Grow Up

Over at PrawfsBlawg, Debbie Borman has raised an interesting question, with some even more curious corollary issues, about Dougie Howser, Esq., the brilliant but underage lawyer.  She prefaces her query with a bit of hyperbole that only a lawprof could offer with a straight face:


Law education is not as easy as it used to be. (Wait – was it ever easy? I’ll start again). Because of the legal market, the economy, for many reasons schools place greater emphasis than ever before on teaching ethics, professionalism, client interviewing, counseling and negotiation (and I am not talking about third year electives, I am talking about first year, first semester) than in the past. Schools focus hotly on practice skills so that students can straight into practice after graduation: “practice ready.”

This no doubt comes as an enormously pleasant surprise to hear, considering that the phenomenon of “practice ready” law students was anathema to the Academy over the  past few years and as of last June, they were popping them out utterly unprepared to do anything. 

One of the commenters to Borman’s post asked the understated question of where exactly one finds law schools that  “focus hotly” on making students “practice-ready,” to which Borman explains that schools are now “retooling,” so that maybe someday this dream will be a reality, assuming that lawprofs have the capacity to make any student “practice ready” given the vast practical experience most lawprofs possess.

Borman than dives into the meat of her question:


So with all of this in mind, practice-ready emphasis, teaching advanced skills, I wonder: is there an age that is too young for a law student? I ask because I have had students who are under the generally-recognized drinking age and I can identify emotional maturity issues in these (obviously smart, they skipped whole school years) students that, in my opinion, do not “play” well either in the classroom or in the workplace.

Meet Timmy, your lawyer?  One would have to assume that students significantly below the normal age for entrance into law school that they’re more than just smart.  Of course, if they were brilliant, why would they go to law school?  Putting aside Borman’s undue reliance on “practice ready,” the question relates to something that no only applies to the anomaly, the Dougie Howser, but to all law students coming straight from college into law school: does maturity matter?

Being a lawyer is partially about the ability to think, to have the knowledge necessary to spot issues, understand the application of law and legal concepts, and apply them.  But it’s also about advising and counseling clients in how to conduct their lives, their businesses, their behaviors, and that requires a depth of understanding of both people and life.  That comes with both maturity and understanding; you can’t (as Borman seems to think) learn sound judgment from a book. You can’t be a competent lawyer without sound judgment.

Before anyone raises it, yes, there are practice areas that involve no contact with human beings, no understanding of human needs and foibles, and can be well and fully handled by any person with a solid knowledge of law.  But until they criminalize this person’s interaction with living, breathing human beings, they remain a generalized danger, and so take no comfort in hiding in the bowels of tall buildings.

In the comments to Boman’s post, a few Dougies show up and, not entirely unsurprisingly, suggest that they aren’t/weren’t so completely immature as to present a danger to life and limb, self-assessment being a completely reliable source.  Paul Gowder, who entered Harvard Law School at age 18, notes:


There is good reason for some skepticism about the notion that there’s a big difference between young law students and law students of a more ordinary age, in general. Maybe in some individual cases (like I said, I think there was in mine), but not as a whole. Why? Well, for one, 18 isn’t all that different from 22, and a quick perusal of any of the more notorious internet sites for law student misbehavior or its reporting (autoadmit, abovethelaw.com, etc.) will provide all the evidence one might need that law students in general can say and do some incredibly stupid things.

This excellent point is where Borman’s point gets more interesting, and strikes closer to home for baby lawyers.  While most parents of children in this age group see (in our own, their friends, their peers) significant growth in maturity between 18 and 22, we also realize that 22-year-olds share much of the poor judgment of teenagers.

More importantly, they lack much of the worldly experience needed to provide viable advice and counsel to others in the conduct of their affairs.  They can be smart as all get-out, and yet lack that critical experience that allows them to understand others and appreciate the significance of what they do.

Of course, 18 and 22 are the entry ages, not the exit ages.  Are 22 and 25 sufficiently different to overcome the experience gap?  Chances are that these young people, being students, may be substantially more mature in most cases at 25 than 22, they still haven’t spent enough time in the real world to make them “practice ready.”  But that’s not a factor of age, but rather their being students and their experience being limited to classrooms, textbooks, and lawprofs.

