Over the past half-decade, the entire concept of going to law school has received strict scrutiny, even here in this law blog.  The idea of acquiring a 6-figure debt for a professional credential strikes most graduate students and their families as ludicrous.

Four states have a little-known alternative for those college graduates committed to becoming lawyers.  In California [of course], Vermont, Washington, and Virginia, a college graduate can qualify to sit for the bar exam without attending law school.

The process is called an apprenticeship - by studying in the office of a real lawyer or judge, by "reading the law", the apprentice gradually learns the law and, at least in 4 states, is deemed qualified to sit for the bar exam.  There are guidelines in each of the states, and the apprentice must take exams along the way.

This is the "road less traveled" to be sure.  According to the National Conference of Bar Examiners, of the more than 80,000 bar exam takers last year, only 60 were law office "readers".  The legal profession is constantly being called to task for using law schools as sentinels guarding entry into our once-noble profession.

Until law schools began to proliferate in the late 19th Century, "reading the law" was the manner in which students became lawyers.  Think, Abraham Lincoln and Chief Justice Thurgood Marshall; neither of these luminaries went to law school.

Out in California, the United Farm Workers union has developed a long-standing tradition of training lawyers through apprenticeships.  Those mentored by the union's staff attorneys have, as attorneys, assisted migrant farm workers and similar causes.

The obvious advantage of the apprenticeship model is that, with no crushing student loan debt to repay, the newly-minted lawyer can bring more focus to bear on doing good, than on making money to repay the loans.

With many law schools giving lip-service over the past quarter century to the concept of training students by providing them with the practical skills they really need, some have moved aggressively toward converting the third and final year of law school into an "externship", i.e. spending time in a law office.

While the practical aspects of a lawyer's training is a good beginning point for improvement, other significant obstacles remain.  For example, of the small group of apprentices that sat for the bar last year, only 28% passed compared to 73% of exam-takers that graduated from ABA-accredited law schools.

The bar exam, also a subject of previous Law Blogger posts, has its own set of critics.  All of this concerns the "secret sauce" that makes up the process of becoming a lawyer.

So long as lawyers remain viable on our nation's professional landscape, the lawyer-making process should be critically examined.

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Back in the summer of 1988, I took the bar exam along with hundreds of other lawyer hopefuls, then administered at one of MSU's convention halls near the Brody dormitory.  Thankfully, I passed on the first try.

Back then, if you scored a 50+ on the "multi-state" portion of the test [multiple choice questions], you passed without even having your essay questions evaluated.  Although I missed passing on the multi-state by two points, my 8.5 out of 10 average on the essays was good enough to pass; whew! [I've always been more on an essay kind-of-guy.]

Next week, the latest crop of lawyer hopefuls will truck up to East Lansing to sit for the 2-day exam.  They will be facing a new assessment technique developed by the Michigan Board of Law Examiners, in conjunction with and approval from the deans from all of Michigan's five law schools.  [Note: Long ago, the Board of Law Examiners did away with passage via your multi-state score.]

The Board of Law examiners is charged with ensuring that law school grads who pass the Michigan Bar Exam demonstrate the minimum level of competency necessary to become a member of the bar [a requirement to be a lawyer in Michigan].  In this way, the public is protected.

The essay exams next week will be assessed in a different manner than in years past.  For the first time, the exam takers will have their essay answers assessed by a method that more accurately:

• ensures that the essay test scores across various administrations of the exam reflect the same skill level; and

• continues to reflect differences in the difficulty between the multiple choice portion of the exam and the essay portion of the exam.

How the Board is going to do this remains part of their "secret sauce".  The idea behind the new assessment method is to ensure that a passing score should mean the same thing with regard to basic competence, from one year to the next.

In adopting the new method of assessment, the Board utilized a firm of leading experts in the development of "high stakes" professional examinations.  The new assessment establishes a common scale that accounts for differences in difficulty across different exam administrations.

You see, in the essay portion of the exam, the subject matter changes over the years.  Different topics are covered; some more difficult than others.

Well, good luck to all the exam takers next week; sure does suck to be you.  I fondly recall spending the month of July locked in the law library in Ann Arbor [back then without a/c], waiting for the doors to open at 8:00 am and dragging myself back out at dusk, wondering what kind of summer day I missed.

Good practice for the real world of lawyering.

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info@clarkstonlegal.com