I agree with President Obama, law school needs to be shorter. Or improved.

A young Barack Obama wonders, "What exactly is the point of the third year of law school?" Now President of the United States, he commented that law schools should consider dropping the third year from their programs Friday while discussing the cost of higher education in New York.

In recent years, law schools have come under fire for increasing tuition costs and class sizes at a time when lawyers are making less and finding the job market to be worse than at any time in decades. President Obama, a former lawyer and law professor himself, weighed in on the debate yesterday with his opinion that law schools should consider cutting the third year and make law school a two-year program.

Anyone who has ever gone to law school thinks law school should only be two years long. If the right changes are made to the curriculum the first two years, the third year really is unnecessary. At the very least, the third year would be better served spent interning or shadowing a practicing attorney and learning practical skills about practicing law that simply aren't required to be taught in law school.

It's entirely possible for a student to graduate from three years of law school without ever having stepped foot in a courtroom or knowing how to file a complaint to initiate a lawsuit. Think about that for a moment: someone could graduate law school without ever standing in front of a judge or knowing how to sue someone. Forget about knowing how to make discovery requests, interview clients, negotiate with opposing counsel, file an answer if your client has been served with a complaint or any of the other basic activities most attorneys spend their days doing.

This is entirely unacceptable. It is also an accepted reality at law schools across the nation. Law students should either be able to complete law school in two years or spend the third year learning how to do the activities described above while working with real clients who have real problems.

My faculty adviser told me during my first year that two years was enough time to teach students how to become lawyers, and he didn't have an answer as to why law school is three years. Three years later, I still have no idea why law school is three years long. Let me use my recent experience to demonstrate what happens in law school and why either eliminating the third year or using it in a more constructive manner would benefit law students, and ultimately, their clients.

The first year

The first year of law school is a rough time for most students. Nearly everyone who goes to law school has been good at school their entire life. But law school isn't like most academic programs. In most programs, especially undergrad, the material is spoon fed to students. That is not the case in law school. Professors teach as little law as possible in the most confusing ways possible to hide the fact they are teaching very little law.

At the end of the semester, you go through your course notes, casebook and other study material and realize that during the entire semester, you've only learned like eight points of law. Seriously, the entire semester is spent learning eight areas of law (or less.) (When you review the material as part of a bar prep course, you cover an entire semester or year of material in a matter of one or two days.)

The reason for this is simple and can be summed up by the words of one of my professors, who made this point clear the first day of class. At law school, you have to teach yourself the law, because professors aren't there to teach you the law, but how to think like a lawyer.

The second year

This seems like a daunting task at first, until you realize you are in fact capable of teaching yourself the law. This process takes about three semesters, or halfway through your second year, to accomplish. By the time you come back for Christmas break the second year, you've already figured out how to teach yourself the law. You come to class knowing the material because you did the homework, or at least read a commercial copy of the case briefs because by then you've figured out that reading the entire case is a waste of time.

Learning how to think like a lawyer is a real and valuable skill. Once you have figured out how to teach yourself one area of the law, you are capable of teaching yourself any area of the law. Most of being a lawyer is knowing how to research. Most of the remaining part is knowing how to use the information you've discovered from your research to advocate for your client's position. (The cool thing about specializing in an area is that once you've done the research up front, you can do a lot more of the second part quicker and more efficiently.)

Learning how to think like a lawyer means that, for example, if someone could come ask a lawyer a health care law question and within few hours, or a couple days, the lawyer can answer that question despite having known nothing about health care law prior to that client's question.

The third year

Unfortunately, if a school's main purpose is to teach one particular skill, once you've mastered that skill, continuing to be at that school becomes a waste of time. By the time you start your third year of classes, you know that you can do the reading, or not do it, come to class and pay attention, or not pay attention, and break out the right study materials at the end of the semester and do enough to pass the final.

Law school isn't so bad at this point, because you've figured out you can more or less hang out for 16 weeks, pull your act together for three days before the final and still pass the course. Once you've figured out you can teach yourself any area of the law you want to know about, going to class seems like a giant waste of time.

You are pretty much forced to pay a third year of tuition for the right to come to class to manage your fantasy football rosters. The third year of law school can be better spent doing anything other than coming to class to manage fantasy football rosters.

