There is a new American Bar Foundation working paper (#9212) title on
title page is "law schools and the construction of competence" working
paper 9212 lists it as "law school and the practice of law: a
reexamination of gaps and their meaning" -- you can buy for $2.00 that
you may be very interested in.
The article uses survey data from the Chicago bar and data collected
from rural and small city bar in Missouri to examine the relationship
between legal education and the skills deemed essential by legal
practitioners.
The report has text and tables of survey results.
Let me give you just a flavor of one part of the text.
page 25 "The ascendancy of ethics as a matter of concern to law schools
is matched by a decline reported by practitioners in the importance of
fact gathering and legal research."
(The working paper compares two surveys. One conducted in the mid 70s
by Zemans and Rosenblum and the current ABF survey).
More text. "Fact gathering was the most valued skill among those
surveyed in the mid 70s by Zemans and Rosenblum. It ranked first on
their list. The importance score was 1.39 and almost 70% reported that
the skill of fact gathering was extremely important. The urban survey
now produces a score of 2.02, not unimportant but nowhere near the top,
and only 36% report fact gathering is extremely important".
"The legal research figures are comparable. To assess the changes,
however, we must compare two of today's categories, library legal
research and computer legal research, with the category of legal research
from the earlier survey. The earlier importance score was 1.81, with
44.5 percent rating legal research as extremely important. The current
scores are 2.37 for library research and 2.92 for computer research, with
the percentages for extremely important only 17.3 and 8.0."
(Several possible reasons for the drop in the importance of legal
research are then offered).
Much more info is offered about research by type of practice, etc. and
info on the other skills practitioners rank important and very
important, etc.
Albert Brecht,USC.
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