The Law Society of Upper Canada is currently considering whether to revise/revamp the articling system or abolish it entirely, and more or less the entire legal profession in Ontario – and by extension Canada, because as goes Ontario, so will eventually the rest of the nation – has an opinion about it.
For those who are not Canadian lawyers or even lawyers elsewhere: articling is a requirement in each of Canada’s provinces (each of which has its own independent law society) in order to join the bar. The basic idea behind articling is: after you graduate law school, you work for ten months for a lawyer, and essentially learn on the job. Law school, you see, does not actually teach you a lot about the daily nuts and bolts of legal work, but rather “how to think like a lawyer.” (Which is actually a thing. We will pause the post here for all of you to get the lawyer jokes out of your system. Trust me as a member of the profession when I say we invented most of them.)
The problem with articling is that there are not enough articling positions to go around – this year, estimates are as low as there being only 80% of graduating students who will find articling positions. And of course, that 20% who don’t find them are then competing with next year’s graduating class, so you have 120% of a graduating class competing for 80% of articling positions. Except, of course, that the problem is that articling positions are decreasing in number and have been for years, so the problem just keeps getting worse. I am in my second year as a lawyer and know of at least one person from my graduating class at Osgoode who still has not found an article. That person’s investment in a law school education (sixty thousand dollars or more) has been, unfortunately, a bad one so far, and he is far from the only one.
I, on the whole, am for the abolishment of articling, as follows:
Proponents of articling argue that practical experience prior to being called to the bar makes for better lawyers, and I would say that this is inarguable. However, the question of whether articling makes for better lawyers overall isn’t a satisfactory answer to the question of whether articling is necessary – after all, no other common-law system in the world still has articling as a requirement for call to the bar. They’ve all abolished it. (I have no idea if Canada has a lower rate of legal malpractice claims than other jurisdictions offhand and Google has not turned anything up yet, but it seems like extremely relevant data.) I think people arguing for the continuance of an additional barrier to the bar that doesn’t exist anywhere else do have an affirmative duty to justify why it should remain, and that argument has not yet been made.
Moreover, I think the overall value of articling is extremely loose – there is no real guarantee that an article will provide serious legal experience worthy of the hassle that getting the article (which, even in an ideal full-employment situation, is still a grueling round of interviews more often than not) represents. (I personally was quite lucky to article with a principal who strongly believed in exposing his articling students to as many different aspects of his practice as possible.) Here, Lee Akazaki argues that the uneven quality of articles is a straw man argument because no article can properly prepare a student for all aspects of law, and the most important thing is to teach lawyers through groupwork and expose them to the demands of professionalism. Which isn’t a terrible argument, but there should exist minimums of exposure to a wide area of legal work. Effectively, this is impossible to regulate. As it stands right now it is already difficult enough for a student to bring a complaint against a principal if necessary (to say nothing of the fact that due to the inherent imbalances in the employer/employee relationship that articling has buried in its very nature).
This is to say nothing of the fact that the articling crisis is most intense outside of large urban centres where the profession is aging fastest. It’s not a surprise that cities attract more lawyers like they do every other type of skilled professional – that’s just urbanization – but articling presents a special problem because if small-town lawyers are to hire articling students, the fact that they are essentially training their competition hits harder than it would a big-city lawyer. (Which is, I think, one of the major reasons articling is in crisis at this point, although I admit this is based at least partly on supposition.) If the entire concept of articling works at cross-purposes for rural lawyers – and I think there is a reasonable argument that it does – then it’s by definition going to be a failed system.
But mostly, it comes down to the question of how many barriers to entry there should be for a new lawyer. Right now articling is simply an additional barrier on top of getting into law school, finishing it and then passing the bar exam (none of which are exactly easy) and so I would argue is effectively redundant. There are other ways to properly introduce students to the actual demands of the profession, the most obvious of which being including a large practical component in the third and final year of law school (which is of dubious value, to say the least, and Paul Campos’ experience being informed by American schools rather than Canadian does not change that much at all).
It’s time for articling to go. I understand why people want it to stick around: you want the best for the profession and it’s a safeguard. But it’s not an effective one, not any longer.
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“Trust me as a member of the profession when I say we invented most of them.”
So that’s a vote *against* the “most lawyer jokes are repurposed ethnic jokes” theory, then?
Engineers have to work for 4 years under supervision before they can work independently. Doctors have Residencies that last for years. Why not put in a similar requirement for Lawyers?
As you yourself say, A law school graduate can’t just hang up a shingle and practice law independently. They do need to work for someone else (and, articling doesn’t provide enough knowledge).
