Oh great. . .as if the Colorado flood wasn't enough. . .

Harris County Texas Courthouse.  The big legal dome of Houston.

now Texas

Texas law graduates would no longer face the Texas bar exam, and instead take a test with fewer essay questions that could qualify them for a law license in 29 states, if the Texas Supreme Court accepts a recommendation from one of its task forces.

When the UBE became the rule in Wyoming, I predicted, and I wasn't alone, that the net result would be bad for Wyoming's lawyers.

We're five years into the new UBE and it has been pretty much as predicted, although I haven't personally been affected by it and recently even started to do some litigation in the big poaching state to our South.  But I have seen a real decline in the standard of practice.  Indeed, I've been in cases in which the UBE minted lawyers from other states were pretty much wholly ignorant of Wyoming's law and missed filings they could have made to their client's advantage as they were too ignorant of the law to know to make them.  And I've likewise been in a case in which a major mistake was made due to the plaintiff's counsel's ignorance and disbelief that the Wyoming law was what it was.

Now, I don't blame Texas for doing this.  Indeed, it makes sense. There are nearly 100,000 lawyers licensed in Texas of which near 90,000 live in Texas.  So they have plenty of lawyers and in any situation in which you have plenty of lawyers you have plenty of lawyers looking for something to do. Now some of them will look for something to do in Colorado, a UBE state, to the detriment of Colorado's lawyers, who are already practicing in Wyoming do the detriment of Wyoming's standards of practice.  This will make a bad situation worse.

But with big population states like New York and Texas joining this trend, the it's probably unstoppable. The net result will be that things like divorces and the like will be left for local lawyers, but courtroom representation will go.  Indeed, trials are likely to go as the big city trial lawyers in reality hardly ever actually try a civil case.

So this makes the center of mass all the more the big cities, for big matters.  And to the detriment of the local.  Law was once a field that people from rural areas who wanted to remain in their home towns could enter and expect to make a middle class living.  Now its increasingly become one which is a big city occupation characterized by lower standards.  Of course, there's been an overpopulation of lawyers for some time, but this doesn't help states with rural populations.

Some law will remain, of course.  But less of it.  And that's shame . . . most particularly for good representation by those who might want a person attuned to the area they are in.  But we can't be too surprised.  Everything is weighted to the blight of the big cities, which turns everything into a blighted field with it.