I’m not a doctor or a med student, so I’m not as intimately familiar with the education of doctors as I am with the education of lawyers. But lucky for us, there’s Wikipedia. For those of you who didn’t know, medical school is a four-year education. The first two years are classroom experience, followed by two years in clinical settings. After those four years, you get your M.D., but then spend 1-3 years in residency (and if you want a really specific or difficult specialty, another 1-3 years in a fellowship). Along the way, you’ll take the four parts of the U.S. Medical Licensing Exam. And after those five years, you take the final boards and get your medical license.
This is why I don’t quite get the constant demand that law schools ensure that their students have all the practical skills they need to practice law. Even medical schools, which by necessity is more “practical” than law school isn’t required to make sure the doctors are ready to go on the first day after graduation, particularly because the medical profession understands how ludicrous that is. Until you spend some time working on live people, you can’t be a good doctor.
What if the legal profession, instead of simply creating a workaround to this perceived problem, actually rebuilt the system and made it look more like medical education? We already have many of the elements in place. California has First Year Law Students Exam, a.k.a. the Baby Bar. Clerkships are sort of like residencies. We have a big licensing exam that could be taken right after law school or maybe a year later.
Legal education could, without too much reconstruction, become much more like how we educate doctors. Law schools could focus on what they’re good at (or at least what should be in their wheelhouse): teaching black letter law and legal theory. After the first year, you would take a baby bar to ensure you have the basic concepts down. The third year could require you to get some practical experience via internship credit.
Following law school, you would first take the Multistate Bar Exam. Not the whole bar, but one part that shows you’ve gained the knowledge that law school was theoretically supposed to give you. That would be followed by a residency where you would work under the direction of another attorney or judge for a year. Imagine clerkships in all sorts of fields, including corporate law and criminal defense, and you get the idea. Then you would take the essay and Multistate Performance Test portions of the bar exam. And during this year we could hopefully stop the bleeding by paying these people, but hold off on them paying those student loans until they have a real job.
If law school’s chief job is to train lawyers, the first step is admitting that law school can’t do that job alone. No amount of classroom instruction will replace real world, hands on experience. And there’s only so much that internships and clinics can do to make up for that. Before we unleash lawyers on the world, why not make them spend a year learning their craft before we decide if they truly are competent to practice?
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Nicely put. Now if school administrators or the ABA would follow the idea. There’s no way that anyone who graduates in May, takes the bar in July, and begins to practice in October is sufficiently prepared for the day to day practice of law.
Which is also the reason why it’s basically malpractice to go out and hang up your shingle without a mentoring attorney. You’d think that would be a hint that our system of education doesn’t work, but I guess it’s not.
The way that lawyers are licensed really is ludicrous when compared to several other professions. Take Engineers for example, typically you graduate from an engineering program and then work as an apprentice for as many as 5 years before taking the exam to become a fully licensed engineer. The fact that you can graduate law school, take the bar, and become a fully licensed lawyer having never taken a trial skills course or worked under the supervision of an experienced attorney in an internship setting really is concerning.
I think it’s not so much the lack of experience as the testing itself. The test we give to someone one year rather than two months after law school would look much different and be a better predictor of who will be a competent attorney.
Yeah, it is pretty dumb the way they teach lawyers. I blame law schools for being lazy, gluttonous pigs. They pack law students in these big classes to get the tuition $$$. Compared to dental school when you graduate you have done a certain amount of fillings, root canals, crowns, cleanings, etc. Law school and the Bar teaches next to nil about how to practice. Law schools would have to work hard to actually train lawyers, they could not get away with the gigantic class sizes, and the law professors that have been spouting the exact same drivel year after year. The way law schools operate now, the value they provide to the profession, there is no reason why law schools could not be replaced by internet law schools at a fraction of the cost.
I think it’s less that law schools aren’t teaching this stuff than it is that they claiming they are. Law schools are selling a bogus bill of goods to students who come expecting to get a focused, practical education that leads to a very specific career. If law schools instead sold the education as a liberal arts grad school education, that would be fine, because people would know what they’re getting.