News & Updates

Last September, we held our 5th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference, where we welcomed approximately 100 legal educators and legal employers from around the country (and the world!) to discuss the measurement of meaningful learning outcomes and development of hiring criteria, focusing on the results of our Foundations for Practice project. It has become a tradition to kick off the first day of the conference with a series of Ignite presentations (snappy, 6 minute, auto-advancing) from ETL Consortium School faculty who want to share their projects, successes, and ideas. Presenters spoke on topics ranging from faculty resources to career development to simulations. You can find recordings of all of the 2016 Ignites below.

The latest IAALS report offers insights for legal employers and aims to close the employment gap. Many legal employers still rely on criteria like class rank, law school prestige, and law review participation to inform hiring decisions, but how effective are those criteria in making good hires? A study released today by IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, finds that when it comes to hiring “the whole lawyer,” experience matters. IAALS’ latest report, Hiring the Whole Lawyer: Experience Matters, continues to share insights from a study of more than 24,000 lawyers that promises to inform the way new lawyers are educated and hired.

Our Foundations for Practice project has permeated the profession as law schools and legal employers seek to bridge the gap between ensuring students learn the right skills and competencies to be successful in practice and ensuring legal employers have the best hiring criteria to secure the right candidates.

There is an exciting movement toward practical legal education in U.S. law schools. There are many good reasons for this movement, including demand from students and potential students, as well as demand from the employers and clients that will hire those students. Additionally, a plethora of compelling studies strongly suggest that adults learn best through practical, contextual, experiential education.

By now, anyone who is familiar with the Foundations for Practice study knows that the data provides a gold mine of information for law schools, the legal profession (especially legal employers), and law students/recent grads.  What makes the list so surprising is not necessarily each individual item, but rather the fact that the things lawyers believe we aspiring attorneys need in the short term are all (mostly) completely within our own control.

Last month, we gathered legal educators, practitioners, and judges from across the country for—wait for it—our 5th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference. As we kicked off the conference on the first day of fall, we reflected on the meaning of harvest.

As a current second-year law student at the University of Denver Sturm College of Law, having the opportunity to attend the 5th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference last month felt a little bit like eavesdropping on my parents as they discussed what my brothers and I would be getting for Christmas.

Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers honored Martin “Marty” J. Katz, former Dean of the University of Denver Sturm College of Law with the 2016 Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers (ETL) Award. Katz served as Dean of Sturm College of Law from 2009 to 2016 and led its development and implementation of a major strategic plan, which included significant initiatives in experiential learning. He is a founding board member of Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, a national consortium of law schools that are leading efforts to improve legal education. In addition, Katz serves as a member of IAALS’ Board of Advisors.

It’s September which means at IAALS, it's time for our 5th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference. This year’s Conference comes fresh off the heels of ETL’s groundbreaking report, Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient, which revealed the keys to career success.

The results of our Foundations for Practice study continue to reverberate throughout law schools and the legal profession, and the concepts of “The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient” are being covered in the press as well.

After the release of the first two reports from our Foundations for Practice project, Law Week Colorado published an article highlighting the groundbreaking findings, which “have the power to radically shift the discussion about what law schools teach and how employers hire."

Figuring out how to educate law students to meet the needs of modern law practice is vitally important given shrinking job markets and changing demands on lawyers. IAALS has accepted that challenge with its Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers initiative, which focuses on preparing new lawyers for successful participation in the legal profession. Law schools have traditionally focused on applicants’ LSAT scores and grade point averages to determine admissions to law schools. This produces a student body designed to perform well on standardized tests and in college-type settings. 

Our Foundations for Practice survey set out to define what new lawyers are lacking. After working with state bar organizations to distribute the survey across the country, we are sitting on more than 24,000 responses from lawyers in all 50 states. Today, we are releasing two exciting outcomes from the survey.

Today, aspiring lawyers across the country will sit for a bar examination that is intended to test their preparation for practice and will determine whether they will join the ranks of the legal profession this fall. While the bar examination has long been the measurement of what law graduates need in order to enter the profession, the profession and legal employers have nonetheless questioned its efficacy and the efficacy of legal education as a whole in actually preparing new lawyers. Many believe that American law schools are graduating lawyers unprepared to meet the demands of modern practice. Yet knowing what new lawyers need to succeed, and how they can acquire it effectively, was elusive until now.

In a recent article, Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Fellow John Lande breaks down the results of a creative session held at the American Bar Association’s Section on Dispute Resolution Conference earlier this year. The session (and article) borrows its message from hockey great Wayne Gretzky, who said he always tried to skate “where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

As law schools across the country strive to produce lawyers who can hit the ground running—and as we gear up to launch our Foundations for Practice findings—Alli Gerkman, Director of Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, has been hitting the road around the country to explain how legal educators and employers can work together to shape the future of legal education.

Deans of law schools throughout the nation are faced with unprecedented challenges in legal education: significant restructuring in the legal employment market, high student debt loads, dramatic declines in applicants for admission, rapid technological advances, students who learn in new ways, shifting accreditation standards, national ranking systems, and concerns from the bench and bar about the preparedness of new lawyers. Against this background, it is so critical that deans have a forum to interact with each other, practitioners, judges, a variety of legal employers, and the many parties interested in and committed to the future of legal education.

The Journal of Experiential Learning at Touro College Jacob D. Fuchsberg Law Center (an ETL Consortium school) is looking for papers for the Fall/Winter 2016 volume. The topic is “Loosening the Walls of the Legal Academy: The Bench and the Bar as Legal Educators.”

There is lots of talk about making changes in legal education at law schools. That's no surprise, law professors love to talk. If they loved practicing law, they'd be lawyers. Instead, ensconced in the ivory tower, safe from the perils of the real world, they leisurely debate what should happen to those poor souls (law students) who must leave the hallowed halls of law school, and actually go out in the world to practice law.

It is hard to believe it has been seven months since our 4th Annual Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers Conference last fall, where we presented initial results from our Foundations for Practice survey. Since that gathering, we have heard from countless legal educators who are embarking on the process to define and measure learning outcomes—and who are using Foundations for Practice to inform that process.