Practice Management

Here is a real shocker.  I did not do all that well on the LSAT.  My wife did not do all that well on her LSAT.  My daughter graduated from a challenging program from the University of Texas in the upper 2% of her graduating class and she did not do that well on the LSAT.

Oh, occasionally you will here some nerdy law professor or law school administrator try to defend the LSAT as relevant to anything other than a hurdle to weed people out in the law school admission process.  But, most all of us that have taken the LSAT, have gotten into law school, that have performed well in law school, and who have practiced law know the LSAT is just plain bunk.

The strange thing is that the ABA rules for accreditation do not even require the LSAT to be considered.  They do require the consideration of some entrance test, but they do not dictate which one or what priority a law school puts on an entrance test.  It is just that through time and memorial law schools have gotten use to the fall back position of looking at the LSAT to answer their admission needs.  Now rankings really pervert the process.  It is really crazy.

That was the reason I was encouraged by the article in The New York Times about a team of professors at the University of California - Berkley that have developed a new test that better gauges the right things and is a better predicter of a student's performance at the practice of law.

Former Berkley law professor Marjorie M. Shultz began to examine the issue after California voters approved Proposition 209, which banned consideration of race in admissions.

To find out what applicant traits should figure in admissions decisions at law schools, they coordinated individual interviews, focus groups and ultimately a survey of judges, law school professors, law firm clients and hundreds of graduates of Berkeley?s law school.  The survey produced a list of 26 characteristics, or ?effectiveness factors,? like the ability to write, manage stress, listen, research the law and solve problems. The professors then collected examples from the Berkeley alumni of specific behavior by lawyers that were considered more or less effective.  The purpose of this was to try and measure a potential student's "raw lawyerly talent".  Instead of focusing on analytic ability, the new test includes questions about how to respond to hypothetical situations.

Over 1,100 lawyers took the test and agreed to let the researchers see their original LSAT scores, as well as grades from college and law school.  Surprise!  The study concluded that the LSAT was not useful in predicting lawyer effectiveness.

Neither the LSAT nor the new test were good at predicting how well applicants would do in law school, but unlike the LSAT, the new test did not produce a gap in scores among different racial or ethnic groups.

Sure, I suppose, law schools need some way to gauge those they admit, but these tests (LSAT and the new test) are only going to become the fodder of the ranking system.  Race elimination is a good thing.  The problem is that law schools and the system want and easy way out in the admission process.  The ranking process wants something it can compare.  And, the point of both tests is that neither the LSAT nor the new test seemed to predict how well anybody would do in law school.  Well, is that not the point?

We are left with a difficult (and might I add expensive) process for law school admission that does not guage how well anybody or any group will perform generally in law school, and it highlights that a law school education obviously does not prepare students well for the active practice of law.

So, I agree, it is time to junk the LSAT.  It has reached the point where it is more than a non-reliable indicator maintained for the law school ranking system.  It is just plain irresponsible at this point.

Which law school is brave enough to first say the hell with the LSAT?  We are not using it any more.  Which one?