Last week, I contended that when it comes to the current lawyer admission process, law schools are part of the problem and show little interest in being part of the solution. Two articles published since then do give me some hope for the academy, both from Canadian law school deans: “Five new developments to reshape Canadian legal education,” by Lorne Sossin at Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto, and “The Canadian Lawyer in the 21st Century,” by Ian Holloway at the University of Calgary Faculty of Law.
But that’s as much as I want to say about the schools, because what we’re really talking about in these conversations, when you get right down to it, is the competence of practicing lawyers. The legal profession is concerned with competence in two ways: at the start of a lawyer’s career (what I’d call Initial Professional Development, or IPD) and then throughout the course of the lawyer’s career (what we already call Continuing Professional Development, or CPD). Let’s begin with the first one and tackle the second one next week.
The bar has a self-evident interest in ensuring that new lawyers enter the profession with enough knowledge, skills and experience to provide reliable legal services at a purely functional level. It’s the responsibility of lawyers, as self-regulating professionals, to set and enforce these basic, minimum standards — to oversee this Initial Professional Development — in order to fulfill our mandate to protect the public in the provision of legal services. So far, so good.
Here’s the problem: Initial Professional Development for new lawyers is a mess. It’s been cobbled together from a mishmash of activities, some mandatory and some optional: a law school education, a summer stint in a law firm, a bar admission course, a bar exam, an articling or trainee contract, and so forth. These measures overlap in some areas and leave other areas completely unaddressed: a new lawyer might have sat through three primers on real property law, for example, but never have the opportunity to run a simulated mediation.
All these activities, moreover, are administered by a range of providers that rarely consult with each other to coordinate their efforts and that are, to a great extent, free to set whatever standards they like in planning and administering these activities. No jurisdiction that I’m aware of sets and enforces a comprehensive strategy and structure for new lawyer training. The bar has effectively outsourced Initial Professional Development to a series of for-profit providers without specifying the equivalent of an acceptable and enforceable Service Level Agreement to govern it.
We frequently complain that “law school doesn’t prepare students for practice.” But we’re missing the point. The point is that our sloppy, jury-rigged approach to new lawyer training is broken. It’s a glaring failure of self-regulation, and it’s what Initial Professional Development reform needs to address.
Consider three emerging alternatives to the status quo, and you can start to see the forces that will guide this reform process.
1. The training brokerage. In the UK, a contract lawyer agency called Acculaw has set off a minor earthquake with its entry into the solicitor training sphere (new solicitors are required to spend two years as “trainees” and pass a professional qualification course before recognition as full-fledged lawyers). Before now, firms would recruit and hire the trainees themselves, much as Canadian firms recruit articling students and American firms hire first-year lawyers. The difference is that UK firms are making commitments well over two years in advance of the day they’ll actually bring these trainees on board as solicitors, at which point the firm’s and the market’s circumstances may have changed dramatically.
Now, Acculaw will hire these trainees straight out of post-graduate law school and then “second” them to law firms as requested. The secondments (a maximum of three per trainee) will last between three and eight months. The premise is that the trainees will serve as a “just in time” resource for firms that want to hire potential new lawyers more sparingly and judiciously.
Acculaw says it will oversee the secondment and ensure that the trainees are, you know, trained. But how this will work in practice is anyone’s guess: we’ve never tried something like this before, so we don’t know how well, if it all, this will advance the goal of acceptably competent new lawyers. Most large and prestigious firms will continue to recruit straight from the schools and have their pick of the graduating litter, so Acculaw’s trainees probably will be viewed as the leftovers. Will this increase their attractiveness on the market? Probably not. But the UK is much farther ahead than other jurisdictions in sending work to LPOs and contract workers: trainee offers of all kinds have dropped nearly a quarter in the last two years. Many trainees will be happy to take whatever they can get.
Make no mistake: this is not a graduate-oriented initiative. Acculaw couldn’t be clearer that its customers are law firms and that its goal is to streamline the trainee recruitment process for efficiency and effectiveness. But this all came about because the previous system wasn’t serving the firms’ needs. That’s the lesson to draw from the early days of the Acculaw experiment: if law firms don’t like the lawyer training process, they will come up a risky and potentially problematic alternative. A centralized brokerage for Initial Professional Development, one where the company takes the trainees in hand and accepts ultimate responsibility for their competence, could work very well in theory, and I hope that’s where this goes. But it’s not hard to envision a less happy outcome.
2. The teaching law firm. Law professors Brad Borden and Robert J. Rhee attracted a lot of attention earlier this month with the suggestion that law schools own and operate their own law firms. In Prof. Rhee’s words, “graduating students [would] get trained in the practice of law for a fixed duration, similar to a judicial clerkship or analogously a residency for new doctors. The law firm would be run by senior attorneys who develop books of business, and it would be economically sustainable.” Response from the legal community was widespread — that last link contains an excellent analysis by John Hodnicki — and mixed interest with skepticism. My own reaction was that I’d be more interested to see law firms get into the legal education business. But there is definitely something here.
