Last week I had lunch with a bunch of lawyers of different ages and experience levels. At some point, as it usually does, the conversation turned to the state of legal education in the U.S. To a person, every lawyer at the table (myself included) lamented the poor training law schools provide. To a person, every lawyer opined that law school does almost nothing to teach students how to practice law.
That observation has been repeated so many places and so many times that it has become accepted as gospel. And seems to be accepted that it can’t be changed. But think about what that means. You go three years of law school, accumulate thousands if not hundreds of thousands dollars of debt. When you graduate, you take an exam that’s supposed to test whether you are competent to practice law. But despite all this, you aren’t ready to do the job you have gone to school to presumably learn how to do. You have no training on how to earn a living or really how to do anything. And you have to pay off your debt. WTF???
(Of course, I realize that the assumption that baby lawyers don’t know how to do anything can be questioned. Given how the profession works, it’s probably valid to ask if young lawyers really don’t know how to do anything. Or whether they just don’t know how to do things like us older lawyers have always don’t them. But that’s for another day. For present purposes, I’m not going to challenge the prevailing assumptions).
Firms and in-house departments seem to accept that new lawyer hires don’t know how to do much of anything. Some clients have even gone so far as to refuse to pay for work done by first-year