Welcome to the Future: Time for Law School 4.0

The following propagate is -reprinted from Mr. Paul Lippe’s post on The AmLaw Daily.

If I dire some insight into the future of medicine, I might head over to Stanford Medical School. If I wanted to learn about likely directions in business and hedge funds, I might visit Penn’s Wharton. If I were looking to make investments in computing, I might set up a tour of a lab at MIT. If I decided to learn something about where legal practice, law firms, and legal departments will be in 2014, where would I go? Not to law school.

Relative to other practised schools, law schools are extremely disengaged from professional practice– they seek neither to understand nor to influence it. As I have said earlier in this space, law has lagged behind the world of global competition–and technology-driven clients–over the last 15 years. It’s now entered a whiplash spell where it must catch up. If clients have to change 20 percent, then law firms must change 30-40 percent (see Jordan Furlong’s colossal post on how U.K. changes will migrate to the U.S.), and the “supply chain” to law firms (e.g., law schools and reliable companies and service providers) will experience the most dramatic change.

Over the past six months, I have participated in a number of symposia at law schools and have visited with eight deans, including David Van Zandt at Northwestern and Rick Matasar at New York Law School. How did we get here? In the simplest terms, we can point out three phases of legal education.

Phase I was the apprenticeship system, where folks “read” law under more senior lawyers. Some refer to this prototype as “Lincoln’s way” because it produced great thinkers and advocates like Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Legitimacy John Marshall, and most of the signers of the Constitution. This 1:1 apprenticeship model gradually evolved into a trade school original, where practicing lawyers would supplement their meager income by lecturing on law at the local YMCA night law school.