This is not always stated explicitly, but will turn up in board minutes if you have access to them. Many professional boards have added a DEI committee or incorporated language into their mission statement in recent years as well (Oregon bar statement: https://www.osbar.org/diversity/programs.html).
I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is "more DEI = more efficacy && competency," or whether the hypothesis is "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)." The former hypothesis at least seems more testable, but I'm not sure whether anyone is trying very hard (meta-analysis: https://academic.oup.com/tbm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/tbm...).
Oregon's move is exactly backwards. If anything, they should cancel the law school requirement and allow the public to sit for the bar exam. Schools are notorious for graduating incompetent students who's only ability was to take out loans to pay the tuition. Allowing the public to sit for the bar exam without going to law school would be a much better DEI initiative because it would directly address disparities in the ability to finance a law school education.
Also law school is ridiculous. My sister is studying to be a lawyer but may not be able to attend despite passing the initial test (the name I forget.) basically she needs a couple of existing lawyers recommendation, but we’re from a small town and she only knows one. Also the work requirements are ridiculous, she’s not allowed to work for a law office at all while attending a law school which seems so backwards compared to most schools where they actively encourage getting a job working in the field. So she’ll have to quit her current law secretary job if she wants to go to law school.
Are you in the US? Created an account to address this misconception in case it’ll help your sister out:
Assuming she hasn’t attended yet (and therefore just took the LSAT, not the bar exam), most schools will accept letters of recommendation from anybody that can speak to your sister’s ability to succeed in law school. That can be her current employer, past employers, colleagues, past professors, community members she’s volunteered with, etc. If she can’t find literally anybody, she might be able to network with local attorneys to get a basic letter to help her meet requirements.
And law students complete internships whilst they’re in school, not sure who told her she couldn’t work for a firm during her studies. However, many schools do have a rule against allowing 1L (first-year) students to work as it could interfere with their studies. I agree that it sucks when you’re not already wealthy, though. She could see if the firm she currently works at would allow her to go on leave, coming back as an intern after her first year. Alternatively, she could do a part-time program.
Disclaimer: I’m also applying to law school this cycle, so actual lawyers may have better info.
You can work, but you can't get paid for said work unless it's during a school break. At least that was ABA rules around ten years ago, and followed assiduously by everyone from private practitioners to the federal government. Nobody will hire you when you study for the bar (although if you apply outside of the legal field, you can. I worked in a kitchen when I studied for the bar). Although you'll have to have a body of work in order to get someone to pay you anyway, so if you're not the type who'd go from law review to big law or teaching, you can rack up a lot more hours if you're willing to do the unpaid busywork that comes with, say, the Public Defender's office, or the Prosecutor's Office. Internship + externship + paid work added together with a summer's head start I managed to cram in almost 3000 hours before I took the bar and had a job waiting for me right away, but please don't do that, because you'll get burned out really quickly and possibly become very jaded about the work. I spent one spring doing only juvenile cases and it totally fucked me up. And this was after I had worked on two capital cases (neither got the death penalty, thankfully), and in the early days of Facebook I scraped the personal details of residents of two counties for peremptory challenges during voir dire (hung jury, both murder cases). I don't think anyone in my class came even close to how much work I put in. I practiced for 6 years and then quit.
I believe all four of the states that don't require law school instead require a substantially equivalent period of supervised apprenticeship with a licensed attorney to qualify for the bar if you choose not to go the law school route (California does), so its inaccurate to point to them as examples of the “allow the public to sit for the bar” recommendation upthread.
The reason for DEI does not matter. The practical outcome is perhaps perverse.
A potential client will see a "diverse" lawyer and think "this person was hired because of DEI rather than competence."
Prudent clients will insist on white male lawyers because they must be competent to have jobs in a DEI environment. So actually competent lawyers from minorities suffer because of DEI policies and laws.
The ordinary client does not know how to properly evaluate the competency of an attorney anyway, DEI or not DEI. And no, the jingle is not correlated to performance either in motion or trial practice. Hell, Cellino and Barnes literally had a new Barnes and kept the jingle and nobody even seemed to notice.
Not sure if the ditch the exam here is related to that, since there’s a lot of pre-existing discourse around exam practices anyways, but
> I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is … or …
It’s possibly both. I’ve seen a lot of arguments (poorly cited usually) to the affect of
* diverse organizations tend to perform better. The general claim is that providing psychological safety enables people to work better. And diverse groups of people have more different experiences, and can contribute increasingly different ideas and perspectives.
* DEI initiatives are beneficial people and society at large. This claim is obvious.
