September 29, 2011

Improving Preparation for Practice: A New Focus for Legal Education

By William M. Sullivan

William M. Sullivan is Director of the Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers project. He is an author of Educating Lawyers (2007), a study of legal education, which was part of the Preparation for the Professions Project that Sullivan directed at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.

William M. Sullivan

Among the casualties of the Great Recession, future historians may place the traditional assumption that getting ready for practice is a leisurely matter with which law schools need not be too directly concerned.

Instead, it seems that external pressures originating in the world of practice, as witnessed by the emerging American Bar Association standards, are placing growing demands on legal education to align itself more intentionally with the day-to-day skills needed by the larger profession. If this is so, then the content and quality of what students learn in law school is likely to become subject to more intense interest - and scrutiny.

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