• You haven't explained why you think that the best way to prepare for practice is to be trying to practice without having learned how. The hypothesis on which law school is based, and which I think has validity regardless of the reasons why law school presently works badly, is that a coherent attempt to teach is more effective than undirected apprenticeship. As a person who both teaches in classrooms and also operates a legal services entity where young lawyers, including law students, practice all the time, I can say for sure that law school education, including at high student-faculty ratios in large classrooms, serves purposes that practice-oriented school-to-work programs can't have on their own. But why should I stop you from explaining how lawyers should be trained?

• I think there is courage and strength in admitting the anxiety, but the next step is to be willing to let go of the cords that tie you to it. If every time you spoke to some suburban householder he told you how he lies awake at night worrying about his mortgage payment and that it's preventing him from doing what he wants to do with his life, you'd wonder. So I wonder. You're going to have a small mortgage to pay, probably in addition to some long-term debt on your home. So what? Life choices aren't made on the assumption that your only way to pay the mortgage is either (a) get a job with the worst industrial polluter in town, or (b) do something no one can quite define or knows how to do. People have been making a good living using law licenses for a thousand years. Large leveraged law firms have been around for less than a hundred years. The belief that you can't make a good enough living to pay the mortgages without hocking your license to some sweatshop isn't worth three essays your freshman year. It isn't worth one. To let the issue have an y significant effect on your life choices is stupid. That's really how it is. Now, can you deal with it?

Fears of a law student

Reasonable Doubt

The Columbia Solution

Or is it?

What to do with it

Looking at our debt with some perspective along with being more proactive about the practical aspects are two things we can do to help ease our anxiety. I'm not sure that either one or both of these things will be able to solve or even substantially mitigate the problem of fear. I think, however, that it would be useful to open up the discussion to the rest of the law school community and recognize and confront each of our own fears with respect to law school and employment so that we can put our focus where it needs to be.

• Ranting is okay, but you have to know what you're talking about. Your view of law firm economics, which assumes that first-year associates are unprofitable, is wrong. If there is enough work to employ the firm's more senior hours, there is work on which first-year time turns a handsome profit. Your use of the word "leverage" to imply something more than the attraction of $165k/yr for a twenty-something who doesn't know very much was not, unfortunately, well-advised. Similarly, the myth of "training" makes your points about the educational system hard to follow: the firms don't make their associates into people who could be solo practitioners; they turn them into specialists in large-firm activities. Nowhere in the world are lawyers produced by a school system that makes practical training via apprenticeship unnecessary. Most systems have required apprenticeship periods; the US is as usual particularly hospitable to personal reinvention in allowing graduates who pass the bar to practice on their own from the beginning, should they so choose. There's no explanation in the essay about how to achieve what no other system achieves either, so it's hard to judge what the consequences of an attempt would be.

• I think we need to figure out what you really wanted to write about. I don't think it was law firms or how law school should work, because those weren't things you wanted to spend time finding out about or you'd have been more accurate about them. The identification of being a lawyer with being rich probably should be more thoroughly considered, too. It doesn't strike me as obvious that being a lawyer means being rich. But it does seem obvious to you, so maybe that's the real subject here. What does being rich mean, and what are you willing to do for what kind of money?

Swindlers

Career Opportunities, the Ones that Never Knocked

Solution?

In class we have already established the fundamental flaws in the two most apparent career choices presented to us by law schools. On the one hand, one could choose to go down the big law path, leading to financial stability but potentially meaningless work and the “pawning” of one's license to practice law. On the other hand, one could choose to work in “public interest” law, where the pay is less but the work is theoretically more rewarding. What compels law students to generally choose only from these two paths is the amount of debt that they incur by choosing to attend law school. Indeed, it seems that there is no choice but to either take the huge salary or to throw yourself at the mercy of Columbia's LRAP, which, according to Professor Moglen, is an essentially empty promise made by Columbia that requires students to sacrifice their own financial comfort for dubious debt relief assistance.

The easy solution would be for law schools to charge more reasonable tuition. This would certainly make it easier to say no to big law salaries. However, I don't think that this is a sufficient solution, nor is it even a necessary part of the solution. I think that the problem lies with the sort of people that law schools produce. Because law school is supposedly a professional school meant to train lawyers, perhaps we could learn something from another professional school – medical school.

The fundamental problem with law school and with earning a J.D. is that holding the degree by itself does not indicate to anybody that you are capable of actually practicing law. Clients hiring big law firms are insistent on having partners and upper-level associates do their work, and with good reason – law school does not provide any real practical training. Contrast this to medical school – patients do not only trust new graduates with their lives, but they will sometimes so trust even medical students during their residencies. The reason for the difference is apparent – medical school takes education much more seriously than law school. Practical skills are emphasized and the educational process is given the time and seriousness that it deserves. Law schools, on the other hand, have contented themselves with becoming big law associate factories, and, as we have established in class, big law associates do not actually practice law.

If law school, like medical school, could gain a reputation for training individuals who were competent on graduation day, there would be a fundamental paradigm shift in all areas of the law. Big law firms might continue to exist, but they could no longer exist as they do today. If law schools could gain a reputation for training trustworthy, knowledgeable and able lawyers, then clients of big firms would no longer be distrusting of their work being assigned to first year associates. Suddenly, partners would lose the immense leverage they currently have over first year associates, a leverage which is founded on the fact that associates are essentially useless to the firm and know it, but still want large salaries. The uselessness of associates combined with their desire for money has been partners' justification for forcing associates to spend outrageous amounts of time working on essentially meaningless projects. With this leverage removed, partners could no longer force associates to “pawn” their licenses to practice law and would have to change their entire business design.

For those students who have no intention to work for big firms, the benefits of a more practical legal education are even more apparent. If law school provided practical training, then students would not feel compelled to work for institutions that they find distasteful in attempt to obtain the practical training they so desperately need after three years of useless academic wankery. If law school could adjust itself to train confident lawyers, such further education would be needless.

It is of course difficult to say how these changes could be brought about or implemented given the stubbornness of the system and the willingness of most to accept the status quo. However, the current economic crisis might expedite or even force such a change to occur. Surely law schools will no longer be able to swindle students if they can no longer offer lucrative firm jobs upon graduation. Instead, they might have to offer their students a different promise – the promise that attending law school is more than just jumping through hoops on the way to the rat race, the promise that, with the requisite effort and will, one can be a competent professional at the end of their education.

-- JustinPurtle - 27 Feb 2009