Beyond Practical Skills: Nine Steps for Improving Legal Education Now

"When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!"-Yogi BerraIntroductionLegal education is at a crossroads. In a series of studies over the past two decades, reports commissioned by the American Bar Association (ABA) and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching have concluded that our nation's law schools are failing to prepare graduates adequately for the practice of law.1 Proposed reforms include providing more practical skills training for our students and adopting teaching practices that focus more effectively on simulated client experiences.2The critics' focus has shifted from the dearth of practical skills training in the law school curriculum to the lack of integrated skills training. The ABA's MacCrate Report in 1992 enumerated ten fundamental skills required of every young lawyer and decried the lack of emphasis on practical skills at most law schools.3 Although the MacCrate Report may have helped fuel the expansion of clinical and externship offerings at many U.S. law schools, it did not bridge or even narrow the divide between experiential education and doctrinal law school courses.4 The more recent 2007 Carnegie Report, Educating Lawyers, favors a rethinking of legal education in a more integrated approach that crosses this doctrinal/clinical divide and that emphasizes practical skills and professional identity at all levels of the curriculum.5Providing students with the analytical skills necessary to "think like lawyers" by teaching them to read and dissect appellate decisions may no longer be sufficient to meet the demands of the legal marketplace. In a provocative series of articles in the New York Times, columnist David Segal has criticized the structure, content, and price of legal education.6 "Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions . . . ."7 The growing expectation of law firms is that graduates should be better trained during law school on the skills necessary to practice law.8 Because clients increasingly are balking at being billed for time spent by firstand second-year associates, law schools that do not modify their curricula to emphasize practical skills may find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in placing their graduates.9Although all signals presently point toward preparing more "practice ready" lawyers, how exactly this will be accomplished remains to be seen. Calls for adopting the medical school model of integrating lecture courses with practice rotations, culminating with an apprenticeship on the model of a medical residency, is one of the most frequently cited alternatives.10 Yet pragmatists among us recognize that an integrated approach to curricular reform in legal education will occur slowly, if it occurs at all. Several other commentators-and the Carnegie Report itself-have noted the inertial effect of traditional law school pedagogy and the institutional impediments to meaningful change.11 Wholesale redesign of the curriculum will require additional study, commitment of financial and intellectual resources, and consensus building among faculty members with diverse perspectives and incentives.This Essay suggests an interim approach. My objective is to offer a "self-help" remedy for faculty members and administrators interested in responding to the Carnegie Report's clarion call for greater emphasis on practical skills, but uninterested in waiting for the committee deliberations, reports, faculty votes, and tough resource trade-offs that lie ahead. We drag our heels at our own peril and to the serious disadvantage of our current students. What follows is a brief description of nine steps that individual faculty members and deans can take now to improve the professional education of our students. The first five propos=- als are pedagogical improvements that individual faculty members can make in the courses they presendy teach.12 The next three steps are new courses and one co-curricular project that would significantiy improve students' professional development. …