Schoolhouse Rock

When David Schizer was a first-year associate at New York's Davis Polk & Wardwell, he remembers being asked to mark up a stock purchase agreement. "I said I was happy to do it," he recalls, "but that I had two questions: One, what is a stock purchase agreement, and two, what do you mean, ‘mark it up'?"

Now, more than a decade later, as the dean of Columbia Law School, Schizer is one of many law school administrators and professors who are trying to revamp law school curricula to make sure graduates don't experience similarly clueless moments. Institutions such as Harvard Law School, Stanford Law School, Vanderbilt University Law School, Northwestern University School of Law, Washington and Lee University School of Law, and Columbia are supplementing traditional courses with more hands-on training. Among the changes: more courses on regulatory law, new clinics, ethics courses, and classes designed to give students more practical writing, negotiating, and research skills. A report on curriculum reform is due next year from a group of ten schools, including Stanford and Harvard, that have begun to revise their course offerings.

The innovations come at a time when a 2007 report by The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has focused new attention on the issue of revitalizing legal education. The Carnegie Foundation report calls for law schools to integrate more practical training with their traditional, analytical course offerings.

Several law firms, eager to hire students who are prepared for work from day one, welcome the newer, more pragmatic approach. "I think it's a positive development," says Mary Gail Gearns, the national hiring partner at Bingham McCutchen, who calls the Carnegie report's conclusions "well-founded." Law schools do "an excellent job of preparing students to do legal analysis," says Gearns, a securities lawyer based in New York. "I do think that law schools could do a better job of preparing students for the day-to-day realities of legal practice." Still, many hiring partners are cautious, suggesting that practical training should not be the main focus of a successful legal education. Many large firms, they point out, offer their own training programs.

The law school curriculum, in general, has changed very little since the case law method was developed in 1870, when common law still dominated the landscape, says Edward Rubin, dean of Vanderbilt's law school and the chairman of the curriculum committee of the Association of American Law Schools. "[Legal education] is not in touch with legal practice, legal theory, or educational theory," he says, citing changes such as the advent of regulatory law, globalization, and the large law firm. Educational theory has changed as well, recognizing that students learn from a variety of different experiences, Rubin says.

Typical contracts courses, for example, don't involve the reading, drafting, or negotiating of contracts, Rubin notes—instead, professors grill students on case law, using the Socratic method. "That doesn't give students any picture of what transactional law is like," Rubin says. "Yet a third of lawyers in mid-to-large firms are transactional lawyers," who rarely go into a courtroom. "Students who have no exposure to transactions are not in the position to make choices about what kind of firm to look for or what kind of practice will be the most amenable to them," he adds. "I think that's a problem."

The Carnegie Foundation, which has long studied and influenced professional education in the United States, also found much to criticize. Its 2007 report, "Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law," is part of a series of studies of professional education that has also examined theology, medical, nursing, and engineering programs. The legal profession suffers from "varying degrees of confusion and demoralization," the report says. "A reawakening of professional élan must include revitalizing legal preparation."

Based on interviews with experts and law school professors and visits to 16 public and private law schools in the United States and Canada, the Carnegie report found that law schools generally emphasized analytic training more than practical skills that could help students practice law after graduation. The report suggests that law schools offer a more integrated approach to learning, adding more clinical programs to a curriculum that continues to teach students to think analytically. Schools should also offer classes that allow students to learn how to exercise ethical and professional judgment and provide them with the opportunities to observe many different aspects of the legal profession, the Carnegie report recommends.

"Relatively few of the faculty [at most law schools] have practice experience," adds Carnegie Foundation senior scholar William Sullivan, the report's lead author. "Compare that to medical school." He suggests that more involvement by the practicing bar would have a beneficial effect on legal education.

It is difficult to gauge the report's impact, Rubin says, because the schools where it would probably have the greatest impact are already likely to innovate. Still, he says, "the report will undoubtedly have a catalytic effect on some of them."

At Washington and Lee, law school dean Rod Smolla says that the Carnegie report helped him make the case for dramatic changes in the school's third-year program. The curriculum overhaul, which was announced in March and will be implemented over the next three years, is aimed at easing the transition between law school and legal practice. Traditional classes will be replaced by courses that emphasize simulated or real-life practice experiences, and the school's clinical offering will be expanded. Outside lawyers will join faculty members in taking students through a year-long professionalism course that will explore legal ethics and current issues facing the legal profession. Students will be required to obtain a third-year practice certificate, enabling them to represent clients under the supervision of a licensed attorney.

"For many years I have believed law schools should be more ambitious and more innovative in our approach to legal education," writes Smolla in an e-mail. "I have believed that we could do more to educate ‘the whole lawyer,' to help students develop their professional identity and judgment, and to help them develop what is, in the end, the most intellectually interesting and most challenging part of being a lawyer: translating the intellectual and theoretical principles of law into problem-solving, counseling, and advocacy for clients in the real world."

