Late last week Northwestern
University Law School in Chicago announced an
"Accelerated
JD" program, compressing the same 86 credit hours earned by traditional
three-year JD students over the course of six semesters into five semesters
over two years. The compression of credits results from a combination
of starting in the summer, taking extra courses each semester, and picking
up credits through mini-courses between semesters. (Students will start
classes in May and graduate in May, two years on.)
But the real story has very little to do with compressing three
years into two: It has to do with a fundamental re-thinking of what a
legal education entails. The other components of the accelerated program
include:
- A limit of 40 students in the first class, rising to 65 in subsequent years;
- A requirement that each individual applicant be interviewed;
- A requirement that they have at least two years of "substantive work
experience" under their belts (sounds as though backpacking across Europe
and Asia on your trust fund developing your "foreign language and cross-cultural
sensitivity skills" wouldn’t cut it); and - Most importantly, the inclusion of two new and one existing course as new
requirements. As
the NWU press release puts
it: "The two new courses would be devoted
to quantitative analysis (accounting, finance and statistics) and the dynamics
of legal services behavior (involving social networks, teamwork, leadership
and project management); the other course focuses on strategic decision-making
(improving students’ ability to understand the strategies pursued by their
clients and organizations)." The point of this, to paraphrase
Northwestern Law’s Dean, David
Van Zandt, is to help prepare students for
the way lawyers actually work today.
No sooner was it announced than it was denounced. Perhaps
this shouldn’t be surprising, as
Van Zandt noted with a slight air of resignation:
"Van Zandt said he expected some criticism. "Any time
you innovate, you are always going to have people who pooh-pooh it or look
down their nose," he said. "Law and legal education is tremendously
conservative.""
What type of denunciation?
"University of Chicago professor and former dean Geoffrey Stone
called the two-year program "irresponsible" and said it risked
producing inferior lawyers who haven’t had time to develop intellectual and
analytical skills."My sense is that compressing the educational process is likely to seriously
derogate from the quality," he said. "What is lost is likely to
be much more than anything that is gained by hustling the students through
more quickly."
And this:
"University of Illinois associate dean Lawrence Solum said students
in a two-year program would have less time to explore career opportunities
during the summer."Law school is already an extraordinarily intense experience and my gut
instinct is that cramming it into fewer weeks and months is not likely to improve
the quality of the education," he said. "If anything, law students
already are doing too much in too few hours."
And—quelle surprise!—the commentariat on Above
the Law and the WSJ
Law Blog were, admittedly with exceptions, rambunctiously dismissive. For
example:
-
Let’s get this straight. The new two-year program would …
1. Cost the same;
2. Allow no breathers between semesters; and
3. Make it harder to find a full-time job at a big firm.If NW really wanted to be innovative, they’d make their third year optional.
-
Wow. Just when I think I couldn’t be any more ashamed of my Northwestern
Law degree, they go and do something like this. Way to dilute whatever
value a NW degree has and turn law school into a vocational school in the
manner of any number of unaccredited California TTTs. Jesus. - This is just another way for Northwestern to cheat on the US News rankings.
Just like some law schools admit students into their night programs so they
do not “count†in US News, NWU will admit students into the “short programâ€
who will not get counted against NWU in the rankings. Free money from 50
below average students without the threat of sinking in the US News rankings
or the faculty revolt from having an onerous night program. Great idea.
You get the idea.
And the "exceptions?" Those who had something positive to
say. They tended to be, excuse the phrase, adults. For example:
- This is not a new idea. Back in the sixties, I came out of the Army and
immediately began a 27 month law school curriculum at the University of Michigan,
starting in June of one year and ending in an August 27 months later. Most
of my colleagues in this program were a little older than the students in
the regular, full 3 year program, having, like me, done a stint in the military
or worked a few years after college in some sort of job. In fact, most of
them were already married. […] When I left law school, I joined one
of the large first tier law firms, and I was a distinctly odd man out, because
my peers at the firm finished the bar exam half a year before I did and had
also enjoyed the work and bonding experiences of a summer together as interns.
