#33 – Law school didn’t prepare me for this

My boss stares at me through his glasses. “Didn’t they teach you this?”

I’m embarrassed. I stare at the floor. I rack my brain and answer timidly:

“N-no. They didn’t.”

How could a five-year degree not prepare me for Law Clerk-level tasks?

I already took aim at PLT here, but let’s recap a little. Law school is like learning how to play basketball by learning the rules until you know them inside-out.

Practice is when you step out onto the Court for the first time and face the Harlem Globetrotters. It suddenly turns you from a baller into a bawler if you don’t catch on quickly.

It doesn’t prepare you for writing letters, making phone calls, or billing clients. It also doesn’t prepare you for when you’re at a party and someone asks you whether they can sue their mechanic for ruining their car because it’s making a funny noise now.

Law school assignments are for legal academics. Law schools are failing actual lawyers.

The job market doesn’t demand people who know the Magna Carta. Your clients aren’t interested in the philosophy of punishment. Your supervisor will never ask you to discuss utilitarianism in a 3,000 word document complete with AGLC referencing.

Then the exam is for when your computer breaks down and you need to recall entire bodies of law in 90 minutes to answer increasingly esoteric questions. You also can’t collaborate and split the work between yourselves.

It’s absurd and it misrepresents the profession to classes of budding, enthusiastic students. Then we wonder why we struggle with steep learning curves and difficult tasks.

Then there’s technology! The most employable lawyers have great IT skills, the less employable will only experience being on hold with IT department for hours until they turn it off and on again.

Then of course there’s all the laws surrounding technology, and the potential for almost one-quarter of lawyers’ work to be automated.

Until law schools change their course assessments to more practical tasks like letter writing, more collaborative tasks and maybe some Microsoft Excel classes; they will continue to underprepare generations of lawyers.

Next week: Too many nights in Solitude