7 reasons to get rid of the law degree — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
Requiring a law degree for bar admission imposes unfair burdens on new lawyers and blocks innovation in legal education. Here’s what we can do instead.
Excerpt:
Hey there, legal sector participant! Do you feel that law school is too expensive? That law students graduate too heavily in debt and deeply stressed? That legal education seems impossible to reform? That the whole lawyer development and bar admission system in general is an enormous hot mess?
If so, you’re like thousands of others who’ve grown massively frustrated with the profession’s broken-down approach to developing new lawyers. But I’m here with some good news! There’s a simple and straightforward path to resolving these and many other problems with legal education and bar admission.
We start by getting rid of the law degree.
Now, hold on, let me be clear — I don’t mean kill the law degree itself. That would be crazy.
No, I mean, let’s get rid of the law degree as a mandatory element of the lawyer licensing process. Law schools should continue to offer whatever sort of degree programs they like — but legal regulators and bar admission authorities should no longer require everybody who wants to be a lawyer to get one.
From DSC:
I need to think on this further, but Jordan could be onto something here…
A better pathway to lawyer licensing — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
No law degree; a single knowledge exam; training in legal, business and professional skills; and a term of supervised practice. This is how we do it.
Excerpt:
Previously here at Substack, I provided a pretty comprehensive takedown of the law degree requirement for lawyer licensing. It generated a ton of fascinating and gratifying feedback, here and especially at LinkedIn, with a few objections but mostly a lot of support.
Of course, it’s easy to criticize legal education — fun, too — but look, most people in the legal profession already know all the problems with the law degree, and complaining about it is kind of a vacuous pastime. What I’m really interested in here is a bigger and more important question: How does — how should — someone become a lawyer?
The 2023 Global Sentiment Survey — from donaldhtaylor.co.uk by Don Taylor
Excerpt:
This year’s Global Sentiment Survey – the tenth – paints a picture that is both familiar and unusual. In our 2020 survey report, we noted that ‘Data dominates this year’s survey’. It does so again this year, with the near 4,000 respondents showing a strong interest in AI, Skills-based talent management and Learning analytics (in positions #2, #3 and #4), all of which rely on data. The table is topped by Reskilling/upskilling, in the #1 spot for the third year running.
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Verified Skills — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain
Hunting for a common thread amid the hype around skills.
Excerpt:
The glitzy ASU+GSV gathering this week was titled “Brave New World.” But Tim Knowles wanted to talk about 1906.
That was when the organization Knowles leads, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, created the credit-hour standard. The time has arrived, argue Knowles and Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS, to move away from the Carnegie Unit and toward a new currency of education based on meaningful skills and accomplishments, demonstrated through assessment.
Our old way of training Americans for ‘good jobs’ is past its sell-by date — from workshift.opencampusmedia.org by JB Holston
We’re at a pivot point in education and workforce development. Employers in the U.S. and its allies have an opportunity to accelerate their economies by collaborating to scale new pathways to prosperity. They need to seize that opportunity, writes JB Holston, former CEO of the Greater Washington Partnership.
The country is at a pivot point. COVID’s acceleration of remote work and training; an increased dedication to inclusion, equity, and diversity since the murder of George Floyd; the inexorable pace of technological change; and America’s new, well-funded industrial policy have created an opportunity for the most significant re-set in the relationship between employers and our education systems in the last 150 years.
The old path to family-supporting career positions—which depended on large employers recruiting graduates from a small universe of ranked colleges whose education stopped with that degree—is past its sell-by date.
AI in Hiring and Evaluating Workers: What Americans Think — from pewresearch.org by Lee Rainie, Monica Anderson, Colleen McClain, Emily A. Vogels, and Risa Gelles-Watnick
62% believe artificial intelligence will have a major impact on jobholders overall in the next 20 years, but far fewer think it will greatly affect them personally. People are generally wary and uncertain of AI being used in hiring and assessing workers
Excerpt:
A new Pew Research Center survey finds crosscurrents in the public’s opinions as they look at the possible uses of AI in workplaces. Americans are wary and sometimes worried. For instance, they oppose AI use in making final hiring decisions by a 71%-7% margin, and a majority also opposes AI analysis being used in making firing decisions. Pluralities oppose AI use in reviewing job applications and in determining whether a worker should be promoted. Beyond that, majorities do not support the idea of AI systems being used to track workers’ movements while they are at work or keeping track of when office workers are at their desks.
