Let’s be honest: when soon-to-be lawyers arrive at Ontario’s law firms, most don’t have a clue how to be lawyers. My three years of law school didn’t offer much in the way of practical skills. I avoided courses that related to the actual practice of law. Sure, there was Civil Procedure in first year, but I’d never actually set foot in a court — it was like reading the rules of chess without ever having played the game.
The course work and exams required as part of the bar admissions program didn’t get me much further. Classroom time felt like busy work and exams felt like hoop jumping. It was summer, and I was done law school. I was hardly paying attention.
And so, like many young lawyers, I began articling totally unprepared.
The entire process is now up for review. A recent Law Society report recommends that the Skills and Professional Responsibility program be discontinued. It also considers changes to the articling program to address the growing number of students seeking a limited number of positions. The report offers three options: the status quo, supplementary programs that would count as articles, and getting rid of the program altogether. A fourth option was later added by Convocation: Consider other options.
Here’s my suggestion: Start teaching students some useful skills before we send them off to work, then make sure there are enough articling positions to go around.
When next year’s estimated 1,730 students apply to fill only 1,300 available articling positions, many will be disappointed. Some will go elsewhere. Some won’t article at all. Minorities, immigrants, and mature students stand to suffer the most.
We need more articling positions so that every qualified candidate gets the opportunity. Let’s create grants so that sole practioners, legal clinics, and firms in rural communities can afford to take on students. And we should encourage flexibility, so articling students can split their time between firms — or even between countries.
If a foreign-trained lawyer has years of experience abroad, they should be able to skip articling to free up a spot for a student who actually needs the experience. Kris Borg-Olivier, who is profiled in our feature story “Law and Border”, is a case in point. A Canadian who graduated from Harvard Law School, Borg-Olivier practised in Manhattan before coming to Toronto. The Law Society gave him just one month of articling credit for every year of experience in New York.
We also have to encourage firms to hire more students. Best way to do that? Make articling students more useful. If we teach them what they need to know before they become the responsibility of their new employer, students will be more employable.
LSUC accredits law schools and lists what they must teach. But the required courses have remained virtually unchanged for 50 years. It’s time to update the requirements. Maybe students should take CivPro after they’ve actually seen this inside of a court. And maybe all students should learn advocacy, negotiation, legal research, and writing.
There’s lots of time in law school to wrestle with ancient case law and philosophical legal arguments, but we should also find a little time to teach some skills that will be useful for the actual practice of law.
Melissa Kluger
Publisher & Editor