The Ugly Ducking Comes of Age: The Promise of Full-Time Field Placements

Robert A. Parker, McGeorge School of Law
Sue Schechter, University of California at Berkeley

Abstract

This article locates field placement offerings within a landscape of legal education that is being transformed by incisive critiques, new regulations, advances in technology, and harsh economic conditions. Drawing upon our combined experience of over 15 years working with students enrolled in full-time field placements and with faculties who define the parameters of field placement programs, we offer a description of the advantages of these programs, innovative options for implementation, and some traps for the unwary. The heart of our article is a discussion of the results of our comprehensive survey of all 200 ABA approved law schools. The information shared by our sister law schools that offer full-time field placements was rich in detail and is otherwise unavailable in current literature. In this article we summarize our survey results referring readers to 74 pages of raw data, organized into eleven tables, and published on the Internet. Since the empirical data gives only a “snap-shot” of current offerings, we also describe the history of the full-time field placement programs at our two schools to show how offerings and faculty reaction may change over time. We conclude with a summary that is intended to provoke discussion about the role of externships, and particularly full-time field placements, in law school education.