Teaching Law Practice: Preparing the Next Generation of Lawyers

Change is here. Accelerating change in technology, trade, and regulation is rapidly reshaping the legal profession - just as they are reshaping other fields. There is a new urgency to deliver affordable legal products and services to corporate and individual clients in sustainable law firm models. Huge new client populations have new legal needs that they expect lawyers to meet using efficient, accessible, affordable, and transparent means.

Lawyers should not expect to return to traditional models of packaging, pricing, and delivering legal services. The question now is how lawyers will respond to changes in the market for legal services that have already occurred. Some lawyers and law firms are responding, identifying those burgeoning new client populations while designing new processes and implementing new systems to serve them affordably.

Law schools have a peculiar responsibility and opportunity to help accelerate the change in the packaging, pricing, and delivery of these legal products and services. Schools that have practice preparation as their mission can help the profession study and improve the ways in which lawyers identify clients and their needs, and then find effective and efficient ways to serve them.

This book collects some of the practice-preparation efforts of the faculty at the nation's largest law school - Thomas M. Cooley Law School. Throughout the essays in this book, you'll learn how faculty from all parts of the curriculum prepare graduates to practice law and meet these new challenges that all lawyers must face. In addition to illustrating the innovative efforts of a practice-based faculty, the book pays tribute to a colleague who stands among the best law professors in the nation - Philip Prygoski.