So it can be true that the benefits of these initiatives are important AND they lead to better performing organizations.
People who are granted access to opportunities based on DEI and not on merit will be forever indebted to the DEI power structure and will aid them in their long march through the institutions by loyally doing whatever it takes to increase and ensure their political power. They claim that their is a conspiracy against DEI and they are just rebalancing the scale and this is why there are different scores on standardized tests, etc. They say the only way for you to get justice is to give political power to the DEI hierarchy and ignore their crimes and corruption and prosecute to the maximum extent those who want to do things based on merit.
And conversely, anyone who has been granted opportunity due to suppressing the opportunities of others despite merit will do whatever it takes to maintain their political power.
Source: the entire civil rights movement going all the way back to slavery
It's just a means of assembling a very large clique of underqualified people, who everyone knows are underqualified and who know they are underqualified who will, in the name of job security and gratitude and whatever fake intellectual "justice" sophistry the PHDs in whatever studies come up with, will willingly participate in and ignore political corruption and call it "justice" and persecute anyone trying to clean it up. This model has been replicated among many big cities in America that demand "diversity." Over time in the name of "social justice", a whole cadre of underqualified civil servants lining their pockets and waving whatever flag of the month protects them from any scrutiny at all milk to death the historical wealth of cities and slowly turn them into Detroit. All the productive people give up on and move out of the cities. The tax revenue falls, cities services decline, lots of buildings become derelict and burn down, and everyone cheers about how "diverse" they are.
In cities that just won't die like San Francisco, they spend $300 million dollars on a homeless problem that would put thousands of diversity hires out of a job if it was ever solved. They do a subway expansion that costs more than $1 billion dollars for a mile, and they demand more taxes to fix problems that could be solved by simply enforcing the existing laws.
If only that was the bar exam. Now it's all UBE so what you end up with is 2/3 multiple choice questions that bear little relationship to actual law you'll be practicing, and 1/3 are answers to absurd hypotheticals that you'd answer in a formulaic fashion, situations that you will pretty much never see IRL and certainly will never be in a position where you can't look up the law, except this one time.
Oh, and the software that's used to conduct the test is practically malware in the way it operates. At the NY State Bar exam I took there were about 100 people who didn't finish because the crappy software crashed and you had to handwrite the whole thing from the first question on. If it crashes your computer, you might as well leave since you won't have time to finish.
Really, the bar exam has virtually nothing in common with the actual practice of law. It's a separate skill, like taking the SATs. Although, there are so many legal niches that it's unlikely that testing real law would really resemble how legal practicecs work today anyway. It's pretty much an arbitrary test that might fry your computer. Hopefully they at least they should have released a newer version of the software in the intervening years.
There is an interesting hypothesis by Oded Galor that states that there should be a balance between not enough and too much diversity when it comes to innovation and progress - with the first you'll get stagnation and with the second you'll get chaos.
However, most professional boards are created with an explicit mandate to promote efficacy and competency, which makes a hypothesis like "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)" rather troublesome for a professional board to rally around. Even if true, it seems out of scope.
The "more DEI = more efficiency && competency" hypothesis seem like it should be where a professional board should focus its efforts and messaging instead.
One of my frustrations with professional licensing (beyond being intentionally protectionist) is that it requires X number of hours in a seat, not really demonstrated competence. This slows down market response to increasing demand (I can't find an electrician in my area).
A very involved exam stretching over multiple days would be much faster and more likely to achieve the stated purpose of licensing competent people.
Were you a guest at some other site? If so, the other person following their policy is a pretty reasonable explanation for your story. The policy isn't going to have an exception for them where they can evaluate your competency outside the established practice at the site.
I agree it's kind of weird if it were just a personal interaction with no surrounding context.
We were both at a customer site. I was called in because at the time my job was "The regular technician can't deal with this, we will send an engineer". The whole job was about a hydropump barge.
One might argue that time in a seat doing a job under the supervision of a licensed professional, without getting fired, is a good demonstration of competence - and has the added bonus of the student getting paid for their time while learning. Apprenticeships can be beneficial to everyone involved and have the added bonus of supporting social mobility.
Unless your job is just to get coffee for someone at minimum wage.
You can’t guarantee what someone’s job is day to day, and what they get to learn, at scale. Also the pay is terrible at most of these jobs, and significantly raises the cost to enter the field.
Agreed and think this definitely applies to software. Most CS students would be better off in an apprenticeship learning under multiple skilled developers rather than 4 years of school.
I would love to study on my own, take an exam, and be qualified to do electrical work on my own house. The only thing stopping me from attempting is the hour requirement.
