Transcript
"Regarding your article on the top law schools in terms of being hired, assuming very smart students from a top law school. I'm just wondering why you didn't discuss the extent to which graduates in various law schools are practice-ready, which might vary depending on their access to clinics and externships, advanced writing course, advocacy courses, moot court coaching, and other experiential learning? Is that not as important over the long run as such things as personality traits? I was under the impression that law firms were willing to provide some on-the-job training and mentoring that might be the norm in the previous eras."
In this particular article, "Being Practice Ready," a school doesn't teach you how to be a litigator. A good law school doesn't teach you how to be a real estate attorney. What a good law school teaches you is that it teaches you a thinking process and how to question things, and it puts you around other people that have very high expectations for themselves and are smart, and you learn from it. That's all good law school does. Then it teaches things in a way that are memorable for you, and that makes sense, and that integrated into what you do. If having access to writing courses and so forth, that all were very helpful. Certainly, some very good law schools have very good exposure to certain sorts of things.
But in general, what you learn in college and law school are not the things you remember. It's how you're taught to think and question ideas. That's one thing that's very important and how you think through things and reach conclusions. And being around people is also helpful. Because the law is always changing, the market's always changing. I was thinking last night, how much has changed. When I started high school, and there was no such thing as a computer. I was typing out my papers on a typewriter, and then very quickly things changed, and it became a Word processor. So things just changed. But having those the ability to think through things and learn is really what a good law school does. And clinics and externships, there's lots of very fancy clinics, very good law schools, and other law schools.
Coaching is important, but I don't know that experiential learning is given enough. I do believe that the US news ranks firms based on that. But I don't know that an employer goes to a certain law school because I think they have a good moot court program. They typically go because of the school's ranking and the teaching, and reputation.
