DefDog: Law Schools Not Teaching How to Lawyer

04 Education, Academia, Cultural Intelligence
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DefDog

This just doesn't apply to lawyers, but most college grads are ill
prepared to enter the work force….

What They Don’t Teach Law Students: Lawyering

New York Times,  November 19, 2011

EXTRACT:

What they did not get, for all that time and money, was much practical training. Law schools have long emphasized the theoretical over the useful, with classes that are often overstuffed with antiquated distinctions, like the variety of property law in post-feudal England. Professors are rewarded for chin-stroking scholarship, like law review articles with titles like “A Future Foretold: Neo-Aristotelian Praise of Postmodern Legal Theory.”

So, for decades, clients have essentially underwritten the training of new lawyers, paying as much as $300 an hour for the time of associates learning on the job. But the downturn in the economy, and long-running efforts to rethink legal fees, have prompted more and more of those clients to send a simple message to law firms: Teach new hires on your own dime.

“The fundamental issue is that law schools are producing people who are not capable of being counselors,” says Jeffrey W. Carr, the general counsel of FMC Technologies, a Houston company that makes oil drilling equipment. “They are lawyers in the sense that they have law degrees, but they aren’t ready to be a provider of services.”

Read full article.

Phi Beta Iota:  The entire US educational system is hosed.  From college students who graduate with no more capability than high school graduates to half century ago, to “professional” degrees that do not teach how to “do” only how to take tests, the disconnect from reality is huge.   While some intelligence studies have emerged, after the pioneering effort of Mercyhurst under Bob Heibel, they do not actually teach the craft of intelligence or how to do holistic analytics or create workable open source information technology support packages — they simply prepare rounded cogs for the secret intelligence world.

See Also:

Education (General) (128)

Education (Universities) (58)

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