The Times on Sunday published two stories about the law that juxtapose a tension that tugs at legal education in the current economy.
The first story looks at how a weak market for legal hiring is inspiring some educators to think anew about training the latest generation of lawyers. The second, a Q&A, has two professors answering real-life questions about the law.
For the story, the Times traveled to the Entrepreneurial Lawyering Startup Competition, a program sponsored by Michigan State University’s law school that aims to spur students to think of themselves as entrepreneurs. The competition, part of the university’s so-called Reinvent Law Laboratory, aims to equip them to navigate a legal marketplace that, like most marketplaces, is being upended by technology. Pitches presented at the competition include a service to help people claim property and another to help immigrants file their taxes.
The school sees the program as part of an effort to give students an assist in a job market that remains gloomy. Daniel Martin Katz, an associate professor and a founder of the laboratory, described the goal as helping students develop knowledge of the law and a broader set of abilities. “Analytics plus law gets you into a niche,” Katz told the Times.
Other schools reportedly are blazing similar paths. The University of Colorado law school runs a four-week summer camp to equip students with training in such tools as Adobe and NetApp. Northwestern University Law School is using faculty members with experience in technology and business to teach in what Daniel Rodriguez, the dean, describes as “the law/business/technology” interface.
The efforts by law schools, especially those outside the top tier, to give students a leg up is understandable. The number of law school applicants dropped this year for the fourth year in a row and is down more than 37% since 2010, according to figures compiled by the National Law Journal. The academic institutions need some way to differentiate themselves in the competition for applicants.
The second piece features six questions about the law drawn from everyday life, with answers provided by Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, and Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law.
The first question, from Dershowitz, reportedly comes directly from his classroom.
Attorney Goodheart is asked by Badact to represent him. Badact asks for and receives a promise of confidentiality, then tells Goodheart that he committed a murder for which another man has been convicted and is awaiting execution. Can Goodheart break his promise to save the life of a stranger but at the possible cost of his own client’s life?
The short answer is yes. Law students learn that a lawyer may not reveal confidential information that she receives from her client, except in limited circumstances, which include to prevent reasonably certain death or substantial bodily harm. But Dershowitz goes on to highlight the difficulty that legal education trains lawyers to confront:
There is still considerable controversy over what “reasonably certain” and “substantial bodily harm” mean. What if the innocent person is serving life imprisonment? Ten years? Five years? Another difficult question: Should a lawyer now advise his client that disclosure is permitted in certain circumstances? If so, will the client tell him the truth? There are no easy answers.
There are no easy answers. The combination of an issue, a rule and its application comprises the core of legal training and, it seems, the essential learning of a lawyer. Lawyers learn a way of thinking that, while sometimes maddening to non-lawyers, distinguishes the profession. Legal thinking also separates law school from business school, where managers deconstruct case studies of business problems in an effort to boost profits at the company the case profiles.
While both methods tie to the world of modern business, they represent different ways of thinking about the world. That’s why I wonder whether add-ons to the law school curriculum make sense. What makes a lawyer valuable is his or her ability to identify legal issues, know the law and apply that law effectively on behalf of a client. Find yourself in need of a lawyer – whether to defend you in court, to draw up your will or to handle your divorce – and my guess is that you’ll value those skills above all.
That’s to say that we value the skills that law schools have taught for years and that the practice of law reinforces. Adobe’s system for managing documents may change or the cloud at NetApp may expand, but the legal method is the legal method. It evolves but it remains basically what it was for the past 600 years. Business tends to profit from the future, if for no other reason than that’s where opportunity lies. The law has no comparable currency.
In attempting to advance its approach, Michigan State’s law school touches on the tension. “Legal education has been stronger on tradition than innovation,” Joan Howarth, the school’s dean, told the Times. “What we’re trying to do is to educate lawyers for the future, not the past.” Law schools will do their best to conceive legal education for a digital age. As for the merits of that strategy, as with many things legal, we’ll have to await the verdict.