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[betterslac]

There is something oddly familiar here:

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/law-schools%E2%80%99-failure-to-prepare-students%E2%80%A6it%E2%80%99s-complicated/42163?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

1) Complaints about training for jobs
2) Discussion of the lack of critical thinking and reasoning skills (and no, students should already have them by the time they hit law school)
3)Recognition that standardized testing does not lead to the kinds of comprehensive learning that we want students to engage in, from k-12 to post-secondary to graduate levels.

If the lawyers think there is a problem, might there be a greater push back against the NCLB  and rote learning nonsense trends?

[tenured_feminist]

Preparing for the LSAT does nothing to help students acquire the skills needed to succeed in law school. Succeeding in law school does very little to help students acquire the skills needed to pass the bar exam. Preparing for the bar exam and passing it does very little to help the examinees prepare to practice law. None of this is new information. What's new is that the tacit bargain whereby students exchange large sums of money for an educational credential and access to a placement service providing a solid shot at a highly lucrative job afterward has collapsed due to the huge contraction in the availability of highly lucrative jobs.

Not that I am cynical or anything.

If you've got a kid in your class who asks you for a recommendation for law school, please, for the love of all that's holy and profane, force feed the kid this and give the kid a pop quiz on it before you agree to write.

[sciencegrad]

If you've got a kid in your class who asks you for a recommendation for law school, please, for the love of all that's holy and profane, force feed the kid this and give the kid a pop quiz on it before you agree to write.

I've been planning on going to law school after grad school for quite some time and, to be honest, reading that blog post made me more excited to go.  Now that I know just how much BS goes on in law school, it sounds like it would be a blast to go through the program pretending to take it seriously while knowing all along that it's a bunch of pseudo-intellectual BS being spewed by everyone.

[ideagirl]

I took the liberty of numbering your assertions...

1. Preparing for the LSAT does nothing to help students acquire the skills needed to succeed in law school.
2. Succeeding in law school does very little to help students acquire the skills needed to pass the bar exam.
3. Preparing for the bar exam and passing it does very little to help the examinees prepare to practice law.

1. True. But then again, it's not supposed to help you acquire skills. It's supposed to "diagnose" how good your mind is at doing the things that will be necessary in order to succeed at legal analysis. In other words, it tests if the raw material for legal analysis is there.

2. Untrue. The bar is like an entire year's worth of law school exams stuffed into two days (or three, in California), plus a lengthy section of multiple choice (very rarely used in law school) designed to see if you actually know what the law is. Students who scrape by in law school rarely pass the bar. Students who did quite well in law school usually pass the bar.

3. True-ish, in that there are many skills you need to practice that the bar does not and likely cannot test (e.g., strong speaking and listening skills; a flair for theater, if you plan to be a courtroom lawyer; etc.). But also false-ish, in that much of what you learn in preparing for the bar is useful later. If really gives you a very solid "lay of the land" in the areas of law that it tests, and that's a necessary foundation for later legal analysis.

That being said, I think law school would be a lot more useful if there were more clinical classes (students actually acting as legal advisers to members of the public, under the supervision, of course, of actual lawyers). It's far too theoretical and the law is not a theoretical profession. Every decision made has a concrete impact on someone.

If you've got a kid in your class who asks you for a recommendation for law school, please, for the love of all that's holy and profane, force feed the kid this and give the kid a pop quiz on it before you agree to write.

That link won't work because it has the word $hit in the URL. But that article, while entertaining, is beside the point. What the students need to be reading are all the recent exposes on just how slender their chances of getting their dream job are, and on how deceitful towards students and prospective students many of the lower-ranked law schools are. The NY Times had something on that recently. It's all over the place.

[ideagirl]

I've been planning on going to law school after grad school for quite some time and, to be honest, reading that blog post made me more excited to go.  Now that I know just how much BS goes on in law school, it sounds like it would be a blast to go through the program pretending to take it seriously while knowing all along that it's a bunch of pseudo-intellectual BS being spewed by everyone.

If you want to spend $100k just to enjoy a long, grueling joke, be my guest. I hope you still think it's as funny 15 years down the line when 1/3 of your take-home pay is going towards your student loans (which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy).

[tenured_feminist]

Ideagirl, people do not pass the bar based on vague memories of black-letter stuff they learned in Crim Pro a year and a half ago. They pass the bar based on plunking down the money for BarBri and memorizing all that stuff in the six weeks before they take the bar.

I'm absolutely positive that if you ran the numbers for success on the bar, completing a good bar review course would have a significantly higher correlation than maintaining a B or better average in law school (though of course most successful bar takers do both). And any reasonably smart person could sit through a bar review course, do the work, and pass the bar without ever having set foot in a law school. If successful law students are more likely to pass the bar, it's because they are better test takers in general and because they are likely to be together enough to figure out that investing 3-5K in a bar review course is a smart choice.

