Category Archives: Law School

Law schools join the talent war

By Jordan Furlong | Published: June 25, 2008
Northwestern University School of Law garnered a lot of attention last week by announcing a series of curriculum changes, most prominently the creation of an accelerated JD program that would allow students to graduate with a law degree in 24 months, rather than the traditional 36. While Dayton and Southwestern law schools have gone this [...]
Also posted in Innovation, Talent | 3 Comments

Ban the law school lecture

By Jordan Furlong | Published: May 20, 2008
The simmering debate over whether to allow laptops into the law school classroom came to a head in March, with the decision by the University of Chicago Faculty of Law to ban wireless access in class. Follow those links, as well as this one from Paul Caron’s TaxProf Blog (HT: Dennis Kennedy), and you’ll be [...]
Also posted in Generations | 2 Comments

The seven-year law degree

By Jordan Furlong | Published: April 10, 2008
There are a couple of well-known phenomena about legal careers that, when juxtaposed, might give us better insight into how lawyers enter the profession. The first is the common assumption that a law degree is far easier postgraduate degree to obtain than, say, a medical degree or Ph.D. Would-be doctors spend four years in medical [...]
Also posted in Big Firms, New Lawyers | 4 Comments

Micro law schools

By Jordan Furlong | Published: March 24, 2008
Two interesting articles by Alex Dimson at Law Is Cool today have me thinking about a possible next step in the evolution of law schools. Two Ontario universities have applied to set up law schools: Lakehead University in Thunder Bay and Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo. Alex reports that Lakehead’s application, although on shakier ground [...]
Also posted in Governance | Leave a comment

Cheating or collaborating?

By Jordan Furlong | Published: March 12, 2008
All I can say is, I’d love to see the law school that tries to flunk a student for setting up a Facebook study group, as Ryerson University in Toronto did this week. Maybe this is a generational thing — I’m officially an X’er, though my leanings are more millennial — but I can’t see [...]
Also posted in Innovation | 3 Comments

The why of law school

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 24, 2008
I took piano lessons as a kid. I didn’t hugely enjoy them, not least because of the timing — 10:00 to 11:00 Saturday morning was primo cartoon time — but the instructor was my aunt and it was kind of expected that all the nephews and nieces had to do their time. Anyway, I didn’t [...]
Posted in Law School | 1 Comment

Student-focused law degrees

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 7, 2008
Mark Osler at the Law School Innovation blog points us towards the University of Dayton Law School, which offers students the option to complete the standard three-year degree in just two calendar years (including a summer off) through an earlier start date and a more intensive course load. The implications, as Mark observes, include less [...]
Also posted in Innovation | 1 Comment

Ontario bar admission overhaul, part 2

By Jordan Furlong | Published: February 1, 2008
Continuing from yesterday’s post, here’s the conclusion of a two-part running commentary on the Interim Report To Convocation from the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Licensing and Accreditation Task Force. Again, this won’t be a blow-by-blow account of the report, but I do recommend you read the whole thing. This article (which is also appearing [...]
Also posted in CLE, New Lawyers | 1 Comment

Ontario bar admission overhaul, part 1

By Jordan Furlong | Published: January 31, 2008
Yesterday, I posted a brief note about the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Licensing and Accreditation Task Force Interim Report To Convocation. Today, as promised, is the start of a two-part running commentary on what struck me as the most relevant or noteworthy aspects of the report. The first half, which I’ll address below, deals [...]
Also posted in CLE, New Lawyers | 4 Comments

Articling abolition? A groundbreaking LSUC report

By Jordan Furlong | Published: January 30, 2008
It arrived quietly and without fanfare. I’ve seen no reports of it in the mainstream media or the legal press. In fact, the young-lawyer-focused law blogs Precedent and Law Is Cool are the only places I’ve seen talk about it so far. But the Law Society of Upper Canada’s Licensing and Accreditation Task Force Interim [...]
Also posted in Careers, CLE, Governance, New Lawyers | 7 Comments

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