State Bar Admission Committees carefully considering their options as the ABA and law school deans observe in the background with the interest of the average legal consumer in mind. . . oh. . . wait . . .
Posted three years ago after this dereliction of duty became the law here:
Lex Anteinternet: The Uniform Bar Exam, early tell of the tape.: One of the threads most hit upon here is the one on the Uniform Bar Exam . As folks who stop in here will recall, Wyoming's adoption of...
So the result by now, 2017?
Just as bad, if not much worse, than predicted. Any long term practitioner in the state is familiar with how this has worked. New local admittees, unless they are very motivated, come into the practice ignorant on the law of the state. Admittees from neighboring states, often from big cities, are clueless about the state's law in many instances but practice as if they know it, which is probably what their clients believe. I've even experienced an out of state lawyer arrogantly telling a Federal jurist that he didn't have to comply with Wyoming's law as he'd complied with the law of the state in which he lived, on a very major matter. The Court politely corrected him, to its credit. A lot of judges would not have been so kind.
Why are we sticking with this lousy result?
States carefully pondering what's best for their residents. . . .
Part of it is that its a law of human nature (hmmm. . . . edit to major feature coming up?) to persist with an error until its blisteringly obvious that its a really big error. There's a certain momentum in human affairs that allows a mistake to get very far progressed before its corrected. That being the case, perhaps this isn't completely hopeless, although its hard to conclude its not. In spite of some very erudite commentary warning that the UBE is a bad idea and flawed, and in spite of the protests of practicing lawyers that it should be halted, the UBE is expanding.
And part of the reason for that is that the ABA is boosting it, as are law schools.
The ABA, for some time, has seemingly only had the interests of lawyers in white shoe firms in mind anyhow. So they worry about things like portability. Gee whiz, after all, Joe Whiteshoe in Big, Bloated, Bigger, & Bigger shouldn't have to worry about his license as he goes from one metropolis to another to practice, should he. After all, he's tried a case. . . sometime, and if he has to worry about state bars he might have to hire local counsel whose tried dozens of cases and knows the law. We can't have that.
Additionally, law schools are backing it.
Now, when the UBE was just passed here we actually had one of our occasional meetings with the (interim) dean of the law school, and she assured us that they'd had nothing to do with it. I've heard skepticism on this, this very year, but I believe her. But she was honest that had they known it was being advanced they would have backed it, as it would have been conceived of as good for graduating law students.
And the reason it would have been so conceived is that the UBE would give them more options.
For about 2.5 seconds.
In reality there are more graduating law students in the United States than the US can absorb and for that reason anyone know in law school ought to be thinking of second career options. Seriously. The UBE isn't going to save them. Indeed, what it actually does is to damage the practice in smaller and more rural states and concentrate it in big cities where the costs of operation are high. There's every reason to believe that in the end there will be fewer jobs due to the UBE, not more. That, by extension, now that licenses are more portable, means that those who graduate from "first tier" schools have a bigger option than they used to.
It used to always be the case that there were two classes of advantaged law students, those who graduated from "first tier" schools and those who graduated from good state schools. Good state schools, like Wyoming's, conferred a real advantage on those who attended them as long as they wished to practice in their states, as they had a big edge up on the local law as well as a network of contacts. Now knowing the local law is necessary for the bar exam and by extension the erosion of some work means that contacts mean less (and the standards of practice are declining while the lawyers treat each other increasingly badly). In my view this means that a school like my alma mater, the University of Wyoming College of Law, is pretty much unnecessary and an anachronism.
All of that of course is an application of the law of unintended consequences, but that's how these things often go. A concept developed to aid "portability" instead aids monculture, hurts the local practice and by extension local people.
Not that it can't be stopped. But will it?
Probably not for some time, or until some state bar is willing to really analyze the situation. . . which is what lawyers are supposed to do.
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