I previously blogged (here, here, and here) Northwestern’s new two-year J.D. program and other curriculum reforms.  Two more developments on this front:

• Northwestern Dean David Van Zandt and consultant Michelle Greene have an op-ed in next week’s National Law Journal:  Stress Core Competencies:

[L]egal education largely has failed to keep up with changes in the industry. The excellent legal analysis and advocacy skills that are the hallmark of all top law school programs remain a priority, as they must. But mastering legal analysis is not sufficient. Today’s law students also need a much more sophisticated understanding of what it means to work as well as think like lawyers in 21st century careers.

With that in mind, Northwestern undertook a comprehensive analysis of what capabilities today’s law students will need to excel in their careers. … The outcome is a major new plan to screen for and develop the competencies that are at the heart of our analysis. A core set of competencies — in communication, strategic understanding, basic quantitative skills, cross-cultural work, project management and leadership — will be stressed as never before at Northwestern in a number of innovative initiatives. Among them, an accelerated two-year J.D. program targeted at high achievers will be launched in 2009. All of the initiatives will make law school as relevant as possible to our students’ future careers.

Northwestern’s communications initiative is focused not only on helping students write excellent briefs and present effective appellate arguments — which most law schools already do well — but also on greatly enhancing their abilities to communicate with nonlawyers. Law students must master communication of complex legal ideas clearly and concisely with nonlawyers in nonlegal formats — free from legalese — including verbal presentations, one-page memos, bullet-point lists and PowerPoint presentations.

• Bill Henderson (Indiana) has posted NU Law 2-Year JD Program, Revisited on his Empirical Legal Studies Blog:

Dean Van Zandt is trying to harness labor markets–students and employers–to work in his favor. And the winds are blowing in his direction: 1) only elite jobs are keeping pace with higher tuition; 2) legal employers are actually looking for better trained (or sorted) workers, particularly in an era of high associate attrition–this has been a recurrent theme in my own conversations with hiring partners. When LSAT scores are essentially co-linear with scholarly reputation and output, which they are now, we academics need to be realistic about the source of our relative market power. High LSAT scores + sorting + business training are, from a employer’s perspective, better than high LSAT scores alone. If employer preferences are clearly signaled in the marketplace, they will shape student preferences. NU Law wants to stoke that signal. In the long run, this could easily marginalize the influence of USNWR. …

NU Law is trying to remake the elite law school market–the market is, after all, segmented. But further down the law school hierarchy, there is evidence that that the market is about to break in a new direction. Students at lower ranked students are increasingly daunted by ever higher debt loads and an unforgiving bi-modal distribution of entry level jobs. If the interest rates go up, many law schools will have a hard time filling their 1L classes with qualified students. Building alliances with legal employers helps solve this problem; thus, it is likely the wave of the future. This is, to my mind, a descriptive rather than normative assertion