The 2008 financial crisis profoundly reshaped legal education. Enrollment declines, changing job markets, and shifting perceptions of the value of a law degree forced law schools to reimagine their missions and strategies. In response, the ABA reformed many of their standards. And law schools likewise responded with innovations in access and affordability, experiential learning, bar readiness, and job placement. Now, as law schools face new transformations — from a restructuring of financial aid and demographic shifts to technological disruption — the lessons of that era remain essential.
This program revisits the 2008 financial crisis and its lasting impact on legal education and how law schools adapted to a transformed profession and what lessons still resonate today, particularly in our efforts to plan for tomorrow.
This program is a significant expansion of a short, moderated conversation between the three proposed participants — ABA Council Chair Daniel Thies, St. John’s School of Law Professor and former Dean Michael Simons, and New York Law School (NYLS) Dean and President Anthony Crowell — that took place at a recent symposium of The Journal of Legal Education (JLE) hosted at NYLS.
In 2010, the Journal of Legal Education published Chair Thies’s influential article, Rethinking Legal Education in Hard Times: The Recession, Practical Legal Education, written while he was a Harvard Law student and an ABA Council student member. The piece urged law schools to balance theory with practical training and affordability.
For the recent symposium, Professor Simons, in an article soon to be published by JLE, reflected on Chair Thies’s work in Rethinking Hard Times in Legal Education: Market Forces and Legal Education Reform. He recognized Thies’ foresight and powerfully traced how legal education evolved during Simons’ own deanship at St. John’s.
In this conversation, Mr. Thies and Dean Simons will explore how those predictions played out, how law schools have changed, and what challenges and opportunities define the next chapter of legal education.