What the professors are suggesting is essentially the legal equivalent of a teaching hospital. (Surely you’ve watched House?) A teaching hospital, like all hospitals, is primarily concerned with treating the sick and injured; but a strong secondary purpose is to give med school graduates and interns an opportunity to experience and learn from actual medical practice on real patients, something that no amount of instruction or simulation can achieve. Senior physicians and staff supervise their work, of course, but the patient experience is undeniably different than it would be in a standard hospital. The expectations are also different, on both sides of the bed: patients of teaching hospitals are frequently low-income or uninsured. Teaching hospitals work by filling a number of gaps in the markets for both medical services and medical training.
In theory (and at Chicago-Kent Law School, in practice), a “teaching law firm” could work equally well: senior law school students and recent graduates, under the supervision of experienced lawyers, engage with clients, research issues, try to resolve problems and generally learn the ropes of being a lawyer while getting the hang of billing and collecting for legal services. Given the likely clientele, the legal work would likely focus on criminal cases, custody and support disputes, immigration and refugee matters, landlord and tenant conflicts, and so forth. That sounds like a law school legal clinic, but those operations are underfunded and are not, so far as I know, operated like businesses. To succeed, a teaching law firm would have to train lawyers not just to practise law but also to run a profitable business. The profits would probably be minuscule, but the point is that the graduates would learn that a law office is not a charity.
It’s worth wondering, however, whether law schools are the best institutions to operate these teaching law firms. Mitchell Rubinstein points out an important acknowledgment by the professors themselves: “this law school law firm would have to be staffed by attorneys, not by the professors. The major problem with law school professors today is that many, if not most of them, are simply incapable of practicing law and many never had. But this is what we have, for the most part, training the lawyers of the future.” If a law school opens a law firm and has to bring in outside lawyers to run it, we have to ask why the law school is involved at all. Teaching hospitals are often associated with universities, but universities and med schools have a better reputation within the medical profession than law schools enjoy in theirs. And there are very few med school professors who’ve never treated a live patient. This may be a good idea in search of the right home.
3. The expert application. A third possible route for ensuring the competence of new lawyers is a technological one: the use of expert applications. Earlier this month, I received a demonstration of a fascinating new application by a company called Neota Logic, founded by respected knowledge management pioneer Michael Mills. Neota Logic is essentially an applied knowledge management system: it automates lawyers’ knowledge and expertise to create step-by-step processes for solving low- and medium-grade regulatory, compliance and advisory problems. Michael sometimes refers to it as “Microsoft Excel for compliance.”
Neota Logic users log in and enter the relevant data on the regulatory or compliance issue facing them; the system prompts them to answer a sequence of questions based on the data it’s receiving. The system guides the user through the process of entering the data, choosing the paths dictated by the responses, and arrives at the same result that an expert lawyer would have reached. It’s not only a cost-saving system that reduces the need for lawyers — it’s also a quality-control system, through the creation and application of a legal database that’s informed by, and collectively better informed than, all the lawyers whose expertise underpins it.
Neota and other expert applications to come will have a massive impact on legal workflow generally, and I’ll look at that in more detail later this fall. But what really struck me was that in the firms where it’s bring used, Neota has emerged as an associate training tool. The lawyers who’ve used it refer to it as the “partner at your shoulder” system, or more colourfully, the “Guardian Angel.” It performs essentially the same function as having a partner sitting in a chair next to the associate, asking her all the right questions, checking on her responses, and guiding her towards the right conclusion. This type of mentoring is something we wish every law firm partner would devote the time and energy to provide; we also know that extremely few ever do. So an expert system that trains lawyers as they perform could be a fine alternative.
It’s worth noting that none of these three innovations — training brokerages, teaching law firms, and expert applications — has come from the practicing bar or professional regulators. That’s not really surprising, considering lawyers’ track record when it comes to developing innovations; but I do think we’re pretty decent at adopting innovations once they’re available. Olswang has already signed on to the Acculaw system, some law firms are already using Neota, and lawyers of all kinds found the “law school law firm” to be worth a close look. I’d like to see bar associations and lawyer regulators consider these and other emerging options for Initial Professional Development as possible external solutions to the new lawyer training fiasco we’ve foisted on ourselves thus far.
If we’ve learned anything from our current situation, it’s that Initial Professional Development has to be taken seriously as the first and fundamental competence responsibility that comes with self-regulatory status. This will probably sound very familiar to you, but: just because we’ve always ushered lawyers into the profession this way doesn’t mean it’s good enough, or that we should keep on doing it this way. Multiple players have something to contribute to new lawyer training, including law schools, law firms and private-sector providers; but at the end of the day, the organized bar has to pull it all together, decide on a new approach, and enforce it. And “the end of the day” had better arrive very soon.