Thank you for making time on the program for this conversation about the future of our profession i am Randy Shepard i ended up spending most of my adult life in the supreme court. I now sit doing senior service. And i have an appointment over at the mccain school of law. To my right is rebecca corliss. Spent more than decade on the colorado supreme court. She left their ten or 11 years ago. She does all sorts of research and programmatic work. On the improvement of courts into the improvement of Legal Education and the legal profession. And then professor anderson certainly a man of circuit if there ever was one after his Legal Education at the university of chicago became a clerk despite his recent career i will say theres nobody has done more intriguing work. I will begin with the words was setting the stage. Not necessarily know about in detail. They provide considerable foundation for evaluating the current state of law schools both now and in the future. You could actually describe recent developments by using just eight words rising tuition, massive debt fewer jobs and fewer applicants. To begin laying the foundation today. No mystery to anybody that tuition and Higher Education has been rising for the lifetime of virtually all of us here it exceeds twice the Consumer Price index. It has in fact been rising at a rate so rapid at the finance officer that they have created a new measure is called the Higher Education price index. It is designed to give a more accurate reading of how much and what ought not be called the Sticker Price of how fast the Sticker Price has been going up in the two decades that just ended the general rate of an inflation for higher ed was 71 percent. But the rate in law schools is not 71 percent over that time but it has been rising at the present a year in recent decades. Undergraduates and law students. Rising to the point where americans now owe more in education debt than the zero on their homes. Its really quite a stunning change. In the american debt picture. The average law student debt on the way out the door is about 85,000 for students who have gone to private schools. It has been easy to read about in the wall street journal. I think it is called parents plus. For them to empower their children to borrow more money. If the parents would cosign. And then in the federal government would enter a guarantee so that more money could be borrowed. Its now clear that parents plus is having an effect on the disposable incomes of working middle class parents not just on their children but on the collection of their parents. It has become a big part of what it means to not only be at University Graduate but law graduate. Third, fewer jobs one of the things we as lawyers didnt notice unless we have a child are very close friend who was looking for work over the last two decades is that we had been turning out more graduates interning out more law license holders than there were a jobs. The reason we didnt notice that unless we have some meat directly involved with it. It was reported. It was quite ordinary. It will be a great year. Now nine months or ten months. And that sounded like a very happy result. The change of the reporting system. How many law graduates find it for which you have to have a law license. The answer to that has been last year it was 59 percent. Of all of the people who turned out the school, people found ongoing work fulltime for which you have to have a lot license. The answer to that is 59 percent. That number has stabilized and has been as low as 57 but the number has stabilized over the last couple of years it still means that a lot of people dont find work the other reason it has stabilized of course is that the number of a the new law grads keeps declining. The way in which you calculate the percentage is altered. The fact is over the last five or six years the number of jobs fulltime license required type jobs has continued to decline. As recently as five years ago attended to be Something Like 20,000 mind you we were graduating with the 40 to 45,000. That number has fallen to 23,700. A slower decline perhaps than earlier in the decade. The College Seniors into secondgeneration and college law advisors are no dummies. They can read those. It has been a dramatic change in how many people apply to go to law school. Within the last decade the normal number and it was the highest number we have ever seen in the country the alltime high was a hundred thousand 600 applicants it seems to be more important to focus on applicants. That number had been Something Like a hundred thousand. It dropped dramatically 2016. The number people that come down and put in their applications. As of last week so far this year there was 50,200. That is down from last year just about percent. I think that as a number that we could say has probably stabilized but there are some things happening inside that number that are particularly attractive for instance of the people that actually get into school those who come into school with those of over 160 are half of what they were five years ago. The number who had 150 to 160 is stabilized. In the number of people that come in under 150 is up 80 from where it was. A very noticeable shift. Others might say the talent and suitability for law school. A change in student legal aid. As the competition chasing the numbers. It helps ratings and of course because you would like to have the smartest students possible in your law school. The result of that is the amount of meritbased aid has gone up 10 . I havent spoken yet to an actual admissions officer. Both meant merit and most of that goes to the people that have the best metrics. It is the folks at the back end of the line will end up they are profile. It is not as good as the agent in caucasians and hispanic applicants they have lower metrics and its harder for law schools im find it harder for them to get scholarships and financial assistance. We have some schools in the circuit