The American Bar Association has announced the establishment of a task force to review and make recommendations on the state of legal education and its responsiveness to the needs and opportunities of the legal market.
The Task Force on the Future of Legal Education will be chaired by recently retired Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Randall T Shepard (pictured). The announcement was made ahead of the ABA's annual meeting in Chicago.
ABA president William T (Bill) Robinson III said: "The growing public attention to the cost of a law school education, the uncertain job prospects for law school graduates and the delivery of legal services in a changing market warrant substantial examination and analysis by the ABA and the legal profession. Legal education must be evaluated in the context of the marketplace and the nation's and world's unprecedented challenges in an ever-more complex global economy."
Chief Justice Shepard explained, "The task force will solicit views in the widest way possible to help us identify how the bench, bar and legal education community can work together to provide meaningful opportunities for law students and graduates that benefit clients and the public at large."
According to the ABA announcement, the task force is expected to continue its work during the next two ABA presidential terms and conclude in 2014.
The issues were highlighted by Jonathan Goldsmith, secretary general of the Council of Bars and Law Societies of Europe. In article in the Law Society Gazette Mr Goldsmith wrote: "Last week, I wrote about going to the American Bar Association's (ABA) annual meeting to learn. Well, here comes the most important thing I discovered: the legal education system in the USA is going through an earthquake which is likely to topple existing structures."
Legal blogs in the US have been full recently of articles bemoaning the expense of obtaining a law degree ($100,000+). The result, according to Jonathan Goldsmith, is that "...the number of law school applicants has dropped by 25% in the last two years."
He went on to compare the situation in the US with that in Europe.
"We have some of the same problems as the USA," he wrote, "too many law graduates for too few jobs. The professions in Spain and Italy, for instance, are over-staffed with lawyers who cannot find jobs. But, in the European way, the state funds much more of legal education and the costs for students are lower, so that no head of steam has built up with law students claiming fraud after being seduced into an expensive education that leads nowhere and saddles them with gigantic debt."
A further demonstration of the international nature of the problem was highlighted in US legal blog Above the Law, which ran a link to a video entitled Dear me, don't go to law school, made for a symposium in Canada.