Since the economic crash of 2008, an increasing number of young lawyers are entering jobs in the public sector as private firms have reduced their hiring. The trend itself is not an unfavorable one:  More young lawyers are devoting their skills and talents to serving the public interest, while gaining valuable legal experience.

However, the rising cost of law school and, consequently, the amount of student loans facing lawyers upon graduation complicates this otherwise encouraging picture.

Starting salaries in government and nonprofit jobs have failed to keep pace with the rise in law school debt, meaning the need for financial assistance has increased for young lawyers who take jobs in the public sector. Law schools and federal and state governments have acted to ameliorate this challenge. They have enacted various Loan Repayment Assistance Programs.

The problem with LRAPs, however, is that many of them are subject to state and federal budget cuts and these programs are the first to go during these years of fiscal austerity.

Perhaps the signature piece of legislation providing federal loan repayment assistance to lawyers is the College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which in 2007 created the Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program. There are two important benefits of this program:

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After all my jabs recently regarding the challenges facing legal education, the American Bar Association has decided to try and discuss these issues at length via committee. The ABA launched the 18-member Task Force on the Future of Legal Education to spend two years examining the changes roiling the law profession and legal education, focusing on how well law schools are meeting the needs of the profession.

This is not the first task force to scrutinize the growing problems in our field. While the ABA’s committee will analyze the legal education more than some of the other earlier committees, task forces within the New York State Bar Association and the Massachusetts Bar Association both convened in 2011 to discuss the training and education of new lawyers, law firm structure and billing, technology and work-life balance, as well as turning a special eye to job opportunities for new lawyers and law graduate unemployment.

In April, the NYSBA issued a 120-page report with its findings. In May, the 14-member panel of the MBA recommended an increase in mentoring for young attorneys and law students, the addition of law school-funded clerk positions within the state trial court system, establishment of post-graduate clinics and law school-controlled teaching firms.

Other state bar associations have recognized the problems facing young attorneys through committee discussions. While these efforts have identified problems, no dramatic changes in career development have resulted. I have heard and read about many crises within the legal profession and the operation of law firms but I have seen no substantial changes being made so far.

What changes do you think need to be made? What needs to happen before changes are actually made? What problems have you directly faced because changes have not been made?

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The ABA’s Council of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar last week voted overwhelmingly to withhold accreditation from law schools outside the United States. The vote concluded a four-year debate as to whether an extension of accreditation was appropriate to overseas law schools that followed the American educational model.

In 2010, a committee was formed to seriously consider the extension of accreditation to certain non-U.S. schools because it would help state judges and bar associations decide whether to allow foreign-trained lawyers to practice within their jurisdictions.

Law students and law graduates spoke out against the accreditation, and stated that there is already too much competition for very few legal jobs in the county. Perhaps not surprisingly, committee members changed their tune and decided it would be too difficult and expensive to govern these overseas institutions.

What do you think? Is it already too difficult to get a legal job in the U.S. without having to add additional graduates from other countries to the surplus of attorney candidates? As much as an overseas institution would model its program after an American educational model, would that be enough to produce an attorney qualified to practice in the U.S.?

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The summer season is full of mosquitoes, sweltering temperatures, open-toed shoes and… studying for the bar exam.

Yes, despite several years having passed, summertime still reminds me of studying for the bar exam. (Sad, I know.) It also reminds me of job discussions, last-minute interviews and unemployed law graduates in distress.

I have had several friends going through the interview process after several years of practicing law. More often than not, the prospective employers request a law school transcript on top of a resume and writing sample. While I have loosely understood the utility of a GPA to evaluate a whole crop of law students with very similar credentials, I have much stronger doubts as to the usefulness of a GPA as a factor in the consideration of an attorney who already has experience (especially in a specific subset of law).

With law schools and the profession going through extreme scrutiny in a variety of arenas (the value of law school, the emphasis that employers place on law school rankings and the current job market for recent graduates, etc.), I was wondering whether folks who graduated from higher-ranking law schools had different opinions on this than those who graduated from lower-ranking law schools.

