The Lawyers' Justice Corps

The creation of a Lawyers’ Justice Corps can immediately address two crises in the legal profession:

The lack of access to legal services for a widening segment of society.
The reliance on an outdated exam that fails to measure the competencies required for law practice; imposes heavy costs on candidates; and disproportionately excludes people with limited financial means, people of color, people living with disabilities, and people with caretaking responsibilities.

The Lawyers' Justice Corps addresses these needs by helping states develop an alternative to the traditional bar exam for licensing lawyers. This additional pathway rigorously tests attorney competence without relying on flawed high-stakes exams that increase costs and lengthen the time needed to enter the profession. The Justice Corps pathway to licensure attracts law graduates to public interest positions and allows them to serve disadvantaged clients more quickly, helping to close the justice gap.

The Justice Corps licensing path would supplement other pathways to licensure. Jurisdictions would continue offering the traditional bar exam and licensing most lawyers through that process. The Justice Corps would offer an alternative for candidates who choose that pathway and satisfy the eligibility requirements. For those candidates, the Lawyers’ Justice Corps will provide a pathway that both protects and serves the public.

Here Is How Justice Corps Licensing Works

A jurisdiction’s highest court designates public service organizations that qualify for the program. These organizations should serve underrepresented individuals or communities.
Qualifying organizations hire law graduates for job openings, using their usual hiring practices and offering their customary compensation.
The Justice Corps lawyers begin working for their organizations shortly after law school graduation rather than deferring work to prepare for the bar exam. Many states offer interim or provisional licenses that would allow the new lawyers to perform most lawyering tasks under supervision.
The host organizations supervise and provide regular feedback to the Corps lawyers.
Candidates compile portfolios of written work product, as well as assessments of their performance in client interviews and negotiations. All work product is redacted to protect client interests.
Candidates submit those portfolios anonymously to graders appointed by the board of bar examiners. Those graders use standardized rubrics to determine whether the candidate has demonstrated minimum competence.
If a candidate completes six months of supervised practice, and if graders deem the candidate’s portfolio of work minimally competent, then the candidate is eligible for bar admission without taking the traditional bar exam.
The candidate must satisfy all the jurisdiction’s other requirements for admission, such as graduating from an accredited law school, successful completion of the Multistate Professional Responsibility Exam (MPRE), and completion of a character and fitness review. Justice Corps work only takes the place of passing the traditional bar exam.

The Justice Corps Pathway Will License Only Competent Candidates

Candidates will demonstrate competencies like client interaction, negotiation, and case management that cannot be measured on a traditional bar exam.
The written work created by candidates will reflect authentic communication with clients, colleagues, opposing counsel, courts, and other decisionmakers—rather than the hurried essays produced for the traditional bar exam.
Graders appointed by the board of bar examiners will assess candidates’ portfolios using rubrics that represent the competencies needed for entry-level practice.
Certification will rest on independent graders' evaluation of the candidate’s portfolio of work.
Supervisors will receive support on best practices for supervising and giving feedback to candidates, including training on how to handle candidates who are not meeting expectations.
Graders will develop consensus guidelines for evaluating portfolios, receive training on that evaluation, and participate in regular calibration sessions to ensure reliable evaluation.

The Pathway Will Be Fair to Candidates

The Justice Corps pathway follows the principles of universal design, giving candidates who live with disabilities an equitable opportunity to demonstrate their competence.
The pathway avoids speeded testing, which bears no relationship to the competencies needed to serve clients effectively. Speeded tests, in fact, contradict the importance of careful, reasoned decision-making.
The pathway also avoids traditional modes of standardized testing, which evoke stereotype threat in some candidates.
Supervisors and graders who participate in this pathway will receive training in implicit bias and other forms of unconscious prejudice that may affect their evaluations.

The Lawyers’ Justice Corps Will Increase Access to Justice

Candidates will be available to start work in late May, rather than August. Many public interest organizations need staffing over the summer.
Rather than devoting two months to bar preparation, candidates will devote that time to helping under-served clients.
Candidates will be able to continue serving those clients while other law graduates wait for their bar exams to be graded.
Candidates will learn, practice, and receive feedback on the skills they need to serve clients, rather than memorizing the details of doctrinal rules tested on the bar exam--most of which they are unlikely ever to use.
Candidates will not have to interrupt their client representation if they fail the traditional bar exam. The Justice Corps pathway is designed to help candidates succeed by providing regular feedback and licensing based on the competencies needed to serve clients.
Candidates and lawyers in the Justice Corps will constitute a new network of lawyers who work with and support one another, strengthening public service organizations and the relationships among them.
Support for the Lawyers’ Justice Corps from government and private funders could provide additional financial support to legal service organizations.

Empirical Support for the Pathway

California maintains a program, the Provisional Licensure Program, that allows some law graduates to practice with provisional licenses under a licensed lawyer's supervision. Candidates in one branch of the program can use that supervised practice to demonstrate their minimum competence. Although California’s program differs from the Lawyers’ Justice Corps in some respects, it offers key insights into operation of a Justice Corps pathway. Deborah Jones Merritt, Andrea Curcio, and Eileen Kaufman studied data from California’s program and discovered that:

Candidates, including those from historically disadvantaged backgrounds, were able to find supervisors.
The supervisors provided excellent supervision and training.
The program was particularly attractive to women of color, men of color, and white women.
Candidates from historically disadvantaged backgrounds succeeded in securing licenses through this pathway.

As the researchers’ report reveals, numerous candidates commented on the program’s importance to them, and many supervisors observed that the candidates in this program were more competent than some peers who had passed the bar exam. The research report is available here.

The researchers are now examining a subset of the data limited to organizations that would qualify to participate in a Lawyers' Justice Corps. That data shows:

Those organizations are significantly more likely than other employers to have training and mentoring programs in place for new lawyers.
Those organizations are more likely than other employers to hire first-generation college graduates, licensees who identify as GLBTQIA+, licensees who identify as people with disabilities, women, and people of color.
The provisional licensees allow public interest organizations to serve more clients. Fully 95% of supervisors working for those organizations reported this benefit.
Supervisors at public interest organizations also praised the program for increasing the diversity of their practice teams. More than 93% of public interest supervisors cited this benefit.

Want to Know More?

The Lawyers’ Justice Corps will advance core values of the legal profession. It will protect the public with bar licensure based on proven competence; facilitate career pathways for lawyers committed to full-time social justice work; and demonstrate a jurisdiction’s commitment to both access to justice and thoughtful, nondiscriminatory licensing. For more information, see these resources:

Bloomberg Law Insight: Lawyers' Justice Corps--Public Service in a Time of Crisis
Eileen Kaufman, The Lawyers' Justice Corps: A Licensing Pathway to Enhance Access to Justice
Handout on the Lawyers' Justice Corps