These are dark days. While law schools and Biglaw continue business pretty much as usual, the good people at Law School Transparency continue to track how the lost generation of lawyers with no real job prospects grows every year.
Steven J. Harper, a Harvard Law grad and 30-year litigator at Kirkland & Ellis, has weighed in on the problems and suggested some solutions in The Lawyer Bubble. It’s the perfect book for a terrible time.
Elie Mystal recently made two smart proposals about how law school career services offices could be improved. Aaron Street provided his take here at Lawyerist a few years back. His ideas were also good ones.
While a few of Aaron suggestions are starting to pop up as reality, sporadically, at some law schools, Elie’s are almost certainly not going to happen at any school. Because law schools still refuse to accept that their fundamental view of themselves is threatening their very existence.
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Paul Campos’ blog, Inside the Law School Scam, closed its doors last week. It was a watershed event in what we might look back at 25 years from now as The End of the Old Way of making lawyers. And Campos may well be seen as a key figure in the era.
I don’t believe in hero worship. But Campos is as close to a hero as we’ve got in what will be a sordid history, our history.
In case you missed it somehow, Campos is a law professor at Colorado. He had expressed grave concerns to colleagues about how law schools were raising tuition to absurd levels while simultaneously being, ahem, less than candid about the employment prospects of new graduates. The reaction from colleagues was apparently a collective shrug.
So Campos started a blog and started telling the truth as he saw it, anonymously.
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I went to law school for two reasons, both dumb ones. First, I lost my job and thought I could find a good job as a lawyer and make more money. Second, I thought law would be fun because it included or intersected with what I was already interested in: politics, history, crime, and reading and watching movies about those subjects.
I was fortunate enough to get a law job. But law school ruined my interest in those subjects. Which is not in any way comparable to being unemployed and drowning in law school debt. But it sucks anyway.
On January 22, 2013, the New York Times ran an article entitled, “Experts Debate Two Year Law School Option.” According to the article, New York State Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman is interested in a proposal that would allow law students to sit for the New York Bar Exam after completing only two years of law school. The proposal was made at New York Law School on January 18 during a panel discussion on legal education. Some reasons cited for the proposal include the rising cost of a law school education and the poor job market, along with the perception that the third year of law school consists mostly of “filler” classes without much value. Keep Reading ⇒
If you’re in law school (or recently graduated) you should find a way to hang out with judges while they work. The benefits are off the charts, and it’s pretty fun (at least some of the time). You’ll learn more, and more of value, spending time with a trial court judge than doing pretty much anything else.
For some lawyers, trial courts are a lot like the end zone in football—the place where you either win or lose the game. But for most lawyers, trial courts are the place you’ll do almost anything to avoid visiting. Either way, much of a lawyer’s time is spent thinking about how an issue might be handled in a trial court. That’s why spending time there, and getting inside judges’ heads, is so worthwhile.
With law firms and law schools in crisis, federal and state governments paralyzed, and the citizens restless and weary of more of the same cynicism and cowardice, we need a comic book hero, someone to inspire us and give us reason to hope for a brighter day.
We now have one. His name is Nathaniel Burney, and he’s a lawyer who wrote a comic book.
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Law school success can be defined multiple ways, but getting good grades meets any definition of success.
Law school exams are unlike any other test you’ve taken, which means you need to meticulously prepare and execute your gameplan.
Here’s how to make it happen.
A local law school Dean recently commented that women seem to be backsliding in the legal profession. She cited lower female enrollment in law schools, lack of women in law firm leadership positions, and stagnant growth in the ranks of women in the judiciary. Her comment surprised me. Are women losing ground in law? Perhaps it’s time to look at some statistics.
Yesterday the New York Times published an editorial by Lawrence Mitchell, Dean of Case Western Reserve University’s law school. The piece can be seen alternatively as a plea to stop the law-school bashing, or as an exegesis on just how wrong everyone has gotten their assessment of the jobs crisis for lawyers. Regardless of your take on Mitchell’s editorial, it is still an open question whether law school is a sound financial investment at this point.
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