[srndsnd]

I am not a lawyer nor do I have a JD, but the argument I've heard from friends who have recently passed the bar amounts to the idea that the inordinate amounts of memorization required to pass the bar are a poor measure of someone's ability to actually practice law.

Worse than that, if a lawyer were to attempt to give advice without consulting any outside resources and not doing any research, that could be construed as malpractice. As a result, you could argue it even encourages that kind of behavior. Yet, that is what the bar exam asks.

I've seen countless takedowns on HN of programming interviews on whiteboards as a poor way to evaluate someone's ability to write code. Same concept, different domain. Similarly to those programming interviews, it can also be seen as a "best of the worst" situation.

[Maultasche]

I don't know much about the bar exam myself, but I had a professor in college who was also a practicing lawyer.

He was of the opinion that in order to pass the bar, you mainly needed to really know the legal fundamentals and be good at making a legal argument in the bar exam, and that knowledge of specific laws is less important, because those are always available in reference books.

He told us a story of passing the Massachusetts bar exam (just to see if he could) without knowing anything about the state laws in Massachusetts, and won a bet he had made with his friend, who didn't think it was possible.

[D13Fd]

What you have to do to pass the bar, even now, is extremely basic by lawyer standards. It's the floor.

It is not like a programming whiteboard interview. It's a test that you study for, learning basic legal concepts, and knowing exactly the range of topics that are going to be on the test. I know many disagree, but in my opinion you need those basic legal concepts to practice law well.

Everyone likes to say "well what if I just want to do family law?" No. You should still have to know the basics of law, because many of these issues will come up in your time as a lawyer, regardless of your area of practice. This is not advanced stuff, and it is not at all unfair to say that every lawyer should have a basic understanding of it.

Bad lawyers make everyone's job harder, and make every case more expensive for clients on both sides. If you think legal cases are expensive now, just wait until they relax the licensing requirements.

[gamblor956]

The bar exam is nothing like a whiteboard. It tests knowledge (law is a knowledge-based profession), and skill (the writing portions test an applicant's ability to write legal documents).

As a lawyer, I've found that anyone who could not pass the bar was simply unsuited to providing legal advice, and are generally even unsuited to doing any legal-related task for pay.

The bar exam sets a minimum threshold for a person's ability to research, and remember, large quantities of rules, applications, and theories, and be able to apply or regurgitate all of that within a short time frame. This is similar to real world demands, such as a trial, or contract negotiations, where the lawyer will not have time to go back-and-forth researching every new thing that pops up during the event and must go into it fully prepared ahead of time.

[HWR_14]

As a lawyer, how do you feel about the need to have graduated from a 3-year law school (in almost all states, with the exception for some that have a longer apprenticeship program) to even take the bar? It seems like if the bar is a sufficient screen it would be unnecessary.

[gamblor956]

The same way I feel about requiring doctors to go to medical school before they can do a residency.

The bar exam and law school have different purposes. A law school teaches the laws of the entire country. A bar exam tests the law of the specific state. While many laws are similar, they're not the same, and the differences matter a great deal.

And secondly, a great many people can eek their way through law school who have no business actually practicing law, and the bar exam is essentially the last filter keeping those incompetents away from the practice of law before they can harm clients. (The law provides recourse to clients when a lawyer's actions deliberately harms clients, however, there is little to no recourse for clients if their lawyer makes a mistake.)

[D13Fd]

> The bar exam and law school have different purposes. A law school teaches the laws of the entire country. A bar exam tests the law of the specific state. While many laws are similar, they're not the same, and the differences matter a great deal.

This was true 10 years ago. Now the majority of states use the Uniform Bar Exam (UBE), often without a jurisdiction-specific component. It's unfortunate.

I agree with the rest of your comment though.

[WastingMyTime89]

Cost-wise the thing I find extremely strange as a foreigner is the US insistence that people should do a full year BS before studying law and medicine. It doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Here you just study the field you want to practice from the start.

The costs by themselves are also shocking to be fair. Here the full four years of a law degree allowing you to pass the bar would only set you back 753€ to which you would probably have to add a year of preparation and the cost of the exam itself which probably bring you to somewhere between 2000€ and 4000€ for the academic part of actually becoming a lawyer.

[dtmmax33]

They should do it like medicine. You go to school, then a residency then pass your boards. It would be better if you went to law school, did x number of hours under a lawyer, then take the bar exam.

[hluska]

That is called articling.

