Law Students Corner
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Pages | 10 |
| Citation | Vol. 80 No. 3 Pg. 10 |
Beyond the Vacuum
By Amanda Haas, Washburn University School of Law
I'm not sure exactly how many times I've heard it, but it's certainly more than a few: "Don't use legalese." Most professors emphasize this at some point in just about every law school course. The underlying message is that the documents we prepare and the things we do as attorneys serve to benefit real people — people who often do not have the legal education and knowledge that we have. In many attorneyclient relationships there seems to be a disconnect between the real experience of those being affected by the law (the clients) and those working to interpret and use the law (attorneys), and this disconnect can prevent those in the legal profession from delivering the best outcome for their clients.
The funny thing is, although almost every law professor I know has given this kind of wise advice, the actual experience of law school (and perhaps even the practice of law itself) doesn't actually instill this lesson.
As law students, we learn the law (and how to be lawyers) in a vacuum. It's no secret that perhaps the main goal of the first semester of law school is to break down the minds of new students and rebuild them in a way best fit for the study of law. Pedagogically, this makes plenty of sense — law school, as an academic experience, is unlike anything else, and in order to succeed, most students must make an extreme adjustment from their prior academic style. Practically speaking, however, this approach might not best serve our future clients.
By the time we graduate law school, we understand a whole heap of things about the legal underpinnings of our society that 80 percent of the general population does not. I'm sure we've all experienced that moment when we are surrounded by friends and family, people with whom we were close before law school days, and suddenly the conversation takes a turn and we realize that everyone is uncomfortably silent because, for one, they don't understand a word we are saying, and two, they really don't care (much like we hadn't cared before three years of law school).
Some law students, and lawyers, mistake this type of real-world disconnect for our own intellectual superiority. This might be the reason I've read dozens of law review articles that contain at least 50 words that even I don't understand. Most of us have always been...
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