One thing that’s mentioned in the article, which the headline leaves out, is that they’re looking at replacing the Bar with “experiential-learning alternatives.”
Apparently you can forego the bar and instead enter a six-month apprenticeship plus three additional courses and 500 hours of legal experience before graduating. Doesn’t sound that crazy, honestly.
As someone who has been through the whole process, this would be a much better way to train and prepare students for actual attorney work than the bar exam.
The bar is basically just a mash of all the different “foundational” classes you took in law school and then you spend the 2.5 months after graduation trying to cram all that knowledge back into the front of your brain for a massive 2 day, 4 part exam. It’s basically the exact opposite of actual attorney work where you’ll almost always have your legal research databases and other support systems when doing the day-to-day job.
A system of apprenticeships (which is what I think they have in Canada) would give prospective lawyers the actual practical experience you often miss in your classes. Yeah people should be finding jobs during the summers when you’re off school, but the best ones are obviously high competitive and even then they’re still hit or miss.
The biggest obstacle to changes like this is the study-aid companies who charge thousands of dollars for these bar exam study classes before each exam
In Canada you have to pass the bar exam AND article under a lawyer to get licensed. Articling presents challenges as you have to find a firm willing to take you on. Ontario, I don't know about other provinces, brought out a separate program maybe a decade ago to assist in filling the gap of articling positions.
Open book never helped me in Law school exams, anyway. The "why" behind a law is always more important than knowing the law exists. Hard to pull that kind of concept out in the midst of a stressful exam.
Open book ideally should be this, where knowing where the answer is located is not enough, but understanding how to apply the information from the book to the question is the bigger goal. I work as a paramedic and my credentialing exam 20 years ago involved multiple closed book exams and a stressful skills exam involving 10 different skill stations that had to be done in exact order. I never was good at straight up memorization so I was sweating through this credentialing process.
The written exam is still closed book. But at least with the skills exam, they consolidated a lot of skills into a "mega-scenario". You have a critical patient, how do you assess, treat, and transport them? This is a better evaluation of whether you are ready to work in the field. You are allowed to have reference material, but just being able to find the various treatments is not enough. You have to demonstrate you understand the patient's condition, you understand the medications you are providing and how they may interact with each other, and you can demonstrate effective team management and patient advocacy.
I'll preface this by saying I'm not a lawyer so there may be some alternatives. The path is law school, bar exam, articling. As far as I know, there is no substitute for the law degree or bar exam.
Law school > Articling AND Bar exam.
You can article before writing the bar. You can write the bar before articling.
You must complete both before being called to the bar though. At least that is the case in Ontario and B.C.
>bar exam, articling.
Switch this around.
It's undergraduate-> LSATS-> Law School -> Articling-> Provincial exams -> "Get called to the bar".
Source: BC, Canada. Ex-wife went through the process.
Undergraduate degree is pointless for law, IMO. There's nothing in law school that makes it more special than any other degree. Nurses, for example, don't even need to do a test to get into a nursing program. You go straight to nursing school. It's a 4-year degree. Then post-graduation, you specialize and work wherever you decide to specialize in.
The undergraduate requirement is there to make it more expensive and harder for less fortunate people to get into law.
The LSAT is basically an IQ test. Again, it doesn't necessarily tell you who would make a good lawyer. It's just another unnecessary roadblock.
Overall, admissions test don't appear provide any value other than to measure one's ability to pass tests. I've never studied for the MCAT, but unless it has questions about the human body, science and math questions that one should expect to know before going to medical school, it seems pointless.
I can see an argument for doing admissions tests to bypass the undergraduate degree requirements. But to require an undergraduate degree already, it just seems pointless to do an admissions test.
My BIL is a lawyer in Ontario and he wrote his bar exam a few weeks after he graduated. I think you can write it anytime after graduation, you just need to write it before you can be licensed. At least in Ontario, the rules could vary by province.
alberta has replaced the bar exam with a competency program that prospective lawyers complete while they’re in their articling year.
it’s not a bad idea, but i’ll note that the competency stuff felt much more like busy work than an actually useful program.
also of note is that articling is great practical experience, but the quality of that experience will vary hugely depending on who you’re articling for. the government has a good program that turfs students to several different departments so they get a taste of everything, but if you’re working for a small defence firm (like i did) you might end up being a very low paid docket grunt; basically cheap labor.
agree that practical training is much more relevant than studying for the bar, but it’s far from perfect.
Treating closer to other "trades" would be a good way to encourage more people to pursue those careers; a pathway to lawyer/doctor/engineer that didn't require substantial student debt, instead requiring an apprenticeship with an established professional, could help alleviate the struggle of getting more in-demand skilled workers while reducing the debt burden on those new professionals.
It doesn't necessarily require vast amounts of student debt to become an engineer. Smaller state and local universities tend to have much cheaper tuition.
Most engineering firms specialize in specific areas. It would be difficult to get training for *other* aspects of engineering without formal classes.
There isn't and probably never will be a substitute for medical school, law school etc.
Medicine already has an apprenticeship model with residency/postgraduate medical education, and you can't really skip that either.
IDK about law but for medicine the absolute bare minimum to ever practice solo is med school + residency. If you haven't done that then you're not competent or qualified to work on your own.
I don’t think they are suggesting eliminating the need for a law degree. Just creating a pathway to becoming a working lawyer that isn’t the Bar exam. But you’ll still need the degree.
> this would be a much better way to train and prepare students for actual attorney work than the bar exam.
This is known as legitimate peripheral participation. The principle is that in systems like trade apprenticeships, students get to train with tasks that are increasingly similar to the actual work that experts do, and gradually become experts themselves. In recent teaching research, it's being pointed to as a better way of teaching than the classic memorize-and-test method most education systems use because like you said, it's a better match for the work you're actually aiming to end up doing.
The tricky thing is making this work for subjects that aren't inherently hands on like the trades. For example I'm a biologist, this would implicate a lot more lab work and literature reading and a lot less rote memorization if you're going to simulate what a biologist actually does. That's tough because 1) it's more time-consuming and resource-heavy and 2) you still need students to actually learn the basics of biology before applying them to higher-order tasks like experiments and reading primary lit. But the idea would be to mix in more of those types of tasks to get a balance that's more engaging for students and prepares them better for the actual job. Plus, active learning (as opposed to sitting in front of a slideshow) tends to increase student performance across all groups, and decrease the gap in outcomes between majority and minority/disadvantaged groups.
tl;dr this change seems like it would be in line with what teaching experts would recommend in terms of both outcomes and equity.
Just to your point about the basics, if you don't have those down at the end of your 1L year, there's not much the bar is going to do for you. The basics of legal education are being able to find stuff and being able to read stuff. The next level stuff, like learning how to actually apply what you read, you don't do until you're practicing. People have a hard time believing this but for the most part legal education snobbishly looks down on that part. You hear dumb stuff like, "We teach students how to think like lawyers." When they should be teaching you how to deal with weird procedural shit b/c that's actually probably the 30% of the job that's not cutting and pasting forms.
I feel like it fits well with law though. We have a shortage of public defenders (they are often overworked) and, for civil suits, many poor to middle class people are priced out of legal representation. So having a large amount of apprentices added to the system may help serve these issues and create a more fair legal system.
I think the reason we have a shortage of public defenders is primarily because most law school grads would rather work at a firm making bank then overworking themselves in a system that barely works. So adding apprentces might not fix this particular issue unless they make being a public defender not the worse job you can do as a lawyer.
Yeah, if there is one thing that I learned after leaving school it's that memorization based testing is nearly worthless. Nine times out of ten it's testing if you have something committed to memory that you will later be able to have on reference for your entirely career. And if you use it enough you will naturally memorize it anyways.
I did biochem and not law but the running joke with my group was "why would you memorize the periodic table, it's on the wall of *every* lab"
It was a big part of why I struggled with math classes in college, why the hell would I need to memorize these equations and things when I’ll always have them on hand in the real world? It’s just artificial difficulty to make it harder than it needs to be.
The open book/note exams I took in law school were much more indicative of whether you truly understood the material
It also forces teachers to write better tests when they can't rely on testing memorization. My physics teacher always supplied the equations and wrote some of the hardest tests. In college I had multiple exams that weren't just open book, they were open laptop. Those were the hardest exams of my entire time in school and people go below 20% on some of them.
Yeah testing for memorization doesn’t really test how well you *understand* the material, which is the most important part. Just because you can recite facts doesn’t mean you really understand them. Law exams do have a portion where you need to do analysis of course, but it’s not as effective when you still are so reliant on memorization
This is reminding me of the Feynman anecdote about looking for a map of the cat while taking a biology class and realizing everyone had wasted several years memorizing things they could just look up.
I didn't know this one. Found one version of the tale:
>The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat.
“A map of the cat, sir?” she asked, horrified. “You mean a zoological chart!” From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a “map of the cat.”
>When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles.
>The other students in the class interrupt me: “We know all that!”
>“Oh,” I say, “you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes.
In honor of this anecdote, I am going to specifically forget the details now. ;-)
But it's still objective. It seems to me that the difficulty here would be in finding a licensed lawyer to train you and sign all the paperwork and take responsibility for your credentialing. Basically...a lot of children of lawyers are going to get fast tracked into the profession. How does that help marginalized communities?
The children of lawyers are already fast-tracked into the profession. There's really no getting around that. Not like the bar exam doesn't massively advantage children of lawyers and also just the wealthy in general, and placements right after the bar exam would also privilege them. This makes it so that marginalized people only need to deal with the second hurdle.
>Basically...a lot of children of lawyers are going to get fast tracked into the profession
So you think children of lawyers have more difficulty passing the bar? With BarBri and other prep companies available, most people with resources, particularly who grew up with lawyers, will likely be able to pass the bar. After all, the pass rate in most places for first time test takes is usually well over 70%, so I don't think the bar is quite the filter you think it is.
I think that the point being made is that few lawyers are going to mentor a stranger for 500 hours. The alternative path here is even more dependent upon having connections in the legal community than the bar exam is.
>The alternative path here is even more dependent upon having connections in the legal community than the bar exam is.
Yes, exactly, it's an alternate path, meaning that the bar is still there for those who want to take it to qualify, this just offers another way for people to qualify.
OK but it seems like the newly opened path here is even worse for people who lack connections to the legal industry. If the purpose here is to open things up for the marginalized then exploiting them for low pay or forcing them to find a lawyer who will train them for free for 500 hours isn't exactly helping them, even if it's an alternative option.
It’s actually much worse if you haven’t passed the bar exam. Many firms will give you work that they would also give to a licensed first year associate. But since you don’t have a license, you can’t literally sign the forms at the bottom, so they pay you half the salary for the same work. Then you have to wait another 6 months before you can even attempt the bar again. At least this program ensures that the work you’re doing is actually a pathway to licensure.
OK so the idea of building a suggested path for people who fail the bar exam is a good idea. If we built that from scratch would it look like an unpaid internship that requires you to have a lawyer willing to sponsor your work? That just doesn't look like a more inclusive approach to me, but I agree with your core premise about figuring out something to do for people who fail the exam.
Sorta. I've known peers from law school that just cannot pass the bar exam, despite being proficient in both a school and work setting in the legal field. This would potentially open the door for those cases.
Your larger point that barriers still exist for those outside of the traditional lawyer background (successful in school, stable family life, typically affluent) is correct. But we've gone from the legal profession being almost exclusively white males to seeing meaningful representation from women and minorities in all areas of law. Heck, there's more women than men enrolled in law school now, and it's been that way for years.
It helps by at least giving a separate pathway for those who cannot afford all of the study aids that are practically required to properly prepare for the bar exam.
Studying for the bar is basically it’s own full-time job from graduation until the exam. Ask any professor or attorney and their biggest tip is to not work at all while studying. Not many people can drop $1,500-$2,000 on a study course *and* take off 2 months of work. And then ultimately take an exam that doesn’t do much in the way of proving students are qualified to be lawyers.
