Reed Smith, the large Pittsburgh-based law firm, has announced a fundamental restructuring of its policies with regard to associate performance and promotion. According to an article in AmLaw Daily:
The firm has revamped its associate model, doing away with associate classes based strictly on entry date in favor of three associate groups that will have formal training from the time they enter the firm until they are ready to be considered for partnership. . . . The goal of the program is to provide a road map for associates detailing the specific skills required at each of the newly created levels–junior, midlevel, and senior associates. Associates won’t be able to move to the next tier until they have met those requirements. Compensation will be tied to those competencies by 2011 as well.
Reed Smith’s new competency model covers four main areas–legal skills, citizenship, business skills, and clients–with a focus on nine core competencies within those areas. Those competencies include mastering fundamental legal skills, support of the firm’s culture, demonstration of leadership and business skills, and understanding and effectively managing client needs.
Each of the three associate levels will be tied to an “academy.” The firm will continue its “Reed Smith University,” which already offers 140 in-house courses. The new program will expand that training with courses and other opportunities tailored to the nine core competencies.
Or, as the headline in the Philadelphia Business Journal has it: “Reed Smith’s New Personnel Policy Allows it to Ditch Automatic Pay Raises.” Now that’s getting to the heart of the matter!
It’s hard to say whether this is an important departure from the standard model, or just an aberration — time will tell. But it’s a bold move; I wish them well with it, and hope that it is a harbinger of fundamental changes in the relationship between law firm associates and their employers, changes that are surely long overdue. Nobody who spends ten minutes looking at the way law firms are organized (including the way that associates are compensated) would conclude that the model makes a great deal of sense or achieves much in the way of efficiency. Change is undoubtedly coming, spurred on, predictably enough, by economic stress, and to my eye the Reed Smith experiment looks like it makes a good deal of sense. Compensation is, after all, supposed to bear some relationship — a close relationship, in a competitive market — to the actual skills that individuals possess and the manner in which they can deliver value to firm clients; tying that compensation rigidly to associate seniority makes about as much sense for law firm associates as it does for elementary school teachers, i.e., none at all.
In addition, to the eyes of a law professor — at least, to the eyes of this law professor — there could be some serious implications (and tremendous opportunities) for law schools here. Plenty of people have been complaining in the last decade or so about the fact that law schools do a poor job of preparing their students for the actual tasks they will be called upon to undertake as practicing lawyers. Much of that criticism is, in my opinion, well-deserved; there are many, many ways in which we could do a better job at helping our students develop the skills they’ll need to practice law. At the same time, teaching anything well is damned hard, and many law schools have lots of people working there who do it damned well. Reed Smith, according to the article and its press release, already offers 140 in-house courses, and will be expanding those offerings in the future as part of the implementation of this new training and promotion policy. Now, I’m sure that there are lots and lots of things that lawyers at Reed Smith can teach better than your average law professor; but I’m also certain that there are lots and lots of things I and my colleagues can teach more effectively than they can. Teaching is damned hard — ask anyone who does it well. If this Reed Smith experiment catches on — if, say, 20% of the large law firms in this country each start to offer hundreds of courses in-house, that’s a whole lot of new courses. If I were running a law school, I’d be looking for ways to collaborate in all of that, because it’s smack in the middle of our “core competencies”; and if I were running a law firm, I’d be really interested in hearing what the law schools have to say, and to think about ways in which the law schools could help them get where they want to get, for the same reason.
Mike McDougal says:
Like . . .
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October 31, 2009, 4:54 pmyankee says:
It is? I thought it was supposed to bear a relationship to supply and demand, which has only a tenuous relationship to “the manner in which they can deliver value to firm clients.” Making money for the firm is very different from delivering the best value for clients. It is not for nothing that the most highly compensated partners are the best salespeople, not the best lawyers.
Previously, supply and demand in the large law firm industry had variable compensation through bonuses: the more profitable associates went to firms that offered bigger bonuses and firms (such as Reed Smith) with non-lockstep bonus programs gave more profitable associates bigger bonuses. The real purpose of this change is to drive down average associate compensation by making compensation less transparent.
