from Hacker News

Bar exam will no longer be required to become attorney in Washington State

by us0r on 3/17/24, 1:19 AM with 110 comments

• by in3d on 3/17/24, 2:41 AM

  They should do the opposite: not require law school but make the bar exam harder. Vermont, California, and Virginia do not require law school.

• by keernan on 3/17/24, 4:02 AM

  I've been an attorney for over 40 years. While I don't have answers to the political and moral issues involved, I can say with very high confidence that attending law school and passing the bar has zero to do with whether that person is capable of practicing law.

  Law school does one important thing: teach how to divine legal principles from reading a written judicial opinion. And, correspondingly, that is the only skill the bar exam measures.

  While certainly important, knowing how to read case law is a far cry from knowing how to practice law. There is only one way to learn how to practice law: and that is practicing law.

  That is especially true of trial work, which I've done for over 40 years. In my opinion, it takes a minimum of 20 jury trials before an attorney even begins getting a faint idea of the art involved in winning trials; and then spending the balance of their career crafting the art.

  The idea that law school or bar exams are essential in any way - either to the eventual lawyer or to protect the public - is way off target. Indeed the myth generated by every judicial branch in the USA that being given a bar card means the holder is ready to offer services to the public, is the most outrageous legal concept I have ever heard. IMO it should be illegal for any lawyer to offer legal services to the public the day after he/she was handed a bar card. That's how little law school prepares - and how poorly the bar exam measures - an attorney's readiness to engage in the actual practice of law.

• by kirykl on 3/17/24, 2:56 AM

  This will push down the quality of public defense

• by zachmu on 3/17/24, 3:17 AM

  Can't we just skip to the part where the signalling value of the certification is severely diluted and they backpedal?

  Elite colleges literally just went through this with standardized tests.

• by kylecazar on 3/17/24, 2:37 AM

  "While people always have been able to study law under another attorney, then become licensed themselves by taking the bar exam, this new pathway creates standardized education materials and removes the examination requirement."

  So no LSAT/law school, no bar is a potential pathway to practice law. Wow.

• by autoexec on 3/17/24, 3:43 AM

  I guess I don't really care if there is a bar exam, some other test (perhaps one even more difficult) that isn't controlled by a state's bar association, or some other means to demonstrate that someone is qualified. It makes no difference as long as the quality of newly licensed attorneys doesn't suffer and more importantly as long as we can still revoke the license of attorneys who can't or wont do their job.

  Any concerns about people ending up able to practice law when they are unqualified can be addressed by exactly the same kind of oversight and accountability we should want/have in place for everyone in the field no matter if they took the bar or not.

• by gnicholas on 3/17/24, 3:29 AM

  When CA lowered the pass threshold on the bar exam, one of my friends who went to a regional law school decried the move because it will open up the profession to even less-qualified lawyers. She said that she'd seen enough bad lawyering with the higher threshold.

  I wonder what firms will end up employing these barless lawyers, and who will end up retaining their services. I also wonder if they'll be able to get malpractice insurance. I would think it would be quite expensive — like getting car insurance for someone who opted to get a driver's license without taking the driver's test.

• by minedwiz on 3/17/24, 2:18 AM

  Honestly sounds like the return of reading law, a kind of legal apprenticeship (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading_law), as opposed to a new experiment.

• by calvinmorrison on 3/17/24, 2:47 AM

  Should drive costs down! A paralegal can do 90% of the work anyway

• by syngrog66 on 3/18/24, 3:12 AM

  I get an eerie feeling its because Micrsoft/OpenAI wants to allow GPT to be granted a law license. or some similar AI shenanigan

• by banana_feather on 3/17/24, 3:39 AM

  I passed the California bar exam on my first attempt (I only say this to head off cries of sour grapes), and I think this is good news.

  The MBE in particular is an embarrassment and the NCBE should be ashamed of themselves. The idea that the MBE or any portion of the UBE is a reasonable test of one's ability to practice law is worse than a joke, as it extracts an enormous amount of money in preparation and administration fees from applicants.

  An expanded form of something like the California Performance Test would, in my opinion, be a pretty good test of minimum competency to protect the public, but if what we're actually offered looks like the UBE, just forget the whole thing.

• by adolph on 3/17/24, 2:53 AM

  This should clear the way for an OpenAI powered law practice.

• by 1letterunixname on 3/17/24, 6:31 AM

  So.. teach said groups better rather than lower the ... bar.

  Washington state is going full lunatic.

• by AmVess on 3/17/24, 2:30 AM

  Good luck getting a good job as a lawyer without passing the bar exam. No reputable firm will hire you, and you'll have an expensive degree that has no value.

• by csours on 3/17/24, 2:42 AM

  Passing a test proves you can pass a test, not do the thing on the test.

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  Edit, if you don't like this comment, please consider applying Bayesian logic similar to medical tests. You get both false positives and false negatives.