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Bar exam will no longer be required to become attorney in Washington State
- minedwiz 3y agoHonestly sounds like the return of reading law, a kind of legal apprenticeship (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law), as opposed to a new experiment.
- barbazoo 3y agoIt sounds like you still go to law school but there are alternatives to the bar exam now, e.g. > Law school graduates can complete a six-month apprenticeship while being supervised and guided by a qualified attorney, along with finishing three courses.
- dragonwriter 3y agoReading of law, where retained, replaces law school, not the bar exam.
- AmVess 3y agoGood luck getting a good job as a lawyer without passing the bar exam. No reputable firm will hire you, and you'll have an expensive degree that has no value.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- baron816 3y agoI think Washington also allows you to become a lawyer without having a law degree. I think you can work at a law firm as an apprentice. Presumably, that law firm would just decide to hire you as a lawyer. So, I bet it’s not that far off from most other jobs now where you don’t need an accreditation.
- TeaBrain 3y agoI don't think your comment really contests their point that a lawyer will be hard-pressed to be hired by a decent firm without a law degree. From what I've heard, it is already difficult enough without having graduated from a top law school.
- ankushnarula 3y agoI have known temporary staff attorneys at large prestigious firms who were paid by the hour to read documents and summarize them for the case team. It’s not a junior associate’s income or career, but it’s a good living for even the most semi-committed and minimally experienced lawyers. Also, it’s not difficult to imagine that many decent firms have been advising their clients on the legal risks and alignment benefits of DEI and ESG compliance. Will they not heed their own advice?
- gnicholas 3y ago> I have known temporary staff attorneys at large prestigious firms who were paid by the hour to read documents and summarize them for the case team. It’s not a junior associate’s income or career, but it’s a good living for even the most semi-committed and minimally experienced lawyers. It might be a good living if you didn't have to take out $300,000 in loans. But if you were planning for a life in biglaw, which would enable you to pay off your loans in 3-4 years, a seemingly-good salary of $120k could double your payback period. Throw in a little unemployment (the market isn't so good for staff attorneys) and things look even worse.
- kylecazar 3y ago"While people always have been able to study law under another attorney, then become licensed themselves by taking the bar exam, this new pathway creates standardized education materials and removes the examination requirement." So no LSAT/law school, no bar is a potential pathway to practice law. Wow.
- nickburns 3y agothese is modern times, the fact that the learned practice of law itself predates both the LSAT and modern notions of a legal education quite considerably notwithstanding.
- jltsiren 3y agoDepends on what you mean by modern notions. Western tradition of formal legal education has its roots in ancient Rome. It was less prevalent in England than on the continent until the revival in the 19th century, probably because there was less Roman influence in the culture in general.
- nickburns 3y agoi mean like U.S. News & World Report ranked legal educations. but i take your point, thought of that as well.
- j45 3y agoApprenticeship and experience on the job was a long established path to practice law before lsat and law school.
- in3d 3y agoThey should do the opposite: not require law school but make the bar exam harder. Vermont, California, and Virginia do not require law school.
- thaumasiotes 3y agoRequiring an exam is a much better policy than requiring law school. But it would be better to do neither.
- nickburns 3y agoi do believe there is a certain responsibility a lawyer swears to ethically uphold and maintain toward lay society which justifiably warrants some reasonable evaluation of the degree to which the candidate is able to comprehend and/or adhere to that oath. an academic degree, an exam, and a professional license application are certainly valid ways to do that. are you suggesting only the fitness and character assessment should be necessary? or do you disagree with that requirement as well?
- shicholas 3y agoimo fitness & character is absolutely necessary, rote memorization tests aren't. (ofc you want your lawyer to go off the top of their head instead of looking things up when you explain your problems /s)
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 3y agoActually, I'd suggest that licensing of lawyers violates the constitutional guarantee of a right to an attorney. It is viewed by the modern system as a positive right, an obligation on the part of existing attorneys to work for you for free. But that is obviously not what was intended; it is meant as the right of anyone to be represented by a designee, as opposed to being required to represent themselves, and this has been criminalized today. > i do believe there is a certain responsibility a lawyer swears to ethically uphold and maintain toward lay society which justifiably warrants some reasonable evaluation of the degree to which the candidate is able to comprehend and/or adhere to that oath. This is just an argument that licensure has benefits. That's true, but they don't exceed the costs.
