The clarion call.

• Author: Walton, R. Howard
• Position: Letters - Letter to the editor

President Pettis hit the nail on the head by identifying two huge issues facing this state's Bar in his September/October President's Page: 1) The proliferation of young and untrained lawyers, and 2) the drying up of funding for legal aid. Both threaten the very fabric of the legal profession as too many lawyers mean too many lawyers willing to tell a client what they want to hear in order to keep the doors open (loss of professional independence), and, despite the bloated and insincere promotional rhetoric in increasingly pervasive television advertising, can we truly say lawyers as a group provide a benefit to the public when dwindling legal aid funding means we do not really serve those most needy of our services? In short, if something is not done about these problems, the legal profession will become merely a business and not a profession at all (some would say we are already there).

To me, the solution is simple: These problems started even before "The Great Recession," with a proliferation of law schools that are low-overhead, high-profit, cash cows for the universities or shareholders who operate them. It is time for a reckoning, and that reckoning is to cut back the classroom portion of law school to two years, while extending the overall requirement to four years. The second two years would consist of working full-time in a legal aid clinic, and you would not be able...