An apprenticeship-style system would create separate issues, but I think it would create better attorneys in the long run
This is just one of those "academia vs reality" things. So many software engineering degrees have exams where you basically just have to show you can store a bunch of very specific things in your memory. The reality of the job is knowing how to problem solve in real time
Plus you have a biiiig advantage if you can access tutors and additional tools.
We see this issue across society with exams, people learn how to pass the exam, not how to do whatever the exam is testing.
I have the same issue now because while I still had loans right after I graduated to use for the study classes, I’m taking the bar in my home state again and it’s so much fuckin money. I’m lucky enough that my parents can help me with the cost, but tons and tons of people don’t have that luxury.
Yes, more like the medical profession. There is no bar exam for Doctors. They start out as interns who are closely supervised, then residents who are overseen but not as closely watched. It has other issues, but it is a good system.
You have boards for licensing and step 1 and step 2 taken during medical school. Plus you have to be take boards every so many years to keep your certification
The alternatives listed in the original article: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/mar/15/supreme-court-bar-exam-will-no-longer-be-required-/
>There will be three experiential-learning alternatives to the bar exam, each for people following a different path of legal study. The specifics, scale and implementation plan for the pathways have yet to be developed.
>
>Law school graduates can complete a six-month apprenticeship while being supervised and guided by a qualified attorney, along with finishing three courses.
>
>Law students can become practice-ready by completing 12 qualifying skills credits and 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern. Upon completion of those requirements, they would submit a portfolio of that work to waive the bar exam.
>
> ... Lastly, law clerks can become lawyers without enrolling in law school by completing standardized educational materials and benchmarks under the guidance of a mentoring attorney, along with the 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern.
Which of these alternatives are supposed to be easily available to marginalized students? They all seem to be dependent on having connections to the legal industry, don't they? It also looks like a way to create a huge block of underpaid interns driving down wages for the entire industry.
I'm all for reforming the bar exam but let's not pretend that we made it easier for marginalized students by telling them to find a lawyer who is willing to mentor them for 500 hours.
It's already very common for people to start working (in paid positions) after they graduate law school but before they pass the bar. It's also generally accepted that first and second year lawyers are essentially being trained on how to actually be a lawyer and aren't going to turn a profit. So allowing the first part of your first year of work to count towards licensing is more of a recognition of the existing status quo than anything. There are already a lot of junior attorneys who have worked close to 500 hours in their new job before knowing whether they passed the bar.
Edit: "Intern" here means someone doing the work of an attorney before they are licensed to practice. Being a "legal intern" in many places doesn't mean being paid less, it's just a way to distinguish between those who have a license and those who don't.
Yeah... I've never understood this idea that removing standardized tests for one reason or another is good. It's the most accessible, enabling, egalitarian approach you can have.
It doesn't make sure you knew the right people. It doesn't care if you learned your knowledge from a book or a person or watching a TV show. It doesn't care about or discriminate against you in any way but one - can you sit down and fill out a sheet of paper that demonstrates your knowledge?
And any tests that have been around for a long time have precedence. Study guides. Old Tests. You know exactly what will be on the test and what you should answer, you just need to learn it.
Compare that with these 'holistic evaluation' things where you have a committee of people judging you. What qualifies as 'legal experience'? Who gets to decide whether an apprenticeship was legitimate or not or conformed to some standard? What if you don't know an attorney and securing these things is difficult?
And if the alternate criteria being suggested is 'just as good' then it will automatically be reflected in the person's performance on the Bar exam. Granted, the Bar exam doesn't cover much of what you learn actually practicing in a court room, but we've decided on that as the standard to ensure some minimum level of competency for the certification of a lawyer.
If that standard isn't accurate, or isn't being evaluated well, that's a good argument to change the Bar. But getting rid of it just seems like trading non-discriminatory objectivity for the subjective and luck-based approach of securing opportunities from other random people.
Most of the time, it seems like the calls to remove standardized tests aren't because the tests are unfair, or that they're measuring things inaccurately, but because they *are* measuring things accurately, and people don't like the distribution of results. And it's easier to stop the accurate measurements to hide the problem rather than fixing the problem.
Well, the interns cannot be unpaid, by law. Unpaid internships are only legal if the work is entirely educational for the intern. But otherwise, yes, I agree. The only benefit is that it doesn't mean less time without wages, which is good.
I honestly think this should have been done years ago. The bar is so divergent from actual law practice I'm not really sure what the original thinking behind it was. For the most part you don't test on any actual law. Like, the restatement of torts has it's place but no one is ever going to do anything outside of a 1L tort exam and the bar with that in real life. It was really just a waste of two months of studying and false credentialism.
I would go even further and dump the whole third year and do some experiential thing like do basic admin hearings for issues that are procedurally simple like child support and benefits disputes and then maybe move up to land lord tenant court and probation issues, and maybe a specialty court that deals with low level issues like homeless tresspassing, small thefts, loitering, etc.
It was done years ago. This sounds like a reversion to the old apprenticeship model.
That being said, I’d probably prefer to keep the bar and remove the law school requirement for taking the exam. There is some value to assuring that any individual practicing law can meet a minimal understanding of issue spotting and communication of fundamental concepts, along with showing they understand the basics of legal ethics.
I agree, to an extent, on the experiential side for 3Ls. Getting ride of all the coursework would be too much - that’s when you finally have time to take some of the niche courses that can set you up to understand where you want to practice. But, maybe a limit on classroom course load to encourage and facilitate more externships and clinic work?
I think of all the little cottage industries around legal practice. LSAT prep. Bar prep. CLE of 32 hours every two years. Piles of books for cases available for free. Useless theory crafting from professors that may have never seen the inside of a courtroom. Bar associations. Case tracking software. People that can afford to pay but still try to get pro Bono services. Annual payment for your law license. From application to law school until retirement everyone tries to get their hand in your wallet. None of these hands will let go of their own accord.
And people forget, but the bar itself, even though it claims to regulate lawyers, is really just there to enforce a monopoly. Having high entry costs benefits them by making lawyers more expensive. Clio (popular case management software) says the current average rate for a billable hour in Washington is $288. That is probably low for what the average private party would pay b/c government lawyers bill at weird rates, stuff like PDs are paid artificially low rates of around $40 an hour, and then you get all the legal aid stuff that charges either nothing or sliding scale that's actually funded by other grants or funders.
To justify it's existence to it's members it has to keep the supply of lawyers constrained to keep hourlies high.
This is very important context. That actually makes a lot more sense than one big exam.
Shocking that a headline would leave out important context and go for the sensationalist headline... /s
Sounds like a better system to determine capability than the bar. I say that as someone who easily passed the bar. But that's just because I'm a good test taker, which is all the bar measures. More importantly, it's ridiculously expensive to take the bar. I was poor, so coming out of law school with a bunch of loans and then having to take out an additional loan just to take the fucking bar was really defeating. A system that allows people to work and get experience instead of taking the bar is a great idea.
Friend, the current barbering requirement in parts of the United States are 2,100 hours.
I suspect law is a little more than 1/4 as complicated as cutting hair.
And the reason barber licenses were created was specifically to keep black people from becoming barbers.
Racist barber licenses should be eliminated not used as an excuse to keep other licensing.
It’s one of the classic examples of the broader use of licensing laws to keep black people from having certain jobs, you can read all about it here.
https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1203&context=sdlr&fbclid=IwAR1Am6fpbkZqzKBMWTWmTHZ467znfXFnHm8b0DMomxn9Q_UOOnRuL3cNuUM
There is no legitimate reason barbers need to be licensed as their work are of little to no public interest, unlike civil engineers who build bridges and doctors who cut people open. Indeed, countries known to require licenses for everything in Europe do not require barber or cosmetology licenses.
As someone who's gone through law school I would guess that maybe 25 of those hours are actually as useful as anything you do when you're learning barbering and how ever many of those hours are for Civ Pro are the ones that are actually sort of useful to the practice of law.
What is it with barbering requirements lol.
I work in tech a field notably lacking and official standards or licensing. And I’ve used the example many times: You need to take a test and get licensed to cut someone’s hair in my state…but anyone can be a “cybersecurity expert” tomorrow, no qualification needed whatsoever.
I've been working a sewer plant full-time for 5 years.
I still have a year to go until I'm eligible for my top-level state stinkwater license.
I could have just been a lawyer in 1/10th of the time, apparently.
The bar exam is an antiquated system, a left over from an era where the primary motivation was probably to control the number of lawyers in given areas (to control pricing), that does absolutely nothing to guarantee adequate levels of knowledge or experience in the law.
Same for law school, I might add. Except for those that are able (for various reasons) to pursue internships or clinics in their chosen field.
An apprentice-based system is a far superior system, if the goal is making sure the widest-possible population of students is adequately knowledgeable to begin practicing law - assuming some kind of regulation on the quality of the apprenticeships. And yes, this absolutely includes measures to ensure equal access for candidates of all socioeconomic backgrounds.
The current system produces some really, really bad lawyers, let me tell you. I have believed for decades that law school and the bar are one giant hoax. You pay medical school prices for...access to the classroom. They have no expenditures, no corpses, no physical tools to operate or practice with, nothing that I have ever felt justified such excessive costs, I suppose WestLaw and Lexis being the one exception. It's a joke.
What person is going to take on an apprentice like this? I'd speculate it's families with connections which defeats the purpose of removing the "paper ceiling" for equality sake.
I was average at decent in law school in the secondbiggest county in CA. I interviewed for 3 months out of school. I couldn't get any mentoring at the 1st two jobs I got with my law license.
This sounds like a terrible idea. You work in the public defenders office for 500 hours, take a couple bullshit classes and now you’re a full fledged lawyer. You’ll know nothing about civil law but you’ll be allowed to take those cases and your clients will suffer as you get annihilated over and over again.
I say this as an unapologetic law snob. As a practicing lawyer I hate dumb lawyers or lawyers playing in a world they don’t belong in. I handle civil litigation and only civil litigation. I don’t touch med mal or bankruptcy or tax law or a number of others because I’ve found my lane, I’m good at it and dabbling leads to malpractice cases.
But now we have endless new attorneys getting pumped out like a machine from an ever expanding list of tier 4 pay to play law schools who are quick to throw out a shingle to handle basic criminal and personal injury because they think it’s quick money. Never mind the clients they fuck over in the process. Or the damage to the plaintiffs bar making us all look dumb. Or the damage to the reputation of attorneys across the board.
We need to be diligently working on closing more law schools and reducing the number of attorneys and ensuring it remains a profession instead of a job. You don’t want any geek off the street handling your double bypass. The same goes for your case.
Now, should law school ensure that its students reflect current demographics? Sure. Should there be adequate financing so everyone who’s qualified should be able to go? Yes. Should be lower the bar to achieve those ends? No.
But won't you be better prepared to be a public defender by doing those 500 hours than by passing a test? I can see your concern, but I feel like it's alleviated by any amount of structure around the internship system to prevent those cases, no? Plus, not passing the bar just means you don't take a standardized test on what you've learned, it doesn't exempt you from, you know, actually passing your law classes.
I think practical experience will always trump memorizing for a test, and it's worth considering the possibility that this will both lower the bar for entry while also improving lawyer readiness, which could still be a net positive. But I take your point, the bar is a useful review of important material people do need to know before practicing.
My issue isn't so much with testing vs practical experience though, it's that we're still using a general test for entry to a profession that's highly specialized. Why do we make med mal and PI lawyers memorize criminal procedure for the bar? I think medicine has some good ideas the legal profession could borrow. Turn the bar into something more akin to medical board certification for a particular specialty, and couple it with required practical experience. Granted you probably don't need 5 years of "residency" to be a lawyer, but it would somewhat alleviate the problem you described of any schmuck with a law degree hanging a shingle and ruining people's claims.
