Professional Work, Professional Careers and Legal Education: Educating the Lawyer for 2010

This paper considers how legal education and training should react to change in the legal professions. It refers briefly to existing literature on the character of these changes and develops information on new forms of legal work. It then goes on to consider a set of developing legal concepts and legal subject areas in order to begin a critical discussion of whether, and how, legal education should reorganise in view of the changes in the profession. How should one begin the process of constructing legal education for a globalised, internationally regulated, industrialised, “deprofessionalised” legal profession with resultant effects on legal careers, legal concepts and legal subject classifications? Looking at the paradigms of legal work, concepts of “graduateness”, types of legal career and new legal concepts, this paper begins the work of mirroring changes within society against changes in legal practice and consequential developments for legal education. Preprint of an article by Avrom Sherr, Woolf Professor of Legal Education and Director, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London