The legal profession is in the throes of a mental health crisis. State bars across the country continue to be rocked by the tragic loss of their lawyers to suicide and accidental drug overdose. Recent studies have also shed further light on the severity and scale of lawyers’ long-recognized struggles with depression, anxiety, substance abuse,…
How Should We License Lawyers?
During the summer of 2020, anger and frustration about lawyer licensing practices boiled over. The bar exam had always imposed economic and psychological burdens on test takers, but the rise of a pandemic added an additional hazard: exposure to a dangerous virus. Some states continued the in-person traditional exam despite the health risks, but others…
The Politics of Lawyer Regulation: The Case of Malpractice Insurance
This article examines the politics of lawyer regulation and considers why some states will adopt lawyer regulation that protects the public, when others will not. It uses the debates over how to regulate uninsured lawyers as a lens through which to examine the question. Clients often cannot recover damages from uninsured lawyers who commit malpractice,…
The Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System publishes new Allied Legal Professionals report
IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, announced today that it released its new Allied Legal Professionals landscape report, along with an accompanying online Knowledge Centre. This project seeks to help standardize a new tier of legal professionals nationally, with the goal of increasing the options for…
The 2022 Law School Survey for Student Engagement finds female students more likely to participate in online law school courses
The Law School Survey for Student Engagement has found female students and students who do not identify with their gender assigned at birth are more likely to participate in classes if they are online. The LSSSE surveyed more than 13,000 law students at 70 law schools in 2022. The goal of the survey, which was administered by…
The Evolution of Professionalism as a Mode of Regulation: Evidence from the United States
Opinion is divided on how far and in what ways professionalism as a mode of regulation has evolved. To date, attention has focused on the impact of neoliberal political and economic ideologies that challenge the idea that professions should be trusted to regulate themselves. This article further examines the impact of these attacks on professionalism…
American Bar Association Consultation on removing standardised entry requirements for law schools closes
The comment period for a proposal to do away with the American Bar Association’s standardized admissions test requirement for law schools closed Sept. 1 with more than 100 comments posted, laying bare the divisiveness of the issue. The topic appears to have garnered the most feedback of any issue posted to the ABA website’s Notice and Comment section since…
Evidence-Based Lawyer Regulation
Chambliss, E. (2019). Evidence-Based Lawyer Regulation. Wash. UL Rev., 97, 297. The legal profession is losing its authority over the regulation of legal services. Recent changes in antitrust law have put state bar associations under a spotlight. Competition from technology companies and concerns about access to justice have increased political pressure for market liberalization. Independent research is…
Evidence-based promulgation: reconsidering the rulemaking process for rules of professional conduct
Much like the indomitable Pippi Longstocking, the legal profession has succeeded for decades in asserting its right to self-regulate. Judges play a key role in this regulatory regime, serving as both rulemakers and enforcers. Indeed, prompted by the efforts of the organized bar, the judiciary claims the inherent—and exclusive—right to regulate the practice of law…
A US study has found that recent law graduates in hybrid working have highest job satisfaction
A new survey by the National Association for Law Placement and the NALP Foundation has found that fully remote work may be losing some of its appeal — at least for lawyers in the early stage of their careers working across the legal profession. For those fully working remotely, the numbers of recent law grads…