Sending a Message: The Importance of the Admissions Interview to Reforming the Legal Professoin

When a Columbia Law School admissions officer looked over my resume, I was 3,663 miles away. When another looked at my grades and LSAT score, he had never heard the sound of my voice. When a third read my personal statement, she didn’t have the faintest clue about who I was or what kind of lawyer I was going to be.

All of this is true because Columbia Law School doesn’t interview its applicants. Nor do the vast majority of the country’s other 200 accredited law schools. Ostensibly, this is because the nationwide rush to obtain a J.D. creates far too many applicants for admissions offices to feasibly interview all of them. But the costs of interviewing are definitively overshadowed by the costs of not interviewing: As a result of schools’ decision to choose numbers and words over faces and thoughts, we have a population of lawyers who don’t have the social conscience to adequately wield the power that comes with their unique position in society, and we have a population of law schools who send the message, even before a student has taken a single step into their halls, that the entire profession of law is nothing more than a shell game.

The bar has worked (somewhat) hard in the last 40 years to try to dispel the notion that this shell game exists. In the wake of the Watergate break-in, when faith in the legal profession was at an all-time low and lawyers started hearing of whispers of federal regulation of the legal industry, the legal profession responded swiftly. Law schools started mandating courses on professional responsibility, state bars began including a Professional Responsibility section on their bar exams and the ABA undertook a large-scale revision of its Model Code of Professional Responsibility. In fact, the ABA now defines a professional lawyer as “an expert in law pursuing a learned art in the service to clients and in the spirit of public service; and engaging in these pursuits as part of a common calling to promote justice and public good.”

Yes, the bar succeeded in avoiding federal regulation, but I’m sure few of my classmates would disagree that such high aspirations for the “professional lawyer” are nothing more than that – aspirations with very little substance in reality. Eighty percent of the legal needs of potential low-income clients go unmet. Lawyers spend less than 30 minutes per week on volunteer service, a number that is dwarfed by the volunteer service of doctors by a ratio of 10 to 1. At the same time, we’ve just borne witness to a financial crisis spearheaded in part by lawyers helping their clients navigate their way around porous regulations.

So why don’t lawyers come close to meeting the ideal that the bar has set out for itself? Many critics have pointed to the environment and learning practices perpetuated by law schools, and rightly so. The American legal system is defined by its adversarial nature; lawyers constantly emphasize their loyalty to their clients’ position as their prime objective, so much that “they appear to make immoral choices and yet are able to dodge responsibility by claiming they are required to act for the benefit of their clients.” Critics put much of the blame on law schools for inculcating this zealous adherence to client advocacy above larger moral concerns through the use of the case method; the way law schools introduce students to the law is by focusing on “identifying principles of doctrine rather than principles of behavior.”

These criticisms, while all valid, miss the best and easiest change law schools can and should make to make their graduates more well-rounded and socially-conscious individuals: The interview. The fact that so few law schools interview their applicants before admitting them tells me that they care little about what kind of people they want to populate the legal profession. It also tells me that their expectation is that their students will have the proclivity and skills to become successful advocates but not the proclivity to become agents of change.

Contrast this with the medical school admission process. There, the interview is an integral, if not dominant, part of the application. For medical schools, there is a heavy emphasis on having applicants with volunteer experience and applicants who can use an interview to demonstrate their commitment to all patients’ well-being ahead of profits and lifestyle. The presence of an interview may seem trivial, but this is basically the first contact that future doctors have with the medical profession. They learn the message from the very entities that are allowing them to enter that profession that there is more to being a successful doctor than test scores and grades.

As Thurman Arnold indicated, creeds are vitally important in directing the actions of an institution’s members. Medical schools constantly hammer home the creed of ‘social service’ in several ways: Through their mission statements – contrast, for example, the mission of statement of Yale Medical School, which includes the provision of “outstanding care and service for patients in a compassionate and respectful manner,” with that of Yale Law School, which includes nothing similar; through the Hippocratic Oath, an integral part of the medical learning experience that has no counterpart in legal education; and, most importantly, through the interview. And, if the above comparison in volunteer service between doctors and lawyers is any indication, it works. If we want lawyers to try to start treating the world as one composed of human beings, as doctors do, we should start by having our law schools treat their applicants as human beings just the same.

(930 words)

-- By JaredMiller - 27 May 2012