#13 – PLT-Why?

I wanted to be a sporting legend.

I wrote a story as a kid about coming off the bench for Melbourne in the Grand Final in the afternoon and winning the cricket World Cup for Australia that night – terrible scheduling if you ask me!

Now imagine if to become a sportsperson you studied for 5 years. Each subject was a semester of learning the rules of a sport: footy, basketball, croquet, boxing. You never step foot into a ring or an oval, just learn the rules in a lecture hall.

Then after 5 years of uni, you do a 6-week intensive. Each week you train intensely for a different sport. Since a week isn’t long enough to learn a sport fully, you just learn a couple of skills per sport.

Are you ready to be a sportsperson? Of course not!

So why does Law do that? You spend years at uni learning laws and being tested with academic, impractical essays; but work does not resemble any of this. It’s about drafting documents, conducting interviews and speaking succinctly.

So after university you enroll in Practical Legal Training (PLT) where for a couple of months you half-learn about 0.1% of those practical skills. It’s a faulty machine, churning out ill-prepared lawyers for the workforce.

It makes more sense to incorporate the practical skills into law school as follows:

1. Scrap traditional exams and assignments. Instead, give students a ‘file’ for the semester. They learn substantive laws in lectures and practical skills in tutorials so they can ‘run the file’. You can even include negotiation or mooting.
   

2. Provide templates and precedents. Law is not a creative-writing class. Often the correct way to draft documents would yield a 98% Turnitin score and be considered plagiarism at law school.
   

3. Encourage students to collaborate. Learn to ask for help and to help each other, because your senior partners won’t always be there for you. If you come to the same answer, that’s not collusion, that’s cooperation.
   

4. Include actual pro bono legal work so those most in need of legal assistance have teams of young, skilled paralegals to help them. Students should feel satisfied with their early work experience.

That’s how you create skilled lawyers.

Next week: Swipe left on your new home