The Coming Crash in Legal Education: How We Got Here and Where We Go Now

Richard W. Bourne, University of Baltimore School of Law

Abstract

This paper traces the rise of legal education through the last forty years, and explains how the industry has been built on a sea of student debt that makes it in the end unsustainable absent radical reform. The collaspe in demand for legal services after the crash of 2008 brought into focus the inherent difficulties of legal education and forced prospective students to question the value of a legal education. The author recommends major changes in the way law schools perform. Briefly stated, law schools will have to end their mad pursuit of status and high ratings in the U.S. News and World Reports sweepstakes, by eliminating expensive marketing mechanisms that add little or nothing to the value of law schools for their prime customers, their students. This will likely mean the end of discounted tuitions, merit scholarships and the mandatory publish-or-perish regime imposed on teachers in order for them to earn job security. Cost-cutting may also force schools to rethink the way they teach legal skills and develop curricula, likely forcing some cutback in live-client clinical offerings and the ubiquitous "law and..." boutique courses offerings that now make law school an extension of the "liberal education" their students supposedly had gained in achieving their bachelors' degrees. More radical changes, including abandonment of the mandatory three year degree program piled atop a four-year undergraduate degree program, may yet be imposed. The bottom line is that legal education will have to reform itself to make its costs congruent with the income expectations of twenty-first century students. Failure to reform is not an option.