Legal profession in turmoil: Let’s blame the law schools
Written by Bruce Feldthusen Posted Date: December 03, 2012
No wonder the legal profession is in turmoil. Between 10 and 15 per cent of fully qualified law school graduates, about 400 students, cannot find articling positions. Currently, if one cannot article, one cannot practise law in Canada. Proposed solutions range from ignoring the problem to abolishing articling. A divided Law Society of Upper Canada has just approved a three-year pilot program to provide alternative instruction for those who cannot find an articling position.
A crisis requires a whipping boy. Many lawyers have found one: legal education. Everything would be fine, they pronounce, had the law schools not increased enrolment. Everything will be fine again, they dream, if law schools restrict enrolment.
Ironically, the law school bashers seem unaware of the federal Competition Act. Restricting admission to law school to protect mandatory articling, itself probably an unlawful barrier to entry, is against the law! The profession can’t do it and neither can the law schools.
In the absence of robust competition, the legal profession has priced itself beyond the means of ordinary Ontario citizens. Access to justice is an important statutory mandate of the Law Society of Upper Canada. If lawyers want to retain the precious right to self-regulate in the public interest, reducing the supply of legal services to the public is unwise.
We could close every law school in Ontario and still have an articling crisis. Between 500 and 1,000 students who obtained their legal education in a foreign law school now annually seek admission to the Ontario Bar. Many are Ontario residents who were unable to find a place in an Ontario law school. If the Ontario law schools were to reduce enrolment, those who could afford to would simply study abroad. Less wealthy Ontario students would be forced out altogether. This would not make a meaningful dent on the demand for articles.
The number of foreign educated law students seeking to work in Ontario is only going to grow. Despite concerns expressed by legal educators, the LSUC has endorsed an “approved law degree” that effectively consists of nothing more than a list of about 10 mandatory courses. Any law school in the world can easily qualify to grant an approved Ontario law degree. The civil law schools of Montreal and Sherbrook already have acquired that right. Next in line are Bond, Australia and Leicester, England. They will soon be Ontario’s largest law schools.
The other way some lawyers whip the law schools is to pronounce that today’s graduates are poorly trained and unsuited for practice. Many should not have been admitted let alone graduated, they say. There is often a subtext.
Legal education is far from perfect. But it has changed a great deal. Today’s students are better educated and more committed than ever. They are preparing for a much more complicated employment market than existed even a few years ago. They enjoy experiential learning opportunities in clinics, work-study placements, and through innovative active learning in the classroom. Legal education can improve further. But Ontario should be proud of its current graduates.
For more than 50 years, the LSUC assumed the responsibility to deliver, through the Bar Admission Course, substantive practical education and skills training to graduated law students — for a fee. Then, without consulting the law schools, the LSUC walked away. University law schools cannot fill this entire void, no matter how hard they try.
Ontario’s law schools did not cause and cannot cure the articling crisis. They cannot alone address the profession’s training objectives. The law schools could work as equal partners in co-operation with the profession to help address real problems. They have never been invited to do so. LSUC Treasurer Tom Conway has promised the Ontario law deans he is willing to work with us. We look forward to it. Meanwhile please help us call off the dogs.
Bruce Feldthusen is the dean of the Common Law Section of the University of Ottawa Faculty of Law.
Additional Info
Published in
Web exclusive content
Tagged under
Featured Videos
Latest Videos
-
In this month's episode of Making Rain, executive coach Debra Forman challenges you to commit even more to your colleagues by becoming a law firm champion. -
In this month's episode, executive coach Debra Forman offers project management insights that demonstrate how lawyers can lead by example and teach juniors to focus…
Digital Editions
Comments
2) Are articling positions defined by market demands? Yes. If lawyers, who are already established in both practice and marketing, are unable to afford taking on articling students, how can we expect fresh graduates, who learn nothing about real lawyers in law school to compete?
Effectively, these fresh graduates, without articles, would be saddled with tremendous debt, with no experience to competently practice, and without the experience of skills to effectively market their practice.
.
4) NCA students - why are we allowing so many admission? We have a general right to legal education, but there is no corresponding right to become a lawyer
I'm afraid I have to disagree here. I believe those who are qualified have the right to become a lawyer. Whether they be Native to the country or not.
