The Legal Profession’s Need for Reform
The American legal profession suffers from systemic issues that it has not been willing to address.
As a society based on the rule of law, the legal profession is critical to our nation and always has been. The profession’s health is inseparable from the nation’s. That is why, as a young lawyer, I’ve grown increasingly alarmed by the legal system’s unwillingness to fix its most fundamental flaws.
Even as a law student, it didn’t take long for me to discover numerous failings of both the legal academy and the legal profession as a whole. So, I didn’t have any grand expectations to begin with, but what I witnessed as a newly minted attorney failed to meet even those modest expectations.
Don’t get me wrong—the American legal profession still produces the brightest legal minds in the world. Despite its flaws, it continues to train exceptional attorneys at the top of their fields. But brilliance at the top doesn’t excuse the broader failures. As a whole, the profession falls far short of the standards it claims to uphold.
I’ve identified three major failings in the profession. These aren’t petty grievances or isolated frustrations—they’re symptoms of a system fundamentally unequipped to meet the demands placed on it. And the longer we ignore the need for meaningful reform, the more harm we inflict—not just on lawyers, but on the public we’re meant to serve.
(1) Overburdened Lawyers and Underrepresented Clients
One of the first and most alarming things I noticed as a young attorney was the consistently poor quality of legal briefs. It was shocking. I expected occasional errors, but what I saw went far beyond that: careless typos, distorted arguments, even blatantly incorrect statements of law. At first, I assumed these were isolated mistakes. But over time, it became clear that this was a far bigger problem. Many lawyers were either too overburdened to do better or too disengaged to care.
Most concerning was the corner-cutting. This isn’t just a quality issue—it’s an ethics issue. A toxic culture revolving around the billable hour, especially for junior attorneys, makes it nearly impossible to meet ethical obligations. When a lawyer, especially one with little experience, is expected to juggle an extreme caseload, the inevitable result is subpar representation. Clients suffer, and the integrity of the profession erodes.
Unfortunately, the profession has largely turned a blind eye to this problem. While every state has ethics rules that mandate competent representation, these standards are too often treated as formalities rather than enforced obligations. The gap between the rules on paper and the realities of practice is wide.
The burdens placed on attorneys also contribute to burnout, depression, and addiction—challenges that have reached crisis levels in our field. While law schools and firms pay lip service to mental health, few take concrete steps to address the underlying causes.
Real reform means rethinking how to assign work, enforcing ethics rules with more teeth, and ultimately transforming legal culture. More effort needs to be spent evaluating what each client needs and being realistic about how much manpower it will take to provide proficient representation. We cannot keep pretending that a profession that prioritizes billable hours over quality of service is meeting its ethical obligations.
At its core, this is a cultural problem—one without a quick fix. Strengthening ethics rules and improving enforcement would be a step in the right direction, but regulation alone can’t solve what is ultimately a values issue. Real change will require a generational shift in mindset. Despite all the progressive rhetoric from major law firms about prioritizing people over profit, the profession remains firmly tethered to the billable hour—and the incentives that come with it.
(2) A Broken Legal Academy: A System That Fails Its Students
The legal education system suffers from three fundamental flaws: it underprepares students for practice, burdens them with excessive costs, and requires an unnecessary third year of classes.
First, law school fails to equip students with the practical skills they need to be effective lawyers. Despite three years of coursework, most graduates require extensive on-the-job training just to meet the basic demands of legal practice. Too often, employers are left to teach what law schools should have covered.
One problem is that the connection between exam results and lawyer effectiveness is highly tenuous. The curriculum is simply out of touch with real-world legal work. Law school exams are usually like timed races to see what you can spit onto your word processor. It has very little bearing on the actual practice of law. Being a lawyer is not about memorizing the rule against perpetuities or the elements of some tort. Rather, it requires methodically identifying, analyzing, and researching legal issues. Grades should be based more on practical evaluations, including legal memo assignments and examinations that simulate the practice of law.