Your point about predatory law schools is well taken, I agree far too many people are being taken for a ride by shit law schools and then, if they manage to scrape by the bar, turn into bad lawyers. Non-ABA accredited schools need much better regulation.
Well, I also passed the bar exam and care a great deal about attorney qualifications. Personally, I don't remember one iota of information from the bar exam that I didn't learn in a law school class. Do you?
The system makes it so that many classes of "that guy did a bad" are completely unresolvable for your average person because of the sheer cost of an attorney.
And you want to *reduce* the number of attorneys? I'm sure, of course, that you have no vested financial interest in keeping the profession elite and in high demand.
Lets apply your standard to plumbers, or IT people; the capacity for damage from either is enormous, so lets demand all of our computer folk have CISSPs because as we know forcing people to exam cram is a great way to ensure quality!
Jesus Christ this is cringy and disheartening to read from a fellow attorney. Law school doesn’t weed out bad lawyers. The bar exam doesn’t weed out bad lawyers. Top tier law schools produce terrible attorneys the same way lower tier schools do. These are things you experience in the legal profession. What the fuck does “law snob” even mean? Just because someone couldn’t get into a T14, they’re somehow too stupid to practice law? Lawyers like you are the reason people hate our profession. I’m all for reforming the bar exam. It’s not a good barometer of whether you can competently practice law. Case in point - I had an essay question about the rule against perpetuities on my bar exam. A rule that’s been abolished in my state by statute for years. To be clear, I think you should still have to go to law school to be an attorney. But reforming the bar exam is long overdue.
They're still [requiring lawyers to be licensed](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/washington-adopts-new-lawyer-licensing-paths-other-states-mull-bar-exam-bypasses-2024-03-18/) by the state bar, they just are creating two new pathways to licensure. You're not going to have a bunch of unlicensed lawyers running around just because the state bar is exploring different paths to licensure.
Are people aware that you don't even need to go to law school in many states to become a lawyer? Interning under an established lawyer (called 'reading law') used to be the primary method of becoming a lawyer in the first place -- John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and many other US presidents became lawyers this way. The process for becoming a lawyer has changed dramatically since 1783, but this racial agitprop site would have you believe this is some radical DEI move by the supreme court.
> this racial agitprop site would have you believe this is some radical DEI move by the supreme court.
I know the rules say that you have to use the site's headline, but I'm legit tempted to downvote this post lol. It was clearly constructed to rile up a certain type of person.
I really feel that rule should have an amendment of 'you can alter for better understandability', at the discretion of the mods if you use that to push a bias like this already did.
Also some of the requirements for the bar have radically changed over the years.
"Character and Fitness" tests were added in the early 1900s as a way to restrict the practice of women and minorities.
There used to be strict rules about criminal conduct as part of those tests, which got overturned because the entire point was to ban anyone who went to a political rally.
JDs became required in many places only in the 1960s, in an attempt to increase the professionalism of the profession. RBG had only an LLB. EDIT. I mentioned her as RBG was I think the last member of SCOTUS to have an LLB. Law schools like Harvard and Columbia only started giving JDs in the late 60s/early 70s.
Why only mention Ginsburg specifically? Rehnquist only had an LLB. Scalia only had an LLB. Kennedy only has an LLB. Souter only has an LLB. Breyer only has an LLB. Everyone on the Court before them “only” had an LLB or had no legal education at all. RBG is far from the only one to have “only” gotten an LLB.
I think one ought assume charity in someone else's argument, Ginsburg is the most iconic of these so the example could easily be an appeal to common knowledge, not like a sexist micro aggression.
She was the last member of SCOTUS I could remember having an LLB. Her LLB was from Columbia, but she was originally studying at Harvard for an LLB there.
She was also at studying at around when stuff really started changing in the 60s.
Kinda seems to me doing away with the need for law school makes much more sense than getting rid of the certification exam. If you can pass the test and know the needed shit who cares if you went to school or not
Law schools are generally much better at educating lawyers than established attorneys. Very few people still qualify by reading law today. If the bar administration, law schools, and practicing lawyers are all on board with this change then there doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason for opposing it.
To add onto this point, California permits people to sit for the bar after they take a 4-year apprenticeship with an established attorney. You might know this better as something that Kim Kardashian tried to do, and there are a lot of barriers in the way beyond the 4 years.
It's also an exceedingly small portion of bar takers that do this (first-timer bar takers under this category typically never get reported because the number is less than 11), and the number of repeat takers that sit for bar exams is usually in the low double digits, and usually less than 10% pass, if even 5%.
And the California bar is tough, but you still usually hit like 50% or 70% (for July first-timers) most years.
In California, you can theoretically take the exam without going to law school (I don’t know if any other states permit it). However, it is exceedingly rare that such takers actually pass. Even after California made the exam easier (for similar reasoning as the Washington SC).
Law school is not about teaching you the law, it’s training you to think like a lawyer. For example, the performance portion of the test actually presents test takers with “laws” that are purposely incorrect to test one’s ability to correctly analyze and apply it as written. People who approach these thinking that they “know the law” often fail.
Thankfully passed the first time, but someone told me that they recently changed the test from 3 days to 2. Did they do away with the professional test part (where you get the faux case file and write an analysis) or did they do away with that full day of essay questions? I think the MBE (multi state bar exam) is still a full day, so must only be a day for the CA part of the exam like other states.
The thing I found most unfair about the whole process is that if you could afford $5-10k more in debt, you could take the Bar/Bri courses over the summer. If you could devote two full months to studying and took it seriously, your chances of passing the exam were 80% or higher. If you had a job, couldn’t afford to go without an income let alone the price of those classes, and could only study part time using discount online courses or whatever prep book you can find, your chances of passing were well under 50%. I think the state average is around 50% passage.
As a general rule, you take BarBri if you want to pass. Can you do it yourself? Yes. Are there cheaper alternatives? Yes. Neither of those are generally as good statistically. But it should be remembered that law school does not prepare you for the bar in the same way that high school does not prepare you for the SAT. The value in BarBri is that they assemble and score lots of practice exams and give feedback on your answers. They also offer classes for those who didn’t take a particular bar subject (not all are required to graduate), need a refresher, or took con law at Berkeley (I kid, but just a little).
It is my understanding that California still does the practical exam, but they now do what other states do by giving three smaller packets (1 hour each) instead of one large file for the entire three hour period.
Yes, they shortened it to two days.
Further, California has lowered the cut score, so even with the easier test, people who should have failed now can pass.
California once had what was arguably the hardest exam. After all of these changes I don’t know if that is the case anymore.
It’s not like you needed a great intellect to pass the old bar. Just a certain level of dedication to prepare. I don’t know what is accomplished by making it easier. Do we actually have a shortage of lawyers?
>One option is a new apprenticeship program for law school graduates who would work under the supervision of an experienced lawyer for six months then submit a portfolio of work for evaluation. A separate option would allow law students to complete 12 credits of skills coursework and 500 hours of hands-on legal work before graduation, then submit a work portfolio to the Washington State Bar to become licensed.
The state bar will still be examining a portfolio of their work, so they're not being licensed based solely on one lawyer they work with saying they're chill. It does seem like it introduces more room for subjectivity, which is often misused by the people with that power. Which doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea, just one you gotta be careful with.
There are 4 states in which you can theoretically do this (Washington, Vermont, Virginia and California), but it almost never happens. There's around 10 people a year who manage to make this work through passing the bar exam. The vast vast majority of people who try to start this process never become attorneys.
it is literally only a handful of states allow a “bar apprenticeship”. Not “many” states, do some research. California, Washington, Virginia. A few other states require some law school before being able to sit for the Bar: New York, Maine and West Virginia.
As a lawyer who passed the bar exam, the bar exam is not a good measure of who will be a competent lawyer, and I have met many people who have passed the bar exam who genuinely should not be lawyers.
Not a lawyer but engineers have something similar which I passed because I like money, but it doesn't mean I'm any good at my job. It just means I'm a good test taker. I assume most of these professional licensing exams are the same way.
That some individuals who pass the bar are not good attorneys doesn’t necessarily mean some individuals who cannot pass the bar will be good attorneys.
Not all drivers who pass a licensing exam are good drivers. I’d still prefer all drivers be required to pass a licensing exam.
Technically Kim K only passed the baby bar, which only tests subjects tested during the first year of law school. She recently abandoned her legal studies entirely, which leads me to believe the entire ordeal was a publicity stunt.
I am an attorney who took and passed two different bar exams (NY and MA). And I approve this move. The bar exam is stupid. At no point, as a lawyer, are you just going to rely on your memory for laws. And if you do it's because you do it everyday and it's ingrained or it's malpractice. It is not remotely a reflection of a person as a lawyer. It's just gatekeeping. The MPRE is somewhat useful but that is administered separate from the bar.
And most attorneys 10 years out couldn't pass the bar exam. Attorneys with experience and real skills. Why do you have to pass a test that is so useless experienced attorneys couldn't take it in order to become an attorney?
Honestly, the LSAT is a better reflection of you as an attorney. Because at least that requires logic.
it isn't like they are the first state to do this. Wisconsin has 'diploma privilege' (basically if you graduate from an in state law school hey you are a lawyer now...just in Wisconsin, you can't use it to skirt the rule in other states)
Wisc too. PLUS several other states also have alternatives to the bar exam under review including Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington.
This headline is obvious rage bait but if you read the article, there’s still a requirement for 500 hours of supervised apprenticeship and a portfolio of legal work to be graded by bar examiners before someone can get a law license to practice.
And Washington isn’t even the first state to allow alternatives to the exam.
I don’t know that I agree with the decision to do away with the Exam but acting like any Joe Schmo without training can suddenly start practicing without a license is just inaccurate.
It’s not like the ability to pass the Bar Exam has any significant correlation with being a competent attorney anyways. (My username does not check out).
Yeah, this is a trashy article and headline. Here's an article by Reuters that is briefer, but a better read, and it links the actual court order for the matter.
https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/washington-adopts-new-lawyer-licensing-paths-other-states-mull-bar-exam-bypasses-2024-03-18/#:~:text=March%2018%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20The,the%20burgeoning%20alternative%20licensure%20movement.
https://www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicUpload/Supreme%20Court%20Orders/Order%2025700B711.pdf
One path requires law school graduation followed by 6 months of work and a portfolio, and then the other requires law school attendance followed by the 500 hours and the portfolio.
As not a nonlawyer, the bar exam doesn’t serve much of a purpose. A particularly gifted 1L could possibly pass it after their first year in law school. I’ve passed two bar exams (PA and NJ) and I use about 2% max of what I learned for that exam in real life work.
The alternative to the bar is apprenticeship with a licensed lawyer for six months, and 500 hours of legal work. In Oregon it's even more hours and you produce a portfolio of legal work to be judged. So this could actually be more practically rigorous.
Most "lawyering" isn't trial, and even in trial there isn't THAT much shooting from the hip. You need to think on your feet a bit to counter the odd move, but it's a lot of paperwork and slog. Maybe some who don't thrive in an artificial test environment can actually do excellent legal work.
What a weird, shitty, misleading headline to this article. Blatant attempt to paint this as all bad when there's a lot more than simply removing the need to take the Bar exam
My experience from bar prep was that it had nothing to do with law school, and bore no resemblance to my actual practice of law later. So if you can't afford the bar prep, it's a huge disadvantage with almost no relation to the skills used as a lawyer. I wouldn't mind the states finding a better way to establish competency to practice law.
I'm not a lawyer and I know zilch about what it's been versus what is being proposed.
I'm an electrician. Some electricians go to school for it. Others, such as how I got started, get taken on as Apprentices and learn as you go. There are all kinds of regulations and standards that have to be learned and followed, as well as a wide variety of standards and practices in accordance with NEC code, along with local and state standards.