by the way dont charge any tuition and all. With a few schools to send the students money. They dont charge any tuition actually write checks to those students. It is part of this greater trend. And of course last week in the news. The passage rates. It is not as good of measure as july. But the february rate here in this state as a lowest that we have ever experienced. On an Important Note that this is not gone unnoticed by our friends at the academy in the number of people in the academy who say this too will pass we have heard this before is a shrinking number. Research done both by various entities which professor anderson is associated about how we change Legal Education to adjust to what it looks like is really very encouraging in a substantial and is the easiest one to see. How many actual handson experiences do head. It has been dramatically changing over the last two decades. They are determined to do as good a job as a possibly can. We are going to hear some treaty news about all of those trends and we will start with justice. Professor henderson and i have to stand because the monitor is only visible from a peer not from our seats. I apologize for breaking up our little trio. I am becky corbis. The trial court and Appellate Court judge but now are running a Research Institute at the institute at the university of denver that we refer to as a sink do you take. It is the worst acronym in the world and i apologize. But we were named by a federal judge. And he wouldnt let me put justice in the name because he thought it was a term that was to susceptible. We work in four different areas. And i had spoken to this assembly on prior occasions but usually in the context of our Civil Justice reform. We do work in Legal Education. We work on the family justice side we work on judicial selection and performance. We identify a problem and Gather Research and put together wonderful groups of stakeholders. We create models and then we facilitate and monitor the implementation of those models and we measure outcomes. Hence think do tank. The problem here which were talking about this morning. Chief Justice Shepard has already identified which is that in the context of Legal Education we are struggling with how to prepare from the profession. Didnt land fulltime employment recognizing law degree, 25 who didnt land fulltime employment including professional and nonprofessional. This is the burista number and 71 of thirdyear law students who believe they have sufficient skills to practice. This set of numbers is really interesting. 71 who think they are locked and ready to go into law practice, however the law professors who teach them say that thats a 45 and wait for it, the percentage of practitioners who believe that new lawyers have sufficient skills to practice is 23 . So theres a problem there and we at ios developed a project intended to shed some light on ways of addressing this. We created our foundations for practice project. We have support from the hewlett foundation. This is a threephase project. We put together an Advisory Committee consisting of practitioners, judges, justices, representatives from the National Association of bar, from the national bar and bar examiners representatives from the public defenders office, aba and even the attorney general of colorado and we developed a plan. The first piece of that plan is to identify the foundations that entrylevel lawyers need to practice. The second phase will be to develop measurable models of Legal Education that supports those foundations and the third will be to align, market needs with hiring practices in order to incan i inventize positive improvements. Phase one, we developed a survey based on existing research. And with the assistance of Advisory Council we distributed that survey through Bar Associations across 37 states in the country. Actually, there were individuals from 50 states who answered but the Bar Association in 37 states distributed the survey and we had a little bit of crossover of people who practice in two states. We have 24,137 valid responses to the survey. If any of you answered the survey, thank you for your time. We got over 40,000 actual responses and 24,000 valid responses. Respondent base mirrors the legal profession. In fact, the respondent base is representative of both geographically in terms of the size of firms in which lawyers across the country practice, the amount of money they make and then the demographics themselves. We asked 400 different foundations and characterized the foundations and they, they broadly fallen to three different categories but some of the examples are identify relevant facts, legal issues, critically evaluate and conduct and defend depositions. Listen attentively and respectfully, make decisions, work as part of a team. The three categories into we divided the foundation is as follows, skills, characteristics and competencies. Remember, we have 147 foundations and we are dividing them into the three categories, 27 of the foundations were skilledbased, 28 characteristic based and 45 competencies. We also graduated the questions that we asked of the respondents, we asked whats necessary in the shortterm. We asked what is advantageous but not necessary in the shortterm, we asked whats necessary over time and we asked whats not relevant at all. The screen right here, bill, doesnt pick up gray so it looks like im missing a cylinder in the middle but fortunately not on your screen. So here are the results. 77 foundations identified in the shortterm by 50 or more of the respondents. 