Rethinking legal education: Summit places FIU law school at center of conversation

By Jamal Thalji

The legal world has a problem: Law schools use the methods of the past to educate modern lawyers. But will that prepare them for the future of the legal industry?

There are problems. The U.S. lawyer population has peaked at more than 1,338,000 lawyers, yet only an estimated 60 percent work in law jobs. There is a massive unmet need for legal services, yet the cost of a law degree is a barrier keeping many from joining. Technology and globalization are radically changing the industry, but traditional law schools are still training students to work for big firms — not to fill the jobs of the future.

There’s no shortage of proposals and ideas for fixing those and more problems. But ideas need a place to be developed and honed, and that’s where FIU’s College of Law comes in.

The college hosted the Summit on the Future of Legal Education and Entry to the Profession on April 12-13, bringing together leaders from across legal education and the profession to assess what’s gone wrong and to explore how law schools and practitioners might come together to start fixing it.

The conference was organized by law professor Scott Norberg in conjunction with FIU Law Review.

“These challenges facing legal education and the profession are increasingly critical,” Norberg said. Norberg served as the deputy managing director of the arm of the American Bar Association responsible for accrediting U.S. law schools from 2011-2014. “I saw this conference, by bringing together leaders with thinkers, as an opportunity to move us toward the change that is needed.”

Preparing a diverse workforce that’s ready to practice from day one

The conference could be just the start of FIU’s impact on these issues. First, law school officials said, the success of this conference will likely beget others, and they hope FIU can become a leader in guiding and facilitating those conversations.Second, it turns out the College of Law is already practicing some of the recommendations that came out of the summit — and coming up with its own innovations.

In eight panels held over two days, participants discussed everything from reforming the Bar exam to making law school more affordable to tailoring legal education to the demands of the job market. The conference brought together the leaders of six leading legal education organizations: The American Bar Association, the Association of American Law Schools, the National Conference of Bar Examiners, the National Association for Law Placement, the Law School Admission Council (LSAC was a co-sponsor as well) and the AcessLex Institute.

“I think the future of legal education and the future of legal practice are at the forefront of a lot of people’s thinking and certainly we want to be at the center of that conversation,” Acting Dean Tawia Baidoe Ansah said.

“My sense was that it was very successful. There was incredible energy and buzz at the conference, and it’s not just because there were so many heavy hitters, from the leaders of the ABA, NCBE and bar administrators, as well as lots of deans and associate deans and career placement officers. There were a lot of different constituencies represented and massive student participation.”

ABA President Hilarie Bass focused on exactly that issue, saying the profession must improve its efforts to create a diverse workforce that is ready to practice law from day one.

“We need to do a better job to ensure that legal education is transformed to prepare graduates to practice law in the current marketplace,” she said.

Norberg pointed out that FIU is one of the most diverse law schools in the nation. In addition, the panel on Access and Affordability discussed ways to improve diversity by reorienting merit-based scholarships and expanding need-based aid. FIU is a school that currently allocates a substantial amount of aid to need-based scholarships.

One of those constituencies was represented by panelist Fernando Garcia, who spent five years as general counsel at Nissan Canada and recently became vice president for legal compliance at CargoJet. He has spent years working on diversity and inclusiveness in Canadian law, so for him, the FIU summit checked a lot of boxes.

“Beyond the formal conference itself, which was great, the opportunity to talk to people who are in this space, who are also thinking about this, to have that dialogue and make that connection and network was fruitful,” he said. “Because at the end of the day, a lot of people who participated are the ones who are going to have to make the changes necessary.”

Garcia believes law schools focus too much on helping students land jobs at big law firms.

“The problem [with that] is they only take 15 percent of the graduates,” he said. He wants law schools to focus on other legal sectors, such as in-house counsel positions for corporations. That requires teaching law students to become what he called the “T-shaped” lawyer: The vertical bar represents traditional legal training; the horizontal bar represents specializing in other areas, such as finance or technology.

“You also need to have that horizontal piece that requires other skills,” Garcia said. “There’s business knowledge, understanding how financial statements work, having an understanding of legal technology, what’s available and how you can use it. There’s project management as well.Those are all the skills that, if a [student] can develop in law school, just makes them better, more well-rounded lawyers.”

Meeting the needs of the market

That kind of approach could address one of the topics Norberg, who teaches commercial law and whose research focuses on bankruptcy law and legal education, is particularly interested in: There are more law school graduates than jobs. He said ABA-accredited law school graduates have exceeded the number of available full-time, entry level jobs by 30 percent for every year since 2001. A possible solution? What if, he proposed, law schools’ accreditation depended on a minimum percentage of job placements.

“If there’s not a market for their graduates, they’ve got to make changes in their program that will meet the needs of the market,” Norberg said, “and maybe they shouldn’t be able to graduate law school students without regard to whether they can get jobs.”

Tailoring the curriculum to fit the local market is something the FIU College of Law is already doing.

“As interim dean I’ve gone downtown and spoken to the partners and lawyers, telling them the story of FIU,” Ansah said, and asking those firms what they need from South Florida’s only public law school.

“The response is yes, you’re doing great things and here’s what else you can be doing: Data, cybersecurity, hospitality, construction, technology. You could send more students our way.”

So FIU has responded.

‘Legal knowledge has left the ivory tower’

The law school offers an Intellectual Property Certificate and an Environmental & Natural Resources Law Certificate. And FIU’s next program will address a specific area of need: a master of science in legal technology for law and non-law students, set to open by the spring of 2020.

“All of this is responsive to the changing nature of the market,” Ansah said. “We don’t expect to train lawyers to be coders. But some knowledge of coding, some knowledge of the cyber domain, will make our students much more successful in the job market.”

In this respect, Ansah believes FIU is ahead of the curve by offering legal training to non-lawyers. Corporations favor such an approach, he said, because it can be more cost-effective to train some departments to vet legal matters than passing everything on to the company’s legal team for review.

“We think this sort of signals that legal knowledge has left the ivory tower,” he said. “We as a young, nimble school want to be at the forefront of offering legal knowledge in a way that is useful to the next generation of lawyers and also accessible to non-lawyers.”

The summit was also a way for FIU to measure itself against the most current trends in legal education, Ansah said, and the results were promising.

“We learned from this summit that we do have something to give to the future of legal practice,” he said.

Moving Forward

So what’s next? More summits, hopefully. Ansah actually envisioned two legal conferences, one for educators and the other for practitioners. What surprised the dean is that the second group contributed to the discussion of the first.

“We’re still planning to do the second summit,” he said. “But I think there were a number of practitioners there who listened to what the legal educators were talking about and contributed to that conversation.”

Norberg said another next step could be to focus on “break-out” sessions, or bringing together smaller groups to focus on just one issue.

“One idea I’ve got going forward is to do something more focused, more hands on,” he said. “Something where we roll up our sleeves and create models for more affordable legal education or what a revamped Bar exam might actually look like, just to drill down to an even more practical level.”

Norberg acknowledged that it would be hard to gather this kind of legal starpower together again. Not every summitt from here on out will feature a speech by ABA president Hilarie Bass, after all. But the interest, and the urgency, are there.