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October 31, 2009, 4:55 pmpracticing lawyer says:
Law schools do a great job at teaching law, and a bad job at teaching law practice– perhaps in many ways this is unavoidable. But I doubt that traditional legal academics would be able to help a firm with programs like this, other than in CLE-type courses.
The courses dealing with client relations, rainmaking, and the like– heck, even the parts about the ins-and-outs of daily practice– are outside the study interests, to say nothing of experience, of most legal academics. The business end of things strikes me as what Reed Smith is really focused on teaching– as you can see by the fact that they’ve partnered with Wharton.
As for changing the current associate model– something like that may happen over several years. But for the foreseeable future, you’ll still see firms having to pay a premium to hire top-ranked students; and since new lawyers must be trained from the ground up, with differing aptitudes that aren’t always apparent, you are likely to see the current tournament model continue.
Maybe the most obvious change is faster attrition– which the Reed Smith plan hints at. Getting passed over for moving up while an associate sounds like an early death blow.
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October 31, 2009, 5:04 pmDuffy Pratt says:
Claiming to teach particular legal business related skills has another advantage for the firm. It offers something to prospective associates that they can take with them when they get the boot. If they can market this aspect properly to prospective associates, they may be in a position to pay them less up front, and then kick them out earlier when they don’t meet whatever standards they put into place.
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October 31, 2009, 5:11 pmMike McDougal says:
I’m not so sure it’s the purpose, but it’s at least one likely side effect.
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October 31, 2009, 5:11 pmRandy says:
You mean law schools have three years to teach students core competencies and can’t do it? Whose idea was it to come up with a useless curriculum?
Not that this is news to anyone, but frankly, any teaching program that fails to deliver needed basics in three years is by any account a failure. And an expensive one at that.
I agree that teaching the business end of law school is outside the core competency of most or all of current professors. So hire ones who do have it! It’ can’t be *that* difficult.
One of the problems with law school courses is that they they feel there is a need to tie themselves to the semester system. I should be able to learn everything I need to know about any topic within a few weeks at most. The problem is that law schools realize that, so they stretch the topic to cover three months of time. That means that if you take a class in say, commercial credit, you have to learn every tiny exemption, twist, narrow application, whatever, under the guise that you can’t study something unless you nail down every possible scenario, no matter how unlikely it will occur in the real world. The result? utter boredom after two weeks, and you promptly forgot everything you learned after the exam, except perhaps a few basic principles that you learned at the beginning.
Teaching corporations shouldn’t take more than a few weeks. Then you should have students learn how to draft up articles of incorporation, and bylaws, since that happens in the real world all the time. In other words, find out what most lawyers do on a daily basis, then teach that.
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October 31, 2009, 6:11 pmPhilosopher says:
Law professors aren’t hired based upon their ability to teach. They’re hired based upon their scholarship.
I think that the average litigator would do a better job of teaching practical nuts-and-bolts litigation skills, for example, than a law school professor. Similarly, partners at a firm are probably just as good, if not better, at teaching associates what they need to know about a typical practice area.
Most law professors are more interested in teasing out the esoteric problems in an area of the law than they are in teaching the basics that an associate needs to know in practice. That makes sense, because most law professors have never practiced law, or have only done so in a very limited capacity. Representing a pro bono client in a high-profile constitutional case does not help you understand what law firm associates need to know.
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October 31, 2009, 6:18 pmMark Field says:
You’d think so, but a lot of adjunct profs aren’t very good. Teaching is itself a skill, and not an easy one to learn. Neither professors — mostly hired for their scholarship, as already noted — nor partners (good at generating business, not necessarily at the nuances of civ pro or at teaching) are likely to be much of a solution.
What I’ve seen some firms do is farm out nuts and bolts stuff (how to take a deposition) to organizations like NITA.* It would make sense to develop private institutions which value teaching ability above scholarship and put them to work on beginning lawyers. Kind of like doctors go through with residency and internship. Then drop the 3L year and focus on practice instead.
*Full disclosure: I teach at NITA.
