Randy: 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.

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.

Randy: what if you graduate, and you can’t find an attorney who will supervise you so you can apprentice?

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?

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.

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.

Um, right. Excuse me, I need to go freshen my drink, Mr. Crazy Eyes.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

David Bernstein: 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.

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.

but law school faculty tenure system … that of course makes perfect sense!

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)

“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.”

Careless: 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?

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.

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?

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).

This post was mentioned on Twitter by omarharedeye: “Cracks Appearing in Law Firm Associate Model” http://bit.ly/bqM72 Guess what’s going to fill it?…

Philosopher: 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.

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.

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.