Practical Legal Education

Recent years have seen a shift in the focus of legal education.  For over a century law schools have focused on using casebooks and the Socratic method to teach law students, but more recently law firms, hiring attorneys, and others in legal field have begun to view this approach with skepticism.  The problem can best be summed up by something that the dean of the law school said during my own law school orientation, paraphrasing, he essentially said that the law faculty and administration where not there to teach us how to be lawyers but rather how to think like lawyers.  In my own experience this was true and much of the focus was on legal theory or concepts and not on the work that lawyers do on a day-to-day basis.  For much of the last century this was accepted as the best method and most attorneys were expected to learn from a senior attorney how to practice law once they had graduated from law school.  More recently, however, economics have forced law firms to need attorneys who were ready to work nearly autonomously from their first day.  This has brought about a call for change in legal education to provide students with more practical skills that they will need in the practice of law.
 Law schools are taking steps to provide a law school experience that closely replicates the practice of law.  These include adding younger faculty who are more familiar with current dispute and negotiation practices, courses in court practice, and offering more skills course.  Law librarians should take the opportunity of this change to make themselves invaluable within the law school.  Much of what practicing attorneys do each day includes drafting documents and conducing basic legal research.  These are skills and course that many law librarians already teach or are otherwise heavily involved in.  Law librarians should use and expand their skill set in this area as it will eventually become a necessity for all law schools to embrace more practical aspects of the practice of law into their curriculum.