Nearly two weeks ago The Wall Street Journal published an editorial by Cameron Stracher heavily criticizing the state of legal education in America...

One of the biggest problems with the current state of legal education is its emphasis on books rather than people. By reading about the law rather than engaging in it, students end up with the misperception that lawyers spend most of their time debating the niceties of the Rule Against Perpetuities rather than sorting out the messy, somewhat anarchic version of the truth that judges and courts care about. When they graduate, young lawyers rarely know how to interview clients, advocate for their positions, negotiate a settlement or perform any number of other tasks that lawyers do every day. In short, they are woefully unprepared to be lawyers, despite the outrageous hourly fees charged for their services.

Stracher advocates for more emphasis on experiential learning in law school...

If law schools really want to change the way they train young lawyers, they would look to medical schools. The latter require clinical "rotations" in the last two years of a student's education and then demand at least one more year of training after graduation. By the time your doctor is licensed, he has examined hundreds of patients.

While many new lawyers will start out at big firms where they will rarely get to meet a client, most still go to smaller firms where they will meet clients immediately. The state bars profess interest in protecting the public, but none seem to care whether new lawyers can actually do the tasks with which they will soon be confronted.

I'll try not to bite the hand that feeds too much here, but I will say that after I graduated from law school with a pretty good GPA, I was completely unprepared for the job I took as a public defender. Before I was assigned my first client I had to go through about two months of training, mostly on trial methods I never even got a chance to use. In my very first court appearance (a guilty plea to public intoxication and disorderly conduct), I had to be walked slowly through each step of the process. And I still screwed up when the judged asked whether there was a "stipulation." I took a chance on "no." I chose wrong.

All of these growing pains would've happened regardless of what stage of my career I was in when making my first court appearance, but it still troubles me that it happened 10 months after I graduated from law school and 5 months after being sworn in as a member of the bar. Would Stracher's proposed solution have fixed things for me? I tend to agree with him, but nothing is certain. What I find most significant is that someone is publicly acknowledging the existence of a problem that needs a solution.

[WSJ.com OpinionJournal] Meet the Clients (via Law Librarian Blog)