This week, Stanford Law School commandeered the Sacramento Bee to announce the completion of the first phase of its very substantial curriculum reforms.  If you have been following the reaction of legal educators to the profession’s clamoring for better educated graduates you know that Stanford began this process in late 2006, and that assorted other elite schools have recently undertaken their own reforms as well.

Stanford, however, claims to be breaking new ground, in an open challenge to its competitors, by introducing a comprehensive, interdisciplinary new program “transforming its traditional law degree into a multi-dimensional JD, which combines the study of other disciplines with team-oriented, problem-solving techniques together with expanded clinical training that enables students to represent clients and litigate cases while in law school”.

The press release, appropriately, highlights Stanford’s commitment to teach students to understand their clients’ needs and solve their problems.  Dean Larry Kramer asserts that the new curriculum does what “no other law school has done, and no other law school can do, because no other university matches Stanford in the number of top-notch programs and departments relevant to lawyers.”  Wow.  Take that, the rest of you. (I think this is the part that could have used an editor.)

The message to recruiters (and this very season’s new admittees) is unambiguous, as well it should be.  The article’s single testimonial is sourced from Skadden, one of the very first firms (along with Milbank and Debevoise) to have the eminent good sense and foresight to invest in business education for its associates. (Skadden and Debevoise turned to the Fullbridge Program and Milbank to Harvard Law.)  Skadden’s global hiring partner, Howards Ellin, offers this applause:

“At Skadden, we value innovation tremendously, and Stanford Law School’s curriculum reforms reflect a truly forward-looking holistic approach to legal education.  The law school is dedicated to anticipating and fulfilling the practical and intellectual needs of both its students and the legal and business communities they enter after graduation.”

Dean Kramer reassures the skeptics: “In rethinking our curriculum, we recognized that we could lay the foundation of traditional legal analysis in the first year” while still dramatically expanding opportunities in the second and third years to prepare students “for the role they can and should play in practice and in society.”

The press release is detailed and deserves a full read. I very much hope that things are, in fact, what they seem in Palo Alto.   The university at large has a lot riding on these heavily funded reforms, including hopes for a major punch up in global brand. It will take a good deal more to threaten Harvard on this count, but these reforms are an excellent first step.   Certainly, both students applying to law school and those weighing multiple acceptances will consider with care the apparent Stanford advantage.  But it will be many months before we can begin to determine the impact of the changes.

A few of the new program’s claims:

• Multi-disciplinary project courses addressing “real-world business and policy problems”.
• Full-time (no course or exam conflicts) clinical work in a broad range of practice areas, including SCOTUS cases and transactional law.
• The proper philosophy and end-game: Stanford Law will do more than teach lawyers “how to spot problems”, it will train them “to solve them”, by ensuring that they will “be able to think like their client, a way of thinking that can and should begin in law school and ….in a global context.”

And some of the “concrete changes”  (already in place) that have generated student interest and success:

• A quarterly school calendar matching the rest of Stanford University (This is good: Many universities encourage cross registration at their business schools–yet students find their schedules don’t match and the basic courses are limited to B-school students).
• 23 formal joint degree programs,  28 individual joint degrees and the continuing option to tailor a joint program in almost any discipline. (I always wished I had sprung for the JD/MBA.  Much more to choose from here.)
• Sophisticated team-oriented, problem-solving courses co-taught by multi-disciplinary faculties.  (Like many of these course offerings, an option in some other schools, including Harvard’s winter term problem solving courses. I’m trying to find out more about these offerings–how many are there? are they full semester courses?) I would have happily registered for all of these examples: “..how to bring an invention to market (evaluating the technology, drafting a business plan, protecting intellectual property, and managing the regulatory process), how to engineer a complex business deal, how to translate complex scientific concepts into a courtroom or policy making setting, and how to develop technology solutions to legal problems”.
• A major reorganization of the law school’s (now ten) clinics to operate like a law firm: The Mills Legal Clinic, with a med-school modeled full-time clinical rotation. (Gratefully this law firm will not self-immolate under the billable hour model.)
• Substantially greater emphasis on the international curriculum, including the addition of a third LLM program, International Economic Law, Business and Policy. On this count, Stanford is still playing catch-up ball.
• Expansion of the numbers and variety of student and faculty research opportunities and public interest resources.

And a few mixed cultural/structural changes:

• A new academic building AND five-building housing complex mixing law students with graduate students in other disciplines–a truly “new concept in interdisciplinary living”. (They even have their own grocery store.  That should silence you tuition whiners.  But seriously, this is a pretty good idea, though I’m not convinced the other graduate students are going to be as enthusiastic as the Dean.)
• Two proprietary online devices:  The first is a curriculum builder that matches courses to practice areas in the law school and the broader university.  If there are also some human beings who understand the multi-disciplinary possibilities–student advisors, for example– then this software will be a helpful resource.  The second connects students with alumni working in the particular field.  A good number of law schools already have sophisticated alumni networking software, but I don’t know if any reach beyond the JD curriculum and alumni/ae bubbles.  All the schools could probably do a better job with technology.

Many of the approaches described in the captive-Bee article have been adopted on other campuses in some form. The beauty of the Stanford strategy, however, appears to be in its comprehensive, university-wide reach, including what appears to be exquisite attention to the whole student: her living arrangements and community, her courses and clinics—all offered with sophisticated, structured support and a thoroughly modern pedagogy committed, nonetheless, to classic foundations.

Nothing piecemeal for Stanford, at least on the surface.  And Dean Kramer is all in. Game on.

A new day?  An honest to goodness game-changer?  I hope so: 

If Stanford’s program comes even close to fulfilling its promise, then other elite schools will follow and the value of legal education will substantially increase.

And then we can worry less about the impossible dream—that the ABA might take a break from accrediting new law schools and strike that pesky, pricy third year.