As every frustrated customer knows, there comes a time when you stop trying to negotiate with a stubborn supplier and start looking for alternatives. I think that time is just about here for the legal profession in its relationship with law schools.

If you’ve been reading this blog for awhile, you probably already know that my general opinion of law school is a fairly jaundiced one (if not, those links sum up my feelings pretty well). To their credit, some legal educators and administrators have recognized the serious if not fundamental problems with the current model and are trying to tackle it. In particular, you should be aware of:

• The Best Practices and Carnegie Reports into legal education,
• The recent Future Ed and Future Firm conferences,
• Law Without Walls, which has recently doubled its membership,
• Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, a promising new program, and
• Several individual law school initiatives mentioned here from time to time

But these are the happy exceptions, and the general rule against which they’re struggling is widely followed and deeply entrenched. For the most part, law schools are legal research and publishing platforms that finance their activities by granting law degrees, enabling aspiring lawyers to join a practicing bar that generously allows the schools to conduct the first three years of new lawyer training. The price of a law degree has risen steadily for almost 20 years; arguably, the value of that degree has stagnated or fallen throughout that time.

This state of affairs has bred an inefficient and sub-standard approach to legal education and new lawyer training, culminating in the crisis of confidence now apparent in the law school-legal profession relationship. Lawyers have been grumbling for years about law school, but they’ve never done more than complain. That’s about to change, because the facts on the ground have become impossible to ignore.

• Fewer law grads than ever in the US are finding legal work — 68% for 2010 graduates, 51% in private practice — and they’re earning less than their predecessors in increasingly temporary positions.
• A growing number of law schools are deliberately or recklessly exaggerating their new-grad employment numbers, creating bait-and-switch scholarships, or actually lying about their students’ LSAT scores.
• Sustained attacks on the system are emerging from inside the schools themselves, and the schools have no answer to them beyond ad hominem targeting of the complainers.
• Matters are scarcely better in Canada or in the UK. John’s Flood’s assessment of the current state of affairs is both accurate and painful:

Stable careers are long gone and contract work is becoming the norm for many, even at the training level. Education, it seems, is transforming into training without the benefits that true education can bring. More and more the employers, as in the case of KPMG, are taking charge of selection, leaving the academy as a mere processing plant. And an expensive one at that. The current model of legal education is unsustainable in its present form. It can’t make up its mind as to whether it is education or training for jobs, or worse, some cackhanded attempt at both. This failing besets legal education in both the US and the UK and others too. Legal education is a perverse mix of cheap delivery and expensive consumption.

What’s really remarkable about this is that most law schools are (or pretend to be) completely unaware of the gathering storm. They continue to value faculty scholarship more highly than the classroom experience or students’ career paths. This calculation that the average law review article costs about $100,000 isn’t as shocking as this additional revelation:

“… 43% of law review articles are never cited by anyone. ‘At least a third of these things have no value…. Who is paying for that? Students who will graduate with six figures of debt.'”

What role, precisely, do law schools serve? They’re not really trade schools — they don’t take career preparation or placement very seriously — and they’re not really graduate schools — the law degree, as I’ve argued before, is a glorified undergraduate program. Their value to the legal marketplace resides in a few magic letters — J.D. or LL.B. — and they seem to be daring the profession to find alternative providers of this three-year credentialing service. I’m not sure why they’d take that risk. Most schools are heavily reliant upon law firms’ continued willingness to hire enough new graduates (often with high salaries and bonuses) to justify those schools’ tuition — at a time when the bible of large law firms, The American Lawyer, has flatly referred to those outlays as “a waste of money.”

Law schools that value their continued involvement in the legal education industry need to understand just how dangerous their position has become. The lawyers and legal regulators to whom I speak sound close to giving up on law schools, writing them off as partners or even stakeholders in the bar admission reform process. These people are the schools’ customers — the annual buyers of their inventory — and they’re despairing of any movement by the schools towards a different approach or even a real conversation with the profession about its needs. There just doesn’t appear to be anyone home.

John Flood writes: “The academy has the present advantage of providing the only route into the legal profession, or what’s left of it. I imagine it won’t retain that monopoly.” I think he’s right. The bar needs better options for the education, training and admission of new lawyers, and it is a motivated buyer. Next week, I’ll look at the whole question of new lawyer admission in some more detail and at the early signs of some new entrants to this market.

If you work in a law school, I’d suggest you track these developments closely. Because schools are poised to become something far worse than simply an irritant to the profession. They’re poised to become irrelevant.

Jordan Furlong delivers dynamic and thought-provoking presentations to law firms and legal organizations throughout North America on how to survive and profit from the extraordinary changes underway in the legal services marketplace. He is a partner with Edge International and a senior consultant with Stem Legal Web Enterprises.