Bar exam will no longer be required to become attorney in Washington State
spokesman.com
spokesman.com
are you suggesting only the fitness and character assessment should be necessary? or do you disagree with that requirement as well?
> i do believe there is a certain responsibility a lawyer swears to ethically uphold and maintain toward lay society which justifiably warrants some reasonable evaluation of the degree to which the candidate is able to comprehend and/or adhere to that oath.
This is just an argument that licensure has benefits. That's true, but they don't exceed the costs.
https://www.vermontjudiciary.org/sites/default/files/documen...
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.
Once you're a lawyer checks like malpractice insurance are great for everyone.
If you serve cockroaches in your food or give fraudulent advice, you should be blasted on the local news (and sued).
I'm sure I could pass an ethics test, no problem. But my first client as a self-described "lawyer" would almost certainly lose their case, and that could cause them significant harm. I'm sure there are ways forward from there, but I don't think I'd characterize this as no big deal, simply because I'd then get bad LawYelp reviews and no one would want to engage my services anymore.
Also if you give me salmonella and I can trace it to you, I’m definitely considering a lawsuit.
But just as I wouldn't trust a plumber or electrician to work on my house without being licensed to perform those tasks (despite acknowledging that this licensing process is not perfect), I wouldn't trust a lawyer to represent me whose only independently-assessed qualification was that someone thought they were an ethical person.
> free market and who customers choose to rank the merits of their lawyers is their own prerogative.
We can't even get reliable, non-gamed restaurant recommendations, for crying out loud. What makes you think consumers will be able to make an informed decision about lawyers in the absence of any sort of licensing body?
Consumers already make gamed personal injury recommendations on who has the most audacious commercials, I don't think anything here re: gatekeeping will change that.
Can I ask where you went to law school? Do you think your experience is common? I gained a lot of valuable skills and knowledge when I was in law school that I used in practice and still use as a founder. I could have learned this stuff elsewhere, but there's no doubt that learning it in law school is one (increasingly expensive) way to do it.
Imo you could learn everything in law school better with apprenticeship, especially the most important part - having tough conversations.
What about your experience made you feel that law school was valuable?
This knowledge could have been gained another way, via a mix of apprenticeship and online learning. But I would have needed to do a bit of online learning before I was able to add much value or absorb the learnings from an apprenticeship position. There might be other areas of law with an easier learning curve, but corporate international tax isn't one of them.
I readily concede that at current tuition levels, going to law school now is a risky proposition. When I went 15 years ago, it was a pretty good deal with in-state tuition and some scholarship. I'm all in favor of students having alternative pathways that allow them to demonstrate the necessary competencies, especially if this lowers the cost to getting a law license.
Why should someone be prohibited from hiring such an person as their attorney though? The implication of what you say is that people shouldnt want them as an attorney but the question is if they should be disallowed.
Being presumed to be unskilled just doesnt seem like a good reason especially since you grant they are fit.
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.
People should see a lawyer frequently for preventative care (e.g. having someone do a prenup or look over their employment contract) the same way people should see a doctor and do preventative care for their bodies.
(Like, I’m making a cute response here, but there’s not exactly an objective standard for objectivity, when you come down to it. Turtles all the way down and all that.)
Anyone can come off the street and take a bar exam. Not everyone can afford the time and financial burden of attending law school.
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.
The main issue is the prestige factor. People will assume that you couldn't get into a decent law school if you went that route. Perhaps some students with sterling undergraduate credentials could try to break through and get jobs based on their undergrad connections.
Most people who take the apprenticeship track are pretty exceptional because they have to convince a practicing lawyer to essentially hire them with zero experience. The lawyer-apprentice relationship is very hands on, not like an intern or even a paralegal.
Regional law schools tend to be more focused on black letter law, partly because their students tend to be less capable of cramming all the black letter law in the 2 months before the bar exam.
But it would not be difficult at all for someone who had apprenticed for a lawyer for multiple years to take a Barbri class and pass the bar.
Is that a vestige of some kind of frontier-days policy, from before they really had law schools in California, or something?
> 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.
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.
This is always true, independent of whether one has gone to law school or not.
The skill gap between a very good lawyer and a worse than average lawyer is already huge. The impact of this gap is highlighted by the O.J. Simpson quote "In America, you get as much justice as you can afford."
someone with the wherewithal to get out there practicing competently enough to continue retaining clients at a profit is just as skilled as any other lawyer from any other pedigree up yonder. apples to oranges.
any 'quality' or 'skill' gap between legal representation is a relative thing. there's shitty doctors, lawyers, accountants, and everything else everywhere.
and the type of law O.J. Simpson was ostensibly referring to is like the .009% of law practice.
Yes, so if you add new shittier people that relative difference gets larger, that is what the person above you said. This doesn't reduce the level uniformly.
My understanding is that people that choose public defender instead of private lawyer in criminal cases have statistically worse outcomes.
From my perspective it seems blatant that people with deep pockets are more likely to have better outcomes in lawsuits.
so yeah, criminal defense, litigation, and any other practice area for that matter is often quite a bit more nuanced than 'expensive lawyer good, cheap lawyer bad.'
Elite colleges literally just went through this with standardized tests.
So no LSAT/law school, no bar is a potential pathway to practice law. Wow.
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.
> 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.
chiming in only to add that judges are not elected in every jurisdiction. in many, they are appointed by the executive and approved by the legislature.
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.
Next step: AI-run corporation that demands both individual and corporate personhood including limited liability between the two.
Washington state is going full lunatic.
Also, it’s not difficult to imagine that many decent firms have been advising their clients on the legal risks and alignment benefits of DEI and ESG compliance. Will they not heed their own advice?
It might be a good living if you didn't have to take out $300,000 in loans. But if you were planning for a life in biglaw, which would enable you to pay off your loans in 3-4 years, a seemingly-good salary of $120k could double your payback period. Throw in a little unemployment (the market isn't so good for staff attorneys) and things look even worse.
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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.
Just like utilities written in C, the fact that they have not shown obvious flaws yet is no guarantee those flaws don't exist.
Nah. The more objectivity, the better.
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.