I kinda see the point, practice is important. But I'm not about to transition careers and work as an apprentice at this stage in life.
Or as a sibling of mine did recently. Electrician didn't have time to do the work so sibling did the work and electrician reviewed on completion (when he was back from vacation) for a nominal fee. Electrician noted the work was meticulous, in fact better than any of his assistants. Several things to note, siblings meticulous work also applies to day job as developer, it probably took longer than the electricians assistants would take and finally you could say the electrician 'approved and merged the PR'.
Practice is important, but mostly for speed. If you could pay me minimum wage or a master normal prices to do electric work, you are money ahead paying the master even though the quality of work is the same in the end. I've done enough electric to know how to do pretty much anything, but it will take me much longer as I don't know all the shortcuts, I'll spend more time going to find the right tools (which would be in the belt of the master). I won't think that an outlet also needs a.cover and so be back to the store several times.
In the end either way the job is done right, but I know how much slower I am. I could get faster with experience, but it isn't worth my time.
My state allows homeowners to do electrical work if they have it inspected. In practice, homeowners are terrible electricians and typically fail multiple inspections before finally passing.
This program requires a short apprenticeship and the submission of a body of work to the bar in lieu of the exam. This sounds reasonable to me (though the 675 hours sounds low - I would have expected 1 year of experience or more).
Virginia is one of two(?) states that allow an apprenticeship ("reading the law") to replace law school. But the bar exam is still required. And the pass rate here is much lower than law school graduates.
Talking to friends who have taken the bar exam, it excels at testing, among other things, attention to detail - a scenario that "is clearly X" at first read is actually nuanced and the answer is completely different. I don't personally believe that any single other skill is more important to being an effective lawyer, and do not believe that a short apprenticeship or submission of "body of work" is any sort of substitute.
Will there be some people who can be effective lawyers without passing the bar? Probably - in the sense that there are some people who can be effective software engineers coming out of a coding bootcamp. That doesn't mean that 95% aren't incompetent people looking to make a quick buck.
> I don't personally believe that any single other skill is more important to being an effective lawyer
I’ll posit one more: a holistic intuition of how the law “works”. The law is unfathomably large. As a lawyer, you have to make numerous decisions that involve novel circumstances or that you simply don’t have the opportunity to research beforehand. So you need to base a surprising number of decisions on instinct, experience, or derivation from first principles.
Four states allow you to take the bar exam without attending law school: California, Vermont, Virginia, Washington. The various requirements differ. California requires two years of college, Virginia requires a bachelor's degree. Vermont takes four years, California takes five years.
The pass rate for law readers (apprentices) is lower than those who completed law school (20% pass rate vs 80%).
The law reader program requires an undergraduate degree and 3 years of apprenticeship under a supervising attorney, so it doesn't save time vs law school. It only saves money.
A small number of people undertake and complete the law reader program in VA. Likely because it's not viewed as a good value - if you complete law school, but fail the bar, at least you still have a post-graduate degree (that's generally viewed favorably in general).
But, IANAL or expert in this program, just interesting the different options to get into a law practice.
> if you complete law school, but fail the bar, at least you still have a post-graduate degree (that's generally viewed favorably in general).
For folks who don't know, lawyers really like JDs, to the point that if you want to be a recruiter for lawyers, you probably need a JD. If you want to be a career counselor at a law school, you probably need a JD.
They can be this choosy because there's enough people with a JD who don't want to be a lawyer or can't hack it as one.
More than a good chance the law readers are doing it alongside a full or part time job, while law school students are fully invested in terms of time and lots of money.
Any professional program instills way more than just knowledge to pass a test. The fact that you survived long enough to pass the test is often a big part of the test's function. The graded practice thing is actually even more intimidating. Not only do you have to do well, you have to do well live in front of people, and you have to have had the requisite experience in those hours of practice to get an adequate portfolio together. This portfolio development component can be brutally harder than all the tests combined.
If you've practiced for a decade in one state, and then you moved to another state without reciprocity (many permutations) and want to work, suddenly you have to sit again. That's a very different headspace. This "supervised work" is a good option in this scenario.
That's the same for doctors. My wife and I moved to a state without reciprocity. One of the local requirements was to have passed the board qualification exams -- the ones you take as a med school senior as part of applying to residencies -- within the last 10 years. Doesn't matter if you've been practicing for 25 years, or even teaching in a med school: you're taking the test again. My wife's the genius of our family and passed it the first time through. I'm glad I work in an industry where I don't have to ever take and pass my college exams again.
