Articles Posted in Law Students

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For many years I have taken excerpts and quotes from the powerful devastating criticism of legal education called The MacCrate Report.

The official name for it is Legal Education and Professional Development – An Educational Continuum, Report of The Task Force on Law Schools and the Profession: Narrowing the Gap, American Bar Associatioin, Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, July, 1992.

While the report is 414 pages long, one way to summarize it is by saying that the task force stated that there are ten fundamental skills that a lawyer needs to practice law and that the law schools teach two of them poorly. There are four fundamental values of the legal profession and while the report does not analyze the performance of the law schools, there is evidence that the law schools do not teach them well either.

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In a previous post requesting that I be appointed law school industry czar, I noted that recent graduates had testified about

“how their experience in law school had destroyed their self-confidence, their self-esteem and their sense of self-worth”

That statement is based on my personal twenty-five years experience advising law students and lawyers. When asked what it is that I do, I always say that one of the most significant aspects of my advising is helping clients rebuild or gain self-confidence and self-esteem. I am not a therapist. I have NO training in that field. What I do know is that my clients are basically intelligent creative thoughtful individuals. What I also know is what has caused them to feel the way they do – attending law school, especially the highly selective ones.

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Change will not come if we wait for some other person or some other time. We are the ones we have been waiting for. We are the change that we seek. Barack Obama


In May ,2005, Lloyd Cutler died at the age of 87. He served as White House counsel to Presidents Carter and Clinton. In 1962 he cofounded Wilmer Cutler & Pickering, one of DC’s leading law firms which merged in 2004 with Boston’s Hale and Dorr. John Podesta, White House Chief of Staff during the Clinton administration said, “Lloyd was a giant in the legal community. In a town split by partisanship, he had enormous credibility and respect on both sides of the aisle. He founded and acted as Cochairman of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law.

In 1980, he said

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So, one day in late 1989, just after my position as public interest adviser at Harvard Law School was eliminated because the new dean said that there was insufficient interest among its students to warrant having such a position and because I was not immediately walked out of the building, I had time to undertake a few projects.

I decided to review the first position taken by its graduates over the previous five years – 1984-1989.

What struck me (but did not shock me since I was generally aware of what I would find) was that of the 2500 graduates of that law school – men and women who, during the previous decade or so of their lives, had lead organizations, created works of art, traveled around the world, written articles and started businesses – ONLY FOUR (4) out of 2500 had NOT taken JOBS – ONLY FOUR (4) out of 2500 had NOT become employees – ONLY FOUR (4) out of 2500 had maintained or kept the confidence they had when they entered law school that they could do something on their own. Two started City Year and two started a legal services program in Texas.

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Are you a law student attending a hard-to-get-into law school (notice that I did not use the descriptive words “good” or “best” or “tier x”)?If yes, here’s a research project for you.

What percentage of the Class of 2006 graduates took positions right out of law school in BigLaw or did so after a judicial clerkship?

What percentage of the Class of 2006 dreamed of such positions when surveyed during their first year of law school?

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Jordan Furlong has posted an article in his blog entitled “The Crossed Purposes of Legal Education” about the law schools responsibility for the gap between what prospective law students imagine about the profession and the reality they find when they enter the legal workforce.

He refers to an article in Forbes describing “the great college hoax” drawing a comparison between professional schools and subprime mortgage hawkers inclluding misguided easy-money policies, half-truths exaggerating the value of its product adding “A few law schools deliberately obfuscate the rewards of a legal career, but too many more finesse or downplay the reality of the debt versus the earning power of a law degree.” 

He goes on to add

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