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Sunday, November 20, 2011

Law - "What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering"

Today's NY Times has this very long story by David Segal.

The short version: "Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, leaving law firms fairly resigned to training their hires how to actually practice law."

From a sidebar:

A Possible New Curriculum: What do corporate clients wish associates were taught in law school?
  • A better understanding of modern litigation practice, which is about gathering facts and knowing how to settle a case.
  • Greater familiarity with transactions law, including how to draft, evaluate and challenge a contract.
  • Deeper knowledge of regulatory law and the ability to respond to a regulatory inquiry or enforcement action.
  • Basic corporate legal skills, like how to perform due diligence.
  • Writing skills. Partners at law firms say they spend a lot of time improving the writing of their first- and second-year associates.
  • A stronger grasp of the evolving economics of legal practice, which will rely less on leveraging the time of new associates and more on entrepreneurship.
Some quotes from the must-read story itself:
Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”

So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime. * * *

Law schools’ aversion to all things vocational has been much debated, both inside and outside the academy. But critics are fighting both tradition and the legal academy’s peculiar set of neuroses.

“Law school has a kind of intellectual inferiority complex, and it’s built into the idea of law school itself,” says W. Bradley Wendel of the Cornell University Law School, a professor who has written about landing a law school teaching job. “People who teach at law school are part of a profession and part of a university. So we’re always worried that other parts of the academy are going to look down on us and say: ‘You’re just a trade school, like those schools that advertise on late-night TV. You don’t write dissertations. You don’t write articles that nobody reads.’ And the response of law school professors is to say: ‘That’s not true. We do all of that. We’re scholars, just like you.’ ”

This trade-school anxiety can be traced back to the mid-19th century, when legal training was mostly technical and often taught in rented rooms that were unattached to institutions of higher education. * * *

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.

“Nobody wants to become a retirement home, or a place for washed-out lawyers,” says Kevin R. Johnson, dean of the law school at the University of California, Davis, who came to the meat market with six positions to fill.

This might seem a paradox — experienced people need not apply — but the academy views seasoned pros with a certain suspicion. In fact, a number of veterans of legal practice who failed to land tenure-track jobs say that experience was a stigma they could not beat.

“It can be fatal, because the academy wants people who are not sullied by the practice of law,” said a longtime lawyer and adjunct professor, who did not want to be identified because his remarks might alienate colleagues. “A lot of people who are good at big ideas, the people who teach at law school, think it is beneath them.”

The exceptions are those who teach legal clinics, which are programs where students learn to counsel clients (usually poor), draft documents and even litigate, all under faculty supervision. Legal clinics are a growing presence on nearly every campus, and many — like Washington University’s Law School in St. Louis and the CUNY School of Law in Queens — get high marks for quality and participation.

But a lot of these programs struggle with a kind of second-class status. Many are staffed, in whole or in part, by teachers who are not voting members of the faculty, and the programs are often modest. A soon-to-be released study of clinical programs by the Center for the Study of Applied Legal Education found that only 3 percent of law schools required clinical training.

[More] This NYT article is not without its law professor critics.

Posted by Marcia Oddi on November 20, 2011 02:44 PM
Posted to General Law Related