Northwestern Law School's "Accelerated JD" Program: It's Not About the Two Years

Late last week Northwestern University Law School in Chicago announced an "Accelerated JD" program, compressing the same 86 credit hours earned by traditional three-year JD students over the course of six semesters into five semesters over two years.  The compression of credits results from a combination of starting in the summer, taking extra courses each semester, and picking up credits through mini-courses between semesters.  (Students will start classes in May and graduate in May, two years on.)

But the real story has very little to do with compressing three years into two:  It has to do with a fundamental re-thinking of what a legal education entails.  The other components of the accelerated program include:

• A limit of 40 students in the first class, rising to 65 in subsequent years;
• A requirement that each individual applicant be interviewed;
• A requirement that they have at least two years of "substantive work experience" under their belts (sounds as though backpacking across Europe and Asia on your trust fund developing your "foreign language and cross-cultural sensitivity skills" wouldn't cut it); and
• Most importantly, the inclusion of two new and one existing course as new requirements.    As the NWU press release puts it:  "The two new courses would be devoted to quantitative analysis (accounting, finance and statistics) and the dynamics of legal services behavior (involving social networks, teamwork, leadership and project management); the other course focuses on strategic decision-making (improving students’ ability to understand the strategies pursued by their clients and organizations)."  The point of this, to paraphrase Northwestern Law's Dean, David Van Zandt, is to help prepare students for the way lawyers actually work today.

No sooner was it announced than it was denounced.  Perhaps this shouldn't be surprising, as Van Zandt noted with a slight air of resignation:

"Van Zandt said he expected some criticism. "Any time you innovate, you are always going to have people who pooh-pooh it or look down their nose," he said. "Law and legal education is tremendously conservative.""

What type of denunciation?

"University of Chicago professor and former dean Geoffrey Stone called the two-year program "irresponsible" and said it risked producing inferior lawyers who haven't had time to develop intellectual and analytical skills.

"My sense is that compressing the educational process is likely to seriously derogate from the quality," he said. "What is lost is likely to be much more than anything that is gained by hustling the students through more quickly."

And this:

"University of Illinois associate dean Lawrence Solum said students in a two-year program would have less time to explore career opportunities during the summer.

"Law school is already an extraordinarily intense experience and my gut instinct is that cramming it into fewer weeks and months is not likely to improve the quality of the education," he said. "If anything, law students already are doing too much in too few hours."

And—quelle surprise!—the commentariat on Above the Law and the WSJ Law Blog were, admittedly with exceptions, rambunctiously dismissive.  For example:

• Let's get this straight. The new two-year program would ...

  1. Cost the same;
  2. Allow no breathers between semesters; and
  3. Make it harder to find a full-time job at a big firm.

  If NW really wanted to be innovative, they'd make their third year optional.

• Wow. Just when I think I couldn't be any more ashamed of my Northwestern Law degree, they go and do something like this. Way to dilute whatever value a NW degree has and turn law school into a vocational school in the manner of any number of unaccredited California TTTs. Jesus.

• This is just another way for Northwestern to cheat on the US News rankings. Just like some law schools admit students into their night programs so they do not “count” in US News, NWU will admit students into the “short program” who will not get counted against NWU in the rankings. Free money from 50 below average students without the threat of sinking in the US News rankings or the faculty revolt from having an onerous night program. Great idea.

You get the idea. 

