Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

I'm taking a little break from coronavirus coverage this week to focus on some of the stories I've missed in recent weeks because I've been chasing the many ways COVID-19 is upending legal education. More specifically, I'm looking at a trio of reports released recently that look at law schools and lawyer licensing. First is the long-awaited report from the ABA's Commission on the Future of Legal Education. Next, I'm looking at Law Schools Transparency's plan to bring the cost of legal education down in the next five years. Last is a look at the second of three reports from a National Conference of Bar Examiners task force that looking at the future of that all-important licensing exam.

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter: @KarenSloanNLJ

Coronavirus Extra Credit Reading

The National Conference of Bar Examiners has added a fall bar exam option for jurisdictions that can't or do not wish to move forward with the July test. New York is the first to postpone the test.

But law students are making it known through letters and petitions that they want jurisdictions to adopt emergency diploma privileges that will enable them to bypass the bar exam.

Law students are sharing their anxieties and supporting each other on the online forum Reddit.

The University of Chicago Law School has angered many students by becoming on the only top-10 law school to stick with traditional grades for the spring semester.

Third-year law students at Harvard, Duke and SMU discuss what it's like to finish law school amid a pandemic.

Legal Ed's Other Problems

I've been so slammed covering coronavirus stories that I haven't had time to write anything about a slew of in-depth reports released over the past few weeks regarding the bar exam and systemic challenges facing legal education. (Side note, the release of these reports was terribly timed.) I hope to delve into these further in the coming weeks for more analysis, but, for right now, I want to point readers to these texts and offer a brief overview of the findings. Now that everyone is stuck at home, perhaps you'll have some extra time to give them a read and ponder the results. So here goes:

➤➤The American Bar Association's Commission on the Future of Legal Education released its report, Principles for Legal Education and Licensure in the 21st Century

Background: This commission, chaired by former University of Miami law dean Patricia White, was formed back in 2017 to examine big-picture issues facing legal education and access to justice.

The takeaway: The report offers an outline of the problems legal education must deal with regarding delivery of the J.D. as well as attorney licensure, and gives some general recommendations for moving forward. In a nutshell, the commission concludes that legal education and the legal profession aren't keeping up with larger societal changes. Law schools—and licensing entities—are preparing students for yesterday's practice of law. And there are significant obstacles to sweeping change in the way new lawyers are trained and licensed. Among them: a one-size fits all approach to law school; and outdated bar exam; and a fear of technology.

So what to do? The commission's recommendations seek to lower the cost of a legal education, better utilize technology, and focus on the competencies most important to the lawyers of the future. I know that sounds vague, and my primary critique of the commission's report is that it feels overly broad and lacking in specifics, but I get the sense that it was intended to spur people to think big and come up with their own ideas, rather than prescribe detailed changes. But it does drill down a little bit more. For instance, the commission recommends that schools ditch strict grading curves in order to spur innovation; expand alternatives to the traditional J.D.; and rethink how they approach admissions and how schools are funded. The ABA, for its part, should rethink its law school accreditation standards to enable more innovation, and should develop other consumer information tools to reduce the influence of the U.S. News & World Report rankings. And the bar exam should be retooled to better assess the skills entry level lawyers need.

"We can modernize our system of legal education and licensure to better prepare the next generation of legal professionals, serve existing and future client needs, and improve access to justice," the report reads. "But we must first believe that we can succeed."

➤➤Law School Transparency's LST: 2025 Vision

Background: Law School Transparency—a nonprofit organization dedicated to better consumer information about law schools and to lowering the cost of legal education—has spent the past two years thinking through and laying out big-picture ways to pursue those goals.

The Takeaway: This report is a doozy, coming in at 84 pages. It's sort of the opposite of the ABA Commission's paper, with lots of numbers and details. I can't get down into the weeds of it here, but the report hinges on two main ideas: Law school is way too expensive, in large part because of the outsized influence of the U.S. News rankings; and the ABA's current accreditation standards are stifling innovation. The report includes myriad suggestions for addressing these two problems with the goal of making noticeable progress within five years.

On the cost and rankings front, Law School Transparency will launch a new index for law schools in which they will be assessed on a variety of as-yet-to-be-determined criteria, and schools that reach a certain threshold will be labeled "certified" by Law School Transparency. The idea is to create a widely accepted measure of law school quality to compete with U.S. News and diminish its influence. The group will also encourage U.S. News to change its methodology to reward schools that keep tuition low and have strong post-graduate employment rates.

As far as law school accreditation standards, the ABA should allow for more distance education, give schools more flexibility in how their faculties are structured, and make it easier to launch new law schools, among other suggestions.

"When we collectively fail to address serious problems with law school access, affordability, and innovation, the legal profession loses out on people who could positively impact clients and diversify our profession. It also worsens our access to justice problem, whether because people take fewer entrepreneurial risks, cannot go into public service, or never enter at all," the report reads.

➤➤National Conference of Bar Examiners Testing Task Force Phase 2 Report: 2019 Practice Analysis

Background: This is the second report issued by the task force that is spending three years examining the future of the bar exam, and it focuses on the results of an extensive survey of what job activities new lawyers performs—hence what skills and knowledge they need right off the bat.

The Takeaway: This is another pretty detailed report, so I'm going to pull from the executive summary here. It seems that when lawyers were surveyed on what new attorneys do the most or is most important to their success, in-depth knowledge of the law didn't play a big role. Instead, tasks such as legal research, communication and legal analysis were biggies. Here's the report:

"The most commonly performed tasks were the following: Identify issues in client matter, including legal, factual, or evidentiary issues; Research case law; Interpret laws, rulings, and regulations for client; Research statutory and constitutional authority; and Evaluate strengths and weaknesses of client matter."

In terms of the skills, abilities and other characteristics that lawyers rated as most critical were: "Written/Reading Comprehension, Critical/Analytical Thinking, Written Expression, Identifying Issues, and Integrity/Honesty."

There's a lot in this report, and I've provided just a tiny taste, but I hope it's enough to highlight the point that lawyers aren't rating knowledge of the law—as tested on the existing bar exam—as what is most important for new lawyers, though they do highly rate legal research and analysis, which the bar exam does purport to test. So it will be interesting to see the results of the final phase of the task force's work, which is to develop recommendations on how the realign the bar exam to focus on the knowledge and skills that lawyers say are most critical for new attorneys.

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I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]