So students perform orally all semester and then have a written final without significant writing experience for the type of final given. From this one test comes the class's grade. Third, law students encounter the reality of life after law school. This reality is harsh and not at all what placement, recruiters or popular media has held it out to be. Texas has 500 new legal jobs every year.
Some schools do much better, some do worse.
Long talks with academics who left large law firms reflects that in most cases they estimated that the firms were only doing about 1,100 hours of useful work every year and then overbilling the rest in order to generate the hours necessary to meet the standards. So they told the firm that one they would not pay for any of the associate hours and two whenever associates were brought along, they expected a discount for the drop in quality of work. Law students generally do not discover these facts until they are in their second or third years of law school. By this time they usually have substantial debts, substantial dreams, have lost any useful or employable skills or contacts they had outside of law, and reality is a dramatic encounter for them. All projections are that things will get worse every year for the next five to ten years.