Still, I felt that the advantages accruing to me overall outweighed these
disadvantages. For one thing, a space of several years between college and
law school resulted in my being more mature when I started law school and,
I think, made me a far better law student. (By my last year of college I
was a real goof off, and might well have failed out of law school if I had
gone there straight out of college. This is exactly what happened to a good
college friend of mine.) And of course, as others have noted above, I basically
gained back a year of time lost in military service and picked up an extra
year to work and make the big bucks in my chosen profession. - I totally agree with you. As an Iraq vet, it was beyond excruciating to
watch another 3 years drain away sitting in a library – especially when I
got little out of it. I don’t think the last year of credits is worth anything
at all, intellectually. It would be better to implement a two year program,
and then maybe add an optional third year that allows law students to do
each semester as an externship somewhere – that way they at least get some
practical experience. - This is a visionary experiment, as is the experiment now going on at Washington & Lee.
Bottom line: the three-year model is unnecessary and all the power behind
it — the ABA and the AALS in particular — cannot stop the momentum behind
a two-year law school curriculum. In two decades, it will be gone.
Clearly, Van Zandt intends to make Northwestern distinctive. Referring
particularly to the two new courses in quantitative analysis and in social
and emotional skills, he says:
"For us to be successful, we have to be producing students that the rest
of the world wants. Just producing people who are great at legal analysis,
they are a dime a dozen out there now," Van Zandt said. "We are
trying to differentiate our students in a way that is positive."
Earlier today I had a chance to talk with Dean Van Zandt and
learned quite a bit more about the impetus for the program and its background. Here’s what I learned from him.
He’s been in his post for over a decade and when he started he decided to undertake a comprehensive review of the law school’s plans. The first step was to start looking for applicants with substantial post-college work experience, and a second step was to become the first major law school to conduct interviews as part of the admissions process. He reports that this past year they interviewed 75% of their 4,500 applicants, a substantial investment in manpower and time (although alumni can help with some of the off-campus interviewing). As for work experience, the incoming class stacks up as follows:
- 95% have worked at least one year after college;
- 82% have worked two years; and
- 58% have worked three years or more.
When they started this effort, the Dean assumed that they’d have to compromise on academic quality and be willing to suffer a small decline. But the opposite has turned out to be the case. From the time they started the "work experience" program until today the average LSAT has gone from 164 to 170, a greater increase than that of any other law school during the same period.
Another surprising benefit was to get more applicants coming from the East and West coasts. The Dean explained the dynamic this way: "Normally, aspiring law students will apply to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and then some ‘safe’ schools nearer to home. In the Midwest, that often meant us, Chicago, maybe Iowa and Indiana, whereas in the East it would be Columbia, Penn, NYU, and in the West Berkeley, USC, UCLA. But by differentiating ourselves on the work experience parameter we find students outside our home territory are now applying to us."
A key part of the program, and the part of greatest interest to me, is the changed curriculum. It now focuses on six fundamental competencies that Northwestern has decided are of critical importance to its students (more on how these competencies were identified in a moment):
- project management and leadership;
- teamwork;
- strategic understanding of the client’s business and organization, as well as how people in organizations make decisions and how they navigate organizations (in this the law school is greatly aided by having Kellogg Business School professors teach the basic strategy course);
- basic communication skills, including:
- basic exposition;
- training in formal legal writing and legal analysis;
- contract drafting; and
- business exposition, meaning how to take your recommendations and analysis to the client, be it orally, in a one-page memo, or in PowerPoint;
- quantitative analysis, including financial statements and statistics; and
- globalization: What skills do you need to be effective in a global business, how to work cross-culturally (not substantive legal expertise).
The Dean points out that when he graduated from law school technical excellence (along with many many long hours) was enough to make partner in a big New York firm, but no longer. Today, it’s all about understanding the client’s business.
