It seemed like such a great idea to the nice folks who rushed to embrace the future of law.  They gave it a really cool name, “experiential learning,” and made a big announcement about how third year students at Washington & Lee were going to hit the ground running. It was supposed to show the stodgy legal Academy how it would change everything.

But it didn’t. Via Paul Caron at Tax Prof Blog, Deborah Jones Merritt ponders the employment puzzle :

Pedagogically and professionally, it makes sense for law schools to teach practical skills along with theory and doctrine.

Employers say they are eager to hire these better-trained, more rounded, more “practice ready” lawyers–and they should be. That’s why the employment results for Washington & Lee’s School of Law are so troubling. Washington & Lee pioneered an experiential third-year program that has won accolades from many observers. Bill Henderson called Washington & Lee’s program the “biggest legal education story of 2013.”

Sadly, the statistics say otherwise. Washington & Lee’s recent employment outcomes are worse than those of similarly ranked schools.

Not the same. Worse. After all the hoopla, the self-congratulatory back-slapping, the praise from the future of law folks, it failed. It sucks for all those students who decided to attend W&L because they bought the unproven hype.

When the biggest and brightest new idea that everyone adores crashes and burns, a post-mortem is in order.  Merritt unceremoniously lays it out:

The results are troubling for advocates of experiential learning. They should also force employers to reflect on their own behavior: Does the rhetoric of “practice ready” graduates align with the reality of legal hiring?

A rather ignominious starting point. The concept can’t be wrong. There can’t be anything wrong with the execution. It must be those damned employers. Lying law firms, paying lip service to “practice ready” grads, and then blowing them off when they knock on their doors.

In fairness, Merritt does raise some good questions as to the concept. Not that experiential learning was flawed, but that it doesn’t create new jobs out of thin air. And indeed, it doesn’t.  Churn out 100 new lawyers and that doesn’t mean 100 new jobs magically appear.

But, much as I respect the lawprofs who are trying to make things better, as opposed to the ones who couldn’t care less as long as their paycheck is signed and they get all the time they need to pretend their law review article on the Asymmetry of Nietzsche and Rule 11 matters, I suggest that this failure reflects a half-baked idea born of the Academy’s insular view of the practice of law. In other words, they don’t get it.

First, who came up with the idiotic name “experiential learning”? Who talks like that? Not lawyers. You lost most of us right there, when our minds immediately went back to the motion we have due tomorrow. This may be mere semantics to lawprofs, but we’re busy and practical. It’s that easy to lose our interest.

Second, what made a bunch of lawprofs think you had the capacity to make students “practice ready”? Clinics? Internships? Externships? Practice as taught by a guy who worked in a big firm warming a seat in the library for three years more than 25 years ago?  That’s not practice ready. Not to a lawyer.  At best, you wet their whistle. Nothing more. Maybe not even that.

Third, while firms may well want new lawyers capable of actually performing work that will satisfy two criteria, contribute to the benefit of a client and not destroy a client’s world, nobody said they were prepared to trade off new lawyers who firms have traditionally believed possessed the potential for greatness for some local kids who were “experiential learners.”  While I strongly disagree with firms that adore Harvard because it’s, well, Harvard, law firms still embrace the pedigree because it sells with clients. But then, I’m not a law firm type, and care more about quality than pedigree.

And finally, your focus on jobs missed the boat entirely. Maybe the concept didn’t fail at all, but you’re quantifying it by the wrong metric. If W&L is actually turning out practice ready lawyers, then why look at jobs? Instead, these are new lawyers who are prepared to practice law, not get jobs in the practice of law. Are they capable of hanging out a shingle, handling clients competently and with integrity?  If so, then you have achieved success. What is it with you people and jobs? Why do you so prefer followers to leaders?

This isn’t to say that I think the concept was well-executed. I don’t. One year of experiential learning (damn, I hate that phrase) does not make a practice ready lawyer. Not even close. Scholars cannot teach students to be practice ready. You are not qualified, no matter how highly you think of yourselves. Dedicated internships and clinics are far too limited in their focus and scope to offer a student a sufficient breadth of the law, even in narrow practice niches, to prepare them to competently practice.

Is there an easy fix? Not that I can see. It takes years to be practice ready, and client safe. It takes even more years of experience to be able to teach students to be practice ready, plus the skillset of the teacher/mentor.  No, this isn’t going to be fixed by law school marketing rhetoric or lawprof self-attribution. Most of you don’t have what it takes, and even fewer grasp what practicing lawyers are talking about.

But even if turning your focus from theory to practice isn’t a magic bullet solution that will get your graduates oodles of big money jobs, and thus fill seats with happily debt-laden baby butts for the next incoming class, the approach has far greater merit than taking the same students and filling their schedule with Law and Macramé.  Don’t give up on the concept, but take a damn hard look at the execution and where your students ought to be heading when they leave the nest.

Update: Via Dr. Sigmund Droid, a sufficiently quasi-related yet analogized point from the New York Times :

Q. Other insights from the data you’ve gathered about Google employees?

A. One of the things we’ve seen from all our data crunching is that G.P.A.’s are worthless as a criteria for hiring, and test scores are worthless — no correlation at all except for brand-new college grads, where there’s a slight correlation. Google famously used to ask everyone for a transcript and G.P.A.’s and test scores, but we don’t anymore, unless you’re just a few years out of school. We found that they don’t predict anything.

What’s interesting is the proportion of people without any college education at Google has increased over time as well. So we have teams where you have 14 percent of the team made up of people who’ve never gone to college.

Q. Can you elaborate a bit more on the lack of correlation?

A. After two or three years, your ability to perform at Google is completely unrelated to how you performed when you were in school, because the skills you required in college are very different. You’re also fundamentally a different person. You learn and grow, you think about things differently.

Another reason is that I think academic environments are artificial environments. People who succeed there are sort of finely trained, they’re conditioned to succeed in that environment. One of my own frustrations when I was in college and grad school is that you knew the professor was looking for a specific answer. You could figure that out, but it’s much more interesting to solve problems where there isn’t an obvious answer. You want people who like figuring out stuff where there is no obvious answer.

Of course, in law, there is always an answer: It depends.