ALLIANCE NEWS - The Chicago Bar Association

Who is Training New Lawyers? Evaluating a Consequence
of the Current Legal Market on the Profession
By Nancy Mackevich Glazer
Originally printed in the January 2012 edition of the CBA Record
I
graduated from law school back
in the Dark Ages. Then, a new
lawyer freshly- minted and
passed-the-bar licensed, worried a
little bit about getting hired but never
about being trained. We assumed with
gusto that our first positions in law
would be full of training and direction.
Back then, we were generally right.
Law graduates’ plans and
expectations all changed in the past
three years. Law firm clients tightened
their overly- stretched budgets and
refused to pay to train new lawyers.
As a result, law firms put the brakes
on hiring new graduates. All law
firm hiring went down. Way down.
I. “Experience required”
In the past three years, the
supply and demand pendulum has
swung widely in the legal industry,
knocking itself far off-balance. As a
result of the market, new admittees
have competed fiercely for jobs, and
most job postings frequently scream
two disappointing words, “experience
required.” So pardon my naïveté in
asking, like the kid who shouted out that
the Emperor had no clothes, but how
do we expect recent law school grads
get trained to compete for starting and
lateral jobs? Are they supposed to waive
a magic wand and just become trained?
I know a young lawyer who
graduated from a Chicago law school
last year. He was hired at $13 an hour
as a litigator for a small firm. While
he was hungry for experience and
worked very hard, he was fired some
months later because a complaint he
drafted almost went out the door with
a typo. In 2012, the guys in the corner
offices expect new grads to come to
them knowing the finer nuances of
practicing law. Novice lawyers are
supposed to know that all pleadings,
motions, briefs or letters must be crosschecked
to perfection before being
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blessed --by virtue of the simple
fact that they are now practicing law
This lawyer’s story is not
unique, and it stresses the underlying
point – that new attorneys have to
somehow get themselves trained
How does that happen? How can
an inexperienced lawyer guide and
mentor her own legal development?
The answer lies in part with novice
attorneys themselves as well as
with the legal community at large.
New lawyers can find
training in a few places: (a) at nonprofits
that provide legal services,
(b) from the legal tech and temporary
staffing worlds, or (c) from private
practitioners, perhaps, with busy
practices and overloaded credenzas.
As a legal community, we
need to talk about this industry-wide
dilemma and come up with real ways
to meet the unmet need of training.
There are novel ways emerging to train
attorneys that we should also consider
such as (a) creating law firms sponsored
by the law schools themselves to
teach practical skills (the South
Carolina Model), (b) hiring private
companies to teach firm associates
and new grads, investing their own
money, needed hands-on skills, and
(c) formalizing a training framework
similar to that used in the medical
profession.
II. Help me help you – what new
attorneys can do to help themselves
A. The Let Them Eat Cake
Model
In today’s legal climate, doing pro bono
work is one way for an industrious new
attorney to get trained. This means
(a) selecting one or more of Chicago’s
outstanding legal services non-profit
agencies, (b) being accepted as a
volunteer, (c) attending training
sessions taught by practitioners in
the various practice areas of choice,
and (d) representing clients. In this
way, a new attorney learns to practice
law and also receives mentoring
from seasoned staff or a senior
volunteer attorney. Most non-profits
cover their volunteer lawyers under
their malpractice insurance as well.
In many cases, a new
volunteer attorney gets out into the
legal community and away from
the solitude behind her computer
screen. She also meets people along
the way who try to help her make
connections and get hired. I have
seen this over and over again; getting
out and “doing good” does some good
for all concerned. It’s a real win-win.
However, letting the nonprofits
train our newbies, obviously
isn’t a perfect solution. A new attorney
has bills to pay, rent, groceries and
student loans … Moreover, from an
industry point of view, we as lawyers
need to decide if this is a training model
we want to follow. Perhaps even more
importantly, can organizations like
Chicago Volunteer Legal Services,
John Marshall Law School’s Veterans’
Clinic, and the Center for Disability
and Elder Law, to name a few,
handle all the training of Chicago’s
new attorneys? Do non-profits even
want to assume this enormous task?
B. Training from the legal
tech and temporary staffing world
As most firms are employing fewer
attorneys, hiring staff attorneys, and
even engaging temporary staffing
agencies to review documents for
document productions, firms once-
picky about who they hired and how
their associates were trained, appear to
be more lax. Many Big Law Chicago
firms have taken a gigantic leap of
cost-cutting faith in recent years,
taking their chances with cheaper labor.
The attorneys hired for document
reviews by temporary staffing companies
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