Two Lawyers Walk Into A Bar (Exam): Another Take on Law School Reform

Prospective and current law school students around the country must have been overjoyed to hear President Obama’s remarks at Binghamton University last month, in which he proposed that law schools consider shortening their programs from three to two years. His statements, taken from a larger speech about college education as a whole, are particularly pertinent to the modern zeitgeist, which finds students, parents, educators, and legislators in a frenzied debate about the growing cost of higher education. These costs are both explicit and implicit; not only is the tuition of many elite schools ballooning out of control (including a certain one in Providence, Rhode Island), but students have to sacrifice many of their golden years to law school programs, during which they forsake a tremendous amount of earning potential and professional development. While the President’s proposition demonstrates his recognition of this growing problem, merely cutting a year off law school—or any other graduate program, for that matter—fails to solve the root of the problem, and may indeed incur more damage than it prevents. Far more innovative solutions, such as a more thorough integration of real-world experience into graduate programs, could potentially alleviate the monetary burden that law students shoulder while also taking into consideration other consequences of such action.

President Obama is not alone in his call for quicker pathways into the legal profession. This January, a proposed rule change was debated in the state of New York that would allow law students to take the bar exam after completing only two years of study, even before they would have fulfilled all the requirements for their law degree, allowing students to start their legal careers sooner and with less debt. The Dean of Northwestern Law School, Daniel Rodriguez, came out in support of this change in a New York Times editorial. However, such proposals are far too cut-and-dry to address the full range of issues in legal education. To begin with, the United States is already experiencing a glut of lawyers, with a national average of more than two lawyers for every potential legal job. In some areas, the ratio is much steeper. Shortening law school by a year would inevitably lead to an even greater oversupply of lawyers in the job market, raising the already significant unemployment rate and forcing law school grads to search for jobs that don’t utilize the legal education in which they had just invested thousands of dollars. It’s all well and good to speak of eliminating a year’s worth of tuition, but it’s not a feasible solution to reduce student debt if students lack the means to pay back their debts or employ the tools they’ve learned.

What is more, some claim that law school as is, with its full three years, does not sufficiently prepare students to practice law. Law schools can tend towards theory as opposed to practice, meaning that their graduates leave with a mountain of debt and still require a great deal of on-the-job training. Simply cutting the final year of their education would not only introduce more lawyers into an overstuffed market, but it would reduce the training that such lawyers receive, likely reducing the quality of those in the legal profession.

But the fact remains that the price of law school remains untenably high, and something must be done to remedy the debt that graduates are accruing across the country. One possible solution comes from the pre-professional track in another field: medicine. Law schools should seek to imitate the medical profession and include something similar to a residency-training program after the first two years of education. Third-year law students would then have the opportunity to earn money and begin building a resume while honing and refining their basic skills. Tied in with this hands-on work would be a reduced academic workload; the student could assist a faculty mentor with research, supplement their work with a highly relevant class or two in the law school, and/or conclude their experience with a comprehensive thesis or report on the work they completed. However, while the specifics would still need to be fleshed out, the general benefits of a “law residency” program would remain: students could earn money while staying in school for the third and final year.

Law residents, if such an opportunity existed, would also be of service to the general population by filling an important gap. The Legal Service Corporation estimated this year that roughly 80 percent of the poor’s legal needs are not provided for; in addition, an international comparison conducted by the World Justice Project ranked the United States 66^th out of 98 for access to legal services. While lawyers are oversupplied in nearly every other part of the job market, this is one area in which lawyers are desperately needed. Rodriguez, in his editorial, stated his belief that such lower-income populations would benefit from permitting those with only two years of education to take the bar, since these inexperienced graduates could find jobs in this type of work. However, he ignores the fact that law students are, by and large, attracted to the more lucrative occupations, such as corporate or patent law. Law school residency programs, were they to be created, have the potential to place students in an underserved avenue of law that needs their skills.

This is the direction legal education should take, and it would solve the dual crisis facing the profession. Presently, law school is expensive and is funneling too many graduates into the same areas of law, creating a surplus. At the same time, impoverished populations, who often greatly need legal counsel or representation, aren’t getting their needs met. Law schools need to take the initiative and give their students a chance to apply what they’ve learned while serving an important role. As a potential future lawyer myself, it’s important to me not only that student debt is reduced and that employment options are increased, but also that whatever skills I might learn go to people who sincerely need it. Law school reform needs to be innovative in order to address the profession’s complex set of problems.  Chopping off a year just doesn’t cut it.