But I couldn't agree more with your response to sciencegrad. And of course you are right about clinical courses. If law schools really wanted to teach people how to practice law, substantial clinical components would be required.

[educator1]

And any reasonably smart person could sit through a bar review course, do the work, and pass the bar without ever having set foot in a law school.

And any reasonably smart person could pass most final exams after attending a well-conducted two week review course based on the actual content of the final (as is a lwa review course) without ever attending the class in question. So what?
The important relationship would be between measures of success in law school (measured by things like membership or even editorship of Law Review, overall grades, grades in courses in one's current speciality, etc.), the quality of the school, and success in the profession. My observation (very limited sample I admit) is the results of this prediction model would be stronger than you think.

[sciencegrad]

I've been planning on going to law school after grad school for quite some time and, to be honest, reading that blog post made me more excited to go.  Now that I know just how much BS goes on in law school, it sounds like it would be a blast to go through the program pretending to take it seriously while knowing all along that it's a bunch of pseudo-intellectual BS being spewed by everyone.

If you want to spend $100k just to enjoy a long, grueling joke, be my guest. I hope you still think it's as funny 15 years down the line when 1/3 of your take-home pay is going towards your student loans (which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy).

I'm not quite sure if I'll do law school if I have to pay the full tuition myself.  I haven't looked too closely into it, but IP law is what I want to go into and I've heard that some firms will pay for tuition in exchange for working as a technical advisor during the summers.

[tenured_feminist]

As a general rule, the higher the school's quality, the less practical coursework you'll have available to ready you to practice law in that state.

I still suspect that "measures of success in law school" are not causal to a successful legal career. Rather, both correlate with intelligence and the ability to learn and work a system.

Let's face it, being able to discuss Palsgraf or MacPherson brilliantly is not going to help anybody handle even a fairly simple tort or contract case. As I've said, clinical education is much more on point, but it's still devalued as part of legal education and clinical educators get far lower salaries and significantly less professional prestige than their straight up law faculty colleagues.

[seniorscholar]

As a general rule, the higher the school's quality, the less practical coursework you'll have available to ready you to practice law in that state.

I still suspect that "measures of success in law school" are not causal to a successful legal career. Rather, both correlate with intelligence and the ability to learn and work a system.

Graduates of the law school at my public university always do significantly better on the bar exam than graduates of the Ivy across town. And they have a lot of experience doing practica with various charities and in clinical coursework. (If you need a lawyer for a garden-variety criminal case, for goodness sake get one of ours!) What the Ivy grads get for their many times higher tuition, however, is networks.

[ideagirl]

I've been planning on going to law school after grad school for quite some time and, to be honest, reading that blog post made me more excited to go.  Now that I know just how much BS goes on in law school, it sounds like it would be a blast to go through the program pretending to take it seriously while knowing all along that it's a bunch of pseudo-intellectual BS being spewed by everyone.

If you want to spend $100k just to enjoy a long, grueling joke, be my guest. I hope you still think it's as funny 15 years down the line when 1/3 of your take-home pay is going towards your student loans (which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy).

I'm not quite sure if I'll do law school if I have to pay the full tuition myself.  I haven't looked too closely into it, but IP law is what I want to go into and I've heard that some firms will pay for tuition in exchange for working as a technical advisor during the summers.

That might be true if you have a highly specialized background (e.g. PhD in some biosciences or engineering field) and want to be a patent lawyer (i.e. patent prosecution--drafting the technical documents that accompany patent applications). But that's a very different type of law than what most people, including most law students, think of when they think about being a lawyer. I would not plan on going into that area unless you have talked to some people who practice in that area to understand what their job is like and whether it's something you would enjoy doing day in and day out.

There are other ways to save money on law school. Chief among them is acing the LSAT and then applying to a school that mostly accepts students with scores lower than yours; they may give you a scholarship.

[educator1]

I still suspect that "measures of success in law school" are not causal to a successful legal career. Rather, both correlate with intelligence and the ability to learn and work a system.

While it is true that causality is very hard to establish, I suspect that senior scholar has a great beginning of the identification of such a pathway. If success is  measured by income and status in the profession, success in law school and status of the school are most likely causal as well as correlated. The key is that both of these items tend to have a causal link not only to networks but the probability that one's initial job is either at a prestigious firm or a prestigious clerkship which tends to set the stage for a successful career. Let's face it, these folks (particularly the law clerks for appelate and higher judges) don't need to handle simple tort or contract cases.

[sciencegrad]

I've been planning on going to law school after grad school for quite some time and, to be honest, reading that blog post made me more excited to go.  Now that I know just how much BS goes on in law school, it sounds like it would be a blast to go through the program pretending to take it seriously while knowing all along that it's a bunch of pseudo-intellectual BS being spewed by everyone.