147 foundations, 77 were identified as necessary in the shortterm by 50 more of the respondents but what emerged surprised us. We call it the character and here it is. How does the top 20 of those foundations identified as necessary in the short term nine are characteristics, ten are competencies and one is a legal skill. There it is, research the law at number 14. The ten competencies, keep confidentiality, arrive on time. This is a millennial issue, right, treaters with respect, respond promptly, take individual responsibility, emotional regulation and selfcontrol, speak professionally, write professionally, exhibit tact and diplomacy. And the characteristics, the other nine, honor, commitments, integrity and trust worthiness, diligence, strong worth ethic, attention to detail, conscientious, common sense intelligence and a strong moral compass, cumulatively we refer to the whole lawyer but what about legal skills. This is why we go to law school, right, the legal skills show up in the must be acquired over time set of responses. These 20 characteristics are the top 20 or these foundations are the top 20 that must be acquired over time according to our respondent base. Here they are, provide incourt trial advocacy, depositions, prepare a case on appeal, prepare for mediation and all the skills that i suspect all of us would identify either on the transactional or the litigation side of practice as being necessary. But the take away here is we expect people to acquire these over time we dont necessarily expect them to show up at the time that they sign up for work ready to do these things or qualified to do these things. So now here is the second part of the survey, here where it becomes more relevant to all of you. In the second part of the survey we asked respondents to consider the helpfulness of a set of hiring criteria in determining whether a candidate has the foundation they identified as important. You have to understand, we took as a given the fact that they had already answered the survey and identified what they thought was important and then we said, okay, how would you hire in order to we did not ask them how they currently hire. Went to yale and harvard and was notes editor of the law review and clerk did a summer clerk shift for cutler. So the notion is that this person would get an interview pretty much any place in the country but does this person really have on his or her in this instant resume that would suggest that he has those foundations that people said they were looking for. So what would people focus on if they we wanted to hire the whole lawyer can a character, 17 criteria and asked the respond teents rank them from very helpful to very unhelpful. So take a look at the 17 criteria quickly and i will show you how the results turned out. Top of the list, legal employment, recommendations ations from practitioners or judges, bottom of the list, law review and journal experience. Now this is all respondents. You will note that the first eight have to do with experience. What the respondents told us is that the character or the whole lawyer metric emerges through experience, we broke out the data by size of firm, government employer, Legal Services or pd, with firms of 100 plus, class rank and law school move up. With firms of 2 to 100,a little bit of a shift in the top eight particularly the second four but its still the same top eight. In smaller firms or solo practitioner settings, substantialized classes, specialized Law School Classes move up which makes sense because theres a little bit more demand for actual ability to jump in on a particular topic. Government employment, the top eight still the same, theres a little bit of a shift in priority and then Legal Services or the public defenders office, again, you see a particular Law School Course specializing in criminal area moves up. So what does all of this tell us as we are thinking about the future of Legal Education and the future of employment of lawyers . First it tells us that practice ready from new lawyers of the profession. We all expect new lawyers to learn on the job but we do expect them to emerge from law school as whole lawyers with a blend of legal skills, professional competencies and the character, blend of foundation that is we have labeled whole, experience really matters. Today the foundations for practiced project has put out two reports, both of which are available on hour website, the first really focuses on the evaluation of the data in terms of what respondents are looking for in new lawyers, thats where the whole lawyer and the character quotion emerged and the component. We are moving on phase two of this project, models of Legal Education that support these foundations, working both with the law schools and with employers to shape ways whereby employers can recognize on a law school resume or some other form of hiring that these individuals have the criteria that they have identified as important. As a final note, i merely want to give credit where credit is due, the director of the foundations for practice practice at aisles and, indeed, of our Legal Education section, its a woman by the name of alan, who some of you may know and she was supposed to be here today and a medical circumstance kept her from you and i wanted to tell you that she developed the project and her information appears before you. I look forward to the discussion about this and what it means for the evolution of law school and of the profession. Bill. [applause] that was a good pinchhitting job, i will say. Great to be back given a talk to a court that i used to clerk on. The point im going to go through today and the central thesis i want to advance is we want the future law school is going to drive from the future of law practice and law practice is changing dramatically. I think evolves over a period of time. Its like the frog boiling metaphor, for those who have heard it, put the water and heat it up but if you toss nit hot water, it will jump out immediately and i think to a certain extent thats a lot what is going on with millennials these days. We lack that fresh perspective. I will give you an overview. Going on this idea that judge shepherd gave, here is data that i was able to calculate data that was posted on aba website. Average class size, those who entered in 1971, quite a while ago, the average class size was 246 and h