Stay Clueless or go Cluetrain? Are law students too inexperienced about life and business? Should they enter law school with real work experience and learn more business school lessons and skills? As an article in today’s New York Law Journal asks: “If the law is becoming more of a business, should law schools become more like business schools?” (NYLJ, Law Schools Steal a Page From Business Schools, by Anthony Lin, 05-05-04 )
This being academia, you can expect the wagons are being circled, to keep the oxen of the various faculties from being gored, and to protect the traditions that many feel are sacrosanct.. John P. Heinz, a professor at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago, points out that many law schools have already “responded to perceived changes in the marketplace and set a goal of training lawyers who better understand the world of business and can more easily put themselves in the shoes of clients.” According to the NYLJ article,
“The team-based, case-study approach to instruction pioneered at business schools is now commonly found at law schools.”
“Where law schools once based admissions solely on grades and test scores, some are now stealing another page from business schools and considering applicants’ work experience as well.”
It is no surprise, though, that some law professors “warn that wholesale adoption of business-school practices risks producing less capable lawyers” – arguing that learning law is far more subtle than learning business skills (through the business case method). Professors also worry that accepting law students based on their life experience will lower the pure acedemic capability of the students, turning out less capable lawyers.
On the other hand, Dean David Van Zandt, of Northwestern Law School argues that “the emphasis business schools place on work experience rather than grades means business school students generally have a maturity and focus lacking in law students. The latter, he said, frequently enter law school directly from college out of fear of actually embarking on a career.”
Last month, Harvard Law School launched a Program on Lawyers and the Professional Services Industry, headed by Professor David Wilkins, a specialist in the legal profession. “Wilkins said the program will benefit from the participation of faculty from Harvard Business School as well as lawyers in private practice.”
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Dean David Van Zandt, Northwestern’s law school has also sought to boost the number of its students who earn business degrees. Perhaps most controversially, Van Zandt has made applicants’ work experience a major factor in the law school’s admissions process, along with grades and standardized test scores. He said that as many as 70 percent of the school’s current students have worked for some period before entering law school.
Van Zandt argues that “the emphasis business schools place on work experience rather than grades means business school students generally have a maturity and focus lacking in law students. The latter, he said, frequently enter law school directly from college out of fear of actually embarking on a career.”
Similarly, “Stanford Law School Professor Deborah Rhode said law schools, with far fewer entrance requirements than medical or business schools, provided fresh college graduates with the professional “‘degree of least resistance’.”
“A lot of students are pretty clueless about the profession and what their lives are going to be like after they graduate,” said Rhode. “They think they’re going to save the world on Wall Street salaries.”
But she noted that many law schools would be wary of adjusting admissions criteria to take greater account of work experience. She said Stanford experimented in the 1990s with admitting some students based primarily on their life experiences but stopped after some faculty expressed concern that the average test scores of Stanford students would drop.
This debate is just starting. One major benefit from having so darn many law schools is that there can be a lot of experimentation, perhaps resulting in numerous successful models to suit the needs of invidual lawyers, clients and industries.