My undergraduate alma mater, the University of Illinois, was recently fined $250,000 for fudging the academic credentials of their incoming law school students. What are your thoughts on this activity? Does this make those who graduated from lower-ranking law schools (and who were inevitably scrutinized for doing so) feel a bit suspicious as to the entire practice of the hugely competitive numbers game in law school admissions and graduation?

There is obviously some pressure for law schools of all rankings to report successful employment statistics for their graduates. Former students of New York Law School and Thomas M. Cooley Law School have unsuccessfully litigated against their alma maters with allegations that those institutions misrepresented their numbers. Is there more or less pressure based on your ranking?

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In a recent Wall Street Journal article about the difficult job market for 2011 law school graduates, Dean Rudy Hasl of Thomas Jefferson Law School in San Diego said the following: “You can’t measure the value of a law degree in terms of what your employment number was nine months after graduation.” He urged prospective students to think of their law degree as a long-term investment.

As a former teacher, a part of me is taken in by Hasl’s characterization of law school. I agree that employment should not be the measure of the worth of any education, even law school.

I frequently told my students that education is not a means to an end but an end in itself. This conversation usually occurred when they would gripe about having to read “The Odyssey” or a similar book in my class under their theory that reading the particular book in question would not have any practical value to their lives. I don’t know that my message to my students always sunk in, but I tried to help them see how stories like “The Odyssey,” if they paid attention to them, actually did have something to teach.

I immediately thought of these interactions with my former students when I read Hasl’s quote. But I should admit, in the interest of full disclosure, that I thoroughly enjoyed law school. When my colleagues hear that, one of them inevitably chuckles or guffaws and says, “Oh, so you’re the one.”

As I have written in this space before, what law school taught me in terms of how to think and how to approach any problem that life throws at me was so total that I cannot recall how I thought or solved problems prior to law school. So, in that regard, I believe that Hasl is correct — employment has nothing to do with the value of the law school education.

However, from the same perspective, the second part of Hasl’s quote — that a law degree is a long-term investment –  is somewhat troubling to me.  Clearly, Hasl is not approaching this issue from my perspective and instead is trying to spin the fact that nearly half of all law school grads will not be gainfully employed nine months after graduation even as most will have significant monthly bills to repay in the form of student loans.

In the end, I don’t know what to think. There is without a doubt significant value in a law school education. It is also clear that the cost of that education has made the decision of whether or not to attend much more difficult than it used to be.

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According to the American Bar Association’s first empirical survey of law school curricula in a decade (which will be released on Aug. 4), 76 percent of law schools surveyed have modified their curricula to adapt to the employment issues our law graduates face today.

The National Law Journal notes this is only one of the key findings discovered through the survey. One of the hardest hurdles for a new lawyer to face is lack of experience. Law schools are trying to bolster the amount of practical skills they offer students by increasing the opportunities to participate in clinics, simulations and externships.

While nothing will replace the actual experience of practicing as a licensed attorney, I felt like my experience as a student adviser at George Mason’s Servicemember clinic was invaluable. I also had the advantage of working as a paralegal before I entered law school. I think these two items on my resume helped me greatly.

I also think that legal research and writing courses were extremely valuable, so it is good to see that law schools have also increased their emphasis on these types of courses as well as the number of course units offered. Eighty-seven percent of law schools offer joint degree programs as well.

However, many things remain the same despite room for improvement. The survey found the same number of schools reported requiring specific courses after the first year as they did in 2002 — with subject matter tested by bar examinations playing no role in these course requirements. Also, the number of law schools that allowed 1L students to take electives increased from 14 in 2002 to only 33 in 2010.

Distance education options are also expanding but still less than half of the law schools surveyed allow online course to count towards a J.D. Only 23 percent of respondents reported offering synchronous courses — in which classes are taught online or via video in real time (up from 13 percent in 2002). Also, 25 percent of law schools offer asynchronous distance education classes, meaning that students complete them in their own schedules (up from 11 percent in 2002). Those increases are fairly minimal for almost a decade passing with many technological advances.

Looking back, what do you think was or were the most valuable skills you gained from law school in preparation for the bar exam and your first job as an attorney? What would you change or add? Did you feel that experience in the legal field prior to law school was helpful?

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