The situation has improved somewhat in recent years as many schools have taken practice preparation more seriously, offering a range of practicums and clinics. Unfortunately, it has not been enough, and the JD curriculum still fails students.
Meanwhile, despite these failures, the cost of law school is staggering. The average annual tuition at private schools is approaching $60,000; at public non-resident schools, it is roughly $45,000; and at public resident schools, the average has surpassed $30,000. This debt burden limits career choices, drains the pipeline for public interest lawyers, and fuels dissatisfaction across the profession, creating more unhappy lawyers. And unhappy lawyers are less likely to provide adequate representation, further damaging the profession.
This is all the more frustrating because there is seemingly no need for a third year of courses. In fact, “3L” year is affectionately called “3LOL” by students because many treat it as a joke.
The current three-year model is both outdated and inefficient. Law schools should adopt a two-year curriculum focused on core doctrinal and practical skills, followed by a one-year, low-cost apprenticeship overseen by the school or a licensing body, where students would work under the supervision of licensed attorneys and be evaluated on actual performance. This structure would provide real-world experience, lessen financial pressure on graduates, and make legal careers more accessible, especially for those interested in public service. By aligning legal education more closely with the demands of actual practice, we could produce more competent, confident, and ethically grounded lawyers from the outset.
Of course, I recognize that the legal academy has a financial incentive to preserve the current three-year model. When I raised this issue with a law professor, I was told the third year is valuable for helping students “find their path.” But in practice, I’ve yet to meet a lawyer outside academia who believes the final year is worth the cost. For most students, it’s an expensive holding pattern—a year spent marking time rather than building skills. Career exploration is important, but it shouldn’t come with a $50,000 price tag.
The deeper problem is that law schools are not incentivized to prioritize practical training or affordability. Their prestige—and funding—often hinges on academic scholarship and rankings metrics that have little to do with producing capable lawyers. For decades, schools have treated legal education more as a theoretical exercise than a professional one, rewarding faculty for publishing esoteric articles rather than mentoring students or teaching skills that translate to the courtroom or client counseling. Meanwhile, tuition keeps rising, and students graduate burdened with debt, undertrained, and pushed toward high-paying jobs they may not want, simply to stay afloat. The system serves the institutions far better than the students—or the public.
The legal profession cannot afford to ignore these systemic flaws any longer. A field that prides itself on justice should not tolerate a pipeline that overburdens its practitioners, miseducates its students, and prices out those who might serve the public interest. A more affordable, streamlined, and practice-focused model of legal education would better equip students for the realities of the profession and restore value to a degree that should reflect the seriousness of the work lawyers are entrusted to do.
(3) The Irrational Bar Exam
The traditional bar exam, in its current form, should be abolished. While it’s billed as a test of competence, what it actually measures is an applicant’s ability to cram enormous amounts of information and regurgitate it under extreme time pressure. Like traditional law school exams, it’s a memorization sprint that has little in common with real legal practice, where lawyers are expected to research thoroughly, analyze methodically, and respond thoughtfully, not vomit responses to complex legal hypotheticals on a stopwatch. It’s time we stopped pretending that the bar exam is an effective proxy for professional preparedness.
There are better models. Apprenticeship-based certification— as described earlier —offers a far more accurate and just method of assessing readiness to practice law. This approach not only aligns more closely with the demands of legal work but also provides on-the-job training and mentorship.
Meanwhile, state bars should oversee targeted certification programs for specific practice areas—such as family law, criminal defense, or transactional work—ensuring that lawyers meet minimum standards of competence in the fields they actually intend to enter. This kind of focused oversight would do more to protect clients and improve the profession than one-size-fits-all licensing exams ever could.
Conclusion
These problems should concern all Americans, not just lawyers, as what happens in the legal field affects us all. Without these reforms, we’ll keep churning out unhappy attorneys, underserved clients, and a legal system that too often fails the people it claims to protect. If we want a legal system worthy of public trust, we must rethink how we train, test, and treat those sworn to uphold it.