Conclusions There are three real alternatives available to fully and properly educated law students. The ABA limits should be scrapped, the beginning of which came with the ABA consent decree. The following steps need to be taken to improve legal education and to create a proper environment for supervised clinical legal education. To improve the law schools economics, Drop the ABA's approach to libraries, publish or perish, law professor's course loads and similar matters out of the year 1890 and require professors to teach twelve credit hours a term. Lawyers bill 1,700 to 2,400 hours a year.
Law professors can work that much as well.
Twelve hours in class, twelve hours reviewing and responding to in class written assignments and twelve hours working with students in clinical settings. The total numbers come to 36 hours a week for about 32 weeks a year. In the other 22 weeks the professors can review and prepare lesson plans and keep up to date on their profession as well as take two weeks of vacation. Add on a fourth year of law school devoted to supervised clinical internship experience. Three years is not enough to fully and properly train prospective lawyers.