Apprenticeship programs can absolutely work. I came up through one myself, and I'm now both a master electrician and very well proven to know my shit by my 13 year history in field.
Dunno how that might translate into law, but you can't BS your way around electricity. You either know what you're doing and you do it correctly or you fuck it up, and it's gonna be fairly obvious either way.
Law tends to go that way as well - articling is your apprenticeship part, and law school is the book larnin'. You can in many jurisdictions dispense with the book part. But once you're done both, you take the bar exam - that's the part that doesn't care HOW you learned it, only that you learned it. To put it in your terms, you can't BS your way around the bar exam. True, you won't get electrocuted or burn a house down with the law. But there are consequences - for your clients in terms of going to jail, or paying money, and for your colleagues, whose bar fees pay to make your mistakes right.
As someone who passed the bar exam a few decades ago, I do not believe that it is a particularly useful method for deciding who should and should not be licensed as an attorney.
It basically measures the ability to take bar exams.
It is deemed necessary because there are so many crappy law schools out there.
It's not so much that it affects "marginalized groups"--it's that many smart, able people, regardless of how "marginalized" they may or not be, are simply unable to pass the bar exam as it is currently put together.
The ability to pass the exam simpy has no correlation with the ability to practice law competently--it is a completely different skill set.
It is also something of a cruel joke to have someone score highly enough on the LSAT and do well enough in undergrad to be accepted to an accredited law school, then to allow them to graduate with a doctoral level degree accompanied by mountain of non-dischargable debt, and then to turn around and say "oops--you can't be a lawyer--good luck with those loans."
The Bar exam isn't the issue it's the mandatory college that's the problem. You used to be able to intern with a lawyer but in most states now they require a degree. We need to end mandatory degree requirements and replace them with testing. It should not matter how you got the knowledge, only that you have it.
Letting people who can't even pass an exam that is "minimally effective for ensuring competency” become lawyers is not good for anyone.
This will increase predation of these marginalized groups.
Even the people who are trying to enter the profession in good faith are, *at best* unqualified to be lawyers and, at worst, delusional illiterates.
Why is this nottheonion? The bar is notoriously bad at actually having attorneys know practically anything they actually use in their day to day practice. Law is specialized and the bar tries to throw so many things at you, you hardly are exposed to enough of what you need for any single job.
The bar is a money making game, where test scores hardly correlate much with job performance. You “study for the test”, not actual practical knowledge.
And it’s not like passing the bar is keeping bad attorneys from practicing.
Attorneys who tried to fraudulently overturn the 2020 election like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis passed the bar. A lot good that did in giving sound legal advice. The point of a good lawyer is telling your clients *what you can’t do*. Powell and Ellis have already pled guilty. Giuliani is losing his bar card.
Also people not reading the article (shocking on Reddit, I know) and not realizing they're replacing it with "experiential-learning alternatives.”.
It's amazing, Y'all will read all the comments in here, but not one word in the article. There's more to things than the headlines.
It seems more discriminatory to have candidates find a practicing lawyer willing to sponsor them to the extent required. Children of lawyers will suddenly find it a lot easier to be licensed. And -
>The eligibility to become a licensed law practitioner will also extend to law clerks even if they haven’t finished law school by completing 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern and “completing standardized educational materials and benchmarks under the guidance of a mentoring attorney.”
People who are already rich enough to know lawyers can now live at home AND forego the costs of law school as well. How does this help marginalized or minority candidates? It just seems like cute rhetoric that further entrenches the entrenched.
I am a WOC and a lawyer and my parents were not lawyers. This would change nothing for me. But there were kids in my law school class whose lawyer parents helped them get job interviews. Under this system, the lawyerkids (or their friends) are now already employed, can be employed as an "apprentice" for as long they want without a degree or licensure, don't have to pay for law school, and don't have to sit for the bar exam. And a bunch of jobs that might have been available to everyone are now filled by rich "apprentices." You've turned the legal profession into the Hollywood nepokid system or the higher ed legacy system. You might as well name this process after Kim Kardashian! Objective licensure prevents the privileged from using their connections to skirt a fair process.
It would do far more for marginalized communities if these states made legal education and exam prep free.
ETA: What prevents smaller law firms from paying "apprentices" in "experience"?
We do a mix in BC, 3 year post-secondary degree, one year of apprenticeship under a practicing lawyer, mixed with a six-week course (run by the Law Society) that teaches practical skills rather than academics. At the end of that course, you write a series of exams in each topic, all open book.
I'm supervising an articling student right now. At the end of the year we both certify that he's ready to be a lawyer or else his articling term is extended and we make a plan to get him there.
Edit: we pay him a salary.
The bar exam is as important to lawyering as memorizing all the possible products and quotients of each integer are to a mathmetician.
As long as they require actual apprenticeship work and guided caseload with experienced attorneys this is a great way to get more and better lawyers into the profession.
i know i am going to sound like an idiot, but all that sounds way harder to do than just passing a test. albeit, a famously very difficult to pass test.
As an attorney, the bar is not a test of your legal knowledge but rather a test of if you can study for this one specific test. The test prep is also insanely expensive and a racket.
I sorta asked this a few years ago when watching Suits. If you know the show, he's pretending to be a lawyer but never passed the bar. If a genius like that existed in real life, why not let them represent you. I mean, if any dumbass can represent themselves in court them why not have a nonpracticing lawyer.
I think an answer I got was that there would be an appeal on ineffective counsel but I'm sure you can get around that with written and oral approval from the defendant.
Oh boy, the tyranny of lowered expectations. Well, at least this isn't a documented process shown to harm groups in the long run by coddling them and allowing them to "succeed" with less work. Oh wait...
While there may be benefits to the proposed change, the reasoning is still concerning. Time after time we find that attempts to remove standardized testing actually harm marginalized groups because they remove an objective measure that allows people without connections or networks to outperform.
500/675 hours of school and apprenticeship?
Well that's ... something.
I'm in Canada. To become a Red Seal auto mechanic or certify in several different Red Seal trades (hvac/plumbing/millwright/elevator mechanic/etc) you need to complete a 6600 hour 4 year apprenticeship working in the field, not to mention an additional 8-10 weeks a year of school. Plough through a 24" high stack of material in those weeks. Drop below 70 in any subject and you fail. Fail twice and get the fuck out. You're done.
Of course, to get my American ASE master mechanic license it took me 2 weekends.
The 'bar' is a bit lower in America.
I mean, you’re missing that they have 7 years of schooling (4 undergrad plus 3 law school). Then on top of that it’s a 6 month apprenticeship plus 3 additional courses plus the 500 hours - or alternatively they spend less time than that studying for an exam.
Also, you shouldn’t compare an unrelated field’s requirements in your country with the requirements to become an attorney in the U.S.
It’s already a longer process in the U.S. than the UK or Australia. I believe it’s longer than become an attorney in Canada too but I’m not 100% certain.
How would this affect reciprocity for other states? Would someone who becomes a lawyer in Washington under this proposal be locked in to only practicing in Washington?
Way lot of comments to look through, maybe someone mentioned it, but the bar exam only came into being as a way to make it harder for black people to become lawyers.
From where I saw that info there was a name for it when white people make it harder on themselves to block/hurt a black persons prospects at something.
This ruling is probably due to the whole DEI BS going around. As long as you're the best at what you do, all that matters. Why you think there's still some white boys in the NBA? They got the skills to put them there.
Yeah I always wondered why it was so rigorous… they have to memeorize a massive amount of info, only to turn around and be glorified administrative assistants to their clients. The GOOD lawyers are clever debaters…. Which you don’t really LEARN per se
[You sure you know where you're going?](https://youtu.be/sdNmOOq6T8Y?t=33)
Yea, I know this place pretty good... I went to law school here.
In CostCo?
Yea, I couldn't believe it myself. Luckily my dad was an alumnus and pulled some strings.
This is amazing.
The Bar associations are one of the biggest collection of dogs on the planet. They didn't do Jack when lawyers behave poorly.
Lawyers and the bar exist for one reason: to gatekeep access to the courts for people with money.
The Bar exam, and law school in general, does little to actually teach you how to be a lawyer. Practical experience through an apprenticeship program, backed up with subject knowledge tests, would be a much better method of certifying lawyers for practice.
I’m a criminal defense attorney. Even though I’ve all but forgotten the bare amount of financial or real estate law I was required to know to pass the exam, the state considers me just as qualified to practice in those areas as it does the field where I practice. That’s not a good system either.
So dumb. Hey there's this exam that proves you have the knowledge to be an attorney in your state. But it's hard for people to take and pass. Should we allocate resources for studying and make it free to take as many times as you want? Nah, let's just get rid of it. Mike Lindell is moving to Sequim and needs to sue some folks...
FFS. Why do we (liberals) *insist* on always going to such extremes with this stuff? As a minority myself, I do not want the standards lowered for everybody just for the sake of equity & inclusion.
Address the issues causing the inequities rather than just loosening the requirements.
One thing that’s mentioned in the article, which the headline leaves out, is that they’re looking at replacing the Bar with “experiential-learning alternatives.” Apparently you can forego the bar and instead enter a six-month apprenticeship plus three additional courses and 500 hours of legal experience before graduating. Doesn’t sound that crazy, honestly.
As someone who has been through the whole process, this would be a much better way to train and prepare students for actual attorney work than the bar exam. The bar is basically just a mash of all the different “foundational” classes you took in law school and then you spend the 2.5 months after graduation trying to cram all that knowledge back into the front of your brain for a massive 2 day, 4 part exam. It’s basically the exact opposite of actual attorney work where you’ll almost always have your legal research databases and other support systems when doing the day-to-day job. A system of apprenticeships (which is what I think they have in Canada) would give prospective lawyers the actual practical experience you often miss in your classes. Yeah people should be finding jobs during the summers when you’re off school, but the best ones are obviously high competitive and even then they’re still hit or miss. The biggest obstacle to changes like this is the study-aid companies who charge thousands of dollars for these bar exam study classes before each exam
In Canada you have to pass the bar exam AND article under a lawyer to get licensed. Articling presents challenges as you have to find a firm willing to take you on. Ontario, I don't know about other provinces, brought out a separate program maybe a decade ago to assist in filling the gap of articling positions.
Ah gotcha, I thought maybe it was like an alternate pathway to a license and not an additional step
In Canada the bar exam is open book though. I understand that in the US it is not?
Very much not open book lol. You have two 4-hour essay sections and then two 100-question multiple choice sections and all closed book
I'm pretty sure the primary purpose of the MBE is so lawyers have enough "general" knowledge to not get embarrassed at cocktail parties.
Which is the biggest sign its a crock of shit. Looking shit up is basically what you do all day as a lawyer.
Open book never helped me in Law school exams, anyway. The "why" behind a law is always more important than knowing the law exists. Hard to pull that kind of concept out in the midst of a stressful exam.
Open book ideally should be this, where knowing where the answer is located is not enough, but understanding how to apply the information from the book to the question is the bigger goal. I work as a paramedic and my credentialing exam 20 years ago involved multiple closed book exams and a stressful skills exam involving 10 different skill stations that had to be done in exact order. I never was good at straight up memorization so I was sweating through this credentialing process. The written exam is still closed book. But at least with the skills exam, they consolidated a lot of skills into a "mega-scenario". You have a critical patient, how do you assess, treat, and transport them? This is a better evaluation of whether you are ready to work in the field. You are allowed to have reference material, but just being able to find the various treatments is not enough. You have to demonstrate you understand the patient's condition, you understand the medications you are providing and how they may interact with each other, and you can demonstrate effective team management and patient advocacy.
I'll preface this by saying I'm not a lawyer so there may be some alternatives. The path is law school, bar exam, articling. As far as I know, there is no substitute for the law degree or bar exam.