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October 31, 2009, 7:14 pmtheobromophile says:
Currently, one of the few (or only) indicators of merit that law firms have, or seem to use, is alma mater and law review membership. While those things certainly indicate intelligence and diligence, they don’t always translate into good lawyering. It ought to be interesting to see what kind of results come out of this system.
Unrelated to the above, however, is a question about exactly how compensation will be determined. A lockstep model tends to favour women (or at least not disadvantage them), as they often do not negotiate as hard and present themselves as well as men do or, if they do so negotiate and sell themselves, come off as cocky or hard-headed.
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October 31, 2009, 7:34 pmmatt c says:
oh please, lawyering is incredibly easy...which is why so many paralegals and secretaries do half the work. teaching legal strategy is the hard part and it comes from going to hearings, not writing briefs or doing legal research or having attended three years of classes.
frankly, the idea that good lawyering is hard to come by is ridiculous and only serves to venerate the legal profession and law school.
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October 31, 2009, 8:06 pmRR says:
At my alma mater (Chicago), one of the most popular young professors (who’s no longer there) gave a talk on his view of the future of legal education. His view was that law schools should sort themselves into two categories: trade schools and post-graduate schools for the training of academics. He left no question that he preferred the latter.
What I gathered from it is that there are lot of law professors who essentially should be in the political science or public policy schools but don’t want to deal with the trouble of, you know, actually putting in the work of getting a PhD. Law prof: Less up-front work, and more prestige / higher pay than your grad school colleagues. What’s not to like? And why sully that gig with something as declasse as actually teaching the practice of the profession?
Yes, I’m a cynic.
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October 31, 2009, 8:53 pmyankee says:
You forgot to mention: much lower standards for publication. Very little of what passes for legal scholarship would withstand peer review in a journal of political science, public policy, economics, sociology, or political philosophy.
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October 31, 2009, 9:52 pmDavid Nieporent says:
That assumes that law schools are trying to do that; they aren’t. Maybe they should be, but they aren’t. Law schools don’t think of themselves as trade schools.
Well, a few weeks of full time study, perhaps. But class is only (usually) 3 hrs/week. If you think you can learn a legal field in 10 hours of instruction, you’re fooling yourself. (Yes, you’re supposed to be studying outside of class, of course. But obviously that’s not a substitute for in-class instruction; if it is, that says something else about said in-class instruction.)
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October 31, 2009, 9:56 pmU. Ill. grad says:
Plenty of people have been complaining in the last decade or so about the fact that law schools do a poor job of preparing their students for the actual tasks they will be called upon to undertake as practicing lawyers.
Last decade? I was complaining in the 1970s.
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October 31, 2009, 10:00 pmArrowSmith says:
Well maybe they think of themselves way too highly. What do they think they’re turning out artists?
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October 31, 2009, 10:09 pmDavid Bernstein says:
A lot of these problems would be resolved if law school were part of a 4 or 5 year undergrad degree, with training like a residency expected thereafter for a year or two.
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October 31, 2009, 11:14 pmRR says:
So true. One of my classmates had a PhD in a non-science discipline and was constantly appalled at what passed for scholarship, even at Chicago, and particularly when it touched on this person’s field. All prejudices were confirmed when said friend received raves at a legal conference for what this person described to me as the worst paper they had written in their academic career. What’s funnier is that they leveraged this paper and those reviews into a fine teaching position at a top-20 law school...
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October 31, 2009, 11:27 pmyankee says:
Wow, a rare point on which I agree with David Bernstein!
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Cornellian says:
The big firm business model is certainly broken, but lockstep associate compensation isn’t the reason.
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November 1, 2009, 1:52 amCornellian says:
but I’m also certain that there are lots and lots of things I and my colleagues can teach more effectively than they can.
If by “things” you mean something relevant to legal practice, then I’m wracking my brains trying to think of what those things might be. Most of the law professors I’ve met know almost nothing about legal practice.
