Room for Debate: A Running Commentary on the News

Before the rise of law schools, lawyers were trained through apprenticeship. “Apprenticeship involved learning the law the way we expect someone today to learn plumbing: in the workplace, as a practical trade,” writes the Yale legal historian John Langbein. “You learn plumbing by working with, observing and imitating an experienced master.”

The modern practice of law, with a proliferation of increasingly technical specialties and subspecialties, is more complicated than plumbing. Formal apprenticeship has fallen by the wayside as a method for training lawyers. Adding apprenticeship back into the system could make legal education shorter, less costly and more practical.

The core of the legal curriculum is covered in the first year of law school. One could easily imagine law school, in terms of formal classroom instruction, lasting two years instead of three and costing two-thirds as much.

After two years, graduates could start working as apprentices for practicing lawyers and being paid, albeit modestly, perhaps like paralegals or medical residents. The bar exam could be administered at the end of an apprenticeship, or in multiple parts at different points in the process, like the medical board exam. Successful completion of an apprenticeship and passage of the bar exam would qualify an individual as a lawyer.

Under this system, aspiring lawyers would stop accruing debt and start earning money at an earlier point. As apprentices, they would learn about the actual practice of law, addressing the common complaint among employers and clients that young lawyers, fresh out of school, lack practical knowledge. Employers who hire apprentices would receive inexpensive labor and could train these workers to their specifications. This model, balancing the theoretical and practical, is similar to what’s used in Canada and Britain, where legal education is less expensive and more practice-oriented than in the United States.

The question, given the cost of law school today, is not whether legal education should be reformed, but how such reform would ever come to pass. Law schools that currently make money hand over fist have little incentive to change the status quo -- and every incentive to fight for its preservation.

Given its power to award or revoke accreditation, which can make or break a law school, the American Bar Association is one of the few institutions with the power to initiate systemic change. But the association historically has shown little interest in changing the way that law schools do business.

Before tackling large-scale changes to legal education, the American Bar Association should focus on obtaining more accurate data from law schools about their graduates’ employment (or lack thereof). Obtaining comprehensive information about the current ability of law schools to find jobs for their graduates is a necessary first step in deciding whether and how to change legal education.