Posted on 03/17/2024 9:26:18 AM PDT by llevrok
The bar exam will no longer be required to become a lawyer in Washington, the state Supreme Court ruled in a pair of orders Friday.
The court approved alternative ways to show competency and earn a law license after appointing a task force to examine the issue in 2020.
The Bar Licensure Task Force found that the traditional exam “disproportionally and unnecessarily blocks” marginalized groups from becoming practicing attorneys and is “at best minimally effective” for ensuring competency, according to a news release from the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts.
Washington is the second state to not require the bar exam, following Oregon, which implemented the change at the start of this year. Other states, including Minnesota, Nevada, South Dakota and Utah, are examining alternative pathways to licensure.
“These recommendations come from a diverse body of lawyers in private and public practice, academics, and researchers who contributed immense insight, counterpoints and research to get us where we are today,” Washington Supreme Court Justice Raquel Montoya-Lewis, who chaired the task force, said in a statement. “With these alternative pathways, we recognize that there are multiple ways to ensure a competent, licensed body of new attorneys who are so desperately needed around the state.”
There will be three experiential-learning alternatives to the bar exam, each for people following a different path of legal study. The specifics, scale and implementation plan for the pathways have yet to be developed.
Law school graduates can complete a six-month apprenticeship while being supervised and guided by a qualified attorney, along with finishing three courses.
Law students can become practice-ready by completing 12 qualifying skills credits and 500 hours of work as a licensed legal intern. Upon completion of those requirements, they would submit a portfolio of that work to waive the bar exam. ..............
(Excerpt) Read more at spokesman.com ...
More deterioration of the justice system. More and more lawyers and future judges who have no idea what the law is.
Maybe twenty years ago. Many of my lawyer friends have been telling me over the last few years that they can't find any decent young lawyers to hire.
If I was a white shoe firm partner in Seattle, I would be shitting a solid brick.
Oregon, nobody gives a flap, Oregon lost their unicorn status 20 years ago. BUT tech unicorns and their wealthy legions of lawyers are still a thing in Seattle, and AI goes through Redburn's MS campus right now.
If they think these pseudo-attorney creatures are just going to chase ambulances? Or go where the shortage really is, in criminal defense?
Hell no, they are going to band together and offer the same patent, R&D and M&A legal services at half the white shoe price.
This is hilarious. The ABA protected this franchise for eons, even after their leadership was conquered by neomarxists under Shrub, they still weren't accrediting these faux law schools and in fact, were busy punishing the last 20 on the accredited list with accreditation probations and suspensions.
A few jungle primary elections later, and a puppet-state installation in The White Hospice, et voila!
And now these legislatures have subverted their neomarxist indoctrination colleagues and their monopoly. You. can't. make. this. shit. up.
Don’t you mean Georgia?
America continues its decline.
I’m of two minds on this. To the extent that this furthers the dumbing down of our country, and the lowering of its standards, I’m against it. On the other hand, it could offer consumers a lower cost alternative to expensive bar approved lawyers. But buyer beware. All lawyers should be required to divulge to any prospective clients whether they’ve passed the bar or not. It would then be on the prospective client to weigh that, along with other factors, in choosing counsel.
Also, anyone serving in government, whether as a government lawyer, prosecutor or judge should be required to be a member of the bar in good standing. State bars are not perfect, but they do offer a fairly effective way of certifying basic competency.
WIKI
1980s check scandal
In 1980, several Hutton branches began writing checks which were greater than the cash they had on hand at the bank, then making a deposit in another bank equal to the amount it wrote at the first bank. This strategy, known as “chaining”, is a form of check kiting. “Chaining” gave Hutton the use of money in both accounts until the checks cleared. In effect, Hutton was giving itself a free loan that also did not carry any interest. Thomas Morley, who was in charge of getting the firm to better manage its cash, wrote a memo to Hutton’s president, George Ball, saying that this practice netted one branch an extra $30,000 per month. Ball sent the memo out across Hutton’s network of regional sales managers, with the note, “A point well remembered—and acted on.” Over the years, Hutton shuffled money in this manner between 400 banks (mostly small rural banks), gaining the use of an estimated $250 million a day without paying a penny in interest. Whenever something was amiss, Hutton questioned the bank’s procedures.
