Exactly. Making law school more of a trade school would be of use to a small set of law school graduates.
Sure, but what’s “enough”? At the very least attending a bar exam prep course? Most likely also doing extensive independent study? At what point are you no longer testing the ability of an average lay person to succeed on the exam?
Lots of things about practicing law are archaic and stupid, so I’ll probably never really object to any complaint that it’s stupid in a specific way. I do think there are straightforward answers to your questions, though.
How would the average law school graduate do? Worse than someone who did some preparation, much much better than anyone else.
Why not well? It’s a test, right? It doesn’t seem to me to be a huge indictment of chemistry exams that someone who went to class but didn’t study won’t do as well as someone who did. Likewise the bar; “some test prep” is warranted given that it’s a massive test that requires inhuman levels of knowledge to ace. You could do “some test prep” that isn’t paying 3 grand to BarBri or whatever, but now we’re just getting into why do specialized commercial services exist.
Why is it necessary to take the bar? The state is about to allow you to take other people’s money to defend/take away people’s rights in court. Say I go to, whatever, Pepperdine Law, and then I move to Louisiana. It seems reasonable to me that Louisiana wants to make its own inquiry into whether I’ve ever heard of the rules of how custody works in Louisiana before I’m allowed to hang up a shingle and start going into family court.
Given the above, why is law school necessary? I think that’s a good question. I think if you can pass the bar you probably should be allowed to be an attorney. But if you stack up the people who went to law school against people who didn’t, but are attorneys nevertheless, I don’t think there’s going to be any competition in terms of who has the sharper tools.
I tried it and was one question (out of 50) away from passing at 60% (though 60% sounds very low to me, aren’t most graduate-level or professional exams requiring over 70% to pass generally?) I agree that the finer points are definitely sticklers. I know I got more of the answers right (i.e yes vs. no), but for the wrong reason. Some of it was for simple multiple-choice logic, especially when one of the answers is along the lines of “yes, because this ALWAYS applies” which pretty much guarantees that’s not the correct answer. In other cases I’d run into similar instances in my own professional practice (architecture) dealing with contracts, insurance claims, and occasional liability lunch-and-learns. Watching some Legal Eagle on YouTube helps too. When it comes to reasons like double hearsay or fee simple deeds and more esoteric stuff that’s where I got lost and just had to guess, but there were only three or four questions that I couldn’t process at all. Of course essays would be a complete bloodbath, but it was a fun exercise. 
No doubt that will be the case, and it’s not something to dismiss. But consider… how many students go into law school thinking they want to work in a particular area of law (such as immigration, general legal aid, healthcare, criminal defense, etc.) and only learned they didn’t want to do it because they had a bad experience actually doing the work in clinic, and so had time to adjust their aim point for the future? How many could have that experience if only law schools across the country saw that as their business and changed to accommodate or even normalize such a path?
The types of legal work that make sense to teach through a law school clinic represents a small fraction of the types of work that lawyers actually end up doing. You need a type of law that focuses on discrete, time-limited tasks. Most lawyers don’t do that kind of work. That’s why legal clerkships (that is, internships) are generally several months long, and still manage to give you a small taste of practice and don’t really train you do do much in a practical sense.
My current clinic has had cases that go on for years (its immigration-related). To the extent my time in the clinic is limited to just one semester, all that does is highlight the extent to which the current system of producing attorneys via law school might limit or impair the development of practical experience by focusing too much on non-standard and elective coursework. To my mind it serves not as a defense of the current system, but as an indictment.
There is nothing but the law schools themselves–not even the ABA–keeping them from opening up clinic experiences that go on for a year or more. And for what it’s worth, that path is actually available. I was in one of the school’s more general legal aid clinics last semester (but even there, only one of my cases was done at the end of the semester: the rest were transferred to incoming students), and I expect to be going back to it as an advanced student next semester. I could, theoretically, have crafted a path spending two or more semesters in that one clinic as the supervising attorneys have indicated a willingness to be flexible (there is no one “advanced course” it’s just telling them how many credits you’d like to do, and them figuring out a client load fitted to that).