And the "exceptions?"  Those who had something positive to say.  They tended to be, excuse the phrase, adults.  For example:

• This is not a new idea. Back in the sixties, I came out of the Army and immediately began a 27 month law school curriculum at the University of Michigan, starting in June of one year and ending in an August 27 months later. Most of my colleagues in this program were a little older than the students in the regular, full 3 year program, having, like me, done a stint in the military or worked a few years after college in some sort of job. In fact, most of them were already married. [...] When I left law school, I joined one of the large first tier law firms, and I was a distinctly odd man out, because my peers at the firm finished the bar exam half a year before I did and had also enjoyed the work and bonding experiences of a summer together as interns. Still, I felt that the advantages accruing to me overall outweighed these disadvantages. For one thing, a space of several years between college and law school resulted in my being more mature when I started law school and, I think, made me a far better law student. (By my last year of college I was a real goof off, and might well have failed out of law school if I had gone there straight out of college. This is exactly what happened to a good college friend of mine.) And of course, as others have noted above, I basically gained back a year of time lost in military service and picked up an extra year to work and make the big bucks in my chosen profession.
• I totally agree with you. As an Iraq vet, it was beyond excruciating to watch another 3 years drain away sitting in a library - especially when I got little out of it. I don’t think the last year of credits is worth anything at all, intellectually. It would be better to implement a two year program, and then maybe add an optional third year that allows law students to do each semester as an externship somewhere - that way they at least get some practical experience.
• This is a visionary experiment, as is the experiment now going on at Washington & Lee. Bottom line: the three-year model is unnecessary and all the power behind it — the ABA and the AALS in particular — cannot stop the momentum behind a two-year law school curriculum. In two decades, it will be gone.

Clearly, Van Zandt intends to make Northwestern distinctive.  Referring particularly to the two new courses in quantitative analysis and in social and emotional skills, he says:

"For us to be successful, we have to be producing students that the rest of the world wants. Just producing people who are great at legal analysis, they are a dime a dozen out there now," Van Zandt said. "We are trying to differentiate our students in a way that is positive."

Earlier today I had a chance to talk with Dean Van Zandt and learned quite a bit more about the impetus for the program and its background.  Here's what I learned from him.

He's been in his post for over a decade and when he started he decided to undertake a comprehensive review of the law school's plans. The first step was to start looking for applicants with substantial post-college work experience, and a second step was to become the first major law school to conduct interviews as part of the admissions process. He reports that this past year they interviewed 75% of their 4,500 applicants, a substantial investment in manpower and time (although alumni can help with some of the off-campus interviewing). As for work experience, the incoming class stacks up as follows:

• 95% have worked at least one year after college;
• 82% have worked two years; and
• 58% have worked three years or more.

When they started this effort, the Dean assumed that they'd have to compromise on academic quality and be willing to suffer a small decline. But the opposite has turned out to be the case. From the time they started the "work experience" program until today the average LSAT has gone from 164 to 170, a greater increase than that of any other law school during the same period.

Another surprising benefit was to get more applicants coming from the East and West coasts. The Dean explained the dynamic this way: "Normally, aspiring law students will apply to Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and then some 'safe' schools nearer to home. In the Midwest, that often meant us, Chicago, maybe Iowa and Indiana, whereas in the East it would be Columbia, Penn, NYU, and in the West Berkeley, USC, UCLA. But by differentiating ourselves on the work experience parameter we find students outside our home territory are now applying to us."

A key part of the program, and the part of greatest interest to me, is the changed curriculum. It now focuses on six fundamental competencies that Northwestern has decided are of critical importance to its students (more on how these competencies were identified in a moment):

• project management and leadership;
• teamwork;
• strategic understanding of the client's business and organization, as well as how people in organizations make decisions and how they navigate organizations (in this the law school is greatly aided by having Kellogg Business School professors teach the basic strategy course);
• basic communication skills, including:
  • basic exposition;
  • training in formal legal writing and legal analysis;
  • contract drafting; and
  • business exposition, meaning how to take your recommendations and analysis to the client, be it orally, in a one-page memo, or in PowerPoint;
• quantitative analysis, including financial statements and statistics; and
• globalization: What skills do you need to be effective in a global business, how to work cross-culturally (not substantive legal expertise).

The Dean points out that when he graduated from law school technical excellence (along with many many long hours) was enough to make partner in a big New York firm, but no longer. Today, it's all about understanding the client's business.