The law schools cannot fix this problem alone but they did create it (mainly your school actually)and they should play a key part in fixing it.
Students don't sign up for this farce. They sign up to study hard and to work into a meaningful career.
Well, no one guarantees employment or articling positions just because you have a law degree.
Sadly, though I try not to, I look at Ottawa students as less worthy than other law students.
Your position on University of Ottawa alumni 'worthiness' is clearly as valid as your inept understanding of the articling crisis. Are you aware that the University of Ottawa's English Common Law program admits less students per annum than Osgoode Hall's Common Law program? uOttawa's cumulative admission numbers also include National Program and Droit Civil students but many of these graduates are not even oriented towards an English-languag e market. While Dean Feldthusen's comments are not a comprehensive answer to law schools' role in the current articling crisis, making disparaging comments about an extremely capable and bright group of individuals speaks to your inability to critically analyze the underlying problem facing the legal profession. I hope one day you encounter one of these 'unworthy' candidates across the bench from you.
And, yeah, hello? What's with all the Ottawa bashing?
Dean Feldthusen isn't my favourite, but Ottawa is still a good school.
As a student, I too am extremely disgruntled with my alma mater's contribution to the articling crisis and its failure to accept responsibility (and I have articles, for the record). Our halls are also 'rampant with animosity', especially because we don't all fit in them. This does not make us less deserving, any of us. We write the LSATs, survive 1L, suffer under the socratic method, take the same courses as everyone else, and ultimately pay bar fees. One might even argue that we are getting a better legal education at Ottawa given the large, diverse base of professors and practitioners who teach us - and the number of SCC and Federal court judges who pop by to say hi on the regular! There may be WAY too many of us, but that's not our fault and we are no less deserving of respect in the legal profession as a result.
Their recent increases in class sizes merely compounds the problem caused by their embarrassing admission standards.... which aren't much higher than the Bonds and Leicesters of the world.
Similarly, the uOttawa medical school does not even require the MCAT. Yet, graduates of medicine are among the most coveted in the nation.
So what does this imply? There are other ways, besides the weight placed on the LSAT or MCAT, to measure quality of education. Maybe try looking at the "output"-- how students perform after graduation. Then let's see if you change your mind about uOttawa's "poor reputation".
I have a hard time accepting criticism of my school's admission standards from someone with such less-than-stell ar grammar skills.
That being said, this argument coming from another source may actually be persuasive. While we do have an articling crisis, we also have an access to justice crisis that may require more (dare I say less-qualified? ) lawyers willing to work for lower pay. The traditional articling system isn't working for the public even more that it is not working for law students.
And there is an acute shortage of lawyers at the very top levels of the profession to handle the most complex cases which impact on society and our democratic values.
There is absolutely no shortage of lawyers to handle the work of banks, large corporations and governments who are not actually using money out of their own pockets to pay for legal services.
It seems to me that the unfortunate students who do not find articles might actually be prepared to pay for a 1 year program in which they do nothing but learn practice and procedure and build up an archive of current precedents (in Word format) and checklists.
If the law schools can't figure this out for themselves I suggest that the community colleges give it a go. If this program is advanced intelligently there is no way the LSUC can stand in the way.
I am, frankly, embarrassed for the U of O Law School.
I say that make law a four-year, first degree in Canada, with one or two years of articling after that. Law schools wouldn't have to cut admissions, law students wouldn't be mired in debt, and I don't think that quality would be compromised - the UK seems to be doing fine.
You don't say...
Also, before you blame foreign graduates flooding the market, you may want to reassess your own joint degree program with Michigan State -- which is essentially a backdoor route into your school for the "Ontario residents who were unable to find a place in an Ontario law school" who you seem to deeply resent.
This goes back to the fundamental problem with society – a lack of personal responsibility coupled with an unfounded sense of entitlement. If you study hard and do well in law school, you will compete for and likely obtain an article. By determining that we no longer want our legal professionals to be the brightest and best, we are creating a society that is handing our participant ribbons to everyone, and ignoring the fact that not everyone is equally successful.
Cream only rises to the top, if there is whey.
