Legal Education: The Unofficial Theme of the ABA's 2013 Annual Meeting
This first appeared on August 26, 2013, in the print edition of LawWeek Colorado.
The American Bar Association's 2013 Annual Meeting in San Francisco was a sprawling event with thousands of attendees spread out over 20 hotels and attending more than 200 continuing legal education programs and countless other meetings. Given all of this, it was interesting to watch as common themes began to emerge and thread the event and its participants together. One of those themes was legal education.
Of course, I'm a bit biased. As the director of a national legal education initiative, legal education is my theme every day, so it only makes sense that I would key into the topic. But the problems facing legal education have captured the attention of a national audience. Issues like law student debt, low employment rates, and inadequacies in law school curricula have settled comfortably into the front pages of major newspapers and play a near-daily role in online news and blogs.