Taking an Integrated View of Legal Education and Licensure

As the practice of law has changed in response to technological advances, globalization, economic pressures, and other forces, the knowledge, skills, values, and traits that legal employers seek in law graduates have diverged from what law schools have traditionally taught. This panel will explore the implications of this gap and how law school curricula, law practice, and the bar exam can be better aligned. What should remain of the core of law school curriculum, and where might the bar exam be changed? If more time in law school is needed to address these matters, is the profession and are the licensing entities prepared to rethink the bar exam to make space in law school J.D. programs to respond to these concerns

Foundations for Practice: Hiring the Whole Lawyer: Experience Matters

In July 2016, we published Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient, which shared findings from a survey that asked more than 24,000 lawyers what new lawyers need as they enter the profession. Respondents overwhelmingly indicated that new lawyers need characteristics, alongside professional competencies and legal skills (collectively, “foundations”). New lawyers, it turns out, are successful when they can demonstrate much more than their intelligence and legal competency. We called the new lawyer who can demonstrate this combination of characteristics, competencies, and skills the “whole lawyer.” If we want new lawyers to develop the requisite foundations, we of course need law schools to commit to admitting, educating, and graduating students who can demonstrate they have those foundations. We also need employers to commit to hiring new lawyers based on their demonstration of those foundations—rather than mainly academic achievement. How can employers hire new lawyers who have the desired foundations? This report provides answers. In our survey, we asked respondents to identify the foundations new lawyers need to be successful in the respondent’s specific type of organization, specialty, or department. Then we asked them to consider the helpfulness of a set of hiring criteria in determining whether a candidate for employment has the foundations they identified as important. Notably, we did not ask them how they currently hire. We effectively asked how they would hire if they wanted to identify candidates with the necessary foundations. We learned that experience matters. While many employers in practice still rely on criteria like class rank, law school, and law review, our respondents indicated that if they wanted to hire people with the broad array of foundations they identified as important, they would rely on criteria rooted in experience, including legal employment, recommendations from practitioners or judges, legal externships, participation in a law school clinic, and other experiential education. In The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient, we recommended that law schools and the profession work together to ensure that new lawyers have the foundations they need to practice. Our findings here give them a place to start. While we do not believe there is only one way to ensure new lawyers have the foundations they need to be whole lawyers, we do believe the path toward a system that prepares lawyers who are ready to enter the profession will be elevated and supported by experience-focused learning and hiring

Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient

The employment gap for law school graduates is well-documented. Almost 40% of 2015 law graduates did not secure full-time jobs requiring a law license and only 70% of 2015 graduates landed a full-time job that either required a law license or gave a preference to candidates with a juris doctor. One in four 2015 graduates did not report having any type of job, even a non-professional job, after law school. The employment gap is exacerbated by another gap: the gap between the skillset lawyers want in new graduates and the skillset lawyers believe new graduates have. Only 23% of practitioners believe new lawyers have sufficient skills to practice. The gap between what new lawyers have and what new lawyers need exacerbates the employment problem, but it is even more insidious than that. When new lawyers enter the workforce unprepared or under-prepared, it undermines the public trust in our legal system. Something has to shift. And for something to shift, we had to understand exactly what new lawyers need as they entered the profession. So we asked. In late 2014, we launched Foundations for Practice (“FFP”), a national, multi-year project designed to: 1. Identify the foundations entry-level lawyers need to launch successful careers in the legal profession; 2. Develop measurable models of legal education that support those foundations; and 3. Align market needs with hiring practices to incentivize positive improvements in legal education. In 2014-15, we distributed a survey to lawyers across the country. The response was overwhelming. More than 24,000 lawyers in all 50 states from a range of backgrounds and practice settings answered. Their answers are illuminating and pose opportunities and challenges to the schools that educate lawyers and the employers that ultimately hire them

Ahead of the Curve: Turning Law Students into Lawyers

In recent years, law schools have been the subject of great scrutiny—by media, by the profession, by law students, and even by legal educators within the schools—about the quality of legal education and training they offer students who will graduate to become tomorrow’s lawyers. There may be disagreement about the severity of the problem and the solutions to the problem, but there can hardly be disagreement that the increasing focus on the quality of legal education is creating more opportunities than ever for innovation in law schools and for building partnerships with the profession to develop improved models of legal education. When New Hampshire’s law school teamed up with the New Hampshire Supreme Court and the New Hampshire Board of Bar Examiners over a decade ago, a unique program was born. The Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program at the University of New Hampshire provides a combination of training and assessment over a two-year period that serves as a variant to the two-day bar examination—simply stated, students who participate in the program are evaluated for bar admission based on their performance over a two-year period and do not sit for the traditional bar examination. But, the success of the program lies not in its relationship to the bar exam. Rather, the success of the program lies in the fact that, on some measures, the students are actually better prepared for the practice of law. The combination of formative and reflective assessment administered in a practice-based context appears to produce better outcomes for students, which ultimately translates to better prepared lawyers. The two-year program, beginning in the second year of law school, works within a proscribed curriculum that immerses students in experience-based learning settings, and both provides and demands formative, reflective, and summative assessment. The ultimate assessment comes, of course, at the end of the program when student participants are reviewed for bar admission based on their performance over the course of two years. From the outside, the program seems to have all the right elements for success, but is it actually doing a better job of preparing lawyers for practice and clients? To find out, IAALS worked with an evaluation consulting firm to conduct quantitative and qualitative analysis of existing research to evaluate outcomes of the Daniel Webster Scholar Honors Program