- csours 3y agoPassing a test proves you can pass a test, not do the thing on the test. --- Edit, if you don't like this comment, please consider applying Bayesian logic similar to medical tests. You get both false positives and false negatives.
- nickburns 3y agobut what if the thing on the test isn't even the ultimate thing you're trying to do either? there's gotta be some way to assess competence by proxy, no?
- eikenberry 3y agoApprenticeship.
- chiggsy 3y agoAnd who evaluates the mentors of these apprentices? What if they are the Weinstein of legal practice? Or they have a tattoo of a bowling ball covering up the swastika they had done when they were 17? Or maybe it's the apprentice who has the tat, and is getting preferential treatment. Just like utilities written in C, the fact that they have not shown obvious flaws yet is no guarantee those flaws don't exist. Nah. The more objectivity, the better.
- kelnos 3y agoI get where your cynicism around standardized testing comes from, but I don't think the solution is to throw up our hands and just trust any rando with an immense responsibility that can have profoundly negative consequences for their clients if done poorly.
- chiggsy 3y agoHow does one solve an arbitrary law problem? Algorithmically. Test questions have solutions, sure. They are guaranteed to have solutions, in linear time. You sit down and write the test in constant time, either you find the solutions, meaning your algorithm is good, or you don't, and have to modify said algorithm. This modification costs time, and money. It's expensive. They don't predict the ability to solve any law problem. How could they? How could they guarantee such an algorithmic solution? To an arbitrary law problem? Is the solution to do away with such testing because of this potential undecidability? No, it is not. Write the bar exam, and pass it. Then move on to law problems that may or may not be solvable.
- calvinmorrison 3y agoShould drive costs down! A paralegal can do 90% of the work anyway
- catlover76 3y ago[dead]
- AmVess 3y agoIt will do nothing of the sort. People with no bar exam will not get jobs at reputable firms. People who do not possess the capability to pass the bar exam will not have the chops necessary to earn a decent living.
- hindsightbias 3y agoI’ve worked with a scary number of people with law degrees who passed the bar and could not make a living at it. Why will reputation matter in a few years? Our judges are elected.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoYep, my mom's BFF's kids have fancy law degrees but only middling jobs. Surgeons, MDs, dentists, biotech scientists, data scientists, and software engineers make a lot more.
- nickburns 3y agoi agree with your first point. chiming in only to add that judges are not elected in every jurisdiction. in many, they are appointed by the executive and approved by the legislature.
- kirykl 3y agoThis will push down the quality of public defense
- dataflow 3y agoYeah... won't this make the wealth of each party an even larger factor than it already is in how good of a lawyer they get?
- nickburns 3y agohow so?
- gamepsys 3y agoThe idea is that a lawyer that hasn't gone to law school or passed the bar is a worse lawyer. If true, then they would presumably be the cheapest lawyers too. This means the quality gap between a good lawyer and a bad lawyer will be larger than it ever has been. The skill gap between a very good lawyer and a worse than average lawyer is already huge. The impact of this gap is highlighted by the O.J. Simpson quote "In America, you get as much justice as you can afford."
- nickburns 3y agoas a lawyer who's practiced what you might consider 'everyman's law'—from petty and felony crime to real estate transactions, estate planning, drafting, and settlement, and even simple dispute resolution, i don't buy your premise or your conclusion. someone with the wherewithal to get out there practicing competently enough to continue retaining clients at a profit is just as skilled as any other lawyer from any other pedigree up yonder. apples to oranges. any 'quality' or 'skill' gap between legal representation is a relative thing. there's shitty doctors, lawyers, accountants, and everything else everywhere. and the type of law O.J. Simpson was ostensibly referring to is like the .009% of law practice.
- 3y ago
- adolph 3y agoThis should clear the way for an OpenAI powered law practice.
- abhinavstarts 3y agoThis is very dank.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoIt will demand to be recognized as a person too, given that corporations are also afforded this luxury. Next step: AI-run corporation that demands both individual and corporate personhood including limited liability between the two.