[richardfontana]

Incidentally, in the US, the transformation during the early to mid 20th century of the basic law degree (originally typically LLB [Bachelor of Laws]) into a postgraduate JD (Juris Doctor) with a 4-year undergraduate degree prerequisite, and the standardization of the LLB/JD program at three years (from earlier instances that were one or two years) was done by the legal profession in a failed attempt to erect barriers to entry to members of immigrant/ethnic minority communities. When I was in law school I wrote a paper for an ethics class on this topic. (Ethics BTW came to be a required class in ABA-accredited law schools in the wake of Watergate.) Outside the US I believe the basic university law degree is typically an undergraduate, bachelor-level program.

[coding123]

As a customer of a lawyer It seems like an absolute requirement for me.

Why is everyone trying to erode society down to like, nothingness?

Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?

[spoiler]

I think they're pointing out the ridiculous costs of law school and the wealth barrier of entry that creates.

Someone who could pass the bar exam, and could end up being a great lawyer isn't even given the chance, because they can't afford to attend law school (which is necessary to take the exam, from what I gather, but IANAL & I'm not from the US).

[abduhl]

Financial aid is readily available at all top tier law schools for anyone that could plausibly end up a “great” lawyer. As much as I dislike the hierarchical nature of post secondary school, there is no doubt in my mind that the hypothetical person who has not distinguished themselves to the point where a top tier law school would notice them and offer financial aid by the time they’ve completed an undergraduate degree and taken the LSAT does not exist or, if they do, they are so rare as to not exist.

Now, are people who could pass the bar exam and be merely a “good” or “acceptable” lawyer being frozen out by the wealth barrier? Absolutely. But actually probably not: these people can go to a lower tier and cheaper school.

[spoiler]

I don't know enough about the system in the US and I might be talking out of my ass here, since most of my impression are formed by reading online discussions, but here goes... I was always under the impression that you can just buy into most unis in the US? There's the scholarship programs, but I was also under the impression they're often through sports rather than grades (and to me it's obvious that there's not necessarily a correlation between someone good at American Football and law).

[HWR_14]

I'm not trying to erode society down to nothingness. I dislike academic credentialism.

I just want there to be many paths to learning. Formal schooling. Apprenticeship. Private mentoring. Hell, you could probably get a series of YouTube channels (with a very low success rate) or something closer to a MOOC.

Obviously, you need to demonstrate you learned from those paths. And I wondered if the bar exam was sufficient to show that. So I asked someone who claimed to be a lawyer on the internet as I don't know how sufficient the bar is as a measure.

[yellowapple]

> Burger flipper to 400k/year lawyer anyone?

Are you saying that a "burger flipper" should always be one and never aspire to eventually be a lawyer?

[barneygale]

Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers? shudders

[HWR_14]

> Could you /imagine/ a world without lawyers?

Yes, I can. And, frankly, it sucks.

I don't do my own roofing. The idea that I would have to argue my own case in court sounds horrible. I don't know how. And then the people who right now are (or become) lawyers would just use their superior system knowledge to extort others. Far better that the responses available to a claim of some tort are "I guess I should call a lawyer" and not "I guess I should pay $5,000 for this to go away or spend the next 2 years learning the law to fight it on my own."

[devteambravo]

Chamath Palihapitiya would be mad if all he made was 400k/yr, and Burger King was his place a choice as a young man looking to flip burgers.

[ksdale]

As a lawyer, there is so much more that falls under the umbrella of "practicing law" that is nowhere near as demanding as a trial or contract negotiations. I personally think the credentials that lawyers have are completely unnecessary for a large portion of the tasks that only lawyers are allowed to perform.

I think the bar exam is more like, sufficient but not necessary, anyone who can pass the bar is easily capable of being a lawyer, but I don't think the bar is necessary at all to prove that someone is capable.

[D13Fd]

What kind of law do you practice? In my view every litigator has to be ready to go to trial.

I guess if you are going to be a contract document review attorney or something then maybe the bar is overkill in some ways. But I would argue that the only value added by someone like a document review attorney is the fact that they passed the bar (demonstrating a broad base of knowledge).

[ksdale]

I was under the impression that most attorneys are not litigators. You can easily spend a career writing wills or creating trusts or doing business formations, or helping people through real estate transactions without ever setting foot in a courtroom.

One of the first things they taught us in law school is that most lawyers won't actually spend much time at all in a courtroom, and I've found that to be true. There's so much else that lawyers do, and a lot of it is done preliminarily by paralegals, and in my opinion, a lot of it could go out the door at that point, having been done by the paralegal. I actually think a lot of work does go out the door at that point and there's just a grand performance happening where we all pretend that the lawyer did more than a cursory review.

