What Good is Law School?

This article in the N.Y. Times has received a lot of attention. It notes that law schools don't teach much in the way of practical, hands-on, day-to-day lawyering skills, instead focusing on teaching you to "think like a lawyer." I'm actually not sure this is quite accurate. I spend a great deal of my time as a lawyer reading case law, which is what I spent most of my time as a law student doing. I'm doing it differently in practice than I did in school, since I'm trying to win instead of just trying to figure out 1) what I'll say if I get called on and 2) what from this will be on the exam. But if I hadn't laid the groundwork in law school, reading cases would be a lot harder, as would I think drafting, arguing, and so many of the other things I do.

As a caveat, I don't do much transactional work, and I can definitely imagine that the skills I learned are more applicable to litigation. But on the other hand, some of the most "practical" things I'm learning in practice would be very difficult to teach in law school, and I'm not sure how much mileage you would get out of them. I mean, every court has different rules, and one of the most practical things you can do as a lawyer is to be familiar with and follow those rules to the best of your ability. But what's law school going to do to teach you that? Other than just say "know the local rules," which they did. Then there's client relations. I'm actually in a good environment for learning this, since here at PSRB us junior associates have a relatively large amount of client contact, but I don't know how you really "teach" that without dealing with actual, live clients and their concerns. I suppose clinics are supposed to help with this, but I never did one.

I think the biggest problem with legal education is the lack of focus on teaching people how to write. I had done a fair amount of writing before law school, and this was a huge advantage. This lack of focus is surprising since writing is such an important skill for me in practice (though maybe it's not for others? I don't know.) The only writing class I took, Legal Research and Writing, wasn't even graded! I think more emphasis on writing, especially in the typical doctrinal classes like contracts, torts, etc., would be a good thing.

But over all I feel like law school prepared me fairly well for life as a litigator in a medium-sized to large private law firm. Of course, this is probably the job that legal education was designed to help people do, since the mega-firms are a thing of the very recent past, and there was definitely an emphasis on private, civil law as opposed to public and criminal law at school.

Anyway, read the whole thing. The stuff about law school faculty is also very interesting.