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What if law schools ran their own law firms?
RICHARD WEINER
Legal News Reporter
Published: September 29, 2011
With all of the talk about law schools not producing attorneys who are actually ready to practice, two law professors have come up with a novel idea: what if law schools ran their own law firms?
The professors––Brooklyn Law School Professor Bradley Borden and University of Maryland School of Law Professor Robert Rhee––have written a 10-page article entitled, “The Law School Firm,” to be published in a forthcoming issue of the South Carolina Law Review.
“Although opinions differ on many aspects of legal education,” the article starts, “there is a fair consensus that legal education is more disconnected from law practice than it should be.”
After discussing various changes that would be possible to the legal education pedagogy, the professors,, “in order to stimulate discussion,” propose the law school law firm.
The basic idea is that the law school firm would both function like a regular law firm (if there is such a thing) and provide a training opportunity for law students. For the schools, there should be minimal expense, and perhaps even a profit.
The firms would be nonprofit, separate entities from the schools, and would be managed professionally through hiring senior attorneys to run the firm. Students would work essentially as clerks. Upon graduation, a newly-minted lawyer would practice at the firm for a period of a few years.
"We see the benefit of having the law's equivalent of a teaching hospital," Rhee and Borden wrote. "Senior attorneys in a law school firm would practice law, model best practices for junior attorneys, help train them and possibly work in collaboration with full-time faculty on research problems that arise in the practice of law."
The law school firm would be an adjunct to, if not a replacement of, various lab-based curricula like the variations on legal aid clinics. The firms would offer low-cost legal representation in practice areas underserved by the existing lawyer population.
Although technically a non-profit, the authors propose that, “the law firm must find clients and source revenue just as a private firm would. The law school would be the economic owner of the law firm, and it may have profit allocation arrangements, but there would be a separation of ownership and control.”
The authors point as models to, “organizations like the ACLU and NAACP, which represent clients and do legal work with no owners and no profit motive.”
Training would be included in the salary, which would be low—similar to legal aid or other public entity entry-level positions.
The entry-level lawyers, “will be expected to do client work but will also learn how to be a successful attorney," they wrote. "They will learn how to develop a book of business and make contacts in the community that will benefit them as practicing attorneys."
A firm like that could revolutionize legal education. One effect could be the acceleration of the genesis of two-year programs, which would also require a change in ABA accreditation standards.
Another could be a lab to learn about lawyer training techniques (which currently consist of “hope you don’t get disbarred and good luck”).
Any extra money generated by the firm beyond expenses could be plowed back into further lawyer training.
Attorneys could learn about the nitty-gritty administrative details of hourly billing, choosing appropriate CLEs, choosing proper software, calendar and client control, and many other details that are simply not taught in law schools.
The authors do not stake out a small vision, although they acknowledge that it may take some time to ramp up any given operation, and that they may need to start an experimental firm to see how it all works out.
But, they say, “We envision a law firm with a size that the market would bear. It could become quite large in terms of number of attorneys. The structure will require a critical mass of experienced attorneys to ensure that the firm has the resources to attract sophisticated and assorted work and also assist with training provisional attorneys.”
The idea is probably too new at this point to generate any comment, But an idea that is this far out there really shows how desperate the entire field of legal education is for fresh ideas.
"It's radical, but then it's not radical," Rhee said. "It's only radical because law schools are so set in their ways."