A ticket on the gravy train
Is law school still a good investment?
The National Law Journal raises that question in an interesting post at law.com this morning.
In the leader to their article, the authors comment:
A J.D. used to mean a first-class seat on the gravy train. Now? Not so much. Critics say law schools have a duty to warn.
(For readers who read this blog in translation, I am not sure how “gravy train” will translate. In American English, a gravy train refers to a strategy, plan, or series of events that, once achieved, takes one to great wealth without any further hard work. Once you have purchased your “seat,” all that you must do is to sit back, relax, and enjoy the ride.)
This excellent article leads to many interesting questions.
Does someone who enters law school expecting to board the gravy train after three years reside in a self-absorbed fantasy world?
Or is the continued demand for admission to U.S. law schools a sign of optimism about the economic future of the legal profession, notwithstanding recent bad news?
Is a law degree worth the investment? Do American law firms actually deliver value for money?
Or have they become an over-priced under-performing anachronism that are increasingly irrelevant to the practice of law in the 21st century?
For years I have heard a consistent set of criticisms of the quality and cost-effectiveness of law schools in the United States:
- Their instructional methods are archaic.
- High law school tuitions effectively exclude poor and working class people from the legal profession.
- Law schools do not give students the business skills they need to practice law in a law firm.
- American law school graduates are no better prepared to practice law than graduates of foreign law schools.
- American lawyers place too much importance on where a person went to law school and not enough on the practice skills and commercial awareness needed to be a good lawyer in a law firm.
- The traditional method in the United States of “reading law” to qualify for practice without a formal law degree, which has been abolished in most U.S. jurisdictions, actually produced better lawyers.
To be fair, one can hear most of these criticisms about legal education in other countries.
It is obvious that a law degree from a law school in the United States — whether one of the so-called “top” law schools or a relatively obscure one — was never a guarantee of a successful legal career.
It is also true that even the best American law schools do an incomplete job, at best, of preparing new lawyers for the challenges of legal practice today.
Perhaps it is time to rethink and reinvent the role of law schools in the whole system of legal education and professional development of lawyers in the United States.
Are American law schools willing to lead this effort? Or must they be dragged into it by law firms and law students that appear to be increasingly disappointed with the value that law firms deliver to the American legal profession.
Tags: Add new tag, law schools, professional development, United States