How Law Schools Are Preparing Students for the New World of Work

Law schools have been under increasing pressure to produce practice-ready lawyers for more than a decade, but as many top law schools launch new programs, it seems a tipping point has arrived.

While some institutions have long had clinical training, primarily in litigation, schools are evolving their offerings in areas like transactional practice, entrepreneurship, and leadership.

The expectation that law graduates be prepared for work on day one is growing. With soaring billing rates, firms and clients are less willing to pay for long associate apprenticeships, the firm model for more than a century.

“I think it is a responsiveness to students and to firms not wanting to have to pay for people to learn on their dime. Schools want to add as much value for their students as they can,” said Kellye Testy, executive director and CEO of the Association of American Law Schools.

Law schools have always taught students to “think like lawyers,” but increasingly schools are being called upon to train students to act like lawyers, as well.

At Stanford Law, for example, students team up with experienced attorneys to represent clients in cutting-edge cases in areas like IP and tech policy advocacy, and AI regulation.

Stanford third-year student Victoria Gardner helped to draft an amicus brief in an anonymous speech case before New York Supreme Court’s Appellate Division as part of a clinic last semester.

Gardner said it was the most hands-on work she had as a law student, and the experience inspired her to seek out a federal clerkship upon graduation—even though she hadn’t previously considered litigation as a career.

“My clinic opened my mind to more possibilities of what work you can do as a lawyer, or what my work as a lawyer might look like,” Gardner said.

Driving the Shift

Through dozens of interviews, many of the country’s top-ranked law schools told Bloomberg Law they have significantly overhauled their curricula over the last roughly seven years to include experiential learning opportunities and training in skills such as client counseling and contract drafting, or business skills like how to read financial statements.

It’s a shift that accelerated in the years after the Great Recession—the period around 2007 to 2009—when firms canceled associate classes and laid off thousands of lawyers.

Early-adopter law schools began offering transactional clinics, simulations and various business classes to give students more skills and training for legal practice, sometimes as early as the first year of law school.

For example, Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University recently revamped its first-year curriculum, adding electives like simulation training in trial advocacy. And Cornell Law last year introduced a professionalism module for 1Ls in keeping with an ABA standard for professional identity development.

The American Bar Association added momentum to the idea of more practical training when, in 2014, its law school accreditation requirements were adopted, requiring six credits of experiential learning.

The ABA’s legal education council is continuing to push the change even now, as it considers upping the current number of required experiential learning credits from six to 15, and the 2026 NextGenBar exam is expected to have practical skills questions.

Also driving the shift: technology.

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Technology could have a “seismic impact” on lawyers’ work going forward. It would be similar to the shift the legal profession saw following the Great Recession, said Caitlin Moon, founding co-director of Vanderbilt AI Law Lab, which launched last year.

“That is why we have to ask ourselves: ‘How are we preparing students for this?’,” Moon said.

More Than a ‘Thinking Degree’

Many law schools are preparing students by adding more clinics and simulations, externships, and internships to help students get more practical experience before graduating.

Emory in Atlanta made a move toward adding more business-focused classes starting in 2007. In response to student demand, Emory began offering a certificate in transactional law, requiring students to take classes largely taught by Atlanta-area lawyers and business leaders, including contract drafting and deal making.

But other schools started making the shift in the last few years. Yale Law, for example, in 2021 began offering courses in accounting, corporate finance, ethics, emerging issues in technology, and globalization.

The school’s dean, Heather Gerken, said the move was an effort to train students in skills they would need for their entire career.

“We realized that we had the long tradition of having this degree being a thinking degree,” said Gerken. “But we wanted to be more self-conscious and intentional about making sure we train every single student for their last job and not just their first.”

And that job may not be at a law firm.

Bloomberg Law Research and Jonathan Hurtarte/Bloomberg Law

Giselle Huron, senior trademark counsel for Google, and Mark Maher, senior legal counsel at Spotify, teach an in-house counsel externship at Columbia Law School.

Students put in 10 hours a week with corporate legal teams and present their experiences to other law students. Students have externed at organizations including Apple, Betterment, Colgate-Palmolive, and the Ford Foundation.

“You can get a flavor of what it means to practice in-house,” said Maher. “Whoever their supervisor is will give them assignments. It will vary widely depending on the company, what the supervisor is doing and what is happening at the company at the time, which is very realistic.”

Mitchell Zamoff, assistant dean of experiential education at the University of Minnesota Law School, said schools are also trying to provide learning opportunities in areas where law graduates “have been deficient in the past.”

Business Essentials

Law schools are also offering students opportunities to expand their business acumen.

For example, Georgetown Law and other schools offer “mini-MBA” programs. University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School has a leadership course, a crisis-management bootcamp, and a week-long intensive “Business Management for Lawyers” certificate with The Wharton School.

A focus on entrepreneurship has gained some steam among law schools in recent years, with schools offering classes, clinics, and entire programs devoted to training future lawyers to advise start-ups or to be founders themselves.

Penn Carey Law’s entrepreneurship program dates to 1981, but a growing number of schools Bloomberg Law spoke with are offering training on how on how to support startups.

New York University School of Law even launched a venture capital fund that sponsors 1L internships at startups, makes investments and awards grants to student and alumni ventures, and hosts a business competition program.

Testy said the overall trend of offering basic business skills—especially within business and transactional law—helps students hit the ground running when they get into practice.

Hange (Hera) Liao, a 2020 Georgetown Law grad and now a capital markets associate at Latham & Watkins in New York, recalled that as a first-year lawyer she listened to a supervisor explain a derivatives transaction.

“While other junior associates seemed to be perplexed by the structure and economics of the transaction, I was pleasantly surprised that I learned about this kind of deal in corporate finance, one of the required courses for the Business Law Scholars program,” she said.

Liao completed the school’s competitive “Business Law Scholars” program, founded in 2016, which includes courses like those in an MBA.

“There are two customers we had in mind. One was the student, and ultimately the client who is the person hiring the student,” said Stephen P. Hills, a visiting professor and founding director of the program and former president and CEO of Washington Post Media.

A 2021 graduate, Jacob Eigner, now a vice president in the legal department of Goldman Sachs, said he had considered applying to a joint J.D./MBA degree program, “But I thought if I could go to a law school with a strong business curriculum and history of placing people in a corporate law setting, I could get more bang for my buck.”

As technology like artificial intelligence begins to drive the next evolution of law school curriculum, most top schools have updated their offerings in legal technology. In fact, almost half of the schools that responded to Bloomberg Law’s 2024 “Path to Practice” survey said they had updated their curriculum recently to teach more about legal technology.

Bloomberg Law Research and Jonathan Hurtarte/Bloomberg Law

While AI is the hot topic of the day, Scott Westfahl, director of Harvard Law School’s Executive Education Program, said he wouldn’t advise schools to double down on task instruction when it comes to legal tech.

“I have no idea what will be happening when our 1Ls start practicing in the fall of 2027. Developing this broader understanding of leadership, negotiation, team skills, human-centered design, problem-solving skills will continue to be important with generative AI.

“Lawyers exercising those skills in addition to business judgment will be of more value,” he said.