> Any professional program instills way more than just knowledge to pass a test.
If you talk to someone for thirty minutes about the same subfield as you do, you can definitely tell whether they know it. Mass testing on paper is harder because of cheating (even if only a small minority does it, it defeats the purpose). It's orders of magnitude cheaper to have a good test, one-on-one if need be, as compared to hiring all the teachers necessary to give everyone a standardized education.
I've learned very little in my master's. Call me the problem for already knowing most concepts and just having to learn-by-heart some protocol byte offsets (yes, that was actually asked on a closed-book test), but a year of memorization of some specific things is and getting a certificate for that is far less valuable/actionable than making sure someone can do the actual job and giving a certificate for that. Yet the former certificate is what most companies base starting pay grade on, or for being considered at all, no matter what they claim before you get to HR.
(Edited the number in first response line from hyperbole to actual estimate. Also loving that people are downvoting reality they, I guess, don't like? Or what's the problem?)
From what I understand, the law school requirement is more useful than the bar exam. To use a CS analogy, the bar exam would involve questions like "write a Sieve of Eratosthenes using PDP-11 assembler," and you're expected to have the PDP-11 assembly manual fully memorized to be able to take it.
No. The bar exam is an outdated, gatekeeping, hazing mechanism that requires rote memorization and application of blackletter law and is altogether unrelated to the practice of law.
However, it wouldn't hurt to shorten law school from three to two years. The third year is a waste.
I have a friend in WA that has been a paralegal for over a decade who is currently going through the process. In most states you are not allowed to take the bar unless you have a law degree, but in WA, CA, I'm sure others, you can take the bar after studying under a lawyer for X hours (not sure the number, but its a lot).
Every lawyer attending law school is a relatively new phenomenon although law schools have been around in the US since 1817. Previously, many might apprentice, then take a bar exam. Justice Robert Jackson, one of our greatest SCOTUS justices and a personal favorite, was the last SCOTUS justice not to attend the standard 3 years of law school.
However IMHO there are plenty of attorneys, perhaps too many, and de-professionalizing the practice of law, at this moment in time, will not be a good thing for judges, other attorneys, and the administration of justice.
But read carefully what Oregon is doing:
> After law school, candidates will spend 675 hours working under the supervision of an experienced attorney and create a portfolio of legal work that bar officials will grade as an alternative to the traditional bar exam.
I think this policy gets the problem backwards. Kids are actually spending too much time and money in law school. The preparation and sitting for a grueling 2-3 day exam more closely approximates one aspect of the profession, than yet another year of law school. I'd be more pleased if we re-adopted the apprenticeship model, as an alternative to some law school, and reduced the traditional law school curriculum to 2 years.
They should eliminate the license altogether and get out of the business of deciding who can practice law.
Professional licensing is generally a scam that allows people in a trade to control competition among other things. Under color of government it’s given the veneer of “protecting the public” but in reality it’s protectionist and also used to punish people who don’t think or act like the licensing organization prefers.
Instead... "After law school, candidates will spend 675 hours working under the supervision of an experienced attorney and create a portfolio of legal work that bar officials will grade as an alternative to the traditional bar exam."
How? If anything, this gives a path forward for people who can't afford to take months away from work to study for the bar exam or pay Barbri for a prep course. Compare it to professional pilots, who can work towards the 1500 hours they need for their ATP license while getting paid to do flight instructing, towing banners, flying charters or cargo, and so forth.
A lot of comments here seem to be speculating about DEI. I'm the last person who would ever defend a DEI push, but the requirements really don't seem to support this narrative.
> Candidates will spend 675 hours working under the supervision of an experienced attorney [...] submit at least eight examples of legal writing, take the lead in at least two initial client interviews or client counseling sessions, and head up two negotiations
> a Supervising Attorney [...] is an active member of the Oregon State Bar [...] has no record of public discipline in any jurisdiction to which they are or have been members [...] is employed by the same Employer as the Provisional Licensee
This looks, instead, like the standard apprenticeship model, and while I'd be slightly wary of the journeyman->master requirements, the apprentice->journeyman requirements seem pretty exhaustive and likely to produce results as good as or better than the bar exam. It takes less than 675 hours to study to pass the bar, but you were going to spend that amount of time informally apprenticed and do this much work anyway.
