Another Sign that Change Will Come Whether the ABA Wants it or Not

This article is about Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers, an initiative that at least makes the attempt to change legal education from the nearly-useless Socratic model to a more pragmatic version where students actually get some skills that they may need after graduation.

Two comments:

1. This is hardly the only "reform" movement or initiative we'll see. As the bottleneck of new entrants becomes tighter and tighter, schools will continue to attempt ways to differentiate themselves from each other. Previously, they didn't have this same level of pressure, where most law schools could virtually guarantee some type of legal work for the median graduate, and everyone reported the same meaningless numbers as everyone else. Now that the truth about law school enrollment and lawyer need has become more mainstream, schools will push the envelope on how finding new ways to appeal to local hiring firms. It may (probably will) cause pressure from the bottom up as administrators at TTTs seek to ease the ABA's various restrictions, such as in-class required hours, tenured law faculty, etc.

It's clear at this point that the Socratic method and relying on firms to (1) hire and (2) train new attorneys in what they'll actually have to do is as dead as Ben Cardozo and Oliver Wendell Holmes. For law schools to preserve their own existence, they'll need to push initiatives like this (even if their actual success is debatable) and that necessarily means pushing the ABA and the state bar associations/state supreme courts/whomever to ease the restrictions.

2. As a corollary to the above, I find the list of schools adopting/paying into Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers telling: Cornell, Stanford, Vanderbilt, and USC are among the 15 schools. Two T-14s, one of the top law schools in the south, and a school that places quite well on the west coast. If schools at that level are willing to alter their methods, it's a sign of how deep these issues hit law schools. It's not just the schools at the bottom that have to change how they operate, it's schools like USC and Cornell as well. The bottleneck is so severe that mid-level graduates at those schools are being squeezed out.

In fact, the risk is very real that many hirers may pass over the median USC grad in favor of a polished, well-trained Pepperdine, San Diego, San Francisco, etc. grad. Of course this doesn't happen at the Latham and Watkinses of the world, but if you're running a small PI shop, would you prefer hiring a top 20% TTT grad who had a clinical legal education or a 60% grad from USC/UCLA/Cal/Stanford who studied Law and Socioeconomics for three years?

There's anecdotal evidence that many firms prefer the former. If schools like Stanford are buying into these sorts of reforms now, it's a sign that legal hiring may not be as rigid from the prestige standpoint as many think, and that the Tier 1s will change even if their above-median grads can rake in the big money by taking garbage Socratic courses.