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[quote=Exlawdean][quote=Anonymous]I have a couple of questions:

1. Unauthorized practice of law (UPL) - My understanding is that there is no clear line where practicing law begins and ends outside of litigating in court and providing a legal opinion.  It seems that traditional legal services are under assault by legal tech, the big 4/consultants, and general cost cutting.  For example, shifting previous attorney roles to lesser paid compliance roles; having compliance consultants copy in-house counsel to obtain attorney-client privilege on certain matters; or tax accountants editing formation/merger documents.  Do you see this trend continuing and how do you think it will affect the already saturated legal market?  Should law schools do something either by changing what is taught or better defining the practice of law to protect the value of the JD? [i]Law schools can only do a few things to help protect the value of a JD. Technological and economic changes will produce, in my opinion, a reduction in the demand for lawyers. One strategy is to emphasize teaching about practice areas that will (and I am guessing here) be more resistant to the incursion of AI. I started a class in Entertainment Law and Business for exactly that reason. The social and technological changes that buffet the entertainment industry would, I thought, make it less rewarding to "train" an AI machine on historical records. Similarly, the few law professors I know who think about such things have concluded that regulatory law (which for these purposes is an amalgam of courses on Administrative Law plus the subject matter courses on regulation, such as Environmental Law, Telecommunications Regulation, Securities Regulation, etc.) may fit the bill. Technological plus political changes often render the historical record to be of little use, except as prologue. We can also train our students how to use AI, likely part of the research and writing courses that one finds at every law school. I believe that most schools are anticipating doing so.[/i]

2. Legal education - It seems legal education has stagnated for sometime.  What needs to be updates to contend with the current job market and prepare students for the future impacts of things like AI? Do you think schools can evolve to tackle these issues?  Or will schools fail to evolve like after the introduction of ediscovery (where the big 4 ended up setting up ediscovery groups and the lawyers ended up in doc review)? [i]Some of this I answered in the paragraph, above. I can't really predict. Some firms, such as O'M&M, have set up ediscovery shops inside their firms. The firms that evolve best will do better.[/i]

3. Cost - It seems to me that making law school a graduate program has allowed schools to exponentially up the cost due to the way loans are distributed (no caps for grad school loans, while undergraduate loans have caps).  Did the institutions you worked at ever siphone money paid by the law students to subsidize other programs or initiatives that would not have a direct or indirect benefit on the law students?  [i]Yes. One of the schools took a substantial amount of money from both the Law School and the Business School and sent the money to the Medical School. And one of the universities explicitly took money from all academic units to fill in holes in the Athletic Department budget. It was beyond annoying.[/i]  Given that law school admissions generally requires no pre-requisite classwork or specific work experience, it seems there would be a benefit to moving it back to a undergraduate degree to lower costs via the cap on student loans and by not requiring students to pay for a bachelors first.  [i]This is a topic with a long history. The most common suggestion is just lopping off the last year of law school. This would save 1/3 the cost. Judge Richard Posner was an advocate of this approach. Some suggest that we should adopt something more like the German system, where law is an undergraduate degree. Note that they also require a couple of years of post graduate internships. China, on the other hand, as well as Japan, have both moved in the opposite direction, setting up post graduate law schools.[/i] Where do you stand on maintaining the JD graduate scheme?  If for the status quo, what are the benefits of keeping the JD a graduate degree? [i]The main value, IMO, is that when we graduate our students and send them into the world they are older and more experienced. I think the real issue that you are having is that law school is so darned expensive, leading to huge debt loads. This is truly a recent phenomenon, and has been driven by (at least) two factors. First, the introduction of federally insured student loans several decades ago greatly increased demand for law school. As economics 101 tells us, when demand for something goes up, the price of that thing tends to rise. Second, the USN&WR rankings of law schools has included factors that prompted law schools to increase the costs of providing a legal education. Most directly, expenditures per student did that. Faculty/student ratio did that. At many schools the faculty/student ratio has almost doubled in the past 50 years. In addition, almost every law school has added enormous numbers of staff people in the past 50 years. They are in not just admissions and placement, but also in communications, student services (including therapists in some schools), facilities and maintenance, event staffing, etc. All of this costs money (which helps raise expenditures/student) and provides a more appealing experience. But it also drives up tuition, and the need for loans. These factors have turned law school into an extremely expensive endeavor. The easiest way to handle that would be to operate leaner, much as we did in the early 1970s. I must admit -- I would not like to try to implement the "rollback" this would require.[/i]

4. Curves/grading - How accurate do you think schools are at ranking students along the curve?  After discussions with how some of my professors graded work, I was already concerned that there was some margin of error in ranking, but my law school experience led me to believe that it was higher than I imagined (eg, while drinking scotch on a plane). Some schools also have moved to the honors/pass/fail grading system.  Do you think that system better captures students ability/potential?[/quote][i]Professors think about grading all the time. We worry about it. Here's what we know. 1. Students' grades correlate highly between courses. If a student gets an A in one course, the probability is high that the student will get an A in a second course. Thus, whatever it is that we are reacting to when we read exam answers, we (professors) tend to react in the same way. 2. Some of us use multiple choice question, similar to those on the bar examination. Students' scores on multiple choice questions correlate highly with their scores on answers to essay questions. 3. There has been grade inflation over the past 40 years. 4. Grading answers to essay questions is the most boring part of a law professor's job. That is unanimous. The most difficult task is paying attention when reading the 40th answer in a row to the same essay prompt. I don't condone drinking while grading, but I understand it. 5. We are profoundly uncertain about making small distinctions -- e.g. A or A-? -- but quite confident about making large ones -- e.g. A or B-?.[/i]

[i]I apologize for having missed some of the posts along the way. I have been dealing with a bathroom redo and it has been consuming my time (and our money). I will attempt to insert italicized responses where I think I have a reasonable answer.[/i][/quote]

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