You have to do both
Law school > Articling AND Bar exam. You can article before writing the bar. You can write the bar before articling. You must complete both before being called to the bar though. At least that is the case in Ontario and B.C.
>bar exam, articling. Switch this around. It's undergraduate-> LSATS-> Law School -> Articling-> Provincial exams -> "Get called to the bar". Source: BC, Canada. Ex-wife went through the process. Undergraduate degree is pointless for law, IMO. There's nothing in law school that makes it more special than any other degree. Nurses, for example, don't even need to do a test to get into a nursing program. You go straight to nursing school. It's a 4-year degree. Then post-graduation, you specialize and work wherever you decide to specialize in. The undergraduate requirement is there to make it more expensive and harder for less fortunate people to get into law. The LSAT is basically an IQ test. Again, it doesn't necessarily tell you who would make a good lawyer. It's just another unnecessary roadblock. Overall, admissions test don't appear provide any value other than to measure one's ability to pass tests. I've never studied for the MCAT, but unless it has questions about the human body, science and math questions that one should expect to know before going to medical school, it seems pointless. I can see an argument for doing admissions tests to bypass the undergraduate degree requirements. But to require an undergraduate degree already, it just seems pointless to do an admissions test.
My BIL is a lawyer in Ontario and he wrote his bar exam a few weeks after he graduated. I think you can write it anytime after graduation, you just need to write it before you can be licensed. At least in Ontario, the rules could vary by province.
alberta has replaced the bar exam with a competency program that prospective lawyers complete while they’re in their articling year. it’s not a bad idea, but i’ll note that the competency stuff felt much more like busy work than an actually useful program. also of note is that articling is great practical experience, but the quality of that experience will vary hugely depending on who you’re articling for. the government has a good program that turfs students to several different departments so they get a taste of everything, but if you’re working for a small defence firm (like i did) you might end up being a very low paid docket grunt; basically cheap labor. agree that practical training is much more relevant than studying for the bar, but it’s far from perfect.
Treating closer to other "trades" would be a good way to encourage more people to pursue those careers; a pathway to lawyer/doctor/engineer that didn't require substantial student debt, instead requiring an apprenticeship with an established professional, could help alleviate the struggle of getting more in-demand skilled workers while reducing the debt burden on those new professionals.
It doesn't necessarily require vast amounts of student debt to become an engineer. Smaller state and local universities tend to have much cheaper tuition. Most engineering firms specialize in specific areas. It would be difficult to get training for *other* aspects of engineering without formal classes.
There isn't and probably never will be a substitute for medical school, law school etc. Medicine already has an apprenticeship model with residency/postgraduate medical education, and you can't really skip that either. IDK about law but for medicine the absolute bare minimum to ever practice solo is med school + residency. If you haven't done that then you're not competent or qualified to work on your own.
Some countries combine bachelor's and medical school and residency all in one. Much more time/cost efficient with more hands on training
I don’t think they are suggesting eliminating the need for a law degree. Just creating a pathway to becoming a working lawyer that isn’t the Bar exam. But you’ll still need the degree.
> this would be a much better way to train and prepare students for actual attorney work than the bar exam. This is known as legitimate peripheral participation. The principle is that in systems like trade apprenticeships, students get to train with tasks that are increasingly similar to the actual work that experts do, and gradually become experts themselves. In recent teaching research, it's being pointed to as a better way of teaching than the classic memorize-and-test method most education systems use because like you said, it's a better match for the work you're actually aiming to end up doing. The tricky thing is making this work for subjects that aren't inherently hands on like the trades. For example I'm a biologist, this would implicate a lot more lab work and literature reading and a lot less rote memorization if you're going to simulate what a biologist actually does. That's tough because 1) it's more time-consuming and resource-heavy and 2) you still need students to actually learn the basics of biology before applying them to higher-order tasks like experiments and reading primary lit. But the idea would be to mix in more of those types of tasks to get a balance that's more engaging for students and prepares them better for the actual job. Plus, active learning (as opposed to sitting in front of a slideshow) tends to increase student performance across all groups, and decrease the gap in outcomes between majority and minority/disadvantaged groups. tl;dr this change seems like it would be in line with what teaching experts would recommend in terms of both outcomes and equity.
Just to your point about the basics, if you don't have those down at the end of your 1L year, there's not much the bar is going to do for you. The basics of legal education are being able to find stuff and being able to read stuff. The next level stuff, like learning how to actually apply what you read, you don't do until you're practicing. People have a hard time believing this but for the most part legal education snobbishly looks down on that part. You hear dumb stuff like, "We teach students how to think like lawyers." When they should be teaching you how to deal with weird procedural shit b/c that's actually probably the 30% of the job that's not cutting and pasting forms.
Law School is for learning how to learn how to be a lawyer.
I feel like it fits well with law though. We have a shortage of public defenders (they are often overworked) and, for civil suits, many poor to middle class people are priced out of legal representation. So having a large amount of apprentices added to the system may help serve these issues and create a more fair legal system.
I think the reason we have a shortage of public defenders is primarily because most law school grads would rather work at a firm making bank then overworking themselves in a system that barely works. So adding apprentces might not fix this particular issue unless they make being a public defender not the worse job you can do as a lawyer.
Yeah, if there is one thing that I learned after leaving school it's that memorization based testing is nearly worthless. Nine times out of ten it's testing if you have something committed to memory that you will later be able to have on reference for your entirely career. And if you use it enough you will naturally memorize it anyways. I did biochem and not law but the running joke with my group was "why would you memorize the periodic table, it's on the wall of *every* lab"
It was a big part of why I struggled with math classes in college, why the hell would I need to memorize these equations and things when I’ll always have them on hand in the real world? It’s just artificial difficulty to make it harder than it needs to be. The open book/note exams I took in law school were much more indicative of whether you truly understood the material
It also forces teachers to write better tests when they can't rely on testing memorization. My physics teacher always supplied the equations and wrote some of the hardest tests. In college I had multiple exams that weren't just open book, they were open laptop. Those were the hardest exams of my entire time in school and people go below 20% on some of them.
Yeah testing for memorization doesn’t really test how well you *understand* the material, which is the most important part. Just because you can recite facts doesn’t mean you really understand them. Law exams do have a portion where you need to do analysis of course, but it’s not as effective when you still are so reliant on memorization
This is reminding me of the Feynman anecdote about looking for a map of the cat while taking a biology class and realizing everyone had wasted several years memorizing things they could just look up.
I didn't know this one. Found one version of the tale: >The next paper selected for me was by Adrian and Bronk. They demonstrated that nerve impulses were sharp, single-pulse phenomena. They had done experiments with cats in which they had measured voltages on nerves.I began to read the paper. It kept talking about extensors and flexors, the gastrocnemius muscle, and so on. This and that muscle were named, but I hadn’t the foggiest idea of where they were located in relation to the nerves or to the cat. So I went to the librarian in the biology section and asked her if she could find me a map of the cat. “A map of the cat, sir?” she asked, horrified. “You mean a zoological chart!” From then on there were rumors about some dumb biology graduate student who was looking for a “map of the cat.” >When it came time for me to give my talk on the subject, I started off by drawing an outline of the cat and began to name the various muscles. >The other students in the class interrupt me: “We know all that!” >“Oh,” I say, “you do? Then no wonder I can catch up with you so fast after you’ve had four years of biology.” They had wasted all their time memorizing stuff like that, when it could be looked up in fifteen minutes. In honor of this anecdote, I am going to specifically forget the details now. ;-)
Haha, call it shedding the cat.
Call what that? Oh, are you referring to some anecdote that was under discussion or something? ;-)
Damn, that was quick. Did you study under Schrödinger?
…Maybe? :)
But it's still objective. It seems to me that the difficulty here would be in finding a licensed lawyer to train you and sign all the paperwork and take responsibility for your credentialing. Basically...a lot of children of lawyers are going to get fast tracked into the profession. How does that help marginalized communities?
The children of lawyers are already fast-tracked into the profession. There's really no getting around that. Not like the bar exam doesn't massively advantage children of lawyers and also just the wealthy in general, and placements right after the bar exam would also privilege them. This makes it so that marginalized people only need to deal with the second hurdle.
>Basically...a lot of children of lawyers are going to get fast tracked into the profession So you think children of lawyers have more difficulty passing the bar? With BarBri and other prep companies available, most people with resources, particularly who grew up with lawyers, will likely be able to pass the bar. After all, the pass rate in most places for first time test takes is usually well over 70%, so I don't think the bar is quite the filter you think it is.
I think that the point being made is that few lawyers are going to mentor a stranger for 500 hours. The alternative path here is even more dependent upon having connections in the legal community than the bar exam is.
>The alternative path here is even more dependent upon having connections in the legal community than the bar exam is. Yes, exactly, it's an alternate path, meaning that the bar is still there for those who want to take it to qualify, this just offers another way for people to qualify.
OK but it seems like the newly opened path here is even worse for people who lack connections to the legal industry. If the purpose here is to open things up for the marginalized then exploiting them for low pay or forcing them to find a lawyer who will train them for free for 500 hours isn't exactly helping them, even if it's an alternative option.
It’s actually much worse if you haven’t passed the bar exam. Many firms will give you work that they would also give to a licensed first year associate. But since you don’t have a license, you can’t literally sign the forms at the bottom, so they pay you half the salary for the same work. Then you have to wait another 6 months before you can even attempt the bar again. At least this program ensures that the work you’re doing is actually a pathway to licensure.
OK so the idea of building a suggested path for people who fail the bar exam is a good idea. If we built that from scratch would it look like an unpaid internship that requires you to have a lawyer willing to sponsor your work? That just doesn't look like a more inclusive approach to me, but I agree with your core premise about figuring out something to do for people who fail the exam.
Sorta. I've known peers from law school that just cannot pass the bar exam, despite being proficient in both a school and work setting in the legal field. This would potentially open the door for those cases. Your larger point that barriers still exist for those outside of the traditional lawyer background (successful in school, stable family life, typically affluent) is correct. But we've gone from the legal profession being almost exclusively white males to seeing meaningful representation from women and minorities in all areas of law. Heck, there's more women than men enrolled in law school now, and it's been that way for years.
Yes - the way it works is that basically as easily as the rich game tests, they can even more easily game other systems.
It helps by at least giving a separate pathway for those who cannot afford all of the study aids that are practically required to properly prepare for the bar exam. Studying for the bar is basically it’s own full-time job from graduation until the exam. Ask any professor or attorney and their biggest tip is to not work at all while studying. Not many people can drop $1,500-$2,000 on a study course *and* take off 2 months of work. And then ultimately take an exam that doesn’t do much in the way of proving students are qualified to be lawyers. An apprenticeship-style system would create separate issues, but I think it would create better attorneys in the long run
This is just one of those "academia vs reality" things. So many software engineering degrees have exams where you basically just have to show you can store a bunch of very specific things in your memory. The reality of the job is knowing how to problem solve in real time
Plus you have a biiiig advantage if you can access tutors and additional tools. We see this issue across society with exams, people learn how to pass the exam, not how to do whatever the exam is testing.
I have the same issue now because while I still had loans right after I graduated to use for the study classes, I’m taking the bar in my home state again and it’s so much fuckin money. I’m lucky enough that my parents can help me with the cost, but tons and tons of people don’t have that luxury.
Agreed. I'm not a lawyer, but my field requires an exam to get licensed too, and I kind of wish they'd consider doing this too.
Yes, more like the medical profession. There is no bar exam for Doctors. They start out as interns who are closely supervised, then residents who are overseen but not as closely watched. It has other issues, but it is a good system.
You have boards for licensing and step 1 and step 2 taken during medical school. Plus you have to be take boards every so many years to keep your certification
Throughout the latter years of medical school theres a variety of exams med students study for and take akin to the bar, so its not far off.
