Are law school graduates prepared to practice law after three or four years of grueling coursework and with a financial burden that could purchase a small home in Fresno? A 2015 Lexis/Nexis study found that 95% of hiring partners and supervising associates surveyed believed that recent law school graduates lacked key practical skills. The study found that while recent graduates had basic research skills, they lacked advanced research skills and a fundamental understanding of how legal matters worked in the real world. The net effect is that employers are stuck still needing to teach newly-minted graduates how to be a lawyer, resulting in a period of diminished value to both the employer and clients.

Enter Lawyers for America, Inc. or LfA. In 2011, two Hastings law school professors, Marsha Cohen and (now Chancellor and Dean) David Faigman, recognized there was a preparedness problem among new lawyers who were competing for fewer jobs during the downturn in the legal market. Professor Cohen believes a legal education that models the medical school progression of classroom, clinical, and finally practice years better prepares students to be viable lawyers when they graduate.

Cohen and Faigman founded Lawyers for America as a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation to address this problem. Its mission is to improve the practical skills of new lawyers, expand the availability of legal services for those who cannot afford lawyers, and increase the ability of government and non-profit legal offices to render such services.

U.C. Hastings is so far the only law school that has implemented the program, but Professor Cohen anticipates signing up additional law schools in the future. LfA operates as a fellowship program that trains law students to work in a legal office, recruits the offices for placement of student Fellows, and handles all logistics between the law school and the legal office. Professor Cohen has limited the pool of legal offices to government agencies and non-profits to fulfill the third prong of LfA's mission.

The program model is a two-year paid fellowship in which 3L students are placed with a legal office where they complete a training year as a student followed by a service year as a first-year attorney. During the first of these two years, a Fellow receives between 24 and 32 hours per week of legal training and is supervised by both law school faculty and attorneys at the placement site. In between the first and second year, Fellows get three months to take the California bar (which they will hopefully pass) and briefly recover from the law school experience. During the service year, Fellows dedicate 40 hours per week to the practice of law and receive a stipend (currently $42,000/year) plus additional funds for health insurance. Funding for each Fellow comes from the entity with whom they are placed. Due to the nature of their work, Fellows are generally eligible for loan repayment or forgiveness programs related to performing public service.

Currently, LfA has three law-student and four first-year-attorney Fellows placed throughout the Bay Area. Since the program's inception, it has placed approximately 31 Fellows in a wide variety of government law offices including District Attorney, Public Defender and City Attorney offices as well as legal non-profits such as the Center for Biological Diversity, Disability Rights California, Consumers Union, and the Center for Food Safety.

Starting this school year, the County of Marin has partnered with Lawyers for America to place a Fellow with the Marin County District Attorney's Office where as part of the program the Fellow will receive orientations and ongoing litigation training and mentorship. This year’s Fellow, Austin Shopbell, is a certified law student, which allows him to make court appearances under the supervision of a licensed attorney. Prior to starting as a Fellow in September, Austin went through a two-week bootcamp at Hastings on the roles and duties of a Deputy District Attorney. During his training year, he will be assigned various forms of motion practice and will receive ample time in the courtroom arguing motions, managing misdemeanor calendars and, of course, conducting jury trials. Austin's advice to prospective fellows is to make sure their prospective placement fits into their anticipated career progression.

The success of programs like Lawyers for America will hopefully spur conversation about whether our current legal education model is outdated. Law school graduates deserve more from their education than a handshake and a diploma—they should expect to be prepared to serve society right out of the gate.