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November 1, 2009, 1:55 amCareless says:
Ok, I’ll ask as someone on the outside: how big is the difference between law school education, bar school requirements, and the law firm job requirements that follow? In other words, if there’s a disconnect between law school and the employers, is it because of the bar exam, or aside from it?
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November 1, 2009, 2:28 amCareless says:
(bar exam, of course. A bar school graduate got me drunk earlier)
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November 1, 2009, 2:29 amMike McDougal says:
The three best professors I had in law school were practicing adjuncts. And their classes weren’t “nuts and bolts” classes. They were fairly normal upper class courses.
I wouldn’t say I had any truly bad professors in law school. However, I also wouldn’t say that the professors had any unique pedagogical abilities.
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Mark Field says:
Maybe the best way to say this is to say that the bar exam does not test your ability as a lawyer in any way. It does test, to some extent, your ability to spot issues on the subjects taken in law school (or learned for purposes of the bar exam).
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November 1, 2009, 9:53 amPatent Lawyer says:
None of those 3 parts really focus on the same things for most BigLaw associates. Granted, I’m a junior associate in the sort of specialized field that doesn’t get much heavy focus, (patent litigation), but...
The bar exam was mostly useless for my practice. It covers only state procedure, and the only time I’ve been inside an NY state courtroom was for my swearing in. Apart from black letter patent law, the most useful subject for me would have been more thorough federal civil procedure. Unfortunately, that wasn’t taught very well at law school, with the professor spending far too much time on class action procedure because that was his pet project. This is common among junior associates, and there’s a particular partner at my firm who will rattle off less well-known FRCP rules and appear shocked when we say that it wasn’t covered in law school.
Law school was surprisingly useful for me, but only because I took a year-long litigation clinic in my 3rd year. Thanks to that clinic, I had already appeared in court for a settlement hearing, had some practice drafting mock document requests, interrogatories, deposition outlines, witness outlines, etc., which put me ahead of the game when I started having to do that stuff for real. I don’t know what I’d recommend for transactional lawyers, but any prospective civil litigator who doesn’t spend most of their third year in a heavy litigation clinic is wasting their 3rd year.
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November 1, 2009, 11:53 amyankee says:
I remember someone saying that if law school were intended to prepare people for practice it would consist of one semester of bar prep and five semesters of document review.
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November 1, 2009, 12:48 pmInstapundit » Blog Archive » CRACKS APPEARING in the law firm associate model…. says:
[...] CRACKS APPEARING in the law firm associate model. [...]
stevethepatentguy says:
If I were a new lawyer I would be drawn to Reed Smith because of this policy. And if I were still inhouse I would find this appealing. The “Associate Model” has a lot of flaws for both the associate and for the client. Associates are yolked to the norm of their class and clients pay for skill sets that they don’t need.
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November 1, 2009, 1:31 pmstevethepatentguy says:
All that being said, anyone going to a big law firm should watch Glengarry Glen Ross:
“first prize is a Cadillac El Dorado. Anyone wanna see second prize? Second prize is a set of steak knives. Third prize is you’re fired.”
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November 1, 2009, 1:38 pmchrisa798 says:
Law school is remarkable in its disdain for law students, and I also agree that a 5th year plus apprenticeship model would be better.
Steve wins the thread.
“Buncha losers sittin around a bar. Yeah, I used to be a BigLaw associate, it’s a tough racket.” (mock sip)
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November 1, 2009, 1:58 pmdr kill says:
But the best of news for the rest of us. Even more failed attorneys available to be lobbyists and congressman.
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November 1, 2009, 2:29 pmSagar says:
Mike McDougal (#1 comment) wins the thread :)
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November 1, 2009, 2:49 pmFormerLawyer says:
The problem with Reed’s program is that it is likely at cross-purposes with their recruitment goals. Right now, “BigLaw’s” goals with regard to hiring is to amass as much prestige as possible in order to impress clients, in order to be able to advertise: “we have the best of the best.” The evidence of quality is the ranking of the institution, law review, class rank if published, and interpersonal characteristics including looks and proper social graces which may come into play when presenting the youngsters to clients. But this “best” has very little to do with ability to practice law; many of the best actual lawyers come from “lesser” schools. Some lack certain graces, many did not become editors of law review, etc. Regardless, the competition for associates who bring the greatest prestige is what has driven Associate Salaries. If Reed really plans to institute a compensation scheme which will make it less attractive to such candidates, it must at the same time be ready to abandon its commonly shared recruitment goals.
