The Canadian Bar Association’s 2014 Legal Futures report touches upon interesting issues for improving legal education: The how, by whom, what and input/output orientation of legal education. Reading today’s Huffington Post shows these issues are similarly relevant for legal education in other countries.
The reports’executive summary states the following:
The key to establishing a viable, competitive, relevant and representative legal profession in Canada in the future is innovation — not just the development and adoption of technology-driven platforms and service delivery models, although they are critical, but also through new ideas about how lawyers are educated and trained, and how they are regulated to maintain professional standards while protecting the public.
Because the legal profession is not homogeneous, it is important to build flexibility and choice into any proposed changes for the future. One size does not fit all.
Recommendations
The report provides three recommendations that are important for legal education:
Recommendation 15:
Legal education providers, including law schools, should be empowered to innovate so that students can have a
choice in the way they receive legal education, whether through traditional models or through restructured,
streamlined or specialized programs, or innovative delivery models.
This is quite a welcome change. Innovation on the how and by whom question:
The level of legal education is still trails behind compared to the way professionals are educated and trained in similar fields like medicine. Therefore, any opening to today’s educational insights is more than welcome.
Interestingly, in the Netherlands one of the big law firms recently questioned the wisdom of the law school as the only road to become a lawyer. “Why should a surgeon not be able to become a lawer, provided he/she passes relevant and required tests?”.
I support the breaking open of the monopoly that the law schools hold over legal education for lawyers. There is no good explanation for the monopoly. It stifles competition and innovation.
Recommendation 16:
An integrated, practical approach, including multidisciplinary skills training, should be incorporated into substantive
curricula to provide “translational knowledge” – the ability to turn critical knowledge of legal concepts, regulatory
processes, and legal culture into actual problem-solving ability in practice.
This recommendation seems to be taken out of TrainWell’s mantra. Not only the what question but much more so the how question should be part of the legal education. Unfortunately, there is currently not much place in today’s focus of the lecturer covering what is important.
This current focus simply does not do the job. Learners must in addition learn how to deal with legal content in actual situations. Covering content is only the means to learning. But learning itself should be the focus of legal education and training.
Recommendation 17:
The curriculum for academic legal education should focus on learning outcomes and should be developed in
consultation with key stakeholders.
Just read law school’s marketing material. It is about learning inputs. It is full of how great their offering and professors are. There is preciously little on the outputs: the proven results, what graduated students can do now, and how useful their learning turns out to be to themselves, their clients and their organisations. Does law school deliver career-ready students? Because that is the value of legal education!