Disruptive Forces at our Doors: Challenges for the Legal Profession and Legal Education
Disruptive Forces at our Doors: Challenges for the Legal Profession and Legal Education

Summary/Abstract: Change is constant, inevitable, and sometimes disruptive. This is especially evident both in the legal profession and in legal education, where unprecedented disruptive change is occurring. Disruptive change can be destructive; yet directed, proportional, and adaptive responses can produce effective, even transformational, change. Identifying and implementing the correct direction of change in legal education is challenging due to declining demand for the output of production in the educational enterprise, excess capacity in producing such output, and structural constraints that make timely adaptation to the changing market difficult. In the U.S., the supply of new graduates exceeds available employment, a mismatch that will not significantly abate soon. Simultaneously, the numbers of both applications and applicants for admission are declining, which challenges many law schools’ efforts to maintain entering class quality, financial health, or both. New technologies and project management techniques steadily increase law practice efficiencies, which reduce the need for the number of lawyers needed to do relatively static or declining quantities of work. Non-lawyer professionals are increasingly entrusted with undertaking tasks traditionally understood as lawyer-only roles, which reduces the demand for lawyers to do some kinds of legal work. Legal education is responding with decreased rates of increase in, and sometimes declining, law school tuition, reductions in enrollment, innovations that reduce the net cost of legal education, and curricular reforms. In the face of disruptive change in the legal profession, legal education occupies a delicate space, where without change law schools are at risk of preparing students to practice effectively in a world that does not exist anymore. Yet disruptive forces present new opportunities, and those who are quickest to recognize them and adapt effectively will be best positioned to transition into the uncertain future.

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