About the Site
Law School is Broken The cold, hard reality is law school is broken. I’m not talking about the actual education. My sense is that the quality of legal education in the US right now is fairly underrated. I’m talking about the system of law school itself. How students are admitted. How schools are organized and operated. How rewards and punishments are given.
One major problem is that from even before Day One in law school, doors are closing. Unless you went to Harvard or Yale on full scholarship or a grant from the Bank of Dad, some doors close to you the minute you select a school. High debt, a love of prestige, and a very regional industry all combine to mean that as you go through law school, options tend to narrow rather than broaden.
People’s Misconception of Lawyers There is a silver lining to this dark cloud. People still think lawyers can do everything. One of the best quotes I ever heard about lawyers and law school was during my 1L year: “For someone reason, people think that having a law degree qualifies you to do a world of things that have nothing to do with a law degree.”
So while within the legal world options narrow, to the lay person, getting a law degree doesn’t just qualify you to be a lawyer, it’s also a stamp or a signal that generally you are really, really smart. And as much as people make jokes about lawyers, people don’t think they’re dumb. That means outside of the legal world, options broaden.
Fearfully Optimistic’s Mission Our goal here is two fold. The first is to give law students tools and techniques to make themselves more productive and make the process of law school a little easier. More productive law students means a little less stress, and a greater focus on the learning, curiosity, and discussion.
The second is to discuss ideas about what law school means to law students and what it could mean. Right now, law students are generally sold on something akin to a trade school, and then not armed with the specific practical skills to be a good lawyer; more training is involved. So to many, law school is a disappointment. But if law students start thinking about law school a little differently, or demanding that they be given what they were sold, it doesn’t have to be that way.
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
John,
I too elected not to practice law, though I was already a nontraditional law student with years of varied career experience behind me. After graduating, I was able to leverage contacts and experiences I’d built up before law school, so the decision not to enter the legal profession was not as difficult and painful as it might have otherwise been.
I’m really glad you’re tackling these subjects. I’ve thought about them as well, and I agree with you 100% that law schools need to become far more than trade schools in order to truly serve students and society at large. The system as it stands now pumps out thousands of graduates every year, but does next to nothing to help those who will for whatever reason, not be practicing law (and not just immediately after law school – the profession suffers a staggering dropout rate).
The argument I’ve heard and read many times is that law school is a crap shoot. Everyone knows it, and you should think of it that way. You might blow 90k on three years of hard work and dedicated learning, only to wind up without a job that come close to paying back your debts in any reasonable amount of time. Plenty of lawyers, students and professors figure that’s just the way it is; you’re either good enough to make it to the top of the heap, or you’re just out of luck and should never have bothered to attend law school in the first place.
It’s past time to open up a discussion about what law schools should be, as opposed to what they’ve always been.
John, Thank you SO MUCH for introducing me to GTD. This blog is just great and I tell all of my pre-law friends about it. I am starting school in a week and I am very excited, but fearfully optimistic as well. Organization, time management, and prioritizing tasks/responsibilities have always been areas that needed a completely makeover in my life. This is why I find GTD so appealing. That being said, I am still VERY confused as to where to start with this. I don’t know which application I should use, how the system works on a real-world law school level, and what the day-to-day use of the system looks like. I was wondering if you have some kind of flow chart or some kind of example you can present for us readers to be able to completely adopt this system. I know that its application is very subjective and I have many options, but it would just be nice to see some examples of it. Please let me know if you can guide me. Thanks!
I will have a post up about tools and tips later in the week.
John – I’m impressed with the site and the mission and only wish there was a link to email you (or that I could locate it). I’m doing a kind of Internet experiment, putting large portions of a book on the Web for free. It’s called For the Sake of Argument: A Life in the Law, and it’s intended to say, with insight and sense of absurdity based on experience, all that I know now, 27 years after starting law school, that I wish I’d known then, at each of the decision points in my legal career. I think it might be of interest to your readers. It can be found at http://www.joeljacobsen.com/book-excerpts/ (I’m sorry that I haven’t listened to Jim Rome enough to think like a caller). Chapter 4 includes my suggestions about how to fix law school, and why no one will ever take those suggestions seriously. If you think the book is something that might be of interest to your readers, I’d be grateful if you’d drop a mention in Fearfully Optimistic. Write me if you’d like to know more. Many thanks, and keep up the good work, Joel
I love this idea! As a recent (and unemployed) law school grad, I tackled many of these issues myself. I too, try to get people to understand that as a professional training ground, the legal education system is broken. I went out of my way to get practical experience in law school, and still feel like that effort fell short. For people like me who want to do public interest/non-profit work, they provided few resources to teach us how to run an organization, or even basic non-profit business practices. Yet, within 5 years after graduation, I know many of my peers will be doing just that (working in non-profits or managing them).
Part of the problem is that academics who teach in law schools are not trained teachers and generally haven’t practiced law (or much of any other profession other than academia) so they are a poor choice to educate anyone!