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2 Responses to “What reforms are needed in legal education and the legal profession?”

1. Jason Says:
   December 21st, 2009 at 12:34 am

   There is a huge problem with the discrepancy between the theoretical legal training provided in schools and the practical legal practice knowledge necessary to practice as an attorney. I am not advocating turning law school into a trade school, but the learning curve is steep once you graduate and pass the bar, and then need to wrangle with the actual business of lawyering.

   I personally think law school should be at most two years with one year internship/clerkship/otj training. However, the three years may be necessary to continue the perceived prestige of the degree, which is technically a doctorate and not a master’s degree. Medical Doctors study at least four years, and then have residency programs. (Maybe lawyers should have residency programs, too. Ugh!) Jason

2. stephen t Says:
   December 23rd, 2009 at 8:30 am

   Close half the law schools, fire 99% of all law faculty, get rid of the ABA, smaller classes, more practical training, socratic method is lame. Law schools are big business, and are a very profitable part of an overall college campus, it seems like every college wants to open one. The way law school is taught today you could get a college football stadium and pack 40,000 law students and have one prof. with a microphone teach the whole stadium, some college will probably steal my idea and do it. Law schools tend to protect themselves, and the tenured faculty’s cushy jobs, career services fudges employment stats in their glossy law school admission brochures, and hey if you can’t get a job as an attorney there is always the alternative careers for lawyers sell and the 1001 uses for a law degree besides law, I do not hear about dental schools talking about non-dentist jobs for dentists, I am sure there are some. If you want to do a non-attorney job after law school it should be a choice not forced on you by market conditions. If you go to most law schools, and oddly enough the better the law school the less practical the training, you will not be taught the skills to be an attorney. It is way too much theory. The most important skills I have learned to make a living in the law were not taught in law school, in fact at times it was scary winging it. Law school should be more geared towards being a trade school, a really good trade school with 1 on 1 training and mentoring on actual cases, there needs to be much more litigation training, both in court and writing, but this would make law schools less profitable because they would have to significantly lower student to faculty ratios and put more of a burden on the law schools to actually train attorneys. Oh, and the Bar Exam talk about an utter waste of time. I have a really low opinion of legal education, I hear about reforms to change this or that from within the system when what is needed is a complete obliteration of the current system and exclusion of anyone or group involved with the current structure. My friend in law school became so pessimistic that after the first year and especially the third year he stopped buying books for classes, he would not show up to class, he would just show up for the final, the teachers taught the same crap year after year and their were plenty of outlines available that had every thing the prof said down verbatim. I even knew a guy that lived in another part of the country that would just fly into town for exam weeks, that was funny. The school was fine with the arrangement they got their tuition $$$ and everyone passed.
   I think law school could be a 4 yr program if they got serious about producing a quality product. stephen t

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