Meanwhile, the bar exam has got its problems, that make replacing it with a formal apprenticeship seem like a great idea. To quote a lawyer I know: "The bar exam does not teach useful or meaningful law. You don't learn <state> law on the <state> bar exam. You are tested about imaginary "common" law concepts that are often specifically replaced by statutes in a given state. If I tried to use the bar exam definition of burglary in <state>, that would be malpractice. In fact no jurisdiction uses the common law definition of burglary." Law is extremely state-by-state, and a theory-based test on an imaginary legal code, while productive, is likely to be a lot less productive than graded real legal work on the real legal code.
The bar exam using an abstract system (that may not really exist in reality) vs specific state law systems seems just fine, as long as the people smart enough to pass recognize that. I suspect they are.
But the bar also tests quite a bit about the concept of liability, the essentials of contract, constitutional law, intent, and I'm sure a bunch of other topics. Are those of so little value that it's worth ditching? Is 1/3rd of a working year (675 hours) enough to cover all those topics? What if the attorney is an estate planner? Or a litigator? It would seem this risks making the minimum experience of a given lawyer potentially more lopsided.
It's not that they've removed the bar exam and changed nothing else. From TFA:
>The Oregon Supreme Court on Tuesday approved an alternative licensing program that bar exam reformers hope will spur further innovation in other states. After law school, candidates will spend 675 hours working under the supervision of an experienced attorney and create a portfolio of legal work that bar officials will grade as an alternative to the traditional bar exam.
>In addition to completing 675 hours of paid legal work, participants in Oregon’s new program must submit at least eight examples of legal writing, take the lead in at least two initial client interviews or client counseling sessions, and head up two negotiations, among other requirements. The applicants' portfolios would then be graded by Oregon bar examiners, and those with qualifying scores would be sworn into the state bar.
Also relevant:
> Wisconsin allows graduates of the state's two law schools to become licensed without passing the bar in what is known as a diploma privilege, and New Hampshire allows a small cohort of law students who complete a specialized curriculum to bypass the bar.
This is kind of a more general question but in terms of finding a good lawyer to do X what is the best filtering mechanism?
I’m one of those people that doesn’t have a “I’ll have my lawyer look at that” kind of relationship with anyone as I e never needed a lawyer. How would I best find a lawyer In my city if I have something come up and need one quickly? Is there a ratings system or reviews system? From the outside it’s like a big gray box with cost and word of mouth recommendations being the only sliders.
This is a forever problem. It’s difficult to judge the competency or skill of a professional without also being a professional in the same space. Word of mouth is the usual solution.
Another approach is to pick a few lawyers (read things they’ve written, online reviews, etc.) then do intro calls and pick the one who clicks best. Do a couple of low stakes projects with them to feel out their competency.
I’ll note that it can be worthwhile to match the professional to the task. No reason to pay top dollar to a specialist if all you need is some common boilerplate that any lawyer can do. You’ll also need to line up separate commercial and criminal lawyers.
Can be a good starting point depending on what you're looking to do.
Ultimately peer recommendations are the best - if you know a lawyer ask them to recommend someone good or if you know an accountant ask them to recommend a good lawyer, etc.
I'd be much more likely to be a patent lawyer if I didn't need to follow some rigid time schedule of courses/in-person events.
I can do logic. I have done well in technical fields so far. I don't see why law is any different, I've had my run-ins with various contracts already.
If I could study, take a test, and participate, it would increase the supply, decreasing cost. Oh yeah, politics, a special interest group increased barrier to entry.
In some jurisdictions, the requirements to be a judge are lower than the requirements to be a lawyer. (Separately: in many jurisdictions, judges are elected officials.)
And in Canada not only is there a requirement for schooling (3 years on top of - in nearly all cases - a 4 or 5 year undergraduate degree), and a bar exam, but also a year of articling at a firm as cheap labour. I am thankful to have a law degree but far more thankful to have never practiced.
Oregon has also decided that high schoolers won’t need to demonstrate basic competency in reading, writing or math in order to graduate for at least five more years because "equity" or something.
High schoolers in Oregon won’t need to demonstrate basic competency in reading, writing or math in order to graduate for at least five more years because, according to education officials, such requirements are unnecessary and disproportionately harm students of color....
This is not always stated explicitly, but will turn up in board minutes if you have access to them. Many professional boards have added a DEI committee or incorporated language into their mission statement in recent years as well (Oregon bar statement: https://www.osbar.org/diversity/programs.html).
I'm never clear whether the hypothesis is "more DEI = more efficacy && competency," or whether the hypothesis is "benefits of (DEI) > benefits of (efficacy && competency)." The former hypothesis at least seems more testable, but I'm not sure whether anyone is trying very hard (meta-analysis: https://academic.oup.com/tbm/advance-article/doi/10.1093/tbm...).