If you want to spend $100k just to enjoy a long, grueling joke, be my guest. I hope you still think it's as funny 15 years down the line when 1/3 of your take-home pay is going towards your student loans (which are not dischargeable in bankruptcy).

I'm not quite sure if I'll do law school if I have to pay the full tuition myself.  I haven't looked too closely into it, but IP law is what I want to go into and I've heard that some firms will pay for tuition in exchange for working as a technical advisor during the summers.

That might be true if you have a highly specialized background (e.g. PhD in some biosciences or engineering field) and want to be a patent lawyer (i.e. patent prosecution--drafting the technical documents that accompany patent applications). But that's a very different type of law than what most people, including most law students, think of when they think about being a lawyer. I would not plan on going into that area unless you have talked to some people who practice in that area to understand what their job is like and whether it's something you would enjoy doing day in and day out.

There are other ways to save money on law school. Chief among them is acing the LSAT and then applying to a school that mostly accepts students with scores lower than yours; they may give you a scholarship.

I had a course on IP law in undergrad that was offered for science and engineering majors.  It was taught by an IP attorney and he brought in several of his coworkers to talk about what their work is like. 

I was planning on taking a good test prep course since it's probably worth the high cost.

[punchnpie]

If you've got a kid in your class who asks you for a recommendation for law school, please, for the love of all that's holy and profane, force feed the kid this and give the kid a pop quiz on it before you agree to write.

For years, I have urged those who expressed an interest in law school to do something, anything else. When I was in school, it was expensive, but no where near the cost it is now. I read the anti-law school blogs and am shocked at how the profession has changed. I think many grads will be lucky to get jobs in document review - and some of that work is being outsourced. Most will never have the kind of career, or make the kind of money, that they've seen on TV. I've read that your typical law grad from a non-tier I school, if s/he can get a job, may make $40-60K - but that person owes $200,000. Whew!

My mother told me that when my stepfather started practice, the insurance agents would take you out to lunch, open the check book and ask how much you 'needed' for the case. Before he passed away, the field had become so competitive and so difficult - most cases went to court and there were few settlements. Trial, even for an old litigator like my stepfather, is difficult work and not where you make your money. At some point, it just becomes not worth it.

Things have changed, and not for the better. One element of change is the proliferation of masters degrees. It used to be that if you got a law degree you could 'do anything.' For example, you could go into hospital administration. Now there are masters degrees in that area; they don't need no stinkin' lawyers with one course in health care administration.  The hidebound nature of the bar exam, keeping you in one locale (maybe two if you either take the bar in contiguous states or can be waived in - at a nice fee for the bar association) is ridiculous in a mobile society, but nothing changes.

I can't imagine being a recent law grad, working as a contingent for maybe $10-20 an hour and looking at a mountain of debt. I used to hire those people back when things were 'difficult,' not 'terrible' the way they are today. Personally, I'm surprised there haven't been some suicides.

[ideagirl]

I had a course on IP law in undergrad that was offered for science and engineering majors.  It was taught by an IP attorney and he brought in several of his coworkers to talk about what their work is like. 

"IP attorney" could mean anything (patents and/or trademarks/trade dress and/or copyright and/or trade secrets), but it usually means litigator. The kind of attorney who might conceivably get hu's tuition paid for by a law firm is not a litigator; they're a patent agent. That's a completely different job. You don't get involved in lawsuits; you draft the patent specification, etc., in other words the documents that are submitted to the USPTO in order to get a patent. You draft patents... i.e., write technical documents describing inventions in very precise and legalistic terms... all day. That's the job. That's who you need to talk to if you're interested in it. That kind of lawyer can have great quality of life, partly because the law firm hours aren't what they are for litigators and partly because you could go for a career with the Patent Office, where instead of writing patent applications you would read them and decide whether to grant a patent or not, and that's a federal job with federal benefits, a zillion holidays a year and the possibility of working mostly from home.

But I wouldn't count on getting your tuition paid for. Research the possibilities, but don't base your plans on that unless your research shows there's a good reason to. I'm not aware of any shortage of science/engineering PhDs with law degrees, or any shortage of patent agents.

I was planning on taking a good test prep course since it's probably worth the high cost.

It is, because this is how you save money on law school: ace the LSAT and then apply to schools whose top-25% scores (which you can find on the US News law school rankings web pages) are 10 points or more below yours. And it's also worth it because unlike the SAT, you can't really retake the LSAT--I mean you can, but law schools won't just take your highest score and call that your score. Unless you had a good reason for doing badly on the first one--like there was a death in the family, or you have documentation showing you were really sick--law schools will generally average your scores.