As I am sure most, if not all of you, know the July bar passage rate here in California was an unmitigated disaster. There’s no good way to put lipstick on this pig, er, in deference to the season, should I say turkey? Six out of 10 bar takers flunked. So, a bare 40 percent passed, which is the lowest bar passage rate for a California July bar in almost 70 years.
My heart goes out to all of those who have to take it again. It’s more expense (more bar review), more delay in starting a chosen career, more heartache and frustration at the roadblocks that seem to be set up for failure. It’s more encouraging words to the effect that “you’ll definitely pass this time,” while trying to stall making those student loan payments that came due upon graduation when it seemed like bar passage was only a few months away and hopefully a job as well.
So, shall we round up the usual suspects for the lousy bar passage rate?
How 8am LawPay Takes The Sting Out Of Legal Billing
Getting paid can be an arduous task. You should make it as easy on yourself and your clients as possible.
Let’s start with our cut score which is the second highest in the country. Yes, I know that the state Supreme Court is not convinced that the score should be lowered. I think that the Court will need even more convincing, especially in light of the July bar results.
How about legal education? Isn’t writing a vital part of every lawyer’s job? Can entering law students write? Can they do so after three (or four) years? Maybe law schools need to spend more time making students write and write and write. If they can’t write, they won’t pass. Isn’t it the faculty’s job to prepare students, including helping them improve writing skills? Yes, I know that critiquing/grading essays is a huge time suck, but how else will students improve?
I like to think that the law school years have taught students how to issue spot, how to construct a sentence, how to have that sentence make sense, how to argue persuasively. Am I wrong? Old-fashioned? Perhaps in these days of texting and abbreviated dialogue, there’s been something lost, and that is the skill of being able to string words into sentences, sentences into paragraphs, and to have those make a coherent argument in support of whatever position you take on your client’s behalf.
And that leads me to the third usual suspect: the quality of the students law schools are accepting. If the quality has diminished, on whose shoulders does that fall? Should it fall? Has legal education strayed far from its purported mission of educating and preparing students?
[BLOG] AI-Enabled Marketing: Your Secret Weapon for Growing Your Legal Practice
Drowning in marketing to-dos? Learn how firms use AI—the right way—to build lead magnets, rank in AI search, turn referrals into revenue, and craft data-driven business plans.
From my vantage point of an old lady lawyer, I think that the current model for law school is broken and that tweaks and repairs aren’t going to fix the fundamental issue of how to test for and meet the minimum competency that the bar exam requires.
What is “minimum competency”? Will we know it when we see it? (Any relation to Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of obscenity set forth in Jacobellis v. Ohio in 1964?)
Is it a standard that is immutable or does it change as the practice changes? Mention new practice areas such as data security, cybersecurity, or e-discovery and those topics flummox the dinosaur lawyers who still balk at using legal technology. How do you test for those areas that may well fall within the definition of minimum competency today but not decades ago?
My friend Sara Barnett is the Director, Programs for Academic and Bar Success at AccessLex and poses a number of questions about minimum competency. What exactly is it?
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS) published a study two years ago that discussed the foundations for legal practice, in other words, what are the minimum skills that a newbie needs to get out there in the hurly-burly world of practice. Not surprisingly, one foundational pillar is what the IAALS terms the “character quotient.”
The study concludes that character and professional competence matter more than legal skills for brand new lawyers. Is anyone listening? (One of the professional competencies of primary importance is listening along with speaking and writing and arriving on time(!). Character? It’s defined as integrity, trustworthiness, conscientiousness, and common sense.)
Does legal education need a reboot? I think so. How to do that? Where to start? Should the third year of law school be ditched in favor of an internship/residency program where law students actually apply the doctrinal law in real life situations, along with the soft skills that every lawyer needs? Sorry law schools, I know that losing a year’s worth of tuition is painful, but it’s not about you anymore, it’s about the students.
How much can a legal education accomplish in preparing law students to enter the profession? If so, how does a legal education meet that goal? What if students could take the bar at the end of the second year and be provisionally passed? Bar admission would follow the completion of whatever internship, residency, whatever you want to call the third year and whatever testing is designed, along with the other necessary hurdles. To be clear, students would still be considered to be in school in that final year, so that that hammer of debt repayment would still have yet to fall.
I’m just thinking about the number of test takers every July here in California, that can run anywhere from $6,000 to $8,000 a pop. How would you test for the so-called soft skills, these professional competencies? Can any standardized test ever even accurately test for those skills? One on one or even testing in groups could pose a whole set of challenges.
Questions but no answers. Great minds will need to figure all this out. I’ll be taking my dirt nap.
Jill Switzer has been an active member of the State Bar of California for more than 40 years. She remembers practicing law in a kinder, gentler time. She’s had a diverse legal career, including stints as a deputy district attorney, a solo practice, and several senior in-house gigs. She now mediates full-time, which gives her the opportunity to see dinosaurs, millennials, and those in-between interact — it’s not always civil. You can reach her by email at [email protected].