Foundations For Practice

In the most recent issue of the Bar Examiner, Alli Gerkman and I discuss the perceived skills gap that affects employment for newly graduated law students, an issue that has even greater implications for the profession as a whole when new lawyers enter the workforce unprepared or underprepared.

Many law school staff, administration, and faculty members have reached out to IAALS to learn more about how the foundations we have identified can improve their own programs, or to share with us how they use the foundations to inform their teaching models—and we are going to continue the conversation in an upcoming webinar.

Law school clinics are often said to serve two goals. They are a place where law students can develop and practice their legal skills in a real setting, with the safety net of faculty supervision. They also aim to serve low and modest means clients whose legal needs might otherwise go unmet. And, according to a recent study, clinics are achieving these goals.

The Young Lawyer Editorial Board of The American Lawyer recently called out a growing disconnect between the skills and training law students are receiving and the tasks new lawyers are asked to complete in practice. For example, new lawyers today are often asked to manage both teams and deadline schedules, and also to take the lead on important documents and matters early in their careers. However, today’s typical law school curriculum does not always cover all these important areas.

In the last blog, we explained that the 77 foundations survey respondents identified as being necessary for new lawyers in the short term are largely consistent and definitive across respondents. Still, there were a few differences that highlight foundations some practice settings emphasize over others. Similarly, when we focused on private practice, we discovered only slight variations among different law firm sizes. In this blog, we explore the foundations that make up the whole lawyer for each private practice firm size category, and the differences as compared with one another and the whole lawyer overall.

In our previous blog, we explained that the 77 foundations survey respondents identified as being necessary for new lawyers immediately upon graduation from law school are consistent and definitive throughout the practice of law. The similarities we saw in responses across demographics, firm sizes, and practice-specific characteristics suggest that the findings can be employed with confidence by law schools, the profession, employers, and others to facilitate the development of crucial foundations needed by lawyers right out of law school. Nonetheless, there were a few notable practically significant differences that arose among the various practice settings we studied.

In July 2016, IAALS published Foundations for Practice: The Whole Lawyer and the Character Quotient, which shared findings from a survey that asked more than 24,000 lawyers what new lawyers need as they enter the profession. In the survey, we also collected from respondents ten demographic and practice-specific characteristics. We thought we might observe interesting, informative, and actionable differences across these demographics and characteristics. However, as we conducted analysis of the survey data for our reports, it became clear that our expectation was misplaced.

The Wisconsin Lawyer recently reviewed IAALS' Foundations for Practice study and discussed some of its ties to Wisconsin's legal community. Of the more than 24,000 lawyers nationwide who participated, 500 were from Wisconsin. In the first part of the survey, at least three-fourths of those respondents said that characteristics were vital for new lawyers to have right out of school, while professional competencies and legal skills were less immediately valuable. Alli Gerkman, the director at IAALS who oversees the Foundations project, emphasized that the survey suggests that legal skills were still important, but new lawyers do not need to have them all mastered right out of law school.

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.

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.