Law school infamously “overprepares” and “underprepares” attorneys for the real world. Law students take on massive debt to fund not just their own professional development, but also the legal publishing careers of law school faculty. While Stephen King made his author money from retail sales of books, and from licensing rights to Hollywood movies, law professors make a lot of their living publishing articles in trade journals, while financed by law students’ professional debt. So law classes – particularly electives – skew towards academic pet projects, rather than the skills development for a working practitioner. Many such examples exist, esp. for third-year courses (fourth-year courses for many night students).
Meanwhile, Civil Procedure courses will teach law students that Fed. R. Civ. P. 30 covers depositions, but that rule’s text will not explain what typically happens in a deposition. One must watch one, participate in one, read one, attack one in motions practice, to “get it”.
A law school Property professor will explain (poorly) the rarely-encountered Rule Against Perpetuities in real estate transactions. If the professor is sufficiently cruel, she will attempt to test that Rule on a final exam. But law school does not teach law students how to get a deed filed in a state with 24 circuit court clerks, and 48 different opinions on how to read “uniform” statutes and rules on deeds.
Professional Responsibility/Ethics courses will warn students – pretty much correctly – that messing with escrow funds or escrow accounting is the fastest express train to disbarment. But those same courses will not teach a student by hands-on work how to obey any jurisdiction’s reconciliation requirements for those accounts – by handing the student a stack of checks, deposit slips, other records and a spreadsheet and telling the student to produce a compliance escrow account record.
Law schools will typically fund a Career Services office (to comply on paper with ABA Standard 508) with paid staffers, to act as a mail drop and bookshelf for literature from big firms and the publicly-funded Pro Bono Industrial Complex. Career Services will not usually teach students the basic economics of much of the private bar – the Finding/Minding/Grinding split (more on that in another post.) It usually cannot do so; Career Services is staffed by debt-funded salaried admin personnel who, generally, have never “found,” “minded” or “ground.”
It would be like asking the late Barbara Bush for advice about selling heroin successfully in west Baltimore or cocaine on Wall Street. Mrs. Bush never learned about “slinging” by slinging. The more honest, self-aware law schools encourage networking and mentoring outside of academia, as a means of blunting the abundant defects of their own expensive enterprise. But this is a devastating confession of mission failure, at the same time.
If law schools occupied less of a captive market due to Bar exam pre-conditions, were less expensive or were shorter (two years rather than three), maybe the academic approach to lawyering would be less worthy of criticism. Every lawyer knows – in the first person, from our own first-hand mortifications of the soul from our early careers – how far the distance is from “law school grad” to “lawyer whom I will trust with my gold.” Marine recruits routinely enter Camp Pendleton and Parris Island and come out as Marines. The Marines do not have to invest much to “undo” the shortcomings of the Crucible, Yet here we are, now nearly as much as in 1994, when Maryland admitted me into this thing, before the Internet even existed for most people, with law students and recent law grads simply unready for the transition from studying to “doing the doing.”
So this Crablaw blog is an attempt, by a working Maryland attorney of a few decades, to fill some of the persistent gaps between the production of mortar-boarded “law school graduates” and the profession’s “techne“, the non-academic art of “knowing how” rather than merely “knowing what”. This posts will primarily be about “evergreen” topics – ethics, practice tips, career management, long-standing precedents. The podcast will be short clips and summaries of more current events, new cases and laws and “hot topics.”
I hope that all of this may be useful to a few, especially here in Maryland and our greater region, to blunt mentoring gaps and the practical distance between law school classrooms and the workbenches of attorneys assisting clients.