Legal Commentary

One of my many great memories of John Langbein's Wills and Trusts class is how he warned us on the last day of class not to think we were now prepared to go out and handle estates matters. Knowing what you know now, he told us, "You are a menace to your clients." As he explained, we'd just scratched the surface of the field in the class (as intense as his class was, even); it would take years of apprenticeship to a senior practitioner to achieve basic competence on our own.

His warning has had me thinking recently about what it takes to make a law student or young lawyer safe to turn loose on clients. On the one hand there are skills: interviewing, drafting, negotiating, speaking, researching, bluffing, sympathizing, and so on. Despite some progress, here law schools still mostly mostly rely on young lawyers' supervisors and colleagues in practice to train them on the job. On the other hand, though, there's also doctrinal competence. Here, law school still claims it has some kind of comparative advantage.

But how much doctrine is enough doctrine? Part of Langbein's point was that even on the black letter, we law students were still babes in the woods--and that we didn't even know enough to know when we'd gotten in over our heads. This isn't just a problem of the young; the case reports are full of examples in which senior lawyers had blundered badly wandering into an area outside of their usual specialty. Lawyers who aren't familiar with bankruptcy don't know how the automatic stay works, and woe betide them when they don't even know there is one. Copyright has registration as a prerequisite to suit; tax and corporate law are chock-full of spring-gun doctrines.

Thus, here's a discussion question for the readership. What does a lawyer need to know to survive in your field? How much time do you need to spend with students to teach them everything they need to know about it? Not everything there is to know about it; everything they need to know about it so they can tell when to forge on ahead and when, like Lassie, to go get help.