Even before the Carnegie report was published, some law schools had made curriculum changes in recent years. Harvard and Vanderbilt now require first-year students to take a class on regulatory law. Several schools are focusing more on clinical education, following the lead of The City University of New York School of Law and the University of New Mexico School of Law, which for decades have required students to take clinical courses.

At Stanford, student participation in clinics has risen to almost 80 percent, up from 20 percent five years ago, says director of clinical education Lawrence Marshall. Students can choose from nine clinics, including ones focusing on environmental law, cyber law, transactions, and U.S. Supreme Court litigation. Dean Larry Kramer hopes to boost clinic enrollment to 100 percent and then to make clinical coursework a requirement. While acknowledging that teaching students analytic skills is a critical part of legal education, he believes that "listening and empathy with a client" is also crucial. Clinics give students the opportunity to learn how to understand clients' needs and to hone skills like negotiating and interviewing.

Both Stanford and Northwestern are also giving more emphasis to joint degree programs. Stanford now offers a whopping 27 joint degree programs through its medical, engineering, life sciences, and business schools. In 2001 Northwestern shortened its joint law and business degree from four years to three—the only top-tier school to offer such a short program—and since then has seen applications to the program double. Northwestern is currently considering more extensive curriculum changes, using input from alumni and from legal consulting firm Blaqwell Inc. Dean David Van Zandt says that the school wanted to "get a sense of what was happening in the marketplace" and how best to respond to the needs of major law firms; he plans to report on Blaqwell's findings later this spring.

Columbia's six-year-old Deals program combines full-time law school professors with active practitioners to offer nuts-and-bolts courses on subjects like mergers and acquisitions, taught by two partners from dealmaking powerhouse Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz, and mezzanine financing, taught by lawyers from Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson. A Deals workshop allows students to analyze contracts and work on simulated transactions. Even though the university has recruited a growing number of adjuncts to teach the courses—and the school has received $10 million in donations specifically aimed at the program—Schizer says the classes remain oversubscribed.

In general, hiring partners and re-cruiting directors welcome the changes that schools are introducing. "I think anything that gives students insight into the more practical aspects of legal practice is extremely welcome," says Gregory Shumaker, a litigator and firmwide hiring partner in Jones Day's Washington, D.C., office. "We want very smart students who understand the law, obviously, but we're also always looking for students who have a great practical sense of the practice of law as well," he says.

That said, attorneys at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, Fulbright & Jaworski, and Vinson & Elkins say that their firms offer comprehensive hands-on programs for summer clerks and young associates that cover topics like trial skills and contract drafting, in addition to practice-specific courses and pro bono externships. "Regardless of what they have learned in law school, we'll assume that there's still a lot to be done and a lot of learning to take place after they [join] us," says Thomas Leatherbury, a partner in V&E's litigation department.

But DLA Piper securities partner Jay Gary Finkelstein, who teaches a class at American University Washington College of Law in which students negotiate a simulated cross-border pharmaceutical deal, says that, in a course like his, students can gain a broader perspective than they would at a firm because they can take a more active role in the transaction than they would as associates. "Lawyers are too busy to provide the training during real-life environments," Finkelstein adds.

Some law firm partners would like to see law schools simply put more emphasis on the basics. "Many young lawyers are very dependent on online research, and some think that's the only way to do legal research—it's not," says Leatherbury. He suggests that many law students would benefit from clinics or courses that give them more opportunities to practice their writing and research skills. Legal recruiter Carol Kanarek of New York's Kanarek & Brady, LLC, says that some students hurt their later chances at big firms by their choices in noncore electives in law school. In a 2004 study of asso¬ciates who had been let go from major corporate firms, she found that most lacked commercial coursework in their second and third years of law school. Taking classes in accounting, tax law, and securities regulation—instead of the classes on Roman law or law in literature that some schools offer—will better prepare future corporate attorneys, Kanarek says.

Just as important as practical skills, say other hiring partners, clinical education gives students a more realistic sense of what it's like to be a lawyer. Students who take clinics and simulation courses are more confident when they start working, says Naima Walker-Fierce, Weil's New York–based national recruiting director. Walker-Fierce, who took part in one of Stanford's discussions on curriculum reform, is hoping that more students can learn about client interaction earlier on in law school. By taking more practical courses on transactions or litigation clinics in addition to the traditional analytical offerings, "students have the opportunity to better understand what a particular practice area is like," says John Cannon III, a hiring partner at Shearman & Sterling in New York.

"Anything that opens the students' eyes to what real-world practice is like would help with retention," says Jones Day's Shumaker. "We lose students who have an unrealistic view of what law practice is like."