In-house ACCess : In-house ACCess: Association of Corporate Counsel : ACC : The In-house Counsel Bar Association

The other night, I was lecturing to a class at the University Of Akron Graduate School Of Business’ MBA program. Since I have been blogging about changes in legal education, and more recently Northwestern Law School’s attempt to address the issue through its strategic plan, I thought it was a good time to expose my view, described in the blog “Trouble in River City,” that the traditional legal educational scheme developed by Dean Langdell at Harvard is more than inadequate, it is misleading.

The students and faculty in attendance got it. Learning legal doctrine based on courts’ explanations of what they are doing and why, rather than examining their actions in the context of the social, economic and scientific reality in which the courts are operating can be very misleading and actually impair your ability to practice law effectively. When you demonstrate how that occurs in the context of a real case—they get it.

They also understood you cannot fix the problem by add-on’s to the present curriculum—you have to fundamentally change it.

The call for a new and thorough look at legal education is echoed by a growing chorus—and it is a call shared by Fred Krebs, ACC’s president. And just perhaps, if my ideas that business schools replace their law survey course with one that teaches business students how to manage legal problems and lawyers are implemented, law schools may find themselves under pressure from customers of the graduates to change and perhaps “catch up.”
 

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The description of the profession used in Northwestern’s Strategic Plan is based on data which describes a profession that very likely has undergone some radical permanent changes since the data describing the legal profession was collected. The Plan presumes a profession that existed through 2006 and is designed to address the requirements of that profession. For example in the opening pages of the Plan it notes that starting salaries for top law school graduates were “now $160,000 plus bonuses” for the top graduates of Northwestern Law School. In my blog I describe how many formerly highly paid law school graduates are now unemployed or employed for modest salaries.

The Plan also describes the growth in the demand for legal services, based on law firm revenues from 2000 to 2006 which show legal services overall slightly outpacing GDP and the revenue of the Top 200 US law firms dramatically exceeding GDP with an annualized growth rate of 9.8%.

2007 has brought dramatic changes to the global as well as the US economy. Similar impacts have been felt by the legal profession. The reduction in the demand for legal services as well as the incomes of lawyers has been widely publicized. Perhaps even more importantly, the role that the law might have played in the US and other cultures may well be changing. Most notably, the central feature of at least the US legal system, lawsuits, appears to be disappearing. As I suggest in this series of blogs, this change may not be a mere function of the economic climate, but a cultural shift in which the role played by law is being replaced by other factors in the culture to order and control behavior.

Northwestern’s plan explicitly describes itself as not being a new effort, but describes itself as “refreshing portions of its 1998 Strategic Plan and “fine tun[ing]” the school’s response to the continuing challenges for legal education. Its biggest problem may be that it does just that and in doing so may have fallen into the trap that has plagued legal education—its uncanny ability to train lawyers for the profession of the past.

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Are law schools rethinking legal education? Northwestern Law School recently completed a strategic plan which makes an effort at defining the type of education it should be providing the profession.

The effort deserves considerable credit because at the very least it is an attempt to confront the growing criticism that law schools are not delivering the skill set needed to properly function in today’s environment. See The AmLaw Daily.

The more serious question is whether the Northwestern effort is an effective method of delivering the skill lawyers need to deliver cost effective service or does it simply pay lip service to that objective while continuing the status quo. Or perhaps is it something in between, a good start, perhaps with a long road to go. The following series of blogs will examine that effort.
 
For those new readers, sometime ago I addressed the issue of the problem of legal education in a series of blogs which tells a story of a young traditionally trained lawyer who confronts a business man who had been trained in his business school using a legal problem solving paradigm. Those blogs are entitled “There is Trouble in River City” and deserve a look as this discussion progresses.

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