Danny Urquhart (Class of 2015)
Law students have three major points of contact with the Law Society of Upper Canada (LSUC): hiring regulations, the bar exam, and the articling requirement. LSUC fails law students at each of these points of contact. It fails to represent them. It fails to protect them. It fails to understand them.
Summer Hiring
The problems start with “call day” for in-firm interview offers. Employers can only extend in-firm interview offers after 8:00am on a Friday morning. Offers are made and accepted sequentially, so employers contact students as soon as possible to minimize rejections.
For students who received multiple interview offers, their decision to accept is distorted by the arbitrary factor that one firm calls at 8:00 and another at 8:01. While employers cannot rescind interview offers, saying you need to think about it, or can only reserve a later interview time, is an implicit rejection and often fatal to your hiring prospects.
When it comes to job offers, employers are prohibited from extending offers until after 5:00pm on the Wednesday of in-firm interview week. LSUC conveniently prohibits firms from committing to students until it is too late for the students to alter the outcome. (Although, this rule is regularly flouted, at least in spirit, and all but impossible to enforce.)
Typically, a firm will not extend a job offer unless it knows the student will accept. Most offers are made and accepted or rejected in the first few minutes after 5:00pm. This creates an incentive for students to communicate in advance that they will accept an offer.
There are at least two consequences to LSUC’s offer windows. First, students face heightened risk for pursuing firms they like the most. Second, there is an increase in bad hiring outcomes because risk-averse students accept offers they are less interested in.
The American system is better for students. There is no limit to the number of interviews students can schedule. Firms can make interview and job offers at any point. Once an offer is extended, it cannot be rescinded for 28 days. Students collect rolling offers over a few months. Students cannot hold more than five offers open at any point, but students turn down previous offers as they collect offers they prefer.
Highly indebted, unknowledgeable, and stressed law students are the vulnerable party in hiring. Why do LSUC regulations make things worse for them?
Maybe LSUC is bad at designing rules. Maybe it wishes to limit the resources firms commit to attracting candidates. Maybe the rules are a misguided attempt to encourage law students to be extremely straightforward (though without recognizing that that firms are not comparably encouraged to be straightforward).
Smaller firms especially benefit from offer windows. A law student is usually wise to keep their future employment options as expansive as possible—it’s a lot harder to move up the prestige/salary ladder than down it. Small firms benefit when law students are effectively restricted from courting more than one or two firms in the late stages of the interview period.
So law students, you are a sacrificial pawn to poor regulations which do little but equalize the hiring prospects of different tiers of law firms and save the firms a little bit of uncertainty.
Be mad.
The Bar Exam
The bar exam is an anachronism. Prior to the 1950s, people in Ontario became lawyers by self-studying or taking classes administered by the Law Society. The Law Society wisely required prospective lawyers to pass an exam to prove they had adequately self-studied. The trouble is we still have a bar exam on top of three years of law school exams.
For six weeks, law school graduates read a 2,000-page summary of Ontario law. They prepare a massive table of contents so they can rapidly locate the minutiae of income tax calculations and civil procedure within these pages. They answer sixteen hours of multiple choice questions on that minutiae. Why?
Ontario law students have all successfully completed six to infinity years of post-secondary education, including three years of intensive legal education. We have strong assurances that law graduates are smart, responsible, and knowledgeable about Ontario’s legal system. It seems like almost everyone ultimately passes the bar exam (you are allowed three attempts), though LSUC does not publish bar failure rates.
And what if Ontario law students fail the bar all the time? Then we should be concerned about the arbitrariness of the test. A 2,000 page, 16-hour word search is not relevant to lawyerdom and does not ensure legal competency. The bar exam did not move anyone from the category of “totally unfit to practice real estate law” to the category of “fit enough to practice real estate law.”
Some people learn a few things while reading the bar materials. We would all learn something by retaking torts after graduation. Let’s say I’m responsible for teaching you to build walls, and I instruct you to spend six weeks throwing feces at a wall. Even if you stare so long at a wall that you learn a little about walls, it doesn’t justify the fact that you spent six weeks throwing shit at a wall.
What are the costs of the bar exam? First, it is expensive to administer. We all pay hundreds for it. Second, it eats six weeks of our lives. That needs justification. This is time away from family, travel, leisure, and work. When law students are notoriously indebted, highly stressed, and overworked, these considerations are not trivial. Most of the bar materials aren’t even relevant to our careers. There aren’t many M&A lawyers with a significant youth sentencing practice out there.
Life is the most valuable thing you’ve got. You wasted six weeks of it preparing for an expensive, ineffective, and arbitrary examination in the honeymoon following three years of concentrated legal education. That life is gone. It’s never coming back.
Be mad as hell.
Articling
Like the bar exam, articling is an anachronism dating to before law schools were around. Almost everyone agrees there are problems with articling. The biggest problem is that it exists.
Much has been written in recent years about LSUC’s Law Practice Program (LPP) experiment. I won’t repeat these discussions, other than to say the program is expensive, likely won’t increase skills or employability of participants, and is funded by the one interest group with the least capacity to pay for it: law students. Do you see a theme?
I don’t know if articling was ever this romantic thing where skilled lawyers selflessly instructed students on how to transition between law school and the profession. Maybe it was. Regardless, if we hold articling up as this idyllic parental apprenticeship, we won’t be able to see it for what it is.
Articling is ten months of indentured servitude. No matter how bad the experience is, students will stick it out because completing those ten months is necessary to be called to the bar. Firms get a commitment-free mechanism to extract work from young lawyers, then cull those who didn’t throw as many punches in the desperate fight for hire-back.
Removing articling wouldn’t cause underlying economic pressures to disappear. Young lawyers will always face considerable pressure to outcompete their peers. But articling intensifies these processes because it allows firms to treat articling students as temporary workers rather than employees.
If the goal of articling is to perform a gatekeeping function, then why does no-one “fail” at articling? I am aware of many people who failed to obtain articles, but not of people who failed to complete them. One might argue that the real gatekeeping function of the articling period is to prevent those who could not find a position from hanging a shingle and exposing the public to bad work. If that is the concern, then why don’t we tailor the protection to the hazard by placing the equivalent of an articling requirement (i.e. proof of work experience) on those who want to open an independent practice?
Instead, law students have to fight tooth and nail to land a temporary contractual position. And then fight to emerge on the happy side of hire-back in working conditions that are excluded from the protections of the Employment Standards Act. And no one can give you a compelling reason why.
You’re not going to take this anymore.
