The background of this letter is that there are seven states which permit apprenticeship (working for a lawyer and studying the law) as a road to becoming a lawyer there. The states are Vermont, New York, Washington, Virginia, California, Maine and Wyoming. A few years ago as Massachusetts considered buying…
For many years I have taken excerpts and quotes from the powerful devastating criticism of legal education called The MacCrate Report. The official name for it is Legal Education and Professional Development – An Educational Continuum, Report of The Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap,…
With all that is happening today, I thought back to an article I wrote shortly after the August, 1997, release of the Boston Bar Association’s (BBA) Report of Professional Fulfillment and the subsequent press conference. I wonder to what extent the article describes the current state of the legal profession in Boston and nationally.…
In a previous post requesting that I be appointed law school industry czar, I noted that recent graduates had testified about “how their experience in law school had destroyed their self-confidence, their self-esteem and their sense of self-worth” That statement is based on my personal twenty-five years experience advising law…
Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Barack Obama In May ,2005, Lloyd Cutler died at the age of 87. He served as White House counsel to Presidents Carter…
Here’s excerpts from a message I sent last December responding to a CNNMoney.com article about the difficulty law school graduates are having finding a job. Hi Jessica Dickler, As you read what I have written, consider that for decades the percentage of those who are dissatisfied with their careers in the law…
So, one day in late 1989, just after my position as public interest adviser at Harvard Law School was eliminated because the new dean said that there was insufficient interest among its students to warrant having such a position and because I was not immediately walked out of the building, I had…
Are you a law student attending a hard-to-get-into law school (notice that I did not use the descriptive words “good” or “best” or “tier x”)?If yes, here’s a research project for you. What percentage of the Class of 2006 graduates took positions right out of law school in BigLaw or did so after…
What has been a consistent ingredient of my 25 years advising lawyers is the continuing and lasting effect of the failure of legal education to prepare law students for the practice of law – a lack of self-confidence and its companion, a lack of self-worth. That is one of the…
Jordan Furlong has posted an article in his blog entitled “The Crossed Purposes of Legal Education” about the law schools responsibility for the gap between what prospective law students imagine about the profession and the reality they find when they enter the legal workforce. He refers to an article in Forbes…