David A. Brennen
2024-2025 Council Chair
As I reflect on the close of this 2024-25 Council year, even amid many challenges, I remain energized about prospects for the future of legal education and the Council’s accreditation role. In addition to ensuring the quality of legal education as it currently exists, the Council must also constantly look to the future so that its standards evolve as the environment in which legal education is delivered evolves. In that vein, this year the Council re-considered whether a standardized law admissions test is an absolute necessity, whether bricks and mortar buildings are needed, and whether current experiential learning requirements are sufficiently robust.
To its credit, the Council addressed each of these matters in a way that reflects its values as a politically neutral independent accrediting body for law schools. For example, regarding standardized tests, the Council authorized the Managing Director’s office to approve variances for individual law schools that would like to experiment with admissions policies that do not require a standardized admissions test. The data from these variances should provide useful information to the Council as it studies whether students admitted in these alternative ways are just as successful in completing the program of legal education and passing the bar exam. Similarly, with respect to assessing whether a legal education can be delivered effectively without a bricks and mortar building, the Council began by seeking advice from allied organizations at two public sessions. The information gained at these sessions will enable the Council to more effectively move forward in considering proposed standards that ensure that students who graduate from completely online law schools have outcomes consistent with graduates of traditional law schools.
One of the most important Council decisions this year was its proposal to significantly increase the number of experiential learning credits. For two years, the Council’s Standards Committee considered whether the number of experimental learning credit hours should be increased from the 6-credit requirement established in 2014. As part of its deliberations, the Standards Committee sent out surveys, hosted a roundtable, and reviewed articles and studies related to experiential learning. As a result of this exhaustive study, in May 2025, the Standards Committee proposed for Notice and Comment revised standards that increase the number of experiential learning credits from 6 to 12, requiring at least 3 of those credits to be in a clinic or field placement, and do not permit any experiential learning in the first one-third of law school to count towards the 12 required credit hours. These proposed changes are aimed at increasing the proportion of each student’s law school education that is more directly linked to developing practice skills that are needed post-graduation, bringing legal education more in line with medical education.
In conjunction with its announcement of the proposed increase in experiential learning credits, the Council released a 22-page memorandum that explains in exhaustive detail the many reasons that support the proposal. The importance of this supporting memorandum cannot be understated. The memorandum responds to each of the many concerns revealed during the two years of deliberations – demonstrating that moving forward with the proposal is both supported by the evidence and was arrived at in a transparent and deliberative way. For example, one of the most oft-cited reasons by some against increasing experiential learning is the cost. The claim is that increasing experiential learning credits will necessarily, and presumably unjustifiably, increase the cost of legal education. Setting aside whether the value of experiential legal education is worth any potential cost increase, the memorandum includes studies and articles that push back on the underlying premise that experiential education is necessarily more expensive. Further, the Standards Committee proposal incorporates various mechanisms that respond to the cost issue by, for example, offering alternatives to traditional live client clinics and providing for a three-year runway on implementation.
The Council’s work on accreditation is important in both ensuring the quality of legal education that is offered today and in outlining a landscape for the future of legal education as society evolves. So long as the Council remains guided by certain procedural values like transparency, thoughtful deliberation, and evidence, it is very likely that legal education in the United States, despite changing times, will continue to positively and meaningfully advance the rule of law.
It’s been my pleasure to serve as Chair of the Council this year. The Council is blessed with a vibrant group of Council members, a terrific staff, a wonderful new Managing Director, and a mission that has contemporary relevance. I look forward to continuing to support its important work as Past Chair.