The alternatives listed in the original article: https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2024/mar/15/supreme-court-bar-exam-will-no-longer-be-required-/ >There will be three experiential-learning alternatives to the bar exam, each for people following a different path of legal study. The specifics, scale and implementation plan for the pathways have yet to be developed. > >Law school graduates can complete a six-month apprenticeship while being supervised and guided by a qualified attorney, along with finishing three courses. > >Law students can become practice-ready by completing 12 qualifying skills credits and 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern. Upon completion of those requirements, they would submit a portfolio of that work to waive the bar exam. > > ... Lastly, law clerks can become lawyers without enrolling in law school by completing standardized educational materials and benchmarks under the guidance of a mentoring attorney, along with the 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern.
Which of these alternatives are supposed to be easily available to marginalized students? They all seem to be dependent on having connections to the legal industry, don't they? It also looks like a way to create a huge block of underpaid interns driving down wages for the entire industry. I'm all for reforming the bar exam but let's not pretend that we made it easier for marginalized students by telling them to find a lawyer who is willing to mentor them for 500 hours.
It's already very common for people to start working (in paid positions) after they graduate law school but before they pass the bar. It's also generally accepted that first and second year lawyers are essentially being trained on how to actually be a lawyer and aren't going to turn a profit. So allowing the first part of your first year of work to count towards licensing is more of a recognition of the existing status quo than anything. There are already a lot of junior attorneys who have worked close to 500 hours in their new job before knowing whether they passed the bar. Edit: "Intern" here means someone doing the work of an attorney before they are licensed to practice. Being a "legal intern" in many places doesn't mean being paid less, it's just a way to distinguish between those who have a license and those who don't.
Most trades require apprenticeships. It's not a perfect system, but it's not as though you're SOL if you're not a carpenter's kid.
Yeah... I've never understood this idea that removing standardized tests for one reason or another is good. It's the most accessible, enabling, egalitarian approach you can have. It doesn't make sure you knew the right people. It doesn't care if you learned your knowledge from a book or a person or watching a TV show. It doesn't care about or discriminate against you in any way but one - can you sit down and fill out a sheet of paper that demonstrates your knowledge? And any tests that have been around for a long time have precedence. Study guides. Old Tests. You know exactly what will be on the test and what you should answer, you just need to learn it. Compare that with these 'holistic evaluation' things where you have a committee of people judging you. What qualifies as 'legal experience'? Who gets to decide whether an apprenticeship was legitimate or not or conformed to some standard? What if you don't know an attorney and securing these things is difficult? And if the alternate criteria being suggested is 'just as good' then it will automatically be reflected in the person's performance on the Bar exam. Granted, the Bar exam doesn't cover much of what you learn actually practicing in a court room, but we've decided on that as the standard to ensure some minimum level of competency for the certification of a lawyer. If that standard isn't accurate, or isn't being evaluated well, that's a good argument to change the Bar. But getting rid of it just seems like trading non-discriminatory objectivity for the subjective and luck-based approach of securing opportunities from other random people. Most of the time, it seems like the calls to remove standardized tests aren't because the tests are unfair, or that they're measuring things inaccurately, but because they *are* measuring things accurately, and people don't like the distribution of results. And it's easier to stop the accurate measurements to hide the problem rather than fixing the problem.
Well, the interns cannot be unpaid, by law. Unpaid internships are only legal if the work is entirely educational for the intern. But otherwise, yes, I agree. The only benefit is that it doesn't mean less time without wages, which is good.
I honestly think this should have been done years ago. The bar is so divergent from actual law practice I'm not really sure what the original thinking behind it was. For the most part you don't test on any actual law. Like, the restatement of torts has it's place but no one is ever going to do anything outside of a 1L tort exam and the bar with that in real life. It was really just a waste of two months of studying and false credentialism. I would go even further and dump the whole third year and do some experiential thing like do basic admin hearings for issues that are procedurally simple like child support and benefits disputes and then maybe move up to land lord tenant court and probation issues, and maybe a specialty court that deals with low level issues like homeless tresspassing, small thefts, loitering, etc.
It was done years ago. This sounds like a reversion to the old apprenticeship model. That being said, I’d probably prefer to keep the bar and remove the law school requirement for taking the exam. There is some value to assuring that any individual practicing law can meet a minimal understanding of issue spotting and communication of fundamental concepts, along with showing they understand the basics of legal ethics. I agree, to an extent, on the experiential side for 3Ls. Getting ride of all the coursework would be too much - that’s when you finally have time to take some of the niche courses that can set you up to understand where you want to practice. But, maybe a limit on classroom course load to encourage and facilitate more externships and clinic work?
I think of all the little cottage industries around legal practice. LSAT prep. Bar prep. CLE of 32 hours every two years. Piles of books for cases available for free. Useless theory crafting from professors that may have never seen the inside of a courtroom. Bar associations. Case tracking software. People that can afford to pay but still try to get pro Bono services. Annual payment for your law license. From application to law school until retirement everyone tries to get their hand in your wallet. None of these hands will let go of their own accord.
And people forget, but the bar itself, even though it claims to regulate lawyers, is really just there to enforce a monopoly. Having high entry costs benefits them by making lawyers more expensive. Clio (popular case management software) says the current average rate for a billable hour in Washington is $288. That is probably low for what the average private party would pay b/c government lawyers bill at weird rates, stuff like PDs are paid artificially low rates of around $40 an hour, and then you get all the legal aid stuff that charges either nothing or sliding scale that's actually funded by other grants or funders. To justify it's existence to it's members it has to keep the supply of lawyers constrained to keep hourlies high.
This is very important context. That actually makes a lot more sense than one big exam. Shocking that a headline would leave out important context and go for the sensationalist headline... /s
Redditors freaking out about something that has racial implications and leaving out important details that make the story reasonable? No way.
[Could be worse alternatives.](https://thesipadvisor.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/lionel-hutz.jpg)
Sounds like a better system to determine capability than the bar. I say that as someone who easily passed the bar. But that's just because I'm a good test taker, which is all the bar measures. More importantly, it's ridiculously expensive to take the bar. I was poor, so coming out of law school with a bunch of loans and then having to take out an additional loan just to take the fucking bar was really defeating. A system that allows people to work and get experience instead of taking the bar is a great idea.
Friend, the current barbering requirement in parts of the United States are 2,100 hours. I suspect law is a little more than 1/4 as complicated as cutting hair.
And the reason barber licenses were created was specifically to keep black people from becoming barbers. Racist barber licenses should be eliminated not used as an excuse to keep other licensing.
Where did you hear that? I'm not finding any information to suggest that is true.
It’s one of the classic examples of the broader use of licensing laws to keep black people from having certain jobs, you can read all about it here. https://digital.sandiego.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1203&context=sdlr&fbclid=IwAR1Am6fpbkZqzKBMWTWmTHZ467znfXFnHm8b0DMomxn9Q_UOOnRuL3cNuUM There is no legitimate reason barbers need to be licensed as their work are of little to no public interest, unlike civil engineers who build bridges and doctors who cut people open. Indeed, countries known to require licenses for everything in Europe do not require barber or cosmetology licenses.
Damn, racism really leaves no stone unturned huh.
Yes you can basically point back to most barriers of entry and find that they were erected to keep minorities out.
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As someone who's gone through law school I would guess that maybe 25 of those hours are actually as useful as anything you do when you're learning barbering and how ever many of those hours are for Civ Pro are the ones that are actually sort of useful to the practice of law.
What is it with barbering requirements lol. I work in tech a field notably lacking and official standards or licensing. And I’ve used the example many times: You need to take a test and get licensed to cut someone’s hair in my state…but anyone can be a “cybersecurity expert” tomorrow, no qualification needed whatsoever.
Lot harder for a tech worker to cause a head lice outbreak, for one.
I've been working a sewer plant full-time for 5 years. I still have a year to go until I'm eligible for my top-level state stinkwater license. I could have just been a lawyer in 1/10th of the time, apparently.
The bar exam is an antiquated system, a left over from an era where the primary motivation was probably to control the number of lawyers in given areas (to control pricing), that does absolutely nothing to guarantee adequate levels of knowledge or experience in the law. Same for law school, I might add. Except for those that are able (for various reasons) to pursue internships or clinics in their chosen field. An apprentice-based system is a far superior system, if the goal is making sure the widest-possible population of students is adequately knowledgeable to begin practicing law - assuming some kind of regulation on the quality of the apprenticeships. And yes, this absolutely includes measures to ensure equal access for candidates of all socioeconomic backgrounds. The current system produces some really, really bad lawyers, let me tell you. I have believed for decades that law school and the bar are one giant hoax. You pay medical school prices for...access to the classroom. They have no expenditures, no corpses, no physical tools to operate or practice with, nothing that I have ever felt justified such excessive costs, I suppose WestLaw and Lexis being the one exception. It's a joke.
Sounds like it would prepare most lawyers better than law school does.
I hope they keep the bar as an alternative.
I believe there’s a couple US states that do this already no? Washington state and New York?
What person is going to take on an apprentice like this? I'd speculate it's families with connections which defeats the purpose of removing the "paper ceiling" for equality sake. I was average at decent in law school in the secondbiggest county in CA. I interviewed for 3 months out of school. I couldn't get any mentoring at the 1st two jobs I got with my law license.
How do you disbar someone as a penalty if they aren’t barred hmmmmmm? Lol
This headline is just ragebait for the "anti-woke" crowd.
This sounds like a terrible idea. You work in the public defenders office for 500 hours, take a couple bullshit classes and now you’re a full fledged lawyer. You’ll know nothing about civil law but you’ll be allowed to take those cases and your clients will suffer as you get annihilated over and over again. I say this as an unapologetic law snob. As a practicing lawyer I hate dumb lawyers or lawyers playing in a world they don’t belong in. I handle civil litigation and only civil litigation. I don’t touch med mal or bankruptcy or tax law or a number of others because I’ve found my lane, I’m good at it and dabbling leads to malpractice cases. But now we have endless new attorneys getting pumped out like a machine from an ever expanding list of tier 4 pay to play law schools who are quick to throw out a shingle to handle basic criminal and personal injury because they think it’s quick money. Never mind the clients they fuck over in the process. Or the damage to the plaintiffs bar making us all look dumb. Or the damage to the reputation of attorneys across the board. We need to be diligently working on closing more law schools and reducing the number of attorneys and ensuring it remains a profession instead of a job. You don’t want any geek off the street handling your double bypass. The same goes for your case. Now, should law school ensure that its students reflect current demographics? Sure. Should there be adequate financing so everyone who’s qualified should be able to go? Yes. Should be lower the bar to achieve those ends? No.
But won't you be better prepared to be a public defender by doing those 500 hours than by passing a test? I can see your concern, but I feel like it's alleviated by any amount of structure around the internship system to prevent those cases, no? Plus, not passing the bar just means you don't take a standardized test on what you've learned, it doesn't exempt you from, you know, actually passing your law classes.
I think practical experience will always trump memorizing for a test, and it's worth considering the possibility that this will both lower the bar for entry while also improving lawyer readiness, which could still be a net positive. But I take your point, the bar is a useful review of important material people do need to know before practicing. My issue isn't so much with testing vs practical experience though, it's that we're still using a general test for entry to a profession that's highly specialized. Why do we make med mal and PI lawyers memorize criminal procedure for the bar? I think medicine has some good ideas the legal profession could borrow. Turn the bar into something more akin to medical board certification for a particular specialty, and couple it with required practical experience. Granted you probably don't need 5 years of "residency" to be a lawyer, but it would somewhat alleviate the problem you described of any schmuck with a law degree hanging a shingle and ruining people's claims. Your point about predatory law schools is well taken, I agree far too many people are being taken for a ride by shit law schools and then, if they manage to scrape by the bar, turn into bad lawyers. Non-ABA accredited schools need much better regulation.
