Law School Scam?

I have been unusually busy lately, and I have not had time to update this blog. Sorry to anyone who was waiting with baited breath for the latest news in the world of Law Clerks

I have a lot of new information to offer about my experiences the Law Clerk program, but today I’m going to write about something else. Lately I’ve been reading a family of blogs purporting to “expose the scam” that is legal education in America today. These bloggers, mostly disaffected recent law-school grads who can’t find a job, claim that because the American Bar Association continues to accredit more law schools, leading more people to take on six-figure debt to finance law degrees, the legal market has become saturated and law degrees are now worthless. This tirade seems to usually accompany speculation that any kid too dumb for medical school can get a law degree, but that it won’t help them get a job.

Here is my take on the “law school scam” theory: We are in a recession here. Unemployment is almost three times higher than it is in a “good” economic period. Lots of people from all walks of life are unemployed. And yes, law school is a business. The admissions department will imply that you are going to graduate with a $160K salary offer or three, and there were times in the past where that was more the norm than it is now. But, as people with doctorate degrees, newly-minted JDs should be able to look beyond the hype and use publicly-available records to determine that not every new attorney makes six figures. Even if the era of plush summer internships and five-figure payscales for baby lawyers is over, that does not mean there is no future in the legal field.

Further, I think that this “legal industry crisis” lends credence to the idea that there needs to be alternative paths to becoming an attorney; paths that do not require taking on a mortgage-esque quantity of non-dischargable debt.

The Law Clerk program is a solution to the legal education crisis in this country, if such a crisis does exist. If, as some economists have suggested, the economy in America is permanently slowing down, we need to change the way that we educate our lawyers. Legal education should not be a for-profit endeavor, and we should not be thrusting new attorneys out into the world without any idea at all on how to actually practice the law.

I have been doing more bankruptcy work than usual, due to the downturn and resulting financial struggles of an increasing number of people in my community. As part of this work, I have met with a number attorneys who have reached the end of their ropes financially. Several of them have shared with me that their legal education landed them $100,000 – $200,000 in debt (which cannot be discharged in bankruptcy), and that they still do not know how to make a living as an attorney, which in some cases has led to a financial situation spiraling out of control.

Law Clerks, on the other hand, do not generally have to go into great amounts of debt to complete their legal education – in fact, most of us earn a living wage and pay low tuition costs while we are training to be attorneys. In addition, we gain practical experience every day, assisting clients to resolve real legal problems, as we will continue to do after passing the Bar exam.

I would suggest that it might be time, instead of continuing to accredit high-cost, low-prestige law schools that do not teach practical legal skills, to make a turn back toward the legal clerkship model which was the root of legal education. In Charles Dickens’ time and in Abraham Lincoln’s, this was how attorneys learned their trade. The vast majority of law clerks with whom I am acquainted finish their legal education with a job offer (often in the firm in which they trained), an established client base and the practical legal skills necessary to continue assisting those clients with the legal needs, as they had already been doing for years. As I see it, legal clerkship is the solution to the major problems facing the American legal industry today.