Quartz write…
Another fall, another crop of students arriving in law schools, buying the same casebooks, ready to be taught the same way how to reach the same conclusions for the same exams.
Law schools in the US today have become depressingly single-purpose: training members of a closed profession and failing to equip them to tackle the full breadth of problems facing economies and societies that are undergoing extensive transformations.
Law schools are letting down their students. They’re requiring anyone who wants to do any type of legal work, even the pro-forma and routine, to enroll in three years of graduate school and take on an average debt of $140,000, all the while facing dwindling job prospects.
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The result is an insulated and out-of-touch conveyor-belt profession that has become too complex, too expensive, and too disconnected from the realities people and businesses face. Law is increasingly not getting the job done, let alone addressing the long-term crisis in access to justice and modern challenges such as automation, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, climate change, and safety and fairness in global supply chains.
Today’s law schools are increasingly chasing their own tails, with the holy grail still being a coveted job in a big law firm that serves large corporations. Meanwhile, roughly 90% of Americans dealing with legal matters do so without legal help. And as I have found in my research, even big businesses are unhappy with what is available to them. In a 2011 survey, 70% of global executives reported that law and regulation were the greatest causes of complexity in their businesses.
Full article at https://qz.com/1082266/law-schools-are-letting-down-their-students-and-society-here-are-three-steps-they-can-take-to-fix-things/
