A visit to the famed Mayo Clinic last year got Douglas Sylvester thinking. The medical residency system gives fledgling doctors real-world experience under close supervision, so why doesn’t anything similar exist for new lawyers beyond the sink-or-swim law firm associate system?
Sylvester, dean at Arizona State University Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, set out to create what he hopes will be the first large-scale, nonprofit training law firm affiliated with a law school. Administrators are still working out the details, but hope to have the as-yet-to-be named firm up and running by 2013.
