I think a teaching law firm is a wonderful idea but sadly something that an institution like Columbia is not going to entertain. The complaints about law school (failure to teach real skills, incredibly high cost of tuition with the hollow promise of a job) are complaints that don't apply to Columbia in the eyes of the administrators here (though they really should). As much as people stress out about getting jobs at EIP and elsewhere, 99% of us will be employed at graduation. The vast majority of us will also be working in jobs where our employers have the resources to make up from the lack of training we may get from the three years spent here. In a similar vein to teaching law firms, I went to the RebLaw? conference at Yale in February and heard about the great work Fred Rooney is doing at CUNY with what he calls "Social Justice Incubators." The idea is that CUNY will give recent grads office space and mentorship over a two-year period to help them start their own practices while simultaneously providing more low-cost legal services to low-income people. I mentioned this program to Dean Chapnick and asked if Columbia ever considered trying to start something like this, and she said there's just no demand for it - in here view, the difference between Columbia and CUNY is that Columbia grads have very little problem in the job market, while CUNY grads can't get jobs and need programs like these as a result. Necessity is the mother of invention, and unfortunately you're not going to get innovation from a school like Columbia that doesn't feel like the status quo is really so bad.

The shame of this is that the status quo is far worse than it appears. Yes, we will all be employed after graduation, but because Columbia doesn't care about leaving after three years with real legal skills, it is very difficult to find employment in jobs in which the employer doesn't have the resources to train you (i.e. non-big firm jobs). Eben constantly tells us to start our own practice after we graduate, and people think it's a ridiculous suggestion, in part because it is. At the moment, Columbia isn't training us to be lawyers but instead merely kicking us down the line to employers who have accepted the responsibility of training us instead. But we're the ones who suffer under that status quo - yes, we get jobs, but we often have to sell our license in those jobs in order to get the training that we should be receiving in exchange for the $150K that we've already paid.

-- JaredMiller - 09 Jun 2012