Training the general practitioner

The law school curriculum sometimes seems very odd, as others have noted before. At better schools, most of the students aspire to high-paying jobs with large law firms. Few of them aspire to a low-paying general practice. Yet, our curriculum is crafted so as to train our students to be general practitioners. That is, we make them take roughly equal amounts of torts, property, contracts and criminal law in the first year, and sometimes into the second year. In the upper-level courses they may specialize to some degree, but rarely does that specialization include much that overlaps with what people at big firms actually do. That is, in both traditional classes and clinical offerings, there is often relatively little that covers the two primary functions of large-firm partners and associates: (1) The discovery process in litigation, and (2) the nuts-and-bolts of transactional law practice. Nor, at most schools, is there much to prepare students for what actually happens in criminal practice. The outcome is that we have trained best those who have done the worst and are relegated to a general practice, as they are unable to get large-firm jobs. (Please understand that personally I think these general-practice jobs actually can be far superior to large-firm practice; I am simply dealing with what I perceive as the desires of most students). Meanwhile, we have provided the least relevant training to those who have done the best, and get the plum big-firm jobs.

Of course, some grounding in the basic fundamentals of torts, property, contracts, and criminal law is essential. Still, are we over-doing it? What would be the right balance?

-- Mark Osler