On the 19th November, The Legal Services Regulatory Authority (LSRA) published two separate reports with recommendations to the Minister for Justice. The first report is entitled, “Setting Standards: Legal Practitioner Education and Training“. The report is focused on examining the competence and standards required to practise as either a Solicitor or a Barrister in Ireland….
American Bar Association Recognised Law School requirements relaxed due to COVID
The Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has announced that they will consider individual law school circumstances due to COVID-19 if bar passage rates fall below 75%. During the announcement at it’s November 20th public meeting, the council said law schools failing to meet Standard 316, sometimes called…
Is Legal Education Over-Regulated or Under-Regulated?
Abstract Posing the challenges facing legal education as concerned with its under- or over-regulation is the wrong question. Instead, we need to cast fresh eyes on the question of legal education beyond the binary of over-and under-regulation. This paper identifies three inter-related factors that reveal the inadequacy of our long-standing discourse on the regulation of Australian legal education: the misapprehension as to…
American Bar Association report details impact of debt on law students
A new study conducted by the Young Lawyers Division of the American Bar Association has revealed substantial and widespread levels of student debt and demonstrated a harmful effect on junior members of the profession in the US. The survey has found that: Over 75% of respondents had at least $100,000 in student loans at graduation…
New solicitor qualification regime approved in England and Wales
The SRA’s new Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) has been formally approved by the Legal Services Board (LSB). The new examination will be officially introduced in September 2021, with the first assessments for SQE1, the first part of the qualification, taking place in November 2021, and the first assessments for SQE2 taking place in April 2022….
A Conversation About Canadian Legal Education: Lakehead University and Dialogue Pedagogy
Abstract Through my experiences opening the first new law school in Ontario in 44 years, I have had time to reflect on my own teaching style and have employed what has been termed “Dialogue Pedagogy.” Using an auto-ethnography methodology in this paper, I will examine ways of teaching the law including the case-law system of…
The Pandemic Syllabus
Abstract A syllabus is a contract, an introduction, a statement of values, a todo list, a plan. It is often the point of first contact between professor and student, or between student and an area of law. Beyond the technological challenges, for many professors Fall 2020 was also the first-time coming up with a camera…
Moving Ahead: Finding Opportunities for Transactional Training in Remote Legal Education
Abstract This article builds on the many calls for teaching business acumen and transactional skills in law school with a timely insight: the shift to remote legal education creates opportunities to do so, in particular by incorporating practice problems and mini-simulations in doctrinal courses. Weaving together the literature on emerging best practices in online legal…
Law Society of British Columbia to Widen Access to Legal Services
On September the 10th the Law Society of British Columbia elected to make changes suggested by a task force on modernisation established this January. The task force cited ongoing changes in the legal market, which have been accelerated by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the pace of change in other jurisdictions, as to…
‘Smart’ Lawyering: Integrating Technology Competence into the Legal Practice Curriculum
Abstract Technology has changed modern law practice. Ethics rules obligate lawyers to understand whether, when, and how to use it to deliver services. But most law schools do not incorporate the so-called “Duty of Technology Competence” into the required curriculum. Despite broad calls for legal education to make students more practice-ready, there is no clear…