Law Firm to Law School: We're not hiring your grads until you improve your legal research program

As a law firm librarian at Seyfarth Shaw (Chicago) in the 1980s, I dealt with the consequences of downright terrible law school legal research instruction. The firm only hired the top 10% from the graduating classes of the top 10 law schools so I seriously doubt the problem was the firm's new associates. As an academic law librarian (Cincinnati) in the 2000s I observed that the quality of legal research instruction hadn't improved. The bottom line: if students didn't take the optional advanced legal research course taught by law librarians, they will leave law school ill-equipped for real world research. The problem is systemic and nationwide; the typical 1L legal research and writing program just doesn't get the job done.

How/when will this change? I was hanging my hopes on the implementation of a legal research bar exam component but I've just read about a much more effective way to overhaul legal research instruction in law schools; law firms go tell law schools that you won't hire their graduates until their legal research program improves. That's what one law firm did and the law school got the message. "The school ended up completely changing the structure of their program. The firms have the power to do that in law schools." Quoted from Nikki Shenk's Starting Them on the Right Foot, Law Librarians in the New Millennium, May-June 2008 issue at 6.

Law firms and corporate legal departments have the power. Nothing much will change until private sector employers and their law librarians demand improvements in legal research instruction. It won't happen internally. The traditional legal research and writing program and its instructors are simply too entrenched. Boycotting one law school may get the attention of nearby law schools in a sort of "there but for the grace of God" sort of way.  Firm and corporate law librarians can help by letting their rainmakers know that they should direct their law school donations to the law library, not the legal research and writing program, for the purpose of legal research instruction. That will make law school deans sit up and take notice. [JH]