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November 1, 2009, 3:12 pmguest says:
“tying that compensation rigidly to associate seniority makes about as much sense for law firm associates as it does for elementary school teachers, i.e., none at all”
but law school faculty tenure system ... that of course makes perfect sense!
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November 1, 2009, 3:35 pmkdackson says:
Welcome to the world of corporate America. It is unheard of in major companies to move up based on when you joined. You have to prove your value and perform at an expected level before you get promoted.
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November 1, 2009, 3:38 pmBrian G. says:
The reason law schools don’t prepare students for actual practice is because most of the professors don’t actually know ho to practice myself. At my law school, most of the professors are more qualified to work as comunity organizers at ACORN than they are to actually practice law.
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November 1, 2009, 5:19 pmBeldar says:
This is correct, except that (a) I still believe lawyers need a traditional undergraduate education before beginning to study law and (b) two years isn’t remotely long enough for the post-graduate residency, try six or eight (which in fact corresponds to the typical length of associate status under the traditional model). There are related and corresponding changes needed to the bar exam and board certification processes, in both cases coming closer to the medical-education model.
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November 1, 2009, 5:51 pmEdward Sisson says:
Are there any current or former “Big law” partners commenting here? Speaking as a former partner at a “big law” firm, let me give a little different perspective here. Associates are a profit-center — probably the biggest proportion of profits comes from fees charged for the time billed from mid-level and senior associates. Partners need to convince clients that the time and fees paid for associates are justified. Every national firm is competing with every other national firm on this, and each one is looking for a way to say “our associates are worth more than their associates.”
This program gives Reed Smith a basis for claiming that their associates are worth more than associates at other firms — “Look, our mid-level and senior associates have studied in our Academy and have proven mastery at all these core competencies.”
Then take it one step further. Corporate in-house counsel usually have the job of choosing outside firms. In-house counsel have to justify their choices to senior management — usually non-lawyer businessmen steeped in the language of business management trends and phrases — like “core competency.” This program makes it a lot easier for in-house counsel to make themselves look good to senior management, because they can cite all the familiar buzz-words.
This is not about attrition, or training. Partners work closely with associates every day and they learn quickly who is smart and who isn’t, who is diligent and who isn’t, who picks-up the firm culture and who doesn’t. All it takes is a two-hour conference room strategy brainstorming session about how to attack tough issues in a big case to tell who has the brains and who doesn’t. All it takes to determine diligence and thoroughness is to see whether the associate who gets a last-minute assignment pulls an all-nighter to get it done, and produces a good product at the end of it. This is about firm marketing to the clients.
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November 1, 2009, 6:12 pmArthurKirkland says:
What prevented you from attending a great school (such as St. Thomas or Chapman or Ave Maria)? Is it too late to transfer to Liberty or Regent?
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November 1, 2009, 6:39 pmMing the Merciless Siamese Cat says:
So, after three years of failing to impart practical skills, you want to shove your snout in the trough and get law firms to pay you to teach what you failed to teach in the first place. Talk about chutzpah.
Plus, who is first going to teach these skills to the law school professors, given that the actual practice experience among the faculty is as close to nonexistant as makes no difference? Or do you think the things we practioners muddy our hand with are so simple you can pick it up on-line in your spare time (in which case why would we pay you to teach it)?
I am utterly disgusted with the current state of legal education. 20 years ago attended a third-tier ‘trade school’ did well, managed to land a job at a top NY law firm, felt much better prepared for practice than my fellow associates from the Ivy League and eventually made partner.
Today, I’m paying for my daughter’s Ivy League law school tuition and I’m horrified at the lack of rigor or practical instruction. Apart from the prestige of the credential, I’m flushing my money down the toilet.
You have a hell of a racket going. Seriously, Bernie Maddoff had nothing you you guys.
