News & Updates

Princeton Review released their 2018 law school rankings at the end of October—top 10 lists with categories like “Best Classroom Experience,” “Most Competitive Students,” and “Best Career Prospects.” Many of the rankings are based on student feedback; in fact, 10 of the 11 categories either feature or are based entirely on responses to a student survey (“Toughest to Get Into” is the only category based wholly on institutional data). The surveys asked students about professors’ teaching ability and accessibility, number of hours spent studying, diversity, sense of community, and opportunities for externships, internships, and clerkships, among many other topics.

In a recent article, Gillian Hadfield, Professor of Law and Economics at the University of Southern California, commented on how the United States legal education system has in some ways become stale. She suggests that law schools aren't preparing graduates to accurately address the legal and regulatory needs found in our rapidly changing society.

Hello! My name is Heather Buchanan, and I am a second-year law student at the University of Colorado Law School in Boulder. I am thrilled to be attending the 6th Annual Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference in Denver this Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (October 5–7). The theme of this year's conference is "Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers... to Serve Tomorrow's Clients," which will focus on client needs, improvements in delivering legal services, and—most importantly—ways to bring those concepts into law schools to better prepare the next generation of lawyers.

When law school applications took a downturn around 2011, some law schools redesigned their curricula to add more experiential learning opportunities. Aimed at ensuring that their students were prepared for practice after graduation—and improving their graduates' chances of getting hired—schools hoped the refocused offerings might attract more applicants. In the midst of this shift, David Thomson and Stephen Daniels planned a three-year study of students at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law. The results were published recently in an article titled, "If You Build it, They Will Come: What Students Say About Experiential Learning."

With nearly 30 percent of lawyers responding to our Foundations for Practice survey indicating that “life experience between college and law school” was “very helpful” (and another 49 percent saying it was “helpful”), why don’t lawyers discuss these experiences more on resumes or in interviews? The focus generally is to keep their background “strictly legal,” but the Foundations survey indicates that employers are looking for new hires that have grit, work ethic, and experience. And if you’re a young lawyer, likely the only place you can draw on past experience is non-legal jobs.

Last night, Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Director Alli Gerkman was honored at the 12th Annual Raising the Bar Dinner hosted by the Colorado Women’s Bar Association Foundation. Each year, the CWBA Foundation honors women lawyers “who have made a difference in our communities and have ‘raised the bar’ for all of us.” With over 400 people in attendance, Alli was honored along with four other women attorneys for their work to raise the bar through reform or innovation “that has significant systemic impact.”

At next month's Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers Conference, we will spend Saturday morning in a Design Thinking workshop. It will be a hands-on way to learn what a design approach is, for you to use as an experiential teaching method or as a problem-solving process. When you hear the word “design,” you might assume this method is all about visuals, making things look nice, and choosing the best PowerPoint themes. Good visual design is important. But “Design Thinking” focuses not so much on visuals, as on solving problems in more human-centered and experimental ways. It's about understanding a challenge area from different stakeholders' perspectives, and then quickly building and testing new solutions to see which have the greatest promise.

A while back, Alli Gerkman wrote about the importance of life experience for new lawyers. But lawyers often don’t discuss these experiences on resumes or in interviews. They try to keep their background “strictly legal.” But the Foundations for Practice survey indicates that employers are looking for new hires that have grit, work ethic, and experience. And if you’re a young lawyer, likely the only place you can draw on past experience is non-legal jobs. Along those lines, I recently asked the people in LawyerSlack.com (the largest, private, lawyers-only Slack community) about their work history and experience.

The 6th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference is right around the corner! In addition to our fantastic lineup of program speakers, we are excited to have fifteen Ignite presentations from a broad swath of law schools and legal organizations. As you may know, it has become ETL Conference tradition to kick off the first day of the conference with a series of Ignites. Presenters have 6 minutes, 20 slides, and 18 seconds per slide to share their projects, successes, and ideas.

