Someone once said that "too often practitioners of the law are simply journeymen of legal practice and not creators of legal justice and do not, in fact, understand, the philosophical basis of law, its ultimate goals or its importance"1 to our society. How do legal educators justify spending billions of dollars a year to educate the "best and brightest" students, yet still not produce a lawyer who is capable of promoting justice with a deep understanding of the law's role in society? How can legal education, at a time when it costs so much, teach so little? With the median law school tuition in New England next year approaching $25,000, is it not fair to ask law schools to create lawyers who can better serve the society that so richly rewards the members of that profession? 

Lawyers and law professors often have a narrow and arrogant view of themselves and of their profession. That view militates against using experts from other disciplines to educate law students and often means lawyers look only to legal solutions to problems clients face and not to the business and moral solutions to those issues. Far too often, the avenues lawyers pursue involve costly and time consuming litigation or other adversarial strategies, to the exclusion of accommodation and compromise. Almost no one expects any more from the legal profession, since lawyers have been trained for the last 100 years in that very manner. But society should. Society should demand more, and the legal profession must do a better job of meeting these demands.

My law school, the Massachusetts School of Law, has been in the forefront of reforming legal education and developing the kind of lawyer a changing society demands. As one would expect, however, MSL has met opposition from those invested in maintaining the status quo. Nonetheless, change has come, but much more is needed. One need only look to the changes in this country since 1921, when the American Bar Association joined the process of educating law students, to know that further change is long overdue. 
Compared to 1921, today's society is far more inclusive, far more complex and generally far more privileged. It is also very concerned about making progress rather than maintaining the status quo. In this ever expanding global community, competition, the use of the internet, and the demise of centralized governments are ripping down traditional barriers to progress. These rapid technological and globalization changes create opportunities for real progress.

Neither law nor education will be able to remain an island in this sea of change. New lawyers now enter a world that is complex, challenging, competitive, global, and technologically driven. Therefore, in order to remain relevant, law schools must become more interdisciplinary in their training of law students, more open in their embrace of conflict resolution instead of conflict escalation, more expansive in their development of students' communication skills and once again rigorous intellectual institutions. Lawyers' presentations will need to focus more on persuasion and less on evoking anger and fomenting more disagreement. Students must learn that communication should build consensus, not create further division. A lawyer should utilize her or his ears and mouth in proportion to their given quantity. Lawyers must become less removed from, and more empathetic with, clients' problems. They must also become better able to deal with the moral dilemmas faced by those who seek to serve others. More lawyers must again aspire to become valued counselors, helpful advisors, and trusted family friends.