Unfiltered Volume III: Are You Ready To Roll Solo?
Submitted by J Boogie [TLL] on Friday, 13 March 2009Comments
The current world can be a terrifying and unsure place for law students, as well as recent graduates. With the chances of securing work right after graduation becoming slimmer, many students are beginning to panic about their futures. The legal world isn’t as black and white as it once was. But there are things that can be done. Though it may be a bit too late for students finishing up their time in school, those who will be graduating in 2010 and 2011 have some time to realistically look at the economy of the legal world and adjust accordingly.When I was in law school, one of my instructors at the school’s community legal center had proposed the idea to teach a class on setting up your own solo practice. She told me that she had taught the class in the past, and that she was thinking of doing so once more. I thought that it was a great idea, and would be a fitting course for students who weren’t quite sure where they fit into the legal landscape. Her idea, however, was shot down and the seminar course was never offered. Our dean had refused her request.
Nowadays, legal educators should offer more chances for their students to learn what is necessary to begin practice as soon as they graduate. Law school has generally been about theory and analytical thinking. We are well trained in the arts of semantics, critical analysis and persuasion. We are not trained on the practicalities of the working world though. I guarantee that if you select a random population of law students or recent graduates, and ask them if they knew what was needed to go into business on their own, the great majority of them wouldn’t have a clue. This is unfortunate. The majority of law schools aren’t the Yales, or the Harvards, not the Stanfords nor Berkeley. No, the great majority of law schools are the middle ground lower tier 1, tier 2 schools. Among these “normal” law schools, maybe 15-20% of students land in big firms, or land jobs through the rigid and formulaic On Campus Interview program. That leaves many students up in the air looking for work, scrambling to the small to mid-sized firms. What remains are the few who intend on not practicing law, have chosen to go into practice for themselves, or those who just have been unfortunate enough to not find work. Of course, there are those who never try, or are socially inept and couldn’t nail an interview if their lives depended on it (and some lives just might). My point is that law schools have done a bang up job for those top students, to prepare them for big firm life because that increases their rankings and earns their schools a reputation as a solid choice. “Come to our school because you will get a job. Look how many students we place! Look at how much they earn!” Law schools should give as much attention to teaching students how to become solo practitioners and offer more courses that teach actual day-to-day skills intertwined with imparting the requisite critical legal thinking abilities.
Let’s be honest here. Practicing law isn’t hard. The law itself, while convoluted and confusing, isn’t some curious mystery to law students. We have the mental acumen to dissect huge bodies of law and make some semblance of sense out of it. It’s what we paid $150,000 to be able to do. Yet scores of students are graduating without knowing the practicalities of the business. As I have mentioned in the past, the practice of law is a business, despite the ill-conceived notions of some lawyers that we are engaged in a profession. Law school needs to adjust to the realities of the times to better prepare their students for real life, but the teaching of practical skills is something that ought to have been done long before. Most law school graduates are in their mid to late twenties. Some have never worked a day in their life (real work here, not interning, or stuff you do after getting to law school). So it should come as no surprise that so many of them have no real clue about how firms operate. With public interest becoming such a hot area with the down-trodden economy, schools will likely start focusing on clinical courses again to help prepare students for such work. I simply ask them to extend this scope to help their students find a footing in the world beyond law school.
Do you think your law school prepared you for the world beyond law school? What could it have done better? What did it do well?
-TLL
