Professor Lawrence Marshall spoke with Jill Tucker of the San Francisco Chronicle on why he thinks a new proposal at Stanford requiring law students to work in the school’s legal clinic before they graduate, is “essential” in preparing for the profession.

While doctors, priests and plumbers often get supervised hands-on experience
before becoming full-fledged professionals, many lawyers don’t get real-life
experience until, well, real life.

Stanford University is looking to change that, with faculty considering a
proposal to require law students to work in the school’s legal clinic before
they could graduate with a juris doctor. In the clinic, they would work on
actual legal cases with real clients.

Currently, about 70 percent of Stanford’s 640 law students participate in the
school’s Mills Legal Clinic during their second or third year. During one
academic quarter, the students put all other classes aside and take on cases
that range from criminal matters, environmental issues and immigration rights to
special education or school discipline matters.

…

“Just as in medical school or every other professional discipline,
experiential training is essential to preparing a professional,” said Lawrence
Marshall, professor and associate dean of clinical education at Stanford Law
School. “What’s critical is not simply the experience by immersion, but it’s the
intense feedback, supervision, mentoring and reflection that are going to create
lifelong habits of lawyering.”

…

Making clinical work mandatory at Stanford would be a “shot heard around the
world of legal education,” Marshall said.

…

Students face “messy real-world problems” that don’t fit nicely into the
confines of a legal case book, said Bill Koski, professor and director of the
clinic’s Youth and Education Law Project.

“We spend a lot more of our time doing things that I would lump under the
broad category of exercising professional judgment and problem solving,” he
said. For many students, “it’s the first time they are responsible for somebody
else’s problem in a very real way.”