Becoming a Lawyer Without Going to Law School (2015)
I come from a family with several California lawyers (I am a lawyer as well) and see this transition from apprenticeship to law school in my family.  My great, great uncle was a lawyer and a judge in a small town in the Bay Area.  He never went to law school.  His nephew, my grandfather, went to law school, but only needed a 2 year college degree to attend law school.  He became the judge in the town after his uncle retired.  Both were successful and well regarded professionally.<p>Reading this article, it’s easy to conflate bar passage success with being an effective lawyer.  Law school is probably better training for passing the bar than it is for practicing law.  Thus, it wouldn’t surprise me that apprentices have lower passage rates than law school grads.  Apprentices are training to practice – not to take tests.  It is well understood among lawyers that law school may give you some discipline, some research skills, and some understanding about how to think about fundamental aspects of “the Law”, but that it doesn’t by itself result in being able to practice law.  That happens over the course of about the first 5 years of practicing law.  Becoming a lawyer or a doctor both take about 8-9 years, but with law, you do most of it out in practice.  So in this sense, all lawyers are apprentices.  Another thing that illustrates this point is the fact that a lawyer’s effectiveness has much less to do with the quality of their law school than is generally thought.  I know many excellent attorneys who attended local law schools here in San Diego that do not rank well.  What they did in their first 5 years (and other factors) mattered more than law school.<p>I see the arc of the profession as one that used to be more tuned toward apprenticeship in the context of a much slower overall pace of business and life toward one where it is increasingly hard to access that critical one-the-job training.   Historically, clients would essentially subsidize the training of new associate attorneys, but, particularly since the belt tightening post-2008, clients increasingly refuse to do so and many law grads are left to figure it out themselves.  Some have rules that no attorneys with e.g. less than 3 years’ experience are allowed to work on their matters.  Another challenge are the strict laws in California on unpaid internships.  I would be happy to provide training to a new lawyer in exchange for some unpaid help and know many new attorneys who would jump at the chance, but that is not allowed in California.