Maybe that's not how law should be practiced, but judging by the wills and LLC agreements that come across my desk, it's how it is practiced and the world goes on without noticing.

[HWR_14]

I am not a lawyer, but I would guess there is a position for "slightly more than Legal Zoom". I want to create a will (and don't need to worry about estate taxes.) I want to create an LLC. My counterparty and I agree on the terms and we need someone to draft or modify a contract that specifies what we say.

[ksdale]

This is exactly how I feel as well. There is a ton of stuff that lawyers do that is basically rote, there are a handful of questions you need to ask, and then you do the thing, and there's no reason someone with an associate's degree and a six week training course couldn't do it, with a strict rule to refer more complicated stuff to the attorneys.

[edmcnulty101]

I would personally not want to go to a lawyer that is not able to pass the bar exam.

Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not.

I wish law had more certification tests like medicine has with its specialties.

I also think law school should be optional like it is in California or not costing $50,000 a year... that's just gate keeping and puts lawyers in massive financial debt or only selects for the rich.

[autoexec]

> Even if it's just an IQ check, I would want my lawyer to have a high IQ, social Darwinism or not.

You can have a high IQ and be terrible and memorizing and regurgitating a bunch of facts and figures. I've seen people who were literal geniuses fail tests that others who were... lets say, 'very much not geniuses' passed without a problem because they were skilled in cramming for a few weeks to get their certification even while never having a real deep understanding of the subject and pretty much immediately forgetting everything they "learned".

IQ (for what it's worth) is more about being able to figure out what's in front of you than it is having a great memory for numbers, trivia, dates, or laws and past legal cases.

[watwut]

If you are terrible at memorizing, you won't be good layer. They do actually need to remember a lot and quickly. And they don't have time to look up everything either.

[autoexec]

Not being a lawyer I can only assume the ideal is to be able to keep a lot of details and legal history in your head while also being able to apply what you know in creative and unexpected ways.

From my limited exposure to the profession, it seems like some aspects of legal work might require someone to spontaneously recall vast amounts of information, but much of it also seems to leave plenty of time for research and deep contemplation. The legal system in the US often moves at a glacial pace and legal requests, responses, strategies, and defenses can be crafted carefully and with a lot of time, research, and billable hours going into them. It makes me think that a person could be a good lawyer without the ability to recall a bunch of the types of specifics you'd need to pass the bar, although it might limit their utility leaving them better suited for some tasks than others.

It seems like the issue comes up a lot in talks about AI replacing lawyers. Computers would certainly be better at remembering details, adhering to protocol, processing large volumes of evidence, and recalling relevant laws and the past cases dealing with them, as well as all kinds of analysis humans would struggle with, but I've often seen it argued that while AI might be really great at that kind of thing, exceptional human lawyers need problem solving skills and the ability to apply that information in ways computers would struggle with or never consider. The context is usually that robot lawyers might make legal assistance more accessible and affordable for many people, but those having to depend on it could also end up highly disadvantaged when up against expensive AI-backed human legal teams.

As AI and automation become increasingly used by law firms, or as it starts to actually replace lawyers, I wonder if the bar requirement could end up excluding exactly the kind of people who might better augment the computer systems.

[edmcnulty101]

Well I think there's different aspects to IQ.

Retention is one as well as problem solving.

I think both play an important part in a lot of situations.

[grumple]

I would do law school online, but guess what? It still costs $70k a year to do a JD that's almost entirely online. The cost is really absurd. I feel that way about all higher education, but especially about JDs. Cheaper learning platforms are the future.

[Ekaros]

I really don't understand logic behind that price other than we can just charge that much. Material doesn't change that much, I doubt the ratio of staff to students need to be very low either... No special or expensive equipment is needed either...

[edmcnulty101]

It's because this profession is regulated by the government. So the prices skyrocket. This happens with any thing regulated by the government. A liquor license in CA can run up to $300,000 dollars. Health insurance is insanely expensive. The more automobile regulation, the more the price goes up.

Regulation is a double edge sword.

They make a thing safer but then the increased cost excludes a lot of people from using the thing until typically only the rich are able to enjoy a thing.

[etc-hosts]

I wish the government would regulate my health insurance a lot harder.

[edmcnulty101]

You could always just give your money to the insurance company. I'm sure they would appreciate it.

[coding123]

I get that a whiteboard code test at Google would be probably very hard. A whiteboard (err, screen share) code test at my company would be fucking bubble sort. Yes there's a 100k/year difference in pay more at Google.