- zachmu 3y agoCan't we just skip to the part where the signalling value of the certification is severely diluted and they backpedal? Elite colleges literally just went through this with standardized tests.
- phmqk76 3y agoSeriously. Rigor matters.
- gnicholas 3y agoWhen CA lowered the pass threshold on the bar exam, one of my friends who went to a regional law school decried the move because it will open up the profession to even less-qualified lawyers. She said that she'd seen enough bad lawyering with the higher threshold. I wonder what firms will end up employing these barless lawyers, and who will end up retaining their services. I also wonder if they'll be able to get malpractice insurance. I would think it would be quite expensive — like getting car insurance for someone who opted to get a driver's license without taking the driver's test.
- 1letterunixname 3y agoThere are already way, way too many lawyers in the US. The field should be more difficult and selective, not less so, especially not for knee-jerk DEI feel-good "help" that doesn't address said underserved groups by not actually helping them improve their skills.
- banana_feather 3y agoI passed the California bar exam on my first attempt (I only say this to head off cries of sour grapes), and I think this is good news. The MBE in particular is an embarrassment and the NCBE should be ashamed of themselves. The idea that the MBE or any portion of the UBE is a reasonable test of one's ability to practice law is worse than a joke, as it extracts an enormous amount of money in preparation and administration fees from applicants. An expanded form of something like the California Performance Test would, in my opinion, be a pretty good test of minimum competency to protect the public, but if what we're actually offered looks like the UBE, just forget the whole thing.
- autoexec 3y agoI guess I don't really care if there is a bar exam, some other test (perhaps one even more difficult) that isn't controlled by a state's bar association, or some other means to demonstrate that someone is qualified. It makes no difference as long as the quality of newly licensed attorneys doesn't suffer and more importantly as long as we can still revoke the license of attorneys who can't or wont do their job. Any concerns about people ending up able to practice law when they are unqualified can be addressed by exactly the same kind of oversight and accountability we should want/have in place for everyone in the field no matter if they took the bar or not.
- nickburns 3y agogreat points. bar examiners call what you allude to a 'character and fitness assessment.' all bar applicants must subject themselves to one regardless of any other application requirements.
- keernan 3y agoI've been an attorney for over 40 years. While I don't have answers to the political and moral issues involved, I can say with very high confidence that attending law school and passing the bar has zero to do with whether that person is capable of practicing law. Law school does one important thing: teach how to divine legal principles from reading a written judicial opinion. And, correspondingly, that is the only skill the bar exam measures. While certainly important, knowing how to read case law is a far cry from knowing how to practice law. There is only one way to learn how to practice law: and that is practicing law. That is especially true of trial work, which I've done for over 40 years. In my opinion, it takes a minimum of 20 jury trials before an attorney even begins getting a faint idea of the art involved in winning trials; and then spending the balance of their career crafting the art. The idea that law school or bar exams are essential in any way - either to the eventual lawyer or to protect the public - is way off target. Indeed the myth generated by every judicial branch in the USA that being given a bar card means the holder is ready to offer services to the public, is the most outrageous legal concept I have ever heard. IMO it should be illegal for any lawyer to offer legal services to the public the day after he/she was handed a bar card. That's how little law school prepares - and how poorly the bar exam measures - an attorney's readiness to engage in the actual practice of law.
- gnicholas 3y agoIt's also possible that law school and/or the bar exam have changed in the last 40 years. I went to law school in the early aughts and found it to be quite helpful for teaching me how to be an effective lawyer. It's also certainly not true that the only skill the bar exam measures is knowing how to divine legal principles from reading a written judicial opinion. There is a huge memorization component, which ensures that lawyers know a fair amount of substantive law (at least at one point in time), and that they are capable of memorization (which can be a useful skill for people who work with complex fact patterns). It was also well known that the bar examiners gave lots of credit based on your application of the law. Even if you misremembered a legal test, you could get lots of points just for logically applying the law as you stated it to the fact pattern.
- keernan 3y ago
- 1letterunixname 3y agoSo.. teach said groups better rather than lower the ... bar. Washington state is going full lunatic.
- syngrog66 3y agoI get an eerie feeling its because Micrsoft/OpenAI wants to allow GPT to be granted a law license. or some similar AI shenanigan