California requires >2,000 hours apprenticeship under a practicing lawyer which is even harder (and more exclusive) than law school. It is theoretically cheaper but in reality not very practical as an alternative.
Very few people in California pass the bar without law school via the apprenticeship track. Most years, zero people pass that way.
I would bet that the readiness/ability of the people who attempt the apprenticeship track is much lower than those who attend CA law schools. This may be the reason that so few people succeed via this route — not because it's harder.
Is that a vestige of some kind of frontier-days policy, from before they really had law schools in California, or something?
https://www.vermontjudiciary.org/sites/default/files/documen...
> 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.
We need more lawyers bc imo the biggest need with AI is trust and safety, and that’s something humans must decide for ourselves in perpetuity, we need as many diverse voices as possible to ensure equity for everyone.
There’s not a quick enough feedback loop here, I think. The vast, vast majority of people would not be “informed buyers,” so to speak.
are you suggesting only the fitness and character assessment should be necessary? or do you disagree with that requirement as well?
So no LSAT/law school, no bar is a potential pathway to practice law. Wow.
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Edit, if you don't like this comment, please consider applying Bayesian logic similar to medical tests. You get both false positives and false negatives.
This modification costs time, and money. It's expensive.
They don't predict the ability to solve any law problem. How could they? How could they guarantee such an algorithmic solution? To an arbitrary law problem?
Is the solution to do away with such testing because of this potential undecidability? No, it is not. Write the bar exam, and pass it. Then move on to law problems that may or may not be solvable.
Law school does one important thing: teach how to divine legal principles from reading a written judicial opinion. And, correspondingly, that is the only skill the bar exam measures.
While certainly important, knowing how to read case law is a far cry from knowing how to practice law. There is only one way to learn how to practice law: and that is practicing law.
That is especially true of trial work, which I've done for over 40 years. In my opinion, it takes a minimum of 20 jury trials before an attorney even begins getting a faint idea of the art involved in winning trials; and then spending the balance of their career crafting the art.
The idea that law school or bar exams are essential in any way - either to the eventual lawyer or to protect the public - is way off target. Indeed the myth generated by every judicial branch in the USA that being given a bar card means the holder is ready to offer services to the public, is the most outrageous legal concept I have ever heard. IMO it should be illegal for any lawyer to offer legal services to the public the day after he/she was handed a bar card. That's how little law school prepares - and how poorly the bar exam measures - an attorney's readiness to engage in the actual practice of law.
It was also well known that the bar examiners gave lots of credit based on your application of the law. Even if you misremembered a legal test, you could get lots of points just for logically applying the law as you stated it to the fact pattern.
Thinking you know substantive law can be a dangerous thing for any lawyer who believes they don't need to bother researching. Obviously we all absorb the law in our areas of expertise but to suggest that practicing lawyers actually use law they learned in law school is a stretch imo.
You are right, of course, that both law school and the bar test memorization. I have always thought that to be a big flaw. As a trial attorney I have, of course, had to deal at times with very large and complex fact patterns. I never had to memorize anything. Dealing with the same fact pattern for 24-48 months reading documents, and deposing witnesses doesn't require memorization - it just requires memory.
As for the bar exam, I'm quite sure it has changed. Back when I took it, it required two full days. Eight hours writing essays one day. Then the multi-state multiple choice the second day. Not sure if states still require a separate day writing several blue books worth of essays. Either way, none of that has the slightest to do with being prepared to engage in the practice of law - which was the primary point I intended to convey.
> Law school graduates can complete a six-month apprenticeship while being supervised and guided by a qualified attorney, along with finishing three courses.
Why will reputation matter in a few years? Our judges are elected.
Next step: AI-run corporation that demands both individual and corporate personhood including limited liability between the two.
Elite colleges literally just went through this with standardized tests.
Any concerns about people ending up able to practice law when they are unqualified can be addressed by exactly the same kind of oversight and accountability we should want/have in place for everyone in the field no matter if they took the bar or not.
I wonder what firms will end up employing these barless lawyers, and who will end up retaining their services. I also wonder if they'll be able to get malpractice insurance. I would think it would be quite expensive — like getting car insurance for someone who opted to get a driver's license without taking the driver's test.
The MBE in particular is an embarrassment and the NCBE should be ashamed of themselves. The idea that the MBE or any portion of the UBE is a reasonable test of one's ability to practice law is worse than a joke, as it extracts an enormous amount of money in preparation and administration fees from applicants.
An expanded form of something like the California Performance Test would, in my opinion, be a pretty good test of minimum competency to protect the public, but if what we're actually offered looks like the UBE, just forget the whole thing.
Washington state is going full lunatic.
