Law Schools

Is There Any Point To Law School Anymore?

There's nothing to be gained from a comprehensive approach.

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While law schools across the country face accreditation issues and graduates face career stagnation, is it possible that the whole law school endeavor has lost its purpose? After all, the overarching model of law school — shared by every school in the country — was concocted a couple centuries ago. A lot has changed since attorneys drew up vacuous paperwork to put a thin veneer of authority on the way J.P. Morgan was really running the country.

Actually, that part may not have changed, but you get the idea.

With an access to justice crisis and hard-working law students languishing on the wrong side of the bar exam, perhaps it’s time to consider a revolutionary overhaul of the law school model and legal industry credentialing. Maybe it’s time for micro-credentials.

There’s always a lot to think about in a Mark A. Cohen piece. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, every article he puts out raises interesting questions about the future of the legal industry. His most recent dive into the coming legal skills crisis is no exception. One proposal he sneaks into this piece is micro-credentialing, a concept that can manifest itself in many forms, but one that broadly speaking could solve a lot of problems in the legal industry if lawyers could get over themselves long enough to accept it.

In a nutshell, micro-credentialing asks why a structured finance lawyer has to regurgitate the local rules of criminal procedure to practice. Why can’t we offer a mechanism to mint attorneys to perform discrete legal tasks?

If someone wants to go learn to be a generalist, more power to them. But someone interested in building a career in a niche area of the law doesn’t need to know everything about the law. This isn’t actually much of a change. In fact, that same structured finance lawyer probably couldn’t recite the criminal rules right now. The current model isn’t designed to ensure that lawyers are competent in the law generally, it’s designed to ensure that lawyers are competent in the law generally for the weeks leading up to the bar exam. Once that’s in the rearview mirror, lawyers move on to their chosen specialization.

Instead of requiring graduates to attend years of school to learn something they’ll never do and then memorize stuff they’ll never need to know again, just create highly specialized exams to earn degrees and licenses in targeted competencies. Law school debt falls as people focus on two-year programs and schools begin to aggressively specialize to prove their value as something other than “Harvard’s Plan E.”

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While we’re at it, one rarely touted effect of a micro-credentialing regime is the positive impact it could have on students currently failing the comprehensive bar exam. There is, I’m positive, a student at Rando Upstairs Law School in California who would be an excellent real estate attorney and aces every real property question on the bar exam, but who nonetheless fails repeatedly for lacking a working knowledge of the hearsay exceptions. The profession is better served by admitting that grad. Other than the hubris of lawyers, there’s no reason to keep that kid locked out of the profession.

When it comes to the future of the profession, it’s time to think outside the box.

Law’s Looming Skills Crisis [Forbes]

Earlier: Law Schools Have To Actually Teach Lawyers For A Change Or Lose Accreditation

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

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