Students often tell him that they aspire to being "international lawyers," and they start counting up the number of courses in the curriculum that have the word "international" in the title. He jokes that he’d like to sprinkle all the courses with the word just to make students feel better, but the actual advice he gives is different:
- become a very good Anglo-Saxon common law lawyer;
- go to work for a truly international US or UK firm;
- try to get on matters involving their transnational clients; and
- you will soon enough find yourself to be an "international lawyer."
Did he experience any pushback when trying to get the program started?
"Interestingly, much of it was from the existing students and faculty; very little of it was from the alumni, because they understand this is the way the world works."
And how exactly do the new required courses, the previous work experience, and the acceleration of the degree tie in together? "The idea was to put together one integrated package that–we hope!–will appeal to a slightly different cross-section of applicants, and a slightly different cross-section of employers. And limiting it to the small initial size means we don’t have to up-end the law school! After all, it’s been around for 150 years.," he says, with a smile in his voice.
The emphasis will clearly be on everything that the traditional
law school admissions process overlooks: The ability to lead teams, emotional
maturity, interpersonal and communications skills, a degree of business understanding
of the world that goes beyond what LSAT’s select for, and (the ultimate goal)
the ability to work with clients from the start, in an environment where business
operates globally and law penetrates the operations of business in unprecedented
ways.
Now let’s step back a moment and ask how this might change the
law school dynamic.
To begin with, what type of student is likely to self-select
into the Northwestern program? I strongly suspect they will be drawn
from the ranks of the "adults"—and not just because of the
prior "substantive work" requirement. As we could infer from
the "commentariat" I noted earlier, this program will appeal to people who
are serious about getting on with their lives and getting to work. (I
would like to imagine it would have appealed to me.)
Then you take those students who already, by hypothesis, have
a higher level of emotional maturity than your average shoot-the-lights-out
LSAT overachiever, and immerse them for two years in a program emphasizing
teamwork, quasi-real world experience, probably a dose of international exposure,
and specific training in quantitative analysis including finance, accounting,
and statistics, as well as training in group dynamics (teamwork, leadership,
and project management).
If you ask me, putting on my metaphorical hiring partner’s hat,
the graduate coming out of that program is who I want to interview first, before
those coming out of the conventional program. The "accelerated JD’s"
will have:
- Real world work experience, and presumably a dose of the realism that comes
with it about what it takes to earn a dollar; - Impeccable academic credentials—this comes with the territory;
- A fighting chance to hit the ground running, with a grasp of business fundamentals
both from the theoretical perspective and the hands-on perspective; and - On average, a couple of more years on them than conventional JD’s.
All it will take is a few high-profile AmLaw firms showing a
revealed preference for those graduates for the next shoe in the marketplace
dynamic to drop: Given heightened demand, law schools will respond to
the demand by increasing the supply of graduates with this type of profile.
Northwestern will surely be included: Indeed, I have asked myself
whether this program isn’t the Trojan horse designed to take over the entire
school in due course.
In the meantime, in the market’s recursive fashion, isn’t it
likely that more "adults" might find the accelerated JD attractive, and the
post-graduation career prospects more promising? Extend this thought
experiment only a tad further to imagine that they would in fact be
all-around better associates: Higher-performing from the start, more
realistic about work and therefore likely to stay longer, better suited and
better skilled for what they actually have to do and therefore more likely
to succeed (which feeds back into predicting lower attrition), etc., all in
a virtuous loop.
And the problem of intellectually overqualified emotional dwarves,
much discussed at the Georgetown Law conference on The
Future of the Global Law Firm, will begin to be ameliorated. Not
through ABA or AALS regulation or accreditation, not through changing a single
component of a single state’s bar exam, not even through law school alumni
pressuring their preferred Alma Mater to turn out people with at least a fighting
chance to succeed, but through the market’s invisible hand. Then, how
long indeed, before the classic three-year curriculum is gone?
On his cv,
it says that Dean Van Zandt majored at Princeton as an undergrad in sociology,
and that his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics was also in sociology.
But I’m betting he spent a fair amount of time slumming over in the economics
department.