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November 1, 2009, 6:43 pmEdward Sisson says:
I thought I would add a further point on the purpose of depositions. I wish I had been taught this in law school, and later in the firm’s in-house deposition training exercises, but no one thought to put it in clear blunt terms. Here is it:
If the witness is a higher-level person, imagine the “smoking gun” document the witness could have written at the time — the document the lawyer taking the deposition wishes the witness had written. In fact, write the document. This is the thing that the witness had the knowledge and position to have written, but did not actually write it.
The primary purpose of the deposition, for the lawyer taking it, is to get the witness to say “yes” to each sentence in the hypothetical document. It doesn’t matter what order you choose to get the statements into the mouth of the witness, because you can re-construct it in your briefs in the order you want.
Of course, some depositions really are exploratory — you’re just trying to get names, dates, etc., or trying to get documents identified. The above approach doesn’t apply to those. You need to know before you go in, whether the deposition is really just exploratory, or whether you are going for the “killer quote.”
The secondary purpose of the deposition, if the lawyer taking or defending it is an associate or junior partner, is to create a document that your superiors will read and say, “Damn, this is an aggressive and tricky lawyer, but doesn’t go so far as to get sanctioned. We like it!”
Law students and associates should be told these things up-front, since this is what they will have to do, or they will wash-out of their firms early.
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November 1, 2009, 7:35 pmDave Baker says:
MarkField said:
My alma mater Washington & Lee has done something like this by revamping its program with 3rd year focused on professional development. See http://law.wlu.edu/thirdyear/. Makes sense to me. Hope it works.
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November 1, 2009, 9:14 pmBrian G. says:
Arthur,
Typical arrogance. I actually went to a second-tier state school amd I have wiped the floor with Stanford and Harvard grads. The funny thing about them, and I am pretty sure it is the same with you, is that they all think they made it once they got into a so-called top school.
GFY.
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November 1, 2009, 10:52 pmBrian G. says:
By the way, Arthur, you reveal your liberalness by naming all religious schools. Ava Maria, by the way, has a higher bar passage rate than U of Michigan.
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November 1, 2009, 10:54 pmNoway says:
“I actually went to a second-tier state school amd I have wiped the floor with Stanford and Harvard grads.”
Um, right. Excuse me, I need to go freshen my drink, Mr. Crazy Eyes.
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November 2, 2009, 12:33 amJames Decente says:
The fact that a law professor actually believes that he could teach something useful to associates better than an actual seasoned practitioner is just evidence of how clueless and self-deluded the legal academy is. You know so little about the actual practice of law that when a middling law firm renames the CLE program that it (and every other law firm) already runs an “Academy” in a obvious move to hold down comp by eliminating lockstep pay increases based on class year and you think the innovation is the offering of the CLE classes.
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November 2, 2009, 10:32 amMartin says:
What’s lurking in the new model is the assessment based on client/business development — a way to filter out those early on who can’t court new clients to the firm. Those who can’t pay for themselves. Will that advantage the back-slappers and party types? Maybe.
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November 2, 2009, 10:54 amgullyborg says:
How about this?
Schools should offer a 4 year undergraduate degree in law. Call the degree “LL.B.” or Bachelor of Law. Yes, it would be confusing, but no more so than it already is once people have a chance to get used to it.
Graduates should be able to go directly to work as an apprentice under a licensed attorney. No bar exam. But all work must have a supervising attorney.
After, say, 4 years, allow an apprentice to take a bar exam and get a license to practice solo. Oh, and the bar exam? No more than one half would be like the current exam — the rest would be hands-on practical work comparable to actual client relations. The idea should be to assure clients that a bar licensed attorney can actually meet their needs.
Meanwhile, have a 2-year master’s program. Call it a Master of Law, or LL.M. Allow anyone with the LL.M. and two years of qualifying experience to take the bar exam.