The Good and the Bad of Solo Practice, Per Clio’s Latest Legal Trends Report for Solos — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi
Excerpt:
As a solo myself, I can tell you that there is much to be said for practicing on your own – freedom and independence not least among them. In fact, during 2022’s “Great Resignation,” a third of lawyers who quit their jobs did so to start their own solo practices, according to Legal Trends for Solo Law Firms, a report published today by law practice management company Clio.
But there are also disadvantages to practicing alone and challenges unique to solo lawyers, as this latest report documents.
What I Learned From My Students Who Became Teachers — from edsurge.com by Corey Winchester
Excerpt:
After nearly two hours of laughter, tears and thoughtful discussion with students who have become teachers, I walked away with two important messages that affirm why teachers decide to stay and why our stories deserve to be heard.
Our dinner conversation revealed that sometimes, it feels like we’re swimming against the flow of what we know is right for students and ourselves, while our education system emphasizes laws, mandates and standards purported to guide the next generation. Because of that, I worry that too many educators – newcomers and veterans alike – feel like they won’t be able to sustain the work. Now more than ever, educators need to be acknowledged and celebrated for the important work we do, especially when stories like ours reveal that meaningful relationships matter, especially when we have the ability and support to meet young people where they’re at.
To Improve a Child’s Education, We Must Be Willing to Let Old Practices Die — from edsurge.com by Isabel Bozada-Jones
Excerpt:
As the weeks turned to months and the surge from the pandemic finally ended, the question still hung in the air: what are we willing to lose in order to change a child’s life? We are still buckling under the weight of the inequitable education system that preceded the pandemic and the makeshift solutions created during the pandemic. At the same time, we fear losing what has kept us going. In order to answer this question, we need to shift from a mindset of scarcity and claim abundance.
They Left Teaching in Search of a Better Life. Did They Find It? — from edsurge.com by Emily Tate Sullivan
Excerpt:
To find out what happens after teachers put in their notice, as they transition into their next acts, EdSurge talked with six former classroom teachers who resigned at the end of the last school year, after that NEA survey was conducted. Is life on the other side everything they hoped and expected — and are they happy now?
How Music Technology Helped My Students Tap Into Their Creativity — from edsurge.com by David Casali
OPINION: Post-pandemic, let’s develop true education-to-workforce pathways to secure a better future — from hechingerreport.org by Mat Gandal
New partnerships will help smooth the way from high school to higher education and careers
That’s why it is once again time for a major evolution in how we think about U.S. education. If we want to address the challenges and inequities faced by students and the ongoing needs of employers and communities, we must deliver on a concept that has gained substantial momentum in recent years: education-to-workforce pathways.
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Through LAUNCH, teams of legislative, K-12, higher education and workforce leaders will be deeply analyzing existing education systems to identify barriers for students. They’ll also come up with ways to help students persist and complete high-quality pathways.
Augmented Reality: Your Next Step Into Immersive Learning — from learningguild.com by Bill Brandon
Excerpt — per Debbie Richard:
Some great examples of using augmented reality in immersive learning are:
Performance support: providing just in time text, video and/or conference calls where the information is overlayed over the physical world.
Language support: an AR app such as Google Translate can overlay translated text over the real text.
Visualizations: Overlaying virtual objects over physical ones such showing the inner working of a machine without opening it up.
Top 10 Tips for Creating a Successful Onboarding Experience — from learningguild.com by Tara Roberson-Moore
Here are 10 things you can do to make your onboarding program a learner experience that will provide the anchor newbies need to stick around.