Does that suggest that students who come to the law later in life, after some real world experience elsewhere, pop out the other end more “practice ready” than kids who never leave the womb?  Another commenter picks up on this aspect:



In my experience, more pre-law real-world experience does not equal better lawyering or better law students. At my regional school, older law students were never at the top of the class. Now, the people who were non-traditional law students are not the ones I would send clients to. Years of experience thinking like a lawyer matter, not years of experience thinking like a scientist or a sales manager.

This strikes me as conflating two issues, that the later-in-life law student is unlikely to be the academic cream of the crop, whether because they aren’t scholastically brilliant or because real world experience tends to make one care a whole lot less about grades and the sort of trophies that other students desperately desire. 

This commenter seems to suggest that they just aren’t as smart, which may be true but then, genius isn’t a requirement for practicing law and, often, gets in the way. This is one of the reasons I am thankful for the existence of the academic career track, as it keeps lawyers who are too damn smart out of the practice and saves potential clients from the damage of their brilliance.

In my experience, some real life experience before law school tends to make students both appreciate the education (and its application) better and be there for the right reasons, which is missing from the Dougie Howser discussion.  These tended to make them better lawyers, not because they were smarter but because they understood things about people that others of us wouldn’t grasp for years.

One of the areas where I see immaturity and lack of experience wreak havoc is with some young prosecutors, whose child-like vision of right and wrong, human experience and expectations, blinds them from exercising sound judgment in the exercise of discretion.  I suspect that the comprehension of a 22 year old, based on essentially no life experience, would have to be worse than that of a 25 year old, but that of a 25 year old isn’t all that great either.

I’m still stuck on one aspect of this discussion, however.  If you’re that smart at 18 that you’ve graduated college and are ready to start Harvard Law School, why the heck would you want to be a lawyer?

5 thoughts on “Grow Up

  1. cb

    Why the heck would you decide, while young and immature, that you want to be a lawyer? I was once standing in line at an airport coffee place behind two dudes who looked to be about 25 (going on 12), and one was showing the other his new business cards — his first as a “real lawyer.” He was pretty sure that “now the pussy starts rolling in.”

    You’re looking backward through time, as a lawyer who has been banged up doing real work for real people with real consequences. They’re looking forward through a haze of thin knowledge and television fantasy. There’s no mystery here.

  2. SHG

    So they think becoming a lawyer is going to get them women?  Sheesh. I used to deny being a lawyer so I could get a date. I told women I was an armadillo breeder. “Bring a little love into their lives.”

  3. cb

    Dude, armadillo breeders are hot. Try hitting the bars with an actual armadillo on a leash — you won’t be able to go home without at least a trio of supermodels following you to your car.

  4. DHMCarver

    Interesting post. My experience, at a so-called “regional law school”, and as someone who in his early 40s when he got his law degree, may speak to these issues. 1) I have found in my legal professional life that the skills it takes to be a good lawyer correlate very loosely, if at all, with the skills it takes to be at the top of one’s law school class; 2) Almost without exception, the top students at my law school were students who had some professional experience under their belt before coming to law school (for instance, the fellow with a Ph.D. from MIT); 3) Similarly to what SHG has seen, the one area where lack of life experience was most evident was in my Criminal Law classes, with the early 20-somethings (the ones who seem most likely to end up as line prosecutors or PDs) showing frightening little understanding of human nature, or life.

    Truth be told, though I have embarked on what looks to be a moderately successful career, I think I was about a decade too old for law school. My classmates who not only brought the most to the law school experience, but have also proven to be some of the best lawyers and, more importantly, have shown that they have the skills and intuition to shake up their practice areas and bring some innovation to the law, are the law students who were in their late 20s/ early 30s when they started law school. Perhaps at “top tier” schools it would be different, but most lawyers don’t go to those schools, and most people who need lawyers cannot afford folks who attend those schools. And I have a suspicion that one of the many problems with the legal profession in the US is that so many young ones go from college to law school to white shoe firms, and end up completely indoctrinated in the system as it is, producing a sclerotic profession.

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