Because it's a requirement to become a licensed lawyer. Aside from the fact that a legal education prepares you for nothing except being a practising lawyer (and barely does that), a JD is *not* an advantage in non-JD fields. Especially if you haven't even managed to become a licensed lawyer. On the contrary, it's a detriment as every employer is, rightfully, going to expect you to jump ship at the first chance you get to actually apply your legal education.
Regarding this so-called fundamental problem with society claptrap. Classic boomer babble. The most privileged generation in history complaining about their progeny's sense of entitlement.
Embarrassing was a fitting screen-name choice.
But at least the law societies won't have to take responsibility for managing this profession. And it'll let Feldthusen's successor raise OttawaU's enrolment to 1000 by the end of the decade. Hell, why not just give every OttawaU graduate the option to add a JD to their Bachelors for an extra $40k or so? OttawaU could justify it by claiming to single-handedly solve the A2J issue by graduating more and more JDs!
Have you read the LSUC report? According to the report, those without positions are not students who have low marks or other poor credentials but rather those students who are minorities.
No one is advocating that incompetent students with poor credentials should have guaranteed employment. Unless we want the legal profession to be open only to the rich and the white, we need to address the articling crisis.
Really? How many of these "alternate careers" are worth incurring an additional three years of eductional debt, plus the opportunity costs of removing yourself from the labour market for the same period of time, to obtain a qualification one never uses?
As one who left the practice of law and later came back, I can tell you that this is utter and complete BS. If anything an LLB is a detriment when you're looking for non legal work. "So why aren't you a lawyer" is the very first question you are asked. The assumption on employers' part was that you arent' a lawyer because you either weren't good enough to find a legal job, or couldn't hack it once you found one. They consider you an over educated flight risk. The fact that many people don't end up with a career in law most emphatically does NOT mean that getting a law degree was a useful or smart career move for those people.
-Upton Sinclair
I graduated with average grades this past spring and am currently forced to article without pay, despite a heavy debt load that continues to accrue interest each month, which wouldn't be all that bad, I guess, if I actually had good prospects of obtaining a decently-paid legal position upon being called -- which I figure I don't. I'm just another embodiment of the massive oversupply at the entry level of our profession, and I don't even show up in the LSUC's articling figures.
Dean Feldthusen and his ilk really only only think in terms of dollar signs. They don't care how many people they've left financially burdened as long as there's a new crop waiting with cheques in hand each year. Their defeat, ultimately, will come in the form of banks refusing to continue funding their degree mills after too many graduates begin to default.
1. The U of O drastically increased its admission numbers for the 2009-2010 academic school year. Allegedly, this was due to a pile of misplaced applications that were not properly considered in that given admission year. Assuming this is true, then why have class sizes remained so large in 2010-2011, 2011-2012, and 2012-2013? Not only is this practice flooding the market with surplus labour, thereby compounding the articling crisis. but Fauteux Hall cannot physically tolerate the number of increased bodies. For the sake of enlightenment, you had to reduce already limited student space and plug a gaping hole to build one (1) new classroom.
FYI, there's more than 400 who can't find articles: they just aren't counted until they register with LSUC. Many don't register until they actually find articles cuz of the 3yr time limit to finish both bar ads + articles.
Counterpoint: U's job is to educate people to get their JD's. They're doing volume sales lately. The days of the self-regulated law guild are over. Law is just a business. For the firms, there is no problem: they get to pick the best grads. Basic supply and demand. They don't owe anyone a job.
BTW, the law jobscape is pretty brutal these days. 1A hiring is lower than articling hiring - there's way more unemployed new calls right now than anyone cares to admit.
3. U of O students, especially ethnic minorities of the male sexe, are particularly affected by the articling crisis. These students paid their dues and worked equally as hard as other students, but for some reason law firms drool at the sight of vanilla ice cream over the more flavourful taste of neapolitan. Here come two (2) scary but perhaps necessary words: Affirmative Action.
Before you shine your shield and raise your dagger, take a hard look in the mirror and reflect on your legacy. This is not your brightest point, Bruce.
Oh yeah? I wonder if the Sheila Blocks of the world and so many of the partners at BLG, Gowlinsg and the like should really be viewed as less worthy counsel?
This comment likely comes from another Ontario law school student as any lawyer with half a brain who actually works at a firm with Ottawa calls knows this is bunk. You're a joke.
RSS