Assembling some disparate pieces of the legal education story in a single place:
Students’ diminished ability to rely on federal student loans will affect the number of students enrolling and their ability to afford legal education in unknown ways. Derek Muller (Notre Dame) is an excellent resource on this topic.
In the not-too-distant future, the total number of students eligible to apply to law school may fall at last. The much-anticipated “Enrollment Cliff” is here. From Substack, economists at Purdue University have a new, comprehensive, and detailed analysis of “the cliff” and what it portends.
And the next five to ten years (and maybe fewer) are likely to bring substantial (in the aggregate) but unknown (in the specifics) changes to the roles that lawyers and legal organizations play in many sectors, given the rapid rise, deployment, and adoption of AI and related technologies. My most recent post on that point relied on a Substack essay from Dorna Moini, who teaches at USC Law when she is not running her legaltech company.
There is more, below the jump.
It seems to me that law schools specifically and legal education generally have some big choices to make: how to find money, how to spend money, who to hire to teach, and what should be taught. Right now, informally my sense of law school and law professor behavior across the US market, responding to the rapid adoption of AI systems across the legal industry, runs the gamut from “batten down the hatches” to “batten down most of the hatches.” Here and there, a new AI-themed course is popping up; here and there, a law-and-tech program is pivoting to AI, or to design. Meanwhile, large numbers of entering law students are bringing with them abundant experience both using and critiquing AI in their undergraduate programs, some under faculty supervision, some on their own.
Lots of people point to accreditation requirements and the ABA Section on Legal Education as barriers to innovation. I know first hand how compliance can substitute for vision in law school management. But – speaking for myself only – I think that takes a too-easy way out. If we’re not planning for the future, the fault lies in ourselves, not in the Section.
I often think (and teach) in terms of movie references, so here are two that are possibly relevant. On the one hand, I think of the ROTC cadet played by Kevin Bacon, at the end of “Animal House,” screaming “Remain calm! All is well!” as he is steamrolled by a crush of frightened parade-goers. And on the other hand, I picture Ed Harris as Gene Krantz in “Apollo 13,” resisting the prospect of losing three astronauts in space by declaring, “With all due respect, sir, I believe this is going to be our finest hour.”
Setting aside my dramatic rhetoric, I would love to hear from or about law schools that are undertaking large-scale, comprehensive, institution-wide investigations of what the future of the legal profession looks like and how that should inform a comprehensive 21st century vision of legal education. This is an opportunity that comes along rarely, and perhaps only once in several generations.
