Finding solutions to the problems plaguing legal education will require holding law schools accountable while giving them the flexibility to craft strategies to educate lawyers who can find jobs, pay off their debts, and serve the millions of people who can’t afford legal services.
That’s the closest to a consensus that the American Bar Association’s legal-education task force seemed to reach during a morning-long discussion that was broadcast online on Wednesday.
The panel kicked off a daylong conference at Indiana University’s Robert H. McKinney School of Law. The proceedings will be posted on the task force’s Web site.
Jay Conison, dean of the Charlotte School of Law, moderated the morning’s discussion, citing the “tremendous challenges and anxieties” facing legal education.
Among other ideas that have been floated as ways to make legal education less costly and services more affordable, experts have proposed:
- Shortening law school from three years to two.
- Allowing law schools to rely more on distance education.
- Testing students on a series of competencies as they progress through law school and allowing those who reach a certain level to work as legal technicians.
The task force was created last year to recommend how law schools, the ABA, and other groups could respond to growing concerns about escalating tuition and student debt, reduced hiring, and heightened demands for curricular changes.
Working through two subcommittees—one dealing with the economics of legal education and the other with the delivery of legal education and its regulation—the task force has held a series of public hearings and reviewed hundreds of comments on its Web site.
The panel hopes to have a draft report ready by August or September to submit for approval by the ABA’s governing body by November. That timetable was accelerated because of the urgency of the challenges facing the profession, according to Randall T. Shepard, the panel’s chair and a former chief justice of the Indiana Supreme Court.
Some educators, Congressional critics, and disillusioned law-school graduates have called on the bar association to toughen standards for law schools, pointing out that new law schools continue to open at a time when current graduates are struggling to find work.
The association has responded by requiring more-transparent data from law schools about the jobs students are getting and whether they’re full time and require a law degree.
Troubling Questions
But just how prescriptive the association should be in regulating law schools remains a question troubling members of the panel.
Michael A. Fitts, dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School, cautioned that overregulating law schools at a time of such uncertainty could backfire. “Trying to predict how the profession and legal education will evolve would be risky,” he said.
A better approach, he suggested, would be “to allow these 200 institutions to structure their academic programs in different ways so they can think about what they do best to educate students in a rapidly changing environment.”
Among the challenges, large law firms are hiring far fewer new associates and are less willing to spend the time and resources to train them. They’re expecting new graduates to hit the ground ready to practice, a view that has prompted law schools to expand clinics that are expensive to operate. Meanwhile, automation and outsourcing are further eroding job opportunities.
Bryant G. Garth, a law professor at the University of California at Irvine and former dean of Southwestern Law School, said that recent news articles have created the incorrect impression that law schools have gotten themselves into a crisis because they’re populated by overpaid professors publishing useless research and doing little teaching. He said that people forget that most law schools are parts of universities facing similar financial constraints and that they can’t tackle the affordability crisis alone.
Lauren K. Robel, provost of Indiana University at Bloomington and a former law dean there, pointed out that schools training journalists and librarians face similar challenges, and that the task force faces a monumental challenge in trying to predict where the profession is going when its practitioners don’t even know.
Richard Campbell, a corporate lawyer who serves on the task force, joined several panelists in noting that many poor and middle-class people can’t afford legal representation, in part because law-school graduates buried under six-figure debt have to charge higher fees.
“The challenge,” he said, “is trying to put young lawyers in contact with the people who need their services.”