Vol. 74, No. 7, July 2001

Preparing for Practice

by Dianne Molvig

What should law schools teach law students to prepare them to be practicing attorneys? Consider this sampling of viewpoints:

• "Society's contract with the law schools is to train lawyers, not to produce half-lawyers, taught some of the theories of the law, but not how to put those theories into practice."
  
  
• "It goes without saying that a proper law course would include instruction on the management of a law office, the handling of clients, the development of a practice, the charging of fees, practical legal ethics, and the benefits flowing from participation in professional organizations and movements."
  
  
• "Law schools ... do not purport, nor should they be expected, to train students so that upon graduation they will be equipped with all the necessary know-how of practice."
  
  
• "My ... prophecy is that legal education will continue to struggle with the problem of practical education, and will almost surely not solve it to the satisfaction of everyone. The question cannot be resolved by turning the law schools into full-time clinics."

You might well assume that such comments came out of present-day legal education journals or conferences. In fact, the above remarks, written by a practicing attorney and two law school deans, date back to the early 1950s.1

Fast forward 50 years, and it's clear that the controversies in legal education endure. "The general perception in the practicing bar is that law schools are not doing enough to prepare law students for the profession," notes John Feerick, dean for 19 years at Fordham University School of Law in New York City, and before that a practicing attorney for 21 years in a large Manhattan law firm. On the other hand, academic lawyers "have a perception that practicing lawyers are telling them what to do," he adds, "but aren't willing to help" in preparing new lawyers for practice. Feerick is the chair of the American Bar Association (ABA) Legal Education Section's Professional Committee. He also cochaired the National Dialogue on the Legal Education Continuum, a conclave held in Dallas in February 2000 to bring together some 500 bar leaders and law school deans nationwide to air their views on legal education.

Surfacing at the National Dialogue were several points of contention and consensus among the practicing bar and academic lawyers - and many still unanswered questions, such as: What are the respective values of legal scholarship and practical skills training? Who should provide transitional education for new lawyers? What's happened to mentoring, and how can it be restored?

The point of the conclave was not to nail down precise answers to these and other questions, but to build understanding between the practicing and teaching legal communities about each other's roles and expectations. "No one would claim we reached an ideal," Feerick reports. "We're never going to reach an ideal, and I don't think we'll ever see agreement on what that should be."

Indeed, some observers, such as Howard Eisenberg, dean of Marquette University Law School in Milwaukee, suggest the debate ought to never cease - in the profession as a whole and among legal educators themselves. It's that struggle between countering viewpoints that keeps law schools dynamic. When the debate is over, it will mean one view has won out, stifling and perhaps even denigrating the other, and legal education will be poorer for it. "I sometimes talk about the people in law schools as being divided between the sheet metal workers and the ivory tower philosophers," Eisenberg says. "That expresses the tension between those who want only the practical and those who want only the theoretical. In a law school, that tension is enormously healthy and necessary."

If divergent views are a sign of health, then legal education in Wisconsin and elsewhere seems destined to thrive. In the May Wisconsin Lawyer, you read about who is going to law school, what students are learning, and where they go upon graduation. Here you'll read about an array of opinions on the current state of law school education, coming from seasoned practitioners, new lawyers, and law school deans and educators. They discuss what they think law schools are doing well, what changes might be necessary, and what law schools can do to better prepare new lawyers for the world of practice. Part of the latter involves teaching lawyering skills and knowledge, which can be tricky to define in the first place. But as you'll see, the issue of preparedness gets even more complicated than it may seem at first glance.

Preparing for Practice Page 2: Vital Skills