The incentives involved if this idea were adopted make me exceedingly skeptical that the result would be good, well-trained lawyers.
I think you’ll find that this experience is what you can get from summer clerkships and first jobs. Summer clerkships can be a good way to try out the area you’re interested in, or, if you can’t get something in your preferred area, to try something different, or related, or something you think would be good experience.
For my own path, law school generally was extremely helpful, as were my summer clerkships. My single most relevant and practical class was an elective. Law Review was also relevant experience for me.
My summer clerkships were even better experience than a clinic. I was doing the exact job I wanted, under a lawyer’s supervision.
If the way law school is taught, (which from this thread I assume is specializing in reasoning and thinking skills, important cases, the essentials of some areas of law, electives for more esoteric areas, attempted summer jobs and internships in areas of interest) is reasonable, do any changes need to be made to bar exams?
I guess that’s point with any professional certification, whether it’s the bar exam, CPA, PE, Series 7, PMP or any other exam. It tells you that you aren’t just getting some average person who walked off the street, pretending they know what they are talking about. At some point, they had to sit down, read, and memorize enough material to pass a standard industry test.
Well, as I posted way up-thread, in several Canadian provinces, there’s no bar exam any more. There’s a bar course, taught concurrently with articles, designed to help articling students learn about the practice of law.
Here’s the link, for a second time:
I understand. I assumed the thread was started with American values in mind, and despite being a Canadian was trying to wear a second hat and discuss that. It’s not an unusual situation here as you know.
My world is Canadian, but we’re a small country and most people are not. Indeed, most things that affect Canada are not, and Canada has for better or worse often defined itself in those negative terms (not American, kind of) rather than positive ones (Our soccer team is ranked 38th! World Cup will be ours!’’’)
‘’’World Cup will not be ours. But we made it.
This is an interesting point. In medical school, almost every fourth year student knows what they want to specialize in. They have to, since that’s when the students are applying to residency programs in their chosen specialty. Is there a reason law school couldn’t work the same way?
We don’t need to, because we don’t specialise the same way that med students do. As I understand (please correct me if I’m wrong), med students have to do residencies to train and qualify in their chosen specialties (“Board qualified”?) , and that’s what they’re going to practise in.
There’s no equivalent to that in law world. The education is a general one, and there is no speciality qualification that you need to meet and maintain. Once called to the bar, you’re a lawyer. You can concentrate in particular areas, but I’m not familiar with a requirement to have a certain qualification to practise in a particular area. (Although the types of insurance you need to maintain can vary, for example the insurance for practising in real estate can be different than the general insurance, at least in some jurisdictions.)
(all of which is just my personal experience; in 51 US jurisdictions and 13 Canadian, there are bound to be some variations)
To add what Northern_Piper said, lawyers can and do change specialties. A pediatrician is (probably) going to spend their whole career in Pediatrics. A criminal defense attorney might easily transition into personal injury law, or family law.
The one important exception in the United States is if you want to practice before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. There is a separate bar qualification for that, which is not transferable from a regular law license. And, indeed, there is a separate educational qualification too.
It would be unduly restrictive both for individual lawyers and for their employers.
I think the “have to” probably has an effect on how medical school is organized - or maybe it’s the other way around. The impression I have gotten is that the last two years of medical school are mostly clinical and students will be exposed to a number of specialties during that time - and I don’t think that’s the case for law school.
And I found that separate bar qualification harder than the regular bar exam, although it is a bit of an apples to oranges comparison.
The regular bar exam seemed like a huge hazing ritual to me. Guess how many Intellectual Property questions were on it…
I agree about the hazing characterization. Also a lot of commercial paper questions, which the vast majority of attorneys will never encounter.