I’m at a weird crossroads right now in my life. Starting a law firm is taking up all my energy and – to be perfectly honest – it is beginning to stress me out.
To that end, I was forwarded an article by my uncle concerning how law schools are not teaching law students how to be lawyers which was in the November 19, 2011 edition of the New York Times. My uncle said he found the article “interesting”. I found it depressing.
These kinds of articles aren’t new. They seem to pop up every few months. My guess is that a reporter somewhere in the world had drinks with some lawyer sometime and the lawyer said something like: “law school is a joke.” Intrigued and looking for a scoop, the reporter then asks “why?”. Later, we all get an article to read about how law schools don’t teach people to be practicing lawyers.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the public needs to be aware that law schools don’t teach their students how to be lawyers. I worry quite a bit that some young lawyer will read this blog, decide they can start a law firm, and then go out and committ malpractice and screw up somebody’s life. It might not even be this hypothetical person’s fault. After all, they went to law school and took a ridiculous bar exam that doesn’t teach them one thing about being a good lawyer.
Ok, it’s not all doom-and-gloom. A diligent, honest, and hard-working person can probably make it right out of law school. I couldn’t have. I’m not even sure I can now. One of the mantras that keeps flloating through my mind is “I may fail.” Luckily, I have a fallback in my wife if that happens. Do you have a fallback?
Go read the NY Times piece if you want to wallow in the misery that is law school v. law practice. Me, I’m going to take the four years or so I spent AFTER law school where I learned to be a practicing lawyer and I’m going to continue to get better and hone my skills. As the article so aptly points out:
To succeed in this environment, graduates will need entrepreneurial skills, management ability and some expertise in landing clients. They will need to know less about Contracts and more about contract.
“Where do these students go?” says Michael Roster, a former chairman of the Association of Corporate Counsel and a lecturer at the University of Southern California Gould School of Law. “There are virtually no openings. They can’t hang a shingle and start on their own. Many of them are now asking their schools, ‘Why didn’t you teach me how to practice law?’ ”