Deborah Jones Merritt: Client-Centered Law Schools

Deborah Jones Merritt (Ohio State), Client Centered Law Schools:

[L]aw schools should educate students to provide the qualities that clients seek. How would law schools do that?

Many people asking this question point to the medical school model, suggesting that law schools should adopt one (or two) years of clinical rotations, perhaps followed by additional years of residency. I would not adopt that model wholesale. For one thing, it is far too expensive for the legal profession. Medical education rests upon enormous payments from Medicare, private insurance, government research grants, and private research funding, plus hefty tuition. Medicare alone contributes $9.1 billion a year to teaching hospitals, which helps pay for resident salaries and teaching costs. We don't have that kind of government support or private insurance in law.

But that shouldn't stop us from making legal education more responsive to clients. There are solutions that lie within our grasp, some of which borrow from less well known corners of medical education. I'll limit this post to my first four suggestions.

The first step is simply to embrace client needs as a measuring stick for curriculum decisions. That's a surprisingly radical notion in legal education. We talk sometimes about meeting student needs, and we reflect other times on employer demands. We plot constantly about how to raise our US News ranking. But we rarely ask directly, does this course/program/pedagogical method maximize the value we are providing to future clients? ...

The second step is to bring clients into the curriculum. One of the best features of medical school, in my opinion, is that students practice patient interviews and meet real patients during their very first year. ...

Third, I would seek new models to add hands-on professional work to legal education. There are ambitious ideas like Bradley Borden and Robert Rhee's proposal for a law school firm. I can imagine smaller initiatives involving partnerships between law schools and particular employers. ...

Fourth, I would rethink the teaching of every doctrinal course. ...

Those are my first four ideas for creating more client-centered law schools. Since you know me by now, you can guess that I have a lot more suggestions. A few of the others are (a) academic prerequisites to law school admission; (b) upper-level "uncasebooks" that teach the law without appellate opinions; (c) courses on law practice management and trends in the business of law; (d) law practice shadowing opportunities; (e) introductions to more of the technologies used in law practice; and (f) requiring every full-time faculty member and top-level administrator to demonstrate ongoing proficiency in the rules of professional responsibility. ...

How will we pay for these changes? Not through increased tuition. I would ask all tenured faculty to recognize the disproportionate amount of time we have devoted to research during the last twenty years and to "give back" some of that time by spending a disproportionate amount of time on pedagogic reform over the next three years. Going forward, I would reduce the amount of time and money we devote to research rather than teaching. I strongly support academic research; despite its critics, research too benefits clients and society. But there were many law professors who produced outstanding scholarship before 1980; indeed, their work still influences us. Those professors generated their scholarship with heavier teaching loads, less research support, and no computers. I think we can match those standards today -- and even retain our computers.

Update:

• Scott Fruehwald (Legal Skills Prof Blog)
• Paul Horwitz (Alabama)