a Lawyer...

For those considering law school, be careful to remember that e-mails like these pop into your inbox from time to time once you take the plunge! Of course, your mileage may vary...

Battle of the Sexes: Law School Edition

One of our readers recently made a comment about needing more estrogen on the blog, and that comment provoked a few thoughts that I've been internally debating for almost three years now. Female law students vs. male law students: where do the differences stem from and how much of it is just gender stereotyping?

A Question of "Degree?"

We can all agree that law school is a costly proposition. But what are we paying for? The degree, the education or some combination of the two? Recently, this question has been the source of much debate amongst my fellow classmates who, like many of us, battle  their conscience over whether to take a perceived "soft" course that seems interesting over a "hard" course that will, as the argument goes, be more valuable in the real world. Presented with this dichotomy, the wise thing to do is to choose the latter; it's hard to argue with choices that will help one in their career. The question, however, may not be as simple as I described it.

As far as I can tell, law school's pedagogical method is not--and has never been--focused on helping prepare students for the specific legal problems they'll face in their careers. Rather, the objective is to provide students with a broad framework for resolving issues that will ultimately be confronted in practice. Whether shirking pragmatism in this manner is sensible is subject to debate from students and faculty alike, but it is a reality. And a reality that makes it less likely that any substantive law learned will ever be more helpful in the workforce than a brief survey of caselaw. (After all, professors have different emphases and the law has this pesky tendency to change.)

Given that, I'm inclined to think it really doesn't matter all that much. But if it does, I suppose there's a second question worth considering: why offer the supposed "soft" courses at all? Thoughts?

Law School Debt Exceeding $120 K

Visualize Law reports on the ballooning cost of law school. Particularly alarming (yet not surprising) is a calculation estimating "about 46% of all students in the year 2013 who [will] anticipate graduating with at least $120,000 in debt." Check out the article.

College vs. Law School: High Powered (Undergrad) Degree Worth it When Shooting for a JD?

Among law students, there appears to be a general understanding that students who attend top tier schools have more opportunities when it comes to prominent law firms, clerkships, and academia. At some point, where you go to law school becomes the dominant question, and where you went to college becomes seemingly less relevant to the point where one wonders whether it even matters.

Is Law School a Good Investment?

Not according to the new research paper, "Mamas, Don't Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Lawyers." From Economix:

The paper tries to measure the return on investment in a law school education, using three prototypical students (the “Also Ran,” the “Solid Performer” and the “Hot Prospect”). . . . The results are somewhat disheartening, especially considering the surging interest in law school during this tough job market.

Of course, there are a few problems with the methodology employed by the authors:

One big caveat with these types of rankings is that the inputs are different: The students who are accepted to Harvard — and then choose to attend — are probably different from the students who go to the University of Iowa, or for that matter, the University of Southern California, or Yale, or any other school.

Check out the article and the paper.