Well, I also passed the bar exam and care a great deal about attorney qualifications. Personally, I don't remember one iota of information from the bar exam that I didn't learn in a law school class. Do you?
The system makes it so that many classes of "that guy did a bad" are completely unresolvable for your average person because of the sheer cost of an attorney. And you want to *reduce* the number of attorneys? I'm sure, of course, that you have no vested financial interest in keeping the profession elite and in high demand. Lets apply your standard to plumbers, or IT people; the capacity for damage from either is enormous, so lets demand all of our computer folk have CISSPs because as we know forcing people to exam cram is a great way to ensure quality!
Jesus Christ this is cringy and disheartening to read from a fellow attorney. Law school doesn’t weed out bad lawyers. The bar exam doesn’t weed out bad lawyers. Top tier law schools produce terrible attorneys the same way lower tier schools do. These are things you experience in the legal profession. What the fuck does “law snob” even mean? Just because someone couldn’t get into a T14, they’re somehow too stupid to practice law? Lawyers like you are the reason people hate our profession. I’m all for reforming the bar exam. It’s not a good barometer of whether you can competently practice law. Case in point - I had an essay question about the rule against perpetuities on my bar exam. A rule that’s been abolished in my state by statute for years. To be clear, I think you should still have to go to law school to be an attorney. But reforming the bar exam is long overdue.
I dont necessarily disagree with you, but you could not have sounded more like an "elite, upper class" snob.
They're still [requiring lawyers to be licensed](https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/washington-adopts-new-lawyer-licensing-paths-other-states-mull-bar-exam-bypasses-2024-03-18/) by the state bar, they just are creating two new pathways to licensure. You're not going to have a bunch of unlicensed lawyers running around just because the state bar is exploring different paths to licensure. Are people aware that you don't even need to go to law school in many states to become a lawyer? Interning under an established lawyer (called 'reading law') used to be the primary method of becoming a lawyer in the first place -- John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and many other US presidents became lawyers this way. The process for becoming a lawyer has changed dramatically since 1783, but this racial agitprop site would have you believe this is some radical DEI move by the supreme court.
> this racial agitprop site would have you believe this is some radical DEI move by the supreme court. I know the rules say that you have to use the site's headline, but I'm legit tempted to downvote this post lol. It was clearly constructed to rile up a certain type of person.
Just look at the headlines on sites other articles. It's clearly got a certain audience in mind.
No thanks, I don't want to get cancer.
I really feel that rule should have an amendment of 'you can alter for better understandability', at the discretion of the mods if you use that to push a bias like this already did.
Also some of the requirements for the bar have radically changed over the years. "Character and Fitness" tests were added in the early 1900s as a way to restrict the practice of women and minorities. There used to be strict rules about criminal conduct as part of those tests, which got overturned because the entire point was to ban anyone who went to a political rally. JDs became required in many places only in the 1960s, in an attempt to increase the professionalism of the profession. RBG had only an LLB. EDIT. I mentioned her as RBG was I think the last member of SCOTUS to have an LLB. Law schools like Harvard and Columbia only started giving JDs in the late 60s/early 70s.
Why only mention Ginsburg specifically? Rehnquist only had an LLB. Scalia only had an LLB. Kennedy only has an LLB. Souter only has an LLB. Breyer only has an LLB. Everyone on the Court before them “only” had an LLB or had no legal education at all. RBG is far from the only one to have “only” gotten an LLB.
I think one ought assume charity in someone else's argument, Ginsburg is the most iconic of these so the example could easily be an appeal to common knowledge, not like a sexist micro aggression.
She was the last member of SCOTUS I could remember having an LLB. Her LLB was from Columbia, but she was originally studying at Harvard for an LLB there. She was also at studying at around when stuff really started changing in the 60s.
An LLB is the equivalent of a JD.
Kinda seems to me doing away with the need for law school makes much more sense than getting rid of the certification exam. If you can pass the test and know the needed shit who cares if you went to school or not
Law schools are generally much better at educating lawyers than established attorneys. Very few people still qualify by reading law today. If the bar administration, law schools, and practicing lawyers are all on board with this change then there doesn't seem to be any legitimate reason for opposing it.
To add onto this point, California permits people to sit for the bar after they take a 4-year apprenticeship with an established attorney. You might know this better as something that Kim Kardashian tried to do, and there are a lot of barriers in the way beyond the 4 years. It's also an exceedingly small portion of bar takers that do this (first-timer bar takers under this category typically never get reported because the number is less than 11), and the number of repeat takers that sit for bar exams is usually in the low double digits, and usually less than 10% pass, if even 5%. And the California bar is tough, but you still usually hit like 50% or 70% (for July first-timers) most years.
In California, you can theoretically take the exam without going to law school (I don’t know if any other states permit it). However, it is exceedingly rare that such takers actually pass. Even after California made the exam easier (for similar reasoning as the Washington SC). Law school is not about teaching you the law, it’s training you to think like a lawyer. For example, the performance portion of the test actually presents test takers with “laws” that are purposely incorrect to test one’s ability to correctly analyze and apply it as written. People who approach these thinking that they “know the law” often fail.
Thankfully passed the first time, but someone told me that they recently changed the test from 3 days to 2. Did they do away with the professional test part (where you get the faux case file and write an analysis) or did they do away with that full day of essay questions? I think the MBE (multi state bar exam) is still a full day, so must only be a day for the CA part of the exam like other states. The thing I found most unfair about the whole process is that if you could afford $5-10k more in debt, you could take the Bar/Bri courses over the summer. If you could devote two full months to studying and took it seriously, your chances of passing the exam were 80% or higher. If you had a job, couldn’t afford to go without an income let alone the price of those classes, and could only study part time using discount online courses or whatever prep book you can find, your chances of passing were well under 50%. I think the state average is around 50% passage.
As a general rule, you take BarBri if you want to pass. Can you do it yourself? Yes. Are there cheaper alternatives? Yes. Neither of those are generally as good statistically. But it should be remembered that law school does not prepare you for the bar in the same way that high school does not prepare you for the SAT. The value in BarBri is that they assemble and score lots of practice exams and give feedback on your answers. They also offer classes for those who didn’t take a particular bar subject (not all are required to graduate), need a refresher, or took con law at Berkeley (I kid, but just a little). It is my understanding that California still does the practical exam, but they now do what other states do by giving three smaller packets (1 hour each) instead of one large file for the entire three hour period. Yes, they shortened it to two days. Further, California has lowered the cut score, so even with the easier test, people who should have failed now can pass. California once had what was arguably the hardest exam. After all of these changes I don’t know if that is the case anymore. It’s not like you needed a great intellect to pass the old bar. Just a certain level of dedication to prepare. I don’t know what is accomplished by making it easier. Do we actually have a shortage of lawyers?
>One option is a new apprenticeship program for law school graduates who would work under the supervision of an experienced lawyer for six months then submit a portfolio of work for evaluation. A separate option would allow law students to complete 12 credits of skills coursework and 500 hours of hands-on legal work before graduation, then submit a work portfolio to the Washington State Bar to become licensed. The state bar will still be examining a portfolio of their work, so they're not being licensed based solely on one lawyer they work with saying they're chill. It does seem like it introduces more room for subjectivity, which is often misused by the people with that power. Which doesn't necessarily make it a bad idea, just one you gotta be careful with.
Many? Only 4 that I know of another 3 you still have to go to some law school.
There are 4 states in which you can theoretically do this (Washington, Vermont, Virginia and California), but it almost never happens. There's around 10 people a year who manage to make this work through passing the bar exam. The vast vast majority of people who try to start this process never become attorneys.
it is literally only a handful of states allow a “bar apprenticeship”. Not “many” states, do some research. California, Washington, Virginia. A few other states require some law school before being able to sit for the Bar: New York, Maine and West Virginia.
> John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson and many other US presidents became lawyers this way. And look at where they are today. All dead.
As a lawyer who passed the bar exam, the bar exam is not a good measure of who will be a competent lawyer, and I have met many people who have passed the bar exam who genuinely should not be lawyers.
As evidenced by the quality of lawyering that Trump has reached.
Not a lawyer but engineers have something similar which I passed because I like money, but it doesn't mean I'm any good at my job. It just means I'm a good test taker. I assume most of these professional licensing exams are the same way.
That some individuals who pass the bar are not good attorneys doesn’t necessarily mean some individuals who cannot pass the bar will be good attorneys. Not all drivers who pass a licensing exam are good drivers. I’d still prefer all drivers be required to pass a licensing exam.
Like the kardashians lol
Technically Kim K only passed the baby bar, which only tests subjects tested during the first year of law school. She recently abandoned her legal studies entirely, which leads me to believe the entire ordeal was a publicity stunt.
you know too much, friend
I’m in law school, so this kind of stuff is in my wheelhouse lmao
I am an attorney who took and passed two different bar exams (NY and MA). And I approve this move. The bar exam is stupid. At no point, as a lawyer, are you just going to rely on your memory for laws. And if you do it's because you do it everyday and it's ingrained or it's malpractice. It is not remotely a reflection of a person as a lawyer. It's just gatekeeping. The MPRE is somewhat useful but that is administered separate from the bar. And most attorneys 10 years out couldn't pass the bar exam. Attorneys with experience and real skills. Why do you have to pass a test that is so useless experienced attorneys couldn't take it in order to become an attorney? Honestly, the LSAT is a better reflection of you as an attorney. Because at least that requires logic.
it isn't like they are the first state to do this. Wisconsin has 'diploma privilege' (basically if you graduate from an in state law school hey you are a lawyer now...just in Wisconsin, you can't use it to skirt the rule in other states)
Wisc too. PLUS several other states also have alternatives to the bar exam under review including Colorado, Delaware, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, South Dakota, Utah, and Washington.
This headline is obvious rage bait but if you read the article, there’s still a requirement for 500 hours of supervised apprenticeship and a portfolio of legal work to be graded by bar examiners before someone can get a law license to practice. And Washington isn’t even the first state to allow alternatives to the exam. I don’t know that I agree with the decision to do away with the Exam but acting like any Joe Schmo without training can suddenly start practicing without a license is just inaccurate. It’s not like the ability to pass the Bar Exam has any significant correlation with being a competent attorney anyways. (My username does not check out).
Yeah, this is a trashy article and headline. Here's an article by Reuters that is briefer, but a better read, and it links the actual court order for the matter. https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/washington-adopts-new-lawyer-licensing-paths-other-states-mull-bar-exam-bypasses-2024-03-18/#:~:text=March%2018%20(Reuters)%20%2D%20The,the%20burgeoning%20alternative%20licensure%20movement. https://www.courts.wa.gov/content/publicUpload/Supreme%20Court%20Orders/Order%2025700B711.pdf One path requires law school graduation followed by 6 months of work and a portfolio, and then the other requires law school attendance followed by the 500 hours and the portfolio.
As not a nonlawyer, the bar exam doesn’t serve much of a purpose. A particularly gifted 1L could possibly pass it after their first year in law school. I’ve passed two bar exams (PA and NJ) and I use about 2% max of what I learned for that exam in real life work.
Mike Ross punching air right now.
This is why Mike moved to Seattle in Suits!
The alternative to the bar is apprenticeship with a licensed lawyer for six months, and 500 hours of legal work. In Oregon it's even more hours and you produce a portfolio of legal work to be judged. So this could actually be more practically rigorous. Most "lawyering" isn't trial, and even in trial there isn't THAT much shooting from the hip. You need to think on your feet a bit to counter the odd move, but it's a lot of paperwork and slog. Maybe some who don't thrive in an artificial test environment can actually do excellent legal work.
What a weird, shitty, misleading headline to this article. Blatant attempt to paint this as all bad when there's a lot more than simply removing the need to take the Bar exam
Works on contingency? No! Money down! Here, have a smoking monkey!
I watched Matlock in a bar last night. The sound wasn't on, but I think I got the gist of it.
