Articles Posted in What Makes An Attorney “Competent”

Yesterday I was privileged to hear Jordan Furlong, a globally renowned expert on the legal profession, take up this question in addressing Canada’s National Legal Innovator’s Roundtable: How long does it take to make a competent lawyer?

Over the years he’s asked accomplished attorneys just how long it took them to know what they were doing in the courtroom, drafting transaction documents, or counseling businesspeople.

Their consistent answer: 3 to 5 years. Continue reading

The Point

As I wrote in my previous post, the U.S. legal profession confines its formal training to a theoretical knowledge of law (J.D. from a law school) and an academic test of memorization (the bar exam). Licensed attorneys’ grounding in practical skills consists almost entirely of unsystematic, on-the-job improvisation. Ad hoc “qualification” whose adequacy is never reviewed by any objective or authoritative third party.

In the U.S. system, once a law firm associate passes the bar, their employer-law firm can start invoicing their hours to corporate law departments willing to pay for them.

To move from this ad hoc and casual acquisition of practical lawyer skills to organized and rigorous training, the U.S. legal system could look to three qualification models:

1. Physicians,

2. Airline pilots, and

3. Solicitors and barristers in England and Wales. Continue reading

The Point

Physicians and business lawyers: The work of both professions is consequential for those they serve. On the capabilities of the first group depend life and death of their patients — literal, personal health outcomes. On the capabilities of the second group depend — if not life and death and personal health — people’s livelihoods in the form of the company’s health and well being, and the jobs, share price, and pension holdings related to the company.

High stakes in both professions. Medicine is standardized and precise in physicians’ practical training and skills development — and accountable to formal third-party validation for quality. But lawyers’ formal, third-party validated preparation is confined to theoretical knowledge acquired by reading and classroom instruction in law school; confirmed by a bar examination that tests academic memorization.

Attorneys’ practical training and skills development are left almost entirely to unsystematic, on-the-job improvisation — whose adequacy is neither reviewed nor confirmed by any objective or authoritative third party. Continue reading