Should law schools be educating entrepreneurs?

[Update 11/26/11: Today's NYT op ed gives a nod to programs like those I mention below in "Legal Education Reform:  The economic downturn is forcing overdue changes in training for lawyers"]

"More Lawyers Skip the Partner Track to be Entrepreneurs" reports the New York Times today in an article by Eilene Zimmerman (the online version appears here with a slightly different headline from the print version).  Zimmerman profiles a number of lawyers who went out on their own, part of "what appears to be a trend of lawyers in their mid-20s to early 40s leaving large firms to start their own small ones."  Among their struggles are time-management, client development, billing, and leveraging start-up costs/overhead. 

Should law schools offer education on these and related matters targeted to lawyer-entrepreneurs?  I say yes. 

Here at Michigan State I've partnered with my colleague Dan Katz on new curriculum to prepare lawyer-entrepreneurs, including the creation of a summer program, 21st Century Law Practice, to be held at the University of Westminster in London June-July 2012.   And I know other law schools are offering educational opportunities for entrepreneurial-minded students, like Michele DeStefano Beardslee's LawWithoutWalls at Miami Law, which brings together students from around the globe and matches them with entrepreneurs, practitioners, subject matter experts, academic advisors, and venture capitalists.  (I wonder whether David Segal--if you missed it earlier this week see here and here--will focus his next legal education article on programs like these and others, where schools indeed are teaching lawyering, along with other skills necessary to create and sustain a vibrant law practice in the 21st century...) 

Comments

[twitter.com/jimmilles]

This is exactly what law schools should be doing, especially in the emerging economic environment. The law school-law firm deal is broken, and law firms are no longer willing to train associates in the specialized skills they need, but there is still enormous unmet need for low-cost legal services.

The problem is that I suspect that law school tends to attract individuals who are precisely the opposite of entrepeneurial. Most seem to go to law school expecting a fairly traditional, guided path into the profession. On the other hand, if a few schools would begin building entrepeneurial law practice programs into the third year, they would probably begin attracting a different type of student.

To make this work, though, tuitions will have to go down, at least relative to the rest of the economy.

[John Steele]

If part of the task of teaching those skills is teaching how to become a solo practitioner, law schools could do a lot of good just by holding a weekend workshop. Many bars offer comprehensive materials on the financial and planning aspects of being a solo. For example, the link below is from the Mississippi bar, which has several financial and budgeting plans for solos.

http://www.msbar.org/4_tool_kit_for_solo_and_small_firm_practitioners.php

[David Cameron Carr]

Yes, law schools should teach entrepreneurship, leavened with a healthy dose of legal ethics. Young lawyers, like young people in general, have an understandable distrust of large institutions, public and private. The future belongs to the small, small firm lawyers and solo practitioners, who can leverage technology to do most everything large law firms can do. The traditional substantive-law heavy curriculum is obsolete in this era of legal specialization; first year law students should be studying jurisprudence, ethics, law business, information systems and clinical experience dealing with real clients with real legal problems. Substantive law the second year, apprenticeship the third.