Excerpt:
In many instances, onboarding is expected to be handled by human resources. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that but unless they are also training experts, a lot of companies could be missing an opportunity to create something special. Letting training and development experts augment HR can result in an onboarding program that provides the experience new employees need to get comfy.
Here are 10 things you can do to make your onboarding program a learner experience that will provide the anchor newbies need to stick around.
How to Manage a Poor Listener & Improve Listening Skills — from learningguild.com by Adam Hockman
Excerpt:
Your L&D team can collaborate in creating a conversational template—a script to guide behavior. An employee might be aware of their problematic listening and welcome this type of scaffold, and even help create it. Once the template is set, the employee can use it to lead an internal meeting, a setting where structure matters. The template can be useful in helping other team members or employees in the organization improve their listening and communication skills as well.
Let’s break the initial template meeting into sections and create language that will help the employee practice new skills.
A.I. Is Coming for Lawyers, Again — from nytimes.com by Steve Lohr (behind paywall)
Previous advances in A.I. inspired predictions that the law was the lucrative profession most likely to suffer job losses. It didn’t happen. Is this time different?
Excerpt:
But unless the past isn’t a guide, the impact of the new technology is more likely to be a steadily rising tide than a sudden tidal wave. New A.I. technology will change the practice of law, and some jobs will be eliminated, but it also promises to make lawyers and paralegals more productive, and to create new roles. That is what happened after the introduction of other work-altering technologies like the personal computer and the internet.
One new study, by researchers at Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania and New York University, concluded that the industry most exposed to the new A.I. was “legal services.” Another research report, by economists at Goldman Sachs, estimated that 44 percent of legal work could be automated. Only the work of office and administrative support jobs, at 46 percent, was higher.
Lawyers are only one occupation in the path of A.I. progress. A study by researchers at OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, and the University of Pennsylvania found that about 80 percent of American workers would have at least 10 percent of their tasks affected by the latest A.I. software.
Also relevant/see:
039 | Micro-legal & AI Legal Help — from thebrainyacts.beehiiv.com
Justice Through Code — from centerforjustice.columbia.edu by ; via Matt Tower
Unlocking Potential for the 80+ Million Americans with a Conviction History.
Excerpt:
A world where every person, regardless of past convictions or incarceration can access life-sustaining and meaningful careers.
We are working to make this vision a reality through our technical and professional career development accelerators.
Our Mission: We educate and nurture talent with conviction histories to create a more just and diverse workforce. We increase workplace equity through partnerships that educate and prepare teams to create supportive pathways to careers that end the cycle of poverty that contributes to incarceration and recidivism.
JTC is jointly offered by Columbia University’s Center for Justice, and the Tamer Center for Social Enterprise at the Columbia Business School.
Credentialed Learning For All — from gettingsmart.com
Vision
Learning happens throughout life and is not isolated to the K-12 or higher education sectors. Yet, often, validations of learning only happen in these specific areas. The system of evaluation based on courses, grades, and credit serves as a poor proxy for communicating skills given the variation in course content, grade inflation, and inclusion of participation and extra credit within course grades.
Credentialed learning provides a way to accurately document human capability for all learners throughout their life. A lifetime credentialed learning ecosystem provides better granularity around learning, better documentation of the learning, and more relevance for both the credential recipient and reviewer. This improves the match between higher education and/or employment with the individual, while also providing a more clear and accurate lifetime learning pathway.
With a fully-credentialed system, individuals can own well-documented evidence of a lifetime of learning and choose what and when to share this data. This technology enables every learner to have more opportunities for finding the best career match without today’s existing barriers around cost, access, and proxies.
Addendum on 4/28/23 — speaking of credentials:
First Rung — from the-job.beehiiv.com by Paul Fain
New research shows stacking credentials pays off for low-income learners.
Stacking credentials pays off for many low-income students, new research finds, but only if learners move up the education ladder. Also, Kansas is hoping a new grant program will attract more companies to participate in microinternships.