The scheme worked for almost three years until officials at the Genesee County Bank in Leroy, New York, discovered that the large deposits made by Hutton’s four-person office there were far more than the office’s banking requirements. They also discovered that the checks Hutton was using to make the deposits were drawn on two Pennsylvania banks. When Genesee officials learned that Hutton did not have enough money in the Pennsylvania bank accounts to cover the checks, they stopped honoring Hutton checks. One of the banks involved, United Penn Bank (now part of Citizens Financial Group), asked the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation to investigate. In 1984, the matter was forwarded to the United States Attorney for the Middle District of Pennsylvania, who opened a federal criminal probe.
Hutton retained Tom Curnin, a respected defense attorney who was inclined to fight the government. However, in February 1985, Curnin discovered a memo from a Hutton regional vice president for the Washington, D.C., area which stated that his offices drew on “bogus deposits”. The memo—tantamount to a smoking gun—led Curnin to change tactics and begin negotiations for a plea agreement. In the spring of 1985, Curnin told Hutton’s board that it faced two choices: plead guilty to a massive list of felonies or face a trial that would likely see three senior Hutton executives convicted and drive Hutton out of business. Curnin advised settling with the government to avoid years of bad publicity.
On May 2, Hutton agreed to plead guilty to 2,000 counts of mail and wire fraud, as well as pay a $2 million fine plus $750,000 for the cost of the investigation. This is equivalent to approximately $4.6 million and $1.7 million, respectively, in 2022. Hutton also agreed to pay $8 million in restitution—the estimated extra income earned from the fraud. This is equivalent to approximately $18.6 million in 2022. In return, Curnin wrung two major concessions. First, no Hutton executives would be prosecuted (even though the government determined that 25 senior officers masterminded the scheme). Second, the Securities and Exchange Commission allowed Hutton to stay in business; offenses of this magnitude usually result in an individual or firm being permanently barred from the securities industry.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF_Hutton
Note carefully the last paragraph.
The bar exam should be appropriately designed to ensure competent legal help can be reliably obtained.
Customers of lawyers are typically ill-equipped to judge lawyer quality themselves.
But they’ll keep the monopoly on public schools and accreditation and competency for teaching etc
I have a greater issue with schools having to be ABA approved than with bar exam requirements.
No private organization should be able to set legal rules directly.
I also have objections to the abuse of the building code system. How energy efficient my Florida house is is not the proper business of an Illinois organization.
I like your style 👍🤓
*Wonder if you’d feel the same way if fighting a murder frame up and you have to depend on a lawyer for a defense that could take many months of intense preparation when that “lawyer” couldn’t prepare for and handle a simple bar exam.*
I can see you point. It’s like a boxer getting up at 3am to go to the gym and work out when he could sleep in and start any noon. It helps him get up when he’s been knocked down for the count.
Soon surgeons will not be certified, pilots no certification necessary, dentists no certification necessary this nation is falling into the abyss voting will not get us out of this!! This is what ALL mail in ballots gets you, we NOW have WA., OR., CA., and CO., with all mail in ballots ALL have become ONE PARTY RULE and EVERYONE tries to convince us there is NO fraud GIVE ME A DAMN BREAK!!
-PJ
Exam to be replaced by a break dancing event.
I basically agree with that. But if a client wants to take his chance on a non bar-certified lawyer to save money, I suppose that should be an option - at least in theory. In practice., it would likely open a huge can of worms. Nowadays, we often see cases being overturned on appeal because the convicted party claims they received poor counsel. How would that scenario be handled if non-bar lawyers were allowed to practice?
I’m not really a doctor in real life, but in the State of Mind of Socialism, I’m a doctor?!
>>”I have a greater issue with schools having to be ABA approved than with bar exam requirements.”
That’s a valid concern.
The biggest lesson I learned was that, at that time, I couldn't close to save my life...lol.
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