Legal News

Who Should Foot the Bill for the ?Worthless? Young Associates?

By Ashby Jones

In December, we ginned up this post about something we termed The First-Year Dilemma.

We described the dilemma like this: nobody wants to foot the bill for training young law-firm associates. Law schools don’t train people to practice law. General counsels are increasingly insisting that young associates don’t get staffed on cases and deals — because they really don’t know what they’re doing. So the financial and practical onus is falling to the law firms. And they’re not happy about it.

But we’re now seeing signs that this might be changing — and that sound of cracking ice just might be coming from the law schools.

Last Friday, a packed classroom filled with, among others, 75 law deans, members of law-school faculties and lawyers, listened to a discussion about the need to change U.S. legal education — partly, it seems, in an effort to address The First-Year Dilemma. Click here for the American Lawyer story.

At the talk, Chester Paul Beach, associate general counsel of United Technologies Corp., “hammered home the need for more real-world training,” and added that United Technologies refuses to pay for first or second years because “they’re worthless.” Schools need to step up and start training people how to become lawyers, Beach said.

Panelists also discussed alternative law school models that might be worth exploring: accelerated programs, experiential learning and distance learning. Every school can’t be Harvard, and every school shouldn’t follow the same system, said Joseph Altonji, from consulting firm Hildebrandt Baker Robbins. Schools should specialize, he said, “because we need different kinds of practitioners.”

Something needs to change, it seems. As Vielka Holness, director of the Pre-Law Institute at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice said, the problem is that “we’re teaching all our students as if they want to be professors.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on April 13, 2010 (boomark / email).