You’re a What?

Did you say you’re an American Bar Association (ABA) Law Student Division (LSD) Liaison?  What exactly is that?  First of all, I have to admit that as of February 1 of this year I had only the vaguest idea what the ABA even was.  I had no idea the ABA had a Law Student Division and certainly wasn’t aware that law students had the opportunity to be liaisons to the various sections, divisions, and standing committees of this national organization. I am happy to say I have learned a lot about the ABA in the past seven months.

I began my law school career in the fall of 2007 as a part-time evening student.  As is true of most part-time students, my law school experience consisted of attending classes at night when most of the faculty, staff and full-time students are gone for the day.  I was fortunate to be able to attend an occasional talk over the lunch hour because I worked on campus, but otherwise law school consisted of going to class and doing homework . . . and managing to get to “bar review” a few times during the semester.

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Rumors of the Death of the Billable Hour Have Been Greatly Exaggerated

2666304350_62fd7514eeOr so it seems to me.  Lately, there has been a variety of articles proclaiming the death, or impending death, of the billable hour.  So goes the argument: Billable hours misalign incentives between lawyers and their clients; law firms and lawyers have faced increasing pressure over recent years to redefine their business model and move away from the billable hour, at least in part; and in this economy clients have the motivation, the leverage, and the moxy to demand alternative billing arrangements from their lawyers.

In theory, this may be true, and perhaps large clients (as in those who spend enormous sums of money with their law firms on an annual basis) have put some of this theory into practice.  But I’m not so convinced that the billable hour has earned its demise quite yet.  For one thing I work as in house counsel at a Fortune 1000 company and I see very few alternative billing arrangements.  (For another, I used to work at a big law firm that also saw few alternative billing arrangements.)  That is due in part to our own taste for risk.  After all, alternative billing arrangements must incentivize both parties, meaning the client may end up paying more for a given set of services than it otherwise would have under a billable hour system.

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Thinking Like a Lawyer

150px-Paper_Chase_BookAt the start of each academic year, I cannot help but to think of Professor Kingsfield, the notorious contracts professor in The Paper Chase. The various classroom scenes where Professor Kingsfield grills student after student on classic contracts cases like Hawkins v. McGee have for years served as a sort of example of the “typical” 1L experience with the dreaded Socratic method.

While Professor Kingsfield surely sits at one end of the spectrum for professorial style, the Socratic method he uses endures.  It is, as one text notes, law school’s “signature pedagogy.”  It’s the way the law school professors across the country have been teaching law students about legal analysis for more than a century.

And students learn.  They begin their first year of law school with, to paraphrase Professor Kingsfield, “a head full of mush.”  Even by the end of that first semester, though, most 1Ls have developed an ability to turn that mush into cogent analysis, to make fine-line distinctions, to look for weaknesses in another’s argument, and to argue both sides of any issue; in other words, they learn to “think like a lawyer.”  This “thinking like a lawyer” is undoubtedly a necessary professional skill; however, mastering the process can come at a personal cost.

For all of the successes of the Socratic method, some have argued that it has serious flaws.  Most recently, Professor Elizabeth Mertz has criticized the Socratic method because of its “acontextual context.”  She notes that the Socratic method virtually ignores morality and social context in its attempt to teach students “objective” analysis.

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