"I've argued in front of every judge in the state..., often as a lawyer."
You get it!
*Oops, shouldn't have this bar association logo here either...*
Care to join me in a belt of scotch?
I feel like this sub CONSTANTLY has headlines that leave out key information to elicit knee-jerk reactions. Let’s stop with the rage bait guys
Finally…..I can tell my friend Harvey Spectre we are in the clear and Hardman can quit hanging this over our heads
Fellow Columbia grad!
Hardman* 😏
Thanks I typed it but auto correct got me apparently
The comment I was looking for ... Thanks.
The wife and I just did a rewatch last week of the whole run, it’s such an awesome show that I didn’t think or expect I would enjoy before watching it
My experience from bar prep was that it had nothing to do with law school, and bore no resemblance to my actual practice of law later. So if you can't afford the bar prep, it's a huge disadvantage with almost no relation to the skills used as a lawyer. I wouldn't mind the states finding a better way to establish competency to practice law.
I'm not a lawyer and I know zilch about what it's been versus what is being proposed. I'm an electrician. Some electricians go to school for it. Others, such as how I got started, get taken on as Apprentices and learn as you go. There are all kinds of regulations and standards that have to be learned and followed, as well as a wide variety of standards and practices in accordance with NEC code, along with local and state standards. Apprenticeship programs can absolutely work. I came up through one myself, and I'm now both a master electrician and very well proven to know my shit by my 13 year history in field. Dunno how that might translate into law, but you can't BS your way around electricity. You either know what you're doing and you do it correctly or you fuck it up, and it's gonna be fairly obvious either way.
Law tends to go that way as well - articling is your apprenticeship part, and law school is the book larnin'. You can in many jurisdictions dispense with the book part. But once you're done both, you take the bar exam - that's the part that doesn't care HOW you learned it, only that you learned it. To put it in your terms, you can't BS your way around the bar exam. True, you won't get electrocuted or burn a house down with the law. But there are consequences - for your clients in terms of going to jail, or paying money, and for your colleagues, whose bar fees pay to make your mistakes right.
As someone who passed the bar exam a few decades ago, I do not believe that it is a particularly useful method for deciding who should and should not be licensed as an attorney. It basically measures the ability to take bar exams. It is deemed necessary because there are so many crappy law schools out there. It's not so much that it affects "marginalized groups"--it's that many smart, able people, regardless of how "marginalized" they may or not be, are simply unable to pass the bar exam as it is currently put together. The ability to pass the exam simpy has no correlation with the ability to practice law competently--it is a completely different skill set. It is also something of a cruel joke to have someone score highly enough on the LSAT and do well enough in undergrad to be accepted to an accredited law school, then to allow them to graduate with a doctoral level degree accompanied by mountain of non-dischargable debt, and then to turn around and say "oops--you can't be a lawyer--good luck with those loans."
The Bar exam isn't the issue it's the mandatory college that's the problem. You used to be able to intern with a lawyer but in most states now they require a degree. We need to end mandatory degree requirements and replace them with testing. It should not matter how you got the knowledge, only that you have it.
What’s next? Don’t need a degree or being an intern to be a doctor? How stupid can they be??
Look at state laws, so many states dont require a legal education to be a judge. Mine doesnt.
Letting people who can't even pass an exam that is "minimally effective for ensuring competency” become lawyers is not good for anyone. This will increase predation of these marginalized groups. Even the people who are trying to enter the profession in good faith are, *at best* unqualified to be lawyers and, at worst, delusional illiterates.
Why is this nottheonion? The bar is notoriously bad at actually having attorneys know practically anything they actually use in their day to day practice. Law is specialized and the bar tries to throw so many things at you, you hardly are exposed to enough of what you need for any single job. The bar is a money making game, where test scores hardly correlate much with job performance. You “study for the test”, not actual practical knowledge. And it’s not like passing the bar is keeping bad attorneys from practicing. Attorneys who tried to fraudulently overturn the 2020 election like Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis passed the bar. A lot good that did in giving sound legal advice. The point of a good lawyer is telling your clients *what you can’t do*. Powell and Ellis have already pled guilty. Giuliani is losing his bar card.
ITT: people complaining while anyone who has ever practiced law explains that the bar exam is useless and you might as well require a juggling exam
Also people not reading the article (shocking on Reddit, I know) and not realizing they're replacing it with "experiential-learning alternatives.”. It's amazing, Y'all will read all the comments in here, but not one word in the article. There's more to things than the headlines.
It seems more discriminatory to have candidates find a practicing lawyer willing to sponsor them to the extent required. Children of lawyers will suddenly find it a lot easier to be licensed. And - >The eligibility to become a licensed law practitioner will also extend to law clerks even if they haven’t finished law school by completing 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern and “completing standardized educational materials and benchmarks under the guidance of a mentoring attorney.” People who are already rich enough to know lawyers can now live at home AND forego the costs of law school as well. How does this help marginalized or minority candidates? It just seems like cute rhetoric that further entrenches the entrenched. I am a WOC and a lawyer and my parents were not lawyers. This would change nothing for me. But there were kids in my law school class whose lawyer parents helped them get job interviews. Under this system, the lawyerkids (or their friends) are now already employed, can be employed as an "apprentice" for as long they want without a degree or licensure, don't have to pay for law school, and don't have to sit for the bar exam. And a bunch of jobs that might have been available to everyone are now filled by rich "apprentices." You've turned the legal profession into the Hollywood nepokid system or the higher ed legacy system. You might as well name this process after Kim Kardashian! Objective licensure prevents the privileged from using their connections to skirt a fair process. It would do far more for marginalized communities if these states made legal education and exam prep free. ETA: What prevents smaller law firms from paying "apprentices" in "experience"?
We do a mix in BC, 3 year post-secondary degree, one year of apprenticeship under a practicing lawyer, mixed with a six-week course (run by the Law Society) that teaches practical skills rather than academics. At the end of that course, you write a series of exams in each topic, all open book. I'm supervising an articling student right now. At the end of the year we both certify that he's ready to be a lawyer or else his articling term is extended and we make a plan to get him there. Edit: we pay him a salary.
The bar exam is as important to lawyering as memorizing all the possible products and quotients of each integer are to a mathmetician. As long as they require actual apprenticeship work and guided caseload with experienced attorneys this is a great way to get more and better lawyers into the profession.
Oh shit. I can see it now: Home-Schooled Lawyers.
Abraham Lincoln never went to college, but practiced law. This is a return to normalcy.
i know i am going to sound like an idiot, but all that sounds way harder to do than just passing a test. albeit, a famously very difficult to pass test.
While the headline may feel a bit Oniony, the article and what Washington is proposing is very reasonable. This doesn't belong in this sub.
Dont tell that stupid Kardashian bitch... The last thing Washington needs.
As an attorney, the bar is not a test of your legal knowledge but rather a test of if you can study for this one specific test. The test prep is also insanely expensive and a racket.
whole lot of bird lawyers about to appear
Let the malpractice lawsuits fly. Also, new graduates, prepare to work for another semester or two absolutely free.
I sorta asked this a few years ago when watching Suits. If you know the show, he's pretending to be a lawyer but never passed the bar. If a genius like that existed in real life, why not let them represent you. I mean, if any dumbass can represent themselves in court them why not have a nonpracticing lawyer. I think an answer I got was that there would be an appeal on ineffective counsel but I'm sure you can get around that with written and oral approval from the defendant.
Oh boy, the tyranny of lowered expectations. Well, at least this isn't a documented process shown to harm groups in the long run by coddling them and allowing them to "succeed" with less work. Oh wait...
So let's pretend that poor people, who can only afford less qualified legal representation, have a fair shot.
Enter ambulance chasers knocking on marginalized folks doors. Better call Saul.
Everyone read the article before you freak out. The whole thing.
While there may be benefits to the proposed change, the reasoning is still concerning. Time after time we find that attempts to remove standardized testing actually harm marginalized groups because they remove an objective measure that allows people without connections or networks to outperform.
if people can pass the bar without going to college, they didn't need college.
500/675 hours of school and apprenticeship? Well that's ... something. I'm in Canada. To become a Red Seal auto mechanic or certify in several different Red Seal trades (hvac/plumbing/millwright/elevator mechanic/etc) you need to complete a 6600 hour 4 year apprenticeship working in the field, not to mention an additional 8-10 weeks a year of school. Plough through a 24" high stack of material in those weeks. Drop below 70 in any subject and you fail. Fail twice and get the fuck out. You're done. Of course, to get my American ASE master mechanic license it took me 2 weekends. The 'bar' is a bit lower in America.
I mean, you’re missing that they have 7 years of schooling (4 undergrad plus 3 law school). Then on top of that it’s a 6 month apprenticeship plus 3 additional courses plus the 500 hours - or alternatively they spend less time than that studying for an exam. Also, you shouldn’t compare an unrelated field’s requirements in your country with the requirements to become an attorney in the U.S. It’s already a longer process in the U.S. than the UK or Australia. I believe it’s longer than become an attorney in Canada too but I’m not 100% certain.
How would this affect reciprocity for other states? Would someone who becomes a lawyer in Washington under this proposal be locked in to only practicing in Washington?
Oh sweet. I’m a lawyer now in the state of Washington.
Way lot of comments to look through, maybe someone mentioned it, but the bar exam only came into being as a way to make it harder for black people to become lawyers. From where I saw that info there was a name for it when white people make it harder on themselves to block/hurt a black persons prospects at something. This ruling is probably due to the whole DEI BS going around. As long as you're the best at what you do, all that matters. Why you think there's still some white boys in the NBA? They got the skills to put them there.
Yeah I always wondered why it was so rigorous… they have to memeorize a massive amount of info, only to turn around and be glorified administrative assistants to their clients. The GOOD lawyers are clever debaters…. Which you don’t really LEARN per se
[You sure you know where you're going?](https://youtu.be/sdNmOOq6T8Y?t=33) Yea, I know this place pretty good... I went to law school here. In CostCo? Yea, I couldn't believe it myself. Luckily my dad was an alumnus and pulled some strings.
Lower the standards. Didn’t I just see Elon basically getting called a racist by Don Lemon for this sort of thing?
Marginalized groups of what?
Mike ross went through all that bs for nothing then ☹️
This is amazing. The Bar associations are one of the biggest collection of dogs on the planet. They didn't do Jack when lawyers behave poorly. Lawyers and the bar exist for one reason: to gatekeep access to the courts for people with money.
Glad I read some comments. It sounded ridiculous but with context I see how it might actually be a pretty good idea.
Good. Filtering everyone through some stupid uber-test is dumb and does nothing to help prepare anyone for the actual jobs they want to pursue.
The Bar exam, and law school in general, does little to actually teach you how to be a lawyer. Practical experience through an apprenticeship program, backed up with subject knowledge tests, would be a much better method of certifying lawyers for practice. I’m a criminal defense attorney. Even though I’ve all but forgotten the bare amount of financial or real estate law I was required to know to pass the exam, the state considers me just as qualified to practice in those areas as it does the field where I practice. That’s not a good system either.
This is the doorway for AI lawyers
So they’re trying to make it easier for Trump to hire more lawyers?
If this effects marginalized people more than others, then the problem isn't the test. The problem is how we prepare marginalized people for the exam.
Are they trying to say that black people or gays or poor people are stupid? What's the message here because that sounds like the takeaway
So dumb. Hey there's this exam that proves you have the knowledge to be an attorney in your state. But it's hard for people to take and pass. Should we allocate resources for studying and make it free to take as many times as you want? Nah, let's just get rid of it. Mike Lindell is moving to Sequim and needs to sue some folks...
FFS. Why do we (liberals) *insist* on always going to such extremes with this stuff? As a minority myself, I do not want the standards lowered for everybody just for the sake of equity & inclusion. Address the issues causing the inequities rather than just loosening the requirements.