At MoneyLaw, Louisville Law Dean Jim Chen wrote what few lawprofs wanted to read, that the denials and protestations within the legal academy aren’t winning any converts:

Let me begin with the angry deniers. For my part, I do not believe that law professors and law schools do themselves any favors, in an age of indebted students, unemployed law school graduates, and laid-off lawyers, to trash these criticisms as a “hatchet job” or (better yet) a “bile pile.” It takes a deep measure of cynicism, perhaps even petty selfishness, to characterize the Times as being motivated by their writers and editors failing to get relatives into law school or past the bar exam. A second, less angry cohort of law professors fervently wants to believe that tough times in the legal profession are merely cyclical. Wait a year or two or five, so the wishing goes, and things will be back to the way they always were.

Count me in the third camp. The criticisms are real. They sting. All of us, from law schools and law students to lawyers and law firms, have to do something. Things could, things should be better.

This seems so utterly obvious to lawyers that it’s hardly worth saying, but since so many in the Academy (you can see them all at the “I hate Paul Campos” therapy group meetings) argue so vociferously to the contrary, it matters that someone with as much scholar-cred at Jim Chen comes out publicly and disagrees.

But conceding we need change doesn’t answer the big question: What change?

No one takes David Segal’s series of New York Times articles, belittling the academy but similarly reflecting an unrecognizable view of the profession, too seriously.  It was good that he raised the issues, but he wasn’t close enough to reality to offer any serious solutions.  Again, Jim offers his views:

The hard truth is that law schools could stand to act more like law firms, paying closer heed to what lawyers actually do for a living. Law firms could stand to to act more like law schools, absorbing the cost and the responsibility of training their new recruits instead of expecting law professors to know skills best perfected far from the classroom. Law students would be well served to take a hard, financially sophisticated look at the out-of-pocket and opportunity costs of legal education, to say nothing of the strictly pecuniary returns on their investments in personal capital. The Socratic method and the parsing of written appellate opinions have a firm place in law school. But law schools and bar examiners and hiring partners should all work together to reconsider why and how we teach certain things. Sheer age and force of habit are terrible excuses for doing anything, much less forcing aspiring members of our profession to endure a three-year ordeal.

This is largely what lawyers have been demanding, that law schools produce lawyers.  Yet, if we get what we ask for, assuming law schools are capable of giving it to us, will that solve the problems? 

The flip side of the issue is that the profession needs change as well.  If law schools produce lawyers who are better capable of performing the old way law is practiced, how will that help the profession to adopt to the change required of us to better meet the needs of society and fulfill our function? 

Colorado Senior Judge John Kane raised a question with regard to that at Stephanie West-Allen’s Idealawg :

Law schools do need to change —so  does the profession, if nothing else by ending the billable hour—- and so do the courts, if nothing else by throwing out the present rules of procedure and coming up with an entirely new paradigm.

I don’t think any of these changes will happen.  What I think will happen is that legal education and the law as we know it will vanish as they become increasingly irrelevant. The Age of Administration is already here.

The universities have been ruined by the shift to administrators; the courts and lawyers continue to price themselves out of the market.

—-But then, I’m an optimist.  Imagine the whole system as a replication of the airline industry.

The Age of Administration strikes me as Judge Kane’s way of saying that our world is being run by grocery clerks with a check list, refusing to budge off their rules and requirements lest they be subject to criticism for failure.  But the judge recognizes that the courts have become “increasingly irrelevant” in society, and that “courts and lawyers continue to price themselves out of the market.”  Notably, he includes courts in that statement, not just over-priced lawyers.

That such a view would be expressed by a disaffected litigant would be no surprise at all. That it comes from a federal judge is very different.  The same is true when it comes from a law school dean.  The people who are most vested in the system, maintaining it the way it is and perpetuating it long enough for them to retire so they bear no responsibility when it collapses, is pretty bold.

It’s one thing to criticize law school and face the shrieks of lawprofs who demand their right to play scholar on the backs of kids who only want to become lawyers and get a job.  But the discussion has largely occurred outside of the confines of a failed system of practice.  Our courts satisfy no one. It takes forever to litigate and reach a result.  Most disputes are priced out of the market for practical reasons. 

Rarely does anyone “win” anything from litigation; they do in full of righteous indignation and come out the other side hoping their adversary suffered more than they did.  No one really wins.  Nothing is really resolved.  And judges seem just as oblivious to the failure of the legal system to serve people’s needs as lawprofs are toward their students.

We’re not just hearing it from the dissatisfied and disaffected, but from the players within the system.  We, all of us, have mucked it up pretty badly.  We can explain how and why it got this way, but that doesn’t make it any better, or serve to provide guidance for how to take this system and make it work for people again.

So while we can worry about law schools failing to produce lawyer-ready students, we are foolish to do so without simultaneously rethinking how the system needs to change.  Without the latter, we have no real clue what to demand of the academy in preparation of future lawyers.  We’re a mess, and it’s time to face the strain and change.