Today I stumbled upon this important piece by the President of the State Bar of California. I have to hand it to Howard B. Miller. He attacks a topic that far too many leaders of legal organizations have shied away from: students who decide to attend school using school-reported job statistics and graduate into a jobless economy with around $100,000+ in debt and without the skills needed to start their own firms… and what this means for the profession.

This is a big problem and there are many players with big stakes in the game. And nobody wants to take responsibility for it. But Mr. Miller presses forward asking (and answering):

Do we in the profession have an obligation to deal with all this — especially the State Bar of California? I think we do.

He lays out three recommendations. The first will be familiar to anyone who participated in or read the Final Report of the ALI-ABA/ACLEA Critical Issues Summit.

First, for those who will have already graduated and passed the bar exam, we need to plan on developing post-graduate and post-bar passage legal education practice courses, continuing a tradition, as in the value of apprenticeships, of the profession training its own, focusing on law practice management, the needs of clients and how to meet those needs — especially by shaping new pricing models besides the billable hour to attract clients suspicious of legal fees.

This, of course, is the recommendation most related to what we do as CLE providers. He says the market is there if the right programming is developed at the right price. But pricing is the sticky point, isn’t it? Everybody loves transitional programming until you get to the point of deciding, “Who pays?” Continuing legal education is much [much] cheaper than legal education, but it still rubs me wrong to say, “You know that education you just purchased? The one you’re now paying back at $1,000/month–at a minimum? Well, see–it doesn’t actually prepare you to be a lawyer. You still need…” And transitional programming, to be truly useful, will be intensive. Which means it might be more costly to administer. Are there organizations that can help subsidize the price? Should bar associations step up to the task?

Next:

Second, the Committee of Bar Examiners, in consultation with California-accredited as well as ABA law schools, needs to begin a serious study of what kind of tests will genuinely determine who is qualified to practice law…

…How many would want a surgeon to operate on them who had only been tested on a written exam, without seeing or operating on a patient, even in a simulation? The bar exam continues to exist as an accepted but flawed tradition, with only tangential problem solving connections to representing clients or any realistic certification of the ability to practice law.

Now you want to take away our time-honored tradition of paying BARBRI to tell us what we need to know to pass the bar?

And finally:

[W]e need to be transparent with potential lawyers about the cost and benefits of studying law. All law schools need to gather, verify and report, in consistent and specified ways, the employment record of their graduates, as well report on those who may have started, paid tuition, but never graduated.

Of course, it’s embarrassing that we don’t already require greater transparency from our law schools–that we allow them to play numbers games that would probably be deemed unethical if applied to a legal practice. There are groups that are already working on this. And I would suggest that the best way to put pressure on schools (and the American Bar Association) is for student groups, alumni groups, bar associations and lawyers to present a united front.

So who’s with Howard and me?

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