"Surviving Law School" Panel

Drexel Kline ACS is co-sponsoring the "Surviving Law School" panel hosted by Drexel Kline National Lawyers Guild (NLG).

One of NLG’s goals is to call attention to the harmful and unnecessarily competitive environment created and upheld by law schools through their enforcement of curved grading, misleading/predatory conditional scholarships, and antiquated class rankings.

First and foremost, we must acknowledge that the law school system, which is typically the foundational exposure to the legal world and the practice of law for most law students, is designed to inhibit progressive legal analysis and unorthodox critical thinking. This first step of calling issues out by name can be intimidating and daunting, but once that door is open, the next steps to fundamentally changing the system for the better can be taken.

The “Surviving Law School” panel will be centered around the questions of “In general, what makes being a law student really awful/difficult/defeating/doubt-producing and why?” and “What specifically can be done to change it?”

Elena Cohen, former National President of NLG and current Drexel Kline professor, will moderate a panel of 3-4 former law students to discuss the realities of the law school experience (i.e. unrealistic workloads of 1Ls, over-emphasis on big law/judicial clerkships, the general “this is the way it is and has always been done” mentality, etc.) to help prepare incoming 1Ls and to validate the less-than-pleasant experiences of upperclassmen.

The panel will conclude with a 10-15 minute discussion of solutions the panelists believe are attainable by working together as a community to better align the current law school system with today’s more diverse and inclusive law school student body.