This doesn't mean that my third year of law school was a complete waste, just the majority of the time I spent in the classroom being forced to learn an area of the law I had no interest in, when I knew I was capable of learning an area of the law that someone else was interested in paying me to learn.

The only reason my third year of law school wasn't a complete waste of time and money is because I took three of the four most useful and practical classes I took in law school during that third year. These courses were among the highlights of my legal education, and will be the foundation I build my career upon when I start my own practice in a few short months.

In the fall of my third year, I took Trial Skills and Lawyering Process. Trial Skills was taught by an adjunct professor who is one of the best trial lawyers in the state. For 16 weeks, we met with him twice a week and learned about practicing law inside the courtroom from someone who continues to make a living inside the courtroom. He also brought in working professionals to participate in our class exercises once a week, including a local judge. Most law school professors don't have licenses to practice law in the state where they teach, or don't have one at all. Spending time in the classroom with an active practicing attorney was a great experience.

Lawyering Process was taught by a professor who had been an adjunct professor until last year. In that class we learned how to draft a complaint, file an answer, write requests for discovery, interview clients and much more. The professor asked us on the first day why we were interested in the course. I replied honestly that I was taking the course because after two years of law school, I still had no idea how to sue someone if I wanted to. I learned the rules of civil procedure my first year, but up until then, I still had no idea how to actually turn a lawsuit from an idea in my head into something that could be filed with the court.

Outside the classroom

The next semester, and my last semester of law school, I participated in the University of Idaho Legal Aid Clinic. This was by far the most amazing and rewarding experience I had in law school. During the course of the semester, I took eight cases from various starting points to completion. I worked with real cases and real clients and resolved their issues. I worked under the supervision of a licensed attorney. This was a great experience, because I could walk into her office and get advice as I needed it. Nothing I did that semester was something that had never been done in the legal field before. It was just all things I'd never done before. To have a licensed attorney guiding me though it was a huge advantage, and I learned a lot from her in the process.

I made several appearances in front of actual judges in courthouses in two counties. During one of these appearances, my client had a less than solid case. Due to a whole bunch of factors, it wasn't clear just how little of a case my client had until I tried presenting it in the courtroom. Judges don't like having their time wasted by parties who don't have cases.

And so, as a third year law student, I found myself in front of a judge who was trying to get me to admit to him my client didn't have a case. At that point, it was clear to me he didn't have a case. It was clear to everyone in the courtroom my client didn't have a case. And yet, I stood there doing the best I could to advocate for my client. That client couldn't have been better represented that day by any other lawyer. And I found out the hard way that it doesn't matter how well you advocate your client's case if there's no case to be advocated for at the end of the day.

This is a lesson that I will take with me throughout my career. Never again will I find myself in front of a judge arguing a case without having an actual case to argue. This was a painful experience to learn the hard way, but one I am grateful to have learned without a paying client sitting beside me.

The semester I spent working for the clinic was awesome. I learned so many things that I hadn't learned in a classroom because they aren't taught in law school classrooms. It baffles me that there are thousands of law students who graduate every year without ever having the opportunity to have their own experiences inside the courtroom and working for a clinic that resembles a practice in every way, except we represent our clients for free in between going to classes no one wants to attend. (I was never less motivated to attend class than I was that last semester. At home I'd think, "I could read for class tomorrow or work on this real divorce case I have." In class, I'd sit there thinking, "I need to go file that notice of appearance in that criminal case I was just assigned before we have court two days from now." Real cases make it hard to take class work seriously.)

During my second year of law school, I had the opportunity to shadow a local attorney for a morning. I learned more in those four hours about being a lawyer than I had in the past 1.45 years of school. I interned for him last summer and spent a lot of time watching him and his associates in court. Again, it baffles me that law students could graduate from law school after three years of formal education and not be required to have even one conversation with an actual practicing attorney.

Conclusion

So I agree with the president. Law school doesn't need to be three years. But that's not the only change that law schools need to make. All students need the opportunity to meet with and practice under licensed attorneys while in school. Law school could be shortened to two years with the fourth semester spent practicing with real clients and cases.

Or it could be left at three years with the third year spent doing the same.

Law students would likely complain about having to spend the semester or two paying tuition to work for free, but they would all be able to enter the workforce knowing how to file their first lawsuit.