Is the crisis in attorney hiring due to the failure of legal education?

Jordan Furlong at Slaw​.ca sug­gests that the cur­rent trend of big firms pay­ing asso­ciates not to work for them is indica­tive of a larger cri­sis, cre­ated by an edu­ca­tional sys­tem that doesn’t pro­vide new lawyers with the skills they need:

[T]he pro­fes­sion is going to go through a cri­sis, one trig­gered by a grow­ing buildup of law school grad­u­ates who can’t find work. Year after year, we’ll pro­duce more new lawyers than the mar­ket will hire — the large firms won’t be tak­ing on nearly as many, while legal tal­ent demand over­all will nar­row to lawyers with proven skills and/​or expe­ri­ence. And these masses of unem­ployed law grad­u­ates are going to make us face an ugly truth we’ve been avoid­ing for years: we’re doing a ter­ri­ble job of train­ing our future lawyers.

via The Canary In Our Coal Mine » Slaw.

As a recent law grad­u­ate, I cer­tainly feel that I would strug­gle at cer­tain aspects of prac­tis­ing law at this stage of my career. Many of these weak­nesses are very prac­ti­cal: man­ag­ing clients, know­ing what doc­u­ments to sub­mit to a court, con­duct­ing dis­cov­ery, etc. Some of these are, quite frankly, left to para­legels even by the most expe­ri­enced lawyers, a prac­tice that may be effi­cient, but can lead to para­le­gals know­ing more about the “actual” prac­ti­cal­i­ties of law that lawyers!

Law school made me a bet­ter legal researcher, reader, writer and thinker. These are crit­i­cal legal skills, but not the only ones. My time extern­ing for a judge gave me more “real” expe­ri­ence, as did my sum­mer intern­ship. Clinics are sim­i­lar in their prac­ti­cal skills training.

Perhaps we need to offi­cially accept the need for an apprenticship-​​style pro­gram as part of the law school sys­tem? (Either within the 3-​​year pro­gram, or a required com­po­nent before tak­ing the bar.) This kind of on-​​the-​​job train­ing is the best way to get the nec­es­sary skills to prac­tice, and mak­ing it part of legal train­ing would remove the dodge of get­ting clients to pay for turn­ing raw lawyers into minimally-​​effictive ones.

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