The CBA Futures Initiative took to the Twitterverse Tuesday night to talk about legal education.

What was supposed to be a half-hour discussion about objectives and obstacles turned into more than two hours of enthusiastic participation from across the country. Mitch Kowalski summed up the responses about 75 minutes in: “So we’ve seen tuition, diversity, maturity, practicality, length of study are issues. Solutions?”

Karen Dyck summed up the legal profession’s response to these issues so far with an emoticon wink: “Don’t change a thing.”

A lot of the early discussion focused on high and rising tuition costs, in response to . . . [more]

“The conundrum that regulators have is that we are to all intents and purposes recognizing entry-level competence,” Tim McGee, CEO of the Law Society of British Columbia told a CCCA lunchtime panel at the 2013 CBA Legal Conference in Saskatoon, discussing what the role of the regulator should be in ensuring competence in the legal profession.

His point was that despite CLE requirements, lawyers aren’t actually assessed by regulators as their careers progress – it’s assumed that if they attend an accredited law school, get a certain degree and pass a bar exam, law students are competent to become lawyers. . . . [more]

“Are we happy being lawyers?” That’s the question Nancy Levit and Douglas O. Linder tackle in The Happy Lawyer: Making a Good Life in the Law (Oxford University Press, 2010). Lawyers themselves, they have anticipated your next question:

What do you mean by “happy”? On a scale that runs from having root canals to a night of fine wines and sex on a tropical island, where does “unhappiness” turn into “happiness”? Do you mean “happy” right now as I write footnote 17 on this brief for Acme Investments or “happy” during the course of my ten-year legal career? … Also, . . . [more]

As he does each year at about this time, Rich McCue tipped us to the fact that the results of his survey of incoming law students are now online. The University of Victoria Law Student Technology Survey has run for ten years now, providing a nifty picture of how things are changing for law students — so far as technology is concerned. The executive summary of this year’s survey, which had a whopping 90% response rate, is as follows:

• 96% of incoming law students own “Smart Phones” that can browse the internet (up from 89% last year and 50% three

. . . [more]

Despite the fact that “de-nial ain’t just a river in Egypt”, we are about to head into September which means the real new year for academics like myself is about to kick off. On the the day after Labour Day (American friends take note of the proper spelling with a “u”) a new crop of bright eyed students arrive at university campuses across the country. Every year at this time I always like to take advantage of the excellent work done by the folks at Beloit College who produce the Mindset List, in order to see what I’m getting . . . [more]

I stumbled across this post by Marc Luber yesterday that I thought I would share.

Marc identifies five different things that are not taught in law school:

1. How to be a Lawyer
2. Career Planning
3. Legal Career Paths
4. Alternative Careers for Lawyers
5. How to Sell your Legal Skills to Employers

It was 10 years ago that I entered my first year of law school. All five of the items mentioned by Marc were as true in 2003 as they are in 2013. With law school enrolment numbers up, and articling placements becoming increasingly difficult to obtain, it still boggles my mind . . . [more]

The summer’s blue moon has come and gone, the evenings are decidedly chilly (here), and sunrise wakes me at an ever more humane hour.

And another sign of autumn’s impending arrival: Planning the fine points of our first-year Legal Research and Writing course occupies a large share of mental space.

Clearly others are also pondering LRW ideas at the moment. The season and a bit of serendipity brought to my screen an interesting question from Dean Kim Brooks of Schulich School of Law at Dalhousie:

Thinking about revisions to LRW – anything you wish you'd learned in first year LRW?

. . . [more]

In a conversation the other day we touched on the differences between how (or if) electronic legal research was taught when I was in law school, and then a few years later when I first instructed legal research and writing. We recalled the equipment, manuals, and peripherals the publisher(s) sent us, and a perception of their complexity.

Serendipitously, the same day, I noticed Sarah Glassmeyer of CALI wrote on LLRX about an idea to collect those old things and more.

Note: It’s not that she’s a hoarder. Sarah happens to want to collect and preserve “our shared legal technology . . . [more]

It’s not enough that there are some who claim there are already too many law schools in Canada, too few articling positions, and too much competition in the job market for junior lawyers. Now they want to make another law school which appears reserved for homophobes, or at the very least a law school which explicitly states that homosexuality is wrong.

The proposed law school would be housed at Trinity Western University (TWU) in Langley, B.C., a private Christian institution associated with the Evangelical Free Church of Canada, with approximately 3,500 students. The school has a Community Covenant Agreement which . . . [more]

On July 15, 2013, the Ontario Human Rights Commission launched a new policy on removing the 'Canadian experience' barrier in recruiting. A requirement for Canadian experience, even when implemented in good faith, can be an impenetrable barrier in recruiting, selecting, hiring or accrediting, and may result in discrimination.

One participant on the cbafutures.org website noted that with their own law school tuition at $13,000 a year, the pool of applicants with the means to attend shrinks tremendously. Indeed, some new students will pay almost $30,000 in tuition in order to attend their first year of law school.

But so what? A lawyer is a lawyer is a lawyer, right? Everyone who goes to law school has the same education, and could conceivably serve the same constituency.

The question is really about the value of diversity. We’re used to thinking of diversity in terms of gender equality, and the . . . [more]

Technology is often cited as the game-changing factor in the future of the legal profession. There’s an endless parade of new devices, plus software is being developed that can do some of the work lawyers used to do. Legal entrepreneurs harness the power of the cloud to power new business models.

What it’s doing to the legal profession is just one side of the equation. For clients – actual and potential – rapidly changing technology can both expand their reach to consumers, and be a legal minefield.

People who conduct any part of their business over the internet, for example, . . . [more]