Practice Management

Mark A. Cohen of the MinnLawyer Blog poses an interesting challenge for the teaching of law.  His point is that "the traditional model of the law profession is starting to crack and crumble under the shrinking number of high-paying lawyer jobs available to support heavy law student debt loads of $100,000 or more".  Mr. Cohen states further that "we need to come up with viable models that provide some of the services, but are less expensive, for students who don?t want to be forced to concentrate in an area where they will make a lot of money when they graduate".   He points out that, although he is not advocating a return of the self-taught lawyer, Abraham Lincoln was able to obtain a pretty good legal education for the price of his textbooks, which he read by the fire.  His point, to paraphrase Thomas Marshall is that this country needs a really good $5,000 (a year) law school.  The solution of one responding to this call was to simply shortened law school, citing "too many fluff type classes that students take in order to meet graduation requirements".  The respondent proposes a law school curriculum that could be accomplished by 12-18 months of classroom work and a period of internship/apprenticeship, afterward (hopefully with pay, if you ask me).  His argument is that if the bar is the measure of what you need to be competent, then all you really need is the first year plus a few extra courses.

I think this argument gets to the crux of the matter that law schools are getting too expensive, too long, and they are not properly generating practice ready attorneys.  They system is simply broke.