Lawyers for America: Improving Legal Education and Access to Justice
Published for Thomson Reuters Legal Executive Institute on July 22, 2015
Professor Marsha Cohen is on a mission. She is determined to address two challenges she knows well from her distinguished career in law:
Making legal education more practical—preparing students actually to practice law; and
Supplying talented and motivated lawyers to represent the underserved in America’s system of justice.
She aims to address these two issues through a program called Lawyers for America, which she helped create and on which she serves as Executive Director. The program is noteworthy both because it likely will make a significant contribution to our legal system and because it illustrates the sort of bold innovation that our times require.
Lawyers for America
Prof. Cohen is the Honorable Raymond L. Sullivan Professor of Law at the University of California-Hastings College of Law in San Francisco. She has devoted her entire career, since graduating from Harvard Law School in 1971, to a combination of educating students to be lawyers and pursuing the interests of ordinary citizens in their access to justice.
As an educator, Prof. Cohen has observed that, while law schools educate students well in the fine points of the law, they don’t do a very good job of preparing them actually to practice.
From her four decades working at the Consumers Union and in other public interest organizations, she has seen first-hand how difficult it is for citizens with limited financial means to find and afford the legal services they need.
Prof. Cohen and her colleagues at Lawyers for America had the “aha moment” to create a program to address these two issues in the context of considering how to deal with a third issue: the challenges students increasingly face in finding jobs after graduation. Drawing on the medical school model and that of Teach for America, they conceived, won institutional approval for, and executed a program that works as follows:
Students make a two year commitment, commencing in their third year of law school, to serve in a public interest setting, either in a local government agency such as a district attorney’s or public defender’s office or in a non-profit organization that serves the public. In the first year, called the “training year,” students work directly with lawyers, learning how the law operates and doing tasks that students are permitted to do under the supervision of licensed lawyers. In the second year, called the “service year,” having passed the bar exam, the students practice law, applying the lessons learned in the training year and learning new ones.
As Prof. Cohen puts it, it is an “externship on steroids,” in which the students assume an “adult work schedule” and set of responsibilities.
As an educator, Prof. Cohen has observed that, while law schools educate students well in the fine points of the law, they don’t do a very good job of preparing them actually to practice.
In the training year, the students receive full academic credit toward graduation, but no monetary compensation. In the service year, the new lawyer receives a stipend and health insurance from Lawyers for America which is roughly comparable to the compensation a new lawyer would receive if employed by his or her host entity.
The participants also receive credit each year for reduction of their student loans under the federal Public Service Loan Forgiveness Program.
At the conclusion of the second year, neither the student nor the host entity are committed to continuing the relationship. The hope is that a substantial number will go on to a career in public service at the host or another entity.
The Kind of Innovation We Need
I think Lawyers for America is the kind of innovation we need in legal service.
For its participants, it materially enhances their readiness to serve clients, by replacing the limited academic value of the third-year curriculum with a year of hands-on experience in the real world of law practice. For the host entities, it provides cost-effective, additional resources they sorely need, enhancing their ability to achieve their missions.
If the relationship ends after the second year, both the participant and host have benefitted from the experience. If the relationship continues, all the better. I think there is a good chance that the program will attract many long-term contributors to public interest endeavors who would not otherwise have been engaged.
Equally important, Lawyers for America shows the way for innovation of other kinds. Prof. Cohen and her colleagues identified specific issues that needed to be addressed, conceived a creative and pragmatic program to address them, overcame institutional barriers, and executed. The more that others follow their lead the stronger our legal system will be.