Students often tell him that they aspire to being "international lawyers," and they start counting up the number of courses in the curriculum that have the word "international" in the title. He jokes that he'd like to sprinkle all the courses with the word just to make students feel better, but the actual advice he gives is different:

• become a very good Anglo-Saxon common law lawyer;
• go to work for a truly international US or UK firm;
• try to get on matters involving their transnational clients; and
• you will soon enough find yourself to be an "international lawyer."

Did he experience any pushback when trying to get the program started?

"Interestingly, much of it was from the existing students and faculty; very little of it was from the alumni, because they understand this is the way the world works."

And how exactly do the new required courses, the previous work experience, and the acceleration of the degree tie in together? "The idea was to put together one integrated package that--we hope!--will appeal to a slightly different cross-section of applicants, and a slightly different cross-section of employers. And limiting it to the small initial size means we don't have to up-end the law school! After all, it's been around for 150 years.," he says, with a smile in his voice.

The emphasis will clearly be on everything that the traditional law school admissions process overlooks:  The ability to lead teams, emotional maturity, interpersonal and communications skills, a degree of business understanding of the world that goes beyond what LSAT's select for, and (the ultimate goal) the ability to work with clients from the start, in an environment where business operates globally and law penetrates the operations of business in unprecedented ways.

Now let's step back a moment and ask how this might change the law school dynamic.

To begin with, what type of student is likely to self-select into the Northwestern program?  I strongly suspect they will be drawn from the ranks of the "adults"—and not just because of the prior "substantive work" requirement.  As we could infer from the "commentariat" I noted earlier, this program will appeal to people who are serious about getting on with their lives and getting to work.  (I would like to imagine it would have appealed to me.)

Then you take those students who already, by hypothesis, have a higher level of emotional maturity than your average shoot-the-lights-out LSAT overachiever, and immerse them for two years in a program emphasizing teamwork, quasi-real world experience, probably a dose of international exposure, and specific training in quantitative analysis including finance, accounting, and statistics, as well as training in group dynamics (teamwork, leadership, and project management).

If you ask me, putting on my metaphorical hiring partner's hat, the graduate coming out of that program is who I want to interview first, before those coming out of the conventional program.  The "accelerated JD's" will have:

• Real world work experience, and presumably a dose of the realism that comes with it about what it takes to earn a dollar;
• Impeccable academic credentials—this comes with the territory;
• A fighting chance to hit the ground running, with a grasp of business fundamentals both from the theoretical perspective and the hands-on perspective; and
• On average, a couple of more years on them than conventional JD's.

All it will take is a few high-profile AmLaw firms showing a revealed preference for those graduates for the next shoe in the marketplace dynamic to drop:  Given heightened demand, law schools will respond to the demand by increasing the supply of graduates with this type of profile.   Northwestern will surely be included:  Indeed, I have asked myself whether this program isn't the Trojan horse designed to take over the entire school in due course. 

In the meantime, in the market's recursive fashion, isn't it likely that more "adults" might find the accelerated JD attractive, and the post-graduation career prospects more promising?  Extend this thought experiment only a tad further to imagine that they would in fact be all-around better associates:  Higher-performing from the start, more realistic about work and therefore likely to stay longer, better suited and better skilled for what they actually have to do and therefore more likely to succeed (which feeds back into predicting lower attrition), etc., all in a virtuous loop.

And the problem of intellectually overqualified emotional dwarves, much discussed at the Georgetown Law conference on The Future of the Global Law Firm, will begin to be ameliorated.  Not through ABA or AALS regulation or accreditation, not through changing a single component of a single state's bar exam, not even through law school alumni pressuring their preferred Alma Mater to turn out people with at least a fighting chance to succeed, but through the market's invisible hand.  Then, how long indeed, before the classic three-year curriculum is gone?

On his cv, it says that Dean Van Zandt majored at Princeton as an undergrad in sociology, and that his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics was also in sociology.   But I'm betting he spent a fair amount of time slumming over in the economics department.