In the name of simplicity, the ABA Council for the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar approved a proposal to roll back transparency in employment outcomes for law school graduates in a process that, itself, is under attack for its lack of transparency. Simplicity is a good thing, but not when it risks mischaracterizing important facts. Understanding how law graduates are employed is critical for prospective students, current students, law schools, and the profession—and under this approved proposal, we would know less than we do now.

The California State Bar recently released the results of a study on the state bar exam’s current cut score, or pass line. The study, which was accelerated in order to possibly apply a new score to the July 2017 exam, suggests two possible options for addressing concerns that the exam may be too hard: 1) Leave the pass line at its current score of 1440 (144 on the 200-point scale), or 2) Set an interim pass line of 1414 (141.4 on the 200-point scale). The Committee of Bar Examiners and the Board of Trustees’ Admissions and Education Committee voted to adopt the study and to collect public comments on both options until August 25.

The 6th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference is right around the corner! It has become ETL Conference tradition to kick off the first day with a series of Ignite presentations. Presenters have 6 minutes, 20 slides, and 18 seconds per slide to share their projects, successes, and innovative ideas with a room full of legal educators and employers. In past years, presenters—and attendees—have been mostly from Consortium Schools. This year, all registrants are welcome—and in that spirit, we are also inviting any registrant to give an Ignite presentation!

The legal profession is amid one of its most tumultuous periods ever. The way law firms conduct business is changing. Technology is upending many long held established practices. New entrants are entering the market and changing the way legal services are provided. And while there may be pros and cons to these changes, they are largely occurring because they produce better results for the ultimate end users of the legal system—clients.

A couple years ago, IAALS co-sponsored a conference called Client-Centric Legal Services. While there were many interesting takeaways, there was one that I still think about all the time. A speaker suggested that, in legal education, we spend so much time thinking about how to teach students to think like lawyers that we often forget we also need them to think like clients. The challenges facing the legal profession right now are many—and many of them will be more successfully addressed if we listen to and better understand the needs of legal consumers. That mindset begins in law school, which is why clients are at the center of our 6th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference.

IAALS is expanding: both in terms of our capacity for impact and in the literal expansion of our ranks. Specifically, we are delighted to announce that Managers Nathaniel Baca and Zack DeMeola and Research Assistant James Swearingen joined our organization in June. Already, they are broadening and deepening our work.

In January, I had the opportunity to present the results of IAALS’ Foundations for Practice study at the Association of American Law Schools’ Annual Meeting as part of the President’s Program. As always, I began my talk by framing the problems we are trying to fix through our work, and among the problems we simply cannot ignore are the lackluster employment rates for new law school graduates.

It didn’t surprise me when lawyers responding to our Foundations for Practice survey indicated that “life experience between college and law school” was helpful in identifying that a new lawyer has the foundations (characteristics, professional competencies, and legal skills) that they believe are important.

Consumer demand and innovations in the legal marketplace, especially technological advances, are leading the charge for changes in the legal profession. Many legal educators, lawyers, court administrators, and judges are embracing the evolution, but others are still reluctant to disrupt the status quo.

I am so proud to present to you our 2016 Annual Report, capturing a remarkable year in our existence and representing the work of our truly visionary staff. Last year we celebrated our tenth-year anniversary. As we embark upon the next ten, in this report we embrace the theme: The Stage is Set: Lights, Camera, Innovation. Throughout the report, you will find not only evidence of what we have accomplished, but also the ways in which we are setting the stage for continuing and fundamental change. You will also find quotes from Nobel Prize-winning bards, Tony Award-winning lyricists, and favorite authors—that inspire the creative in each of us. 

My work on the classroom/traditional side has never needed empirical justification. By contrast, my work on the experiential side has always been met by skepticism by those who share my belief in the value of the classroom. Experiential education is not the status quo; it is always subject to demands for empirical evidence of its value.