A Survey of the Relevance of Legal Training to Law School Graduates.

Abstract

Perhaps the most important question for legal educators is whether particular aspects of legal education are more valuable than others for lawyers in various activities. To answer this question we need to know more about what legally trained people do. What are they doing? How do their legal skills help them in their roles as attorneys, judges, corporation executives, owners of businesses, stockbrokers, union officers or government officials? Is there something about legal training which is an advantage to people, even if they do not practice law? The research project described in this article attempted to determine the activities of the legally trained, the use to which they put their legal skills, and their views of the utility of various aspects of their legal training. In order to understand the relevance of legal training to the roles and duties of practicing and non-practicing legally trained persons, we need to make some sense out of the variety of their activities. To do this we need several kinds of information. First, we need an account of their activities, that is, what they do, and an idea of which activities are most important. Second, we need to assess the opinions of legally-trained people about the relevance of certain aspects of their legal training to their professional and non-professional activities. Third, we need to know the essential skills they use in their work. To meet the needs for information about legal and nonlegal activities of legally-trained people, a review of relevant literature was conducted. Building on the results of these studies, a survey of a sample of 1,600 legallytrained persons from six law schools and three career stages (the classes of 1955, 1965, and 1970) was conducted. The survey provided information about legally-trained people's occupations, the extent of their legal and nonlegal activities, the skills they used in their work, and their perception of the value of their legal training in their activities. This article first describes the earlier studies of lawyers' opinions of the role of their legal educations in their careers. Then the sample and survey used in this study are described. The general results concerning alumni professional employment, areas of legal practice, and views of the importance of general knowledge and skills in their work are described in the following section. The results for groups of lawyers pursuing different kinds of careers ( e . g., solo practitioners, practitioners in large firms, legal educators, etc.) are explored in the next section. The results were also analyzed in other ways to compare groups of special interest. These analyses compare the careers and views of men and women law school alumni, of alumni at different stages of their careers, of alumni who had attended law school part-time and full-time and of alumni who had different academic records in law school. Finally, the implications of the study are discussed.

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