The party line in legal education is that we “teach you to think like a lawyer.” Except that we don’t.

What we do in law school is teach students to think in terms of problems. The emphasis, especially in first year, is on the development of critical reasoning. This is an important skill. But lawyers — good lawyers, at least — don’t think in terms of problems. They think in terms of solutions. Medical schools now teach solution-oriented thinking. Business schools have done so for a long time. Yet no law school in North America does so, at least not in a comprehensive, systematic way.

In fact, many of the important things young lawyers need to know aren’t taught in law school. Of course, substantive legal knowledge is important. But if you talk to employers (and over the years, I’ve probably talked to hundreds), the common refrain is not that graduates don’t know the law, but that they don’t know how to use their knowledge. And as heretical as this will seem to some, I don’t completely disagree.

We don’t, for instance, teach teamwork, when the reality is that almost all young lawyers today will work in teams of some sort. Nor do we teach project management. And perhaps most critically, we don’t teach leadership.

Yet people hire lawyers not because they’re smart or clever, but because they want someone to help lead them to a solution that improves their situation.

This could have been the moment to begin a serious discussion about what Canadian law schools should teach. The Federation of Law Societies of Canada recently issued the report of its national task force on legal education. Like most other law deans, I feared the report would reflect a “back in my day” view of expected core competencies. So I was relieved the recommendations were largely minimalist: all law schools must have a mandatory course in legal ethics and professionalism (we already do at Western); corporate law must be a required course (ditto); and a few other small things. For the most part, though, the theme seems to be to leave us alone. But maybe that’s not such a good thing.

Legal education in North America is stuck in a time warp. You could plunk any of us down in a classroom in any Canadian law school a century ago and — apart from gaslights on the wall and the absence of laptops — we wouldn’t feel terribly out of place. I once had a professor tell me that that’s because the model has been perfected. Happily, he wasn’t one of my own colleagues!

In most ways, the quality of education at Canada’s law schools is, in fact, higher than it has ever been. The range of courses and programs is richer than ever before and schools pay more attention to the teaching aspect of academic life than at any time probably since the 1960s. As for those who think we should teach students how to draft wills or to appear in an arraignment, well…my view is that that is trade school stuff and not what we should be teaching in a university-level J.D. program.

No, what I’m talking about are transportable skills. Sociologists and demographers tell us that young people today will have several careers in their lifetimes. We need to prepare them to make their way through their professional lives and to serve society in useful ways.

That’s why I think we’ve missed a wonderful opportunity. The Federation’s foray into the realm of legal education could have been the opportunity to kick-start a real discussion about what a 21st century legal education should look like. Sadly, that was not to be. Occasio aegre offertur, facile amittitur!*

* Opportunity is offered with difficulty and lost with ease.