Why spend more money on school when you could be working and actually earning money instead of paying it? Some reasons:
1) Specialization. You could focus on something like tax law, or bankruptcy, or divorce, or prosecution, etc. Sure, you could do that as an apprentice also, but this would be an option for the person who knows what specialty he wants and doesn’t want to waste time being the supervising attorney’s b*tch doing document review or Shepardizing cases.
2) Academic prestige. Maybe you went to a so-so undergrad, but you got good grades and get into an Ivy League school for the LL.M. program.
3) Requirement for certain jobs. Some employers might require the LL.M. plus so many years of experience.
4) Requirement for academic advancement... see below.
Of course, while these are all good reasons for the LL.M., many people would do very well with just the LL.B. education combined with real world experience.
Finally, for people who want to become true subject matter experts, offer the LL.D. or Doctor of Law as a REAL terminal deggree (instead of the honorary degree usually given). This would require an LL.M. and, ideally, bar membership, in order to get into the program. So no going full time academic without at least 2 years of real world work. After completing an LL.D. in a specific field of law, which would take usually 2 more years of schooling plus a dissertation, you could go back to the real world with some very focused knowledge.
This is how it should be. Tell me why it shouldn’t. Other than the usual “that’s not how we’ve done it” or “it wouldn’t be fair to current lawyers or professors.”
I don’t care about perpetuating the current system or protecting careers. I care about making the system right.
Oh, and notice I didn’t mention pure academics or professors. For them, there could still be a J.M. and J.D. degree:
The J.M. should be a 2 year degree with a master-level thesis requirement and a focus on teaching. It should not be a substitute for the LL.M. If you want to be a professor, you should need bar membership (with or without an LL.M.) and a J.M. in order to teach. If you want to teach the teachers (that is, teach the highest levels of scholarship), then you should need a J.D., which would require bar membership, a masters degree of one sort or the other, and at least 2 more years of scholarship plus dissertation.
In an ideal world, where only the best and brightest could actually TEACH the law, the professors would have earned both the LL.D. and the J.D. This would ensure being a true subject matter expert AND being a true academic with a record of scholarship. This would be comparable to a professor in today’s world being an experienced attorney with a J.D. and a Ph.D. But this would not be expected for all professors — only for those who want to be the best of the best, hold top positions at top schools, etc. I’d wager most professors would have the LL.B./J.M. combo with the minimum 4 years experience to gain bar membership — and sadly, this would STILL be tougher than what many current professors who went straight to academics after law school went through.
Again, I know this isn’t how it is done and I know it wouldn’t be “fair” to current professors. But this isn’t about fairness. It is about making the system work to produce the best lawyers and the best law professors.
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November 2, 2009, 7:06 pmRandy says:
I think that’s a good idea. However, what if you graduate, and you can’t find an attorney who will supervise you so you can apprentice? I suppose there is always someone, somewhere, who needs the low cost legal work, but then you would perhaps have to move to Alaska or Alabama or some other place to complete your apprenticeship, and what if you don’t want to practice there?
I guess tough luck. It would certainly decrease the number of law grads, which is probably a good thing.
I think a two year undergrad degree in law is sufficient. Four years is much too long, and I would rather have students get a well rounded education than have to take that any law related classes.
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November 2, 2009, 11:27 pmgullyborg says:
What if you graduate with your J.D. today and can’t find a law firm that will hire you — or don’t pass the bar to practice solo? Then you are out 3 years of expensive grad school on top of your undergrad. At least with my model, the LL.B. grad who can’t get hired has only spend 4 years on undergrad and has options of grad school, or working in another field. Lots of liberal arts majors with a B.A. in sociology, poli sci, etc., go on to do generic government or office work that requires a bachelor’s degree but no real specific skill or study. Why should it be different with the LL.B. scenario?
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November 3, 2009, 12:35 amgullyborg says:
Of course, it would be like most other bachelor’s degrees: 2 years of lower division general ed (English, math, history, science, foreign language and some electives) followed by 2 years of upper division concentrated on the field. Imagine combining an A.A. “transfer” degree (first 2 years), with 2 years of “law school” (1L core plus a year of bar courses and practical clinics) to make the 4 year undergrad degree.
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November 3, 2009, 12:43 am