What we need is some sort of supervised residency, say 2 years, with somewhat restricted privileges – perhaps limits as to the amount you can hold in trust, but as an actual lawyer, not as Junior Bitch.
All this ends up doing is formalizing the real process. After your two years is satisfactorily completed, you can strike out on your own as a full fledged lawyer.
Articling sounds like apprenticeship: and there’s no guarantee that articling would work if the mentoring lawyer is a bad one. You run that risk for any mentoring program, I know. But mandating it increases the risk.
What other ways are there to get recent law grads into training employment? Working in law libraries, perhaps good for researching skills but not for trial work or contracts. Employment (at min wage) to social services offices? What else is there?
chris 11:36 has it right.
I’m a current articling student. There is no way I should be touching actual files without supervision. At very least I need a program with regular access to a competent, experienced lawyer. This cannot be voluntary.
On the problem of graduate over-supply …
1. Should every graduate be *entitled* to a position? At the risk of sounding harsh, because some of this is dictated by economic conditions, but as a profession, perhaps we’re better off with some degree of filter.
2. There is blame to be laid here, and it rests with middling schools like Ottawa that cranked up enrolment in recent years with no consideration of job prospects. That is straight-up irresponsible. There are also at least 3 schools actively lobbying to build law schools in Ontario. Professional schools too often serve as prestige vanity projects and cash cows for universities. Students pay the price for both.
I’m just going to go ahead and restate: the filters should come before somebody spends sixty thousand dollars on a law degree.
Can you propose a more useful replacement for the process? You make an effective argument here, but if I understand you correctly the profession will still need a bridge between the theoretical and the practical.
And I speak as a complete layperson in these matters, so feel free to set me straight or whatever.
Speaking as a teacher whose student teaching period was seriously shortened due to just such reasons… I’d suggest looking everywhere for a better solution than cancelling articling. A proper ten-month apprenticeship would have left me so much better prepared for my current responsibilities; I pity my overwhelmed Teach For America colleagues who have no apprenticeship experience. Removing the requirement also removes the opportunity for most – an opportunity badly needed.
Of course, the problems described in the post need a solution, and if no other can be found… but is there really no better solution than abolishing the system?
(I think my lawyer-father would agree that an articling system would have been handy for preventing his being shoved into the lead role as defense on a capital case six months into his legal career. I dunno that America is doing “just fine” without such a system. In lieu of that, Dad strongly recommends that all law school students watch My Cousin Vinnie for a crash course in theory versus practice.)
I’m in 1st year at Queen’s right now, so articling will be on the horizon in the near-future.
One of the big problems with articling positions is that to a great extent articling students aren’t really necessary to firms; they’re often taken on essentially as a service to the profession. But the number of spots available continues to shrink as a result of this.
As someone who is looking at having to produce a 3-400 page dissertation before I get my sheepskin, one article doesn’t sound quite so bad . . .
I note your assertion that no other common-law jurisdictions maintain an articling system, but it does sound suspiciously like the apprenticeship system that leads to admission to the solicitor’s profession in Northern Ireland. The big difference, of course, is that you have to obtain an apprenticeship placement *before* you begin your professional training, so at least you’re not throwing the expenditure on it out there blindly.
So basically, the requirement to get a law degree, is to get a law job. Kind of ass-backward, the degree is supposed to be the thing letting you get a job.
I’m an engineer so I understand the whole “levels of responsibility” thing. But if the job market for my profession is bad, at least give me the damn degree, instead of screwing me twice. Don’t make the degree dependent on a possibly bad job market.
Articling should be abolished, it just seems like mandated slave labour unless you get lucky.
But hopefully the word gets out and less people try to become lawyers…? Because that might be a bigger problem. No reason not to fix articling of course (or perhaps *more* reason).
Also, replacement for articling = first year on job. Why is this not obvious?
Is Articling the same things as your Letters?
Because I’m pretty sure Lawyers still have to do their Letters in Australia.
So basically, the requirement to get a law degree, is to get a law job. Kind of ass-backward, the degree is supposed to be the thing letting you get a job.
Assuming that Northern Ireland works broadly similarly to the rest of the UK (and I think it does), then the part where you need to get a job is before you do a post-graduate qualification. You will have already done an undergraduate degree in law to show your proficiency in the theory and this is a professional qualification which focuses on the more day-to-day, hands-on aspects on the job.
Because the post specifically says that law school does not prepare you for the specifics of being a lawyer. So expecting someone to do this right out of university without getting hands-on experience seems a little mean-spirited.