The recent Stanford Daily piece by Riya Mehta (“Evaluating the Third Year of Law School,” 10/28/14) asked whether legal education really needs to last three years. Noting that some commentators—including most famously President Obama, who attended Harvard Law School for the requisite three years—have expressed skepticism about the value of the 3L year, Mehta spoke to students and professors at Stanford Law School on their opinions.  Unsurprisingly, views were mixed.

For now, the third year of law school is here to stay. But this doesn’t mean students should spend all three years in traditional lecture- and discussion-based courses. Students should take advantage of the wide range of educational modalities available in law school to tie together the core skill of “how to think like a lawyer” with the more complex and diverse skills associated with actually being a lawyer. Clinical legal education, where students represent real clients in real cases (under close supervision by faculty), along with externships, practicums, and simulation classes, supplement the classroom curriculum and enable students to use their three years in law school to evolve from a student to a professional.

Alums report that their SLS clinical experiences helped them better succeed in their first jobs and beyond. Megan Byrne, who graduated from SLS in 2014 and is now a litigation associate at Kirkland & Ellis says, “I found my third-year clinic to be a perfect capstone to my law school experience, as I was able to integrate the knowledge base and practical skill set I had gained from two previous years of course study.” 

Mike Smith, a sixth year lawyer at Wilmer Hale in Washington DC comments, “Participating in clinic while I was at SLS helped me hit the ground running when I started as an associate at a large law firm.  Clinical practice helped me learn how to work through complex legal issues with clients and put together a persuasive case.  I use those same skills in private practice, whether I am counseling clients on intellectual property matters or representing them in litigation.”

Summer jobs of course are a way to experience real practice, but they are not explicitly designed with the student’s education in mind; rather, lessons learned often depend on where you work and what projects, cases, or clients happen to be on tap. Clinic courses, by contrast, are designed to expose students to universally useful professional dilemmas and skills that translate to many areas of law and into the business world as well. And law school clinical faculty are able to emphasize constant, one-on-one mentoring, deeply reflective learning, and student responsibility for their work and clients.  Manal Dia (JD ’14), COO and Co-founder of the tech startup Rabbit Proto says, “When I co-founded and ran a startup, I built on many of the skills I developed at the Clinic: from negotiating and structuring contracts, to developing empathy towards our startup’s users. I gained many insights, from supervisors and case partners, about my leadership and communication style. In both these respects, the Clinic was a great course in how to be an entrepreneur.”

Other alums have experienced the inherent benefit of taking a full-time clinic at SLS: developing the interpersonal and collaboration skills to successfully navigate today’s work environment.  As Jack Donohoe (SLS JD ’14), associate at Gunderson Dettmer points out, “Clinics force students to navigate real-life work dynamics. This includes working on a team, divvying up a project among multiple people, collaborating on a common work product, and just learning how to build camaraderie and/or be a well-liked and helpful person in an office setting. For a lot of recent law school grads, that personal-professional element is going to be as steep a learning curve as the content of their early-career work.”

Law schools across the country, as well as the entities that regulate them and the legal profession, are debating whether to make such experiential learning a graduation or admission requirement. But even absent a requirement to do so, Stanford Law School is encouraging all of its students to take advantage of Stanford’s clinical and other experiential learning courses before they finish their three years. Like a medical school residency, clinical legal education puts classroom knowledge into practice and propels students into professional life. And it also can make that third year go faster!    ◊