The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

The New Jersey continuing legal education (CLE) requirements for new lawyers could be a good idea. Lawyers get out of law school not really knowing how to be lawyers, and the bar certainly doesn't prepare them. So before being unleashed to practice on the public (or at least pretty soon thereafter) it makes sense to ensure that they know enough of the rules, laws, and procedures of the jurisdiction in order to practice properly.

Unfortunately, the New Jersey program, as implemented by the New Jersey Institute for Continuing Legal Education (ICLE), the only agency authorized to administer the required courses, falls far short of that ideal. So far short, in fact, as to render the entire requirement a complete waste of time and money for all involved, but particularly for those who can least afford it: new lawyers already saddled with school debt and busy with trying to establish their nascent careers.

Lest my criticism seem born out of sour grapes from having had to endure it, I will say that the ICLE staff at my location were very nice. During the five days of video replays they took pains to make sure that we could get through them as expeditiously as possible. Also, the general advice given by most of the presenters in the various lectures was often informative and practical.

However tips alone are not nearly enough of a payoff to justify the immense investment in time and money lawyers are required to make in completing these mandatory classes. For this CLE program to be a rational requirement it must truly meet the ideal of providing new lawyers with the practical knowledge necessary to practice. While tips are consistent with that goal, they cannot on their own replace a pedagogically sound curriculum. Which, in the case of these NJ ICLE Skills and Methods courses, was sorely lacking.

The presentations we watched this summer were recordings of those given live in the spring. Although poor videography at times further compromised the summer learning experience (for instance, one presenter used powerpoint, but the videographer had neglected to adjust the camerain order to record what was on the screen), the basic defects were inherent to both sessions, with the most significant being that presentations appeared to be largely haphazard. Although we had been given outlines for each of the five courses, the lecturers either didn't follow them, followed them inconsistently, or followed ones that were obviously different from what we had been given. While many of lecturers had constructive things to say on their topic, and their presentations generally followed a logical internal order themselves, they did not conform to a systematic overview of what a new lawyer would need to know on the topic (nor a specific practical tutorial on any part of it instead). In some instances the presentations seemed to assume that students had already worked with the subject matter, which wasn't always the case. Of course, to the extent that it was the case it rendered these courses even more useless, as those lawyers would be further along on their learning curves and require more sophisticated instruction in order for the class to have been valuable to them.

Such is the problem inherent to the one-size-fits-all approach of the CLE requirement. Arguably it is good for every lawyer to have exposure to areas of law they might not practice in, but even so, at this stage in our careers we will need instruction in differing degrees of detail. Yet every lawyer, regardless of their background or experience, is required to sit through the exact same course, which ultimately was useful for no one.

It is already constitutionally suspect that lawyers have to be physically present in the state to take these courses, lest their licenses be suspended, because it imposes an impermissible and unfair burden on out-of-state residents (such as myself). Given that the summer cycle of the program's administration was entirely video-based with supplementary homework, meaning that there is no reason the courses couldn't be taken remotely, it's also a needless burden. Of course, given the quality of the instruction, the CLE requirement is a needless burden on everyone. Each course amounted to little more than a loosely-structured panel presentation on its respective topic which, while not wholly uninteresting, did not return enough substantive instruction to justify the investment of time students had to make to attend. Nor did the presentations sufficiently prepare the students to complete the cumbersome assignments that we must do in order to get credit for having attended, instead requiring us to waste even more of our time struggling through them.

Fortunately, at the moment, the New Jersey CLE requirement is limited to these and subsequent prescribed courses for the first three years of practice. The state however is kicking around whether to join other states in instituting a career-long continuing legal education requirement. There are reasonable arguments for such requirements, but if the proposed new CLE requirement demands fulfillment like this one does it will certainly do more harm than good.

In any case, the Supreme Court must take a look at its current requirement and institute significant changes. At minimum the requirement for physical presence must be removed in order to comply with the US Constitution. Secondly, and regardless of whether ICLE is allowed to keep its monopoly on administration of the required courses, new curricula must be designed and implemented to ensure that lawyers actually learn the substantive law the Court, in imposing these requirements at all, apparently feels is so necessary to learn. It would further be advisable to carefully consider exactly what that law is, so that no other lawyers need to be disadvantaged by having their time so needlessly wasted in superfluous classes.