The Great Recession has transformed entire industries. From manufacturing to banking and countless sectors in between, each has been or ultimately will be reshaped and retooled. The legal industry is no exception. Over the last two years, our industry's experts have pointed to material and tangible changes in the pricing and delivery of legal services. Many conclude that profound changes — like decreased leverage, the push for cost predictability and increased value-added counseling — are here to stay.

These trends are in large part client-driven. With flat or shrinking budgets and, at best, conservatively optimistic economic projections for nearly all business sectors, the financial impetus for change is front and center. Clients are scrutinizing their legal budgets and undertaking comprehensive evaluations of their legal service providers. These same clients are similarly working with their outside lawyers to increase the predictability of fees and results and to obtain greater value for their dollars. More subtly but surely, these clients are driving their outside lawyers to be business-savvy problem-solvers as a complement to being legal service providers. The lawyers and firms who proactively meet these challenges will do more than survive, they will thrive.

Within the context of these transformative trends is the role of the law school as the institution most responsible for educating lawyers. Undeniably, law schools hold a seat at this table of transformation. The question is: How may law schools better prepare their graduates to meet these accelerated, change-driven challenges?

"Thinking like a lawyer" — a phrase law school professors and their students know well — provides an oversimplified yet helpful summary of a worthy law school training objective. Generally, too, law schools do an excellent job of preparing lawyers to identify legal issues; gather relevant legal frameworks to consider those issues; and work within those frameworks to reach rational, reasoned and supported conclusions. But "thinking like a lawyer," without more, often leaves law school graduates underprepared to add greater value to client engagements upon their entry into the profession. Indeed, graduates intent on counseling businesses, nonprofit organizations or governmental entities (among other clients) would be far more prepared if, upon graduation, they were also "thinking like a client."

To illustrate, upon receiving a lawsuit in a new matter, a first-year litigation associate will likely work up the legal defense, i.e., marshall the facts, conduct legal research and draft an answer or a motion to dismiss. This is precisely how law students are trained — follow the legal framework, anticipate the next step, and prepare a well-reasoned and researched product to satisfy the legal requirements.

While the approach is certainly workmanlike and demonstrates that the first-year lawyer is indeed "thinking like a lawyer," this course of action may unfortunately be entirely divorced from a client's practical expectations and priorities: What are the exposures and other risks posed by the claims? What will your proposed course of action cost, and what benefits will be gained? How else can this dispute be resolved, and what will these alternative solutions cost? What does this dispute say about how I run my business, and what changes, if any, would you recommend for the short and long terms?

In the wake of the Great Recession, these are just some of the top-of-mind questions that greater numbers of clients now routinely pose to their attorneys. Unfortunately, law schools in large part are not training future lawyers to explore and answer these questions and, more important, to shape their legal advice based upon the elicited answers and economic realities.

With more emphasis on "thinking like a client" to complement "thinking like a lawyer," law schools would better equip students with the business acumen needed to succeed in today's practice of law.

One obvious way to address this training gap is for law school curriculum to cover business judgment fundamentals. A single course in client counseling is not enough. Specifically, law students should graduate with skills in cost/benefit analysis, problem solving, strategic thinking and project management. MBA programs equip their graduates with these skills, which are no less applicable to the effective legal representation of clients, and law schools should do the same. For those schools affiliated with MBA programs, joint coursework should be considered to provide law students with the business skills that today's legal industry demands.

If law schools trained students in "thinking like a client" and proactively developed their students' business acumen, new lawyers would be far more sensitive to their clients' practical objectives and realities, and would craft their legal advice and work product to meet both the requirements of the law and the relevant business priorities. Furthermore, those law schools providing a complementary curriculum to develop business acumen would be positive change agents within the legal industry, driving from the ground up the development of skills to make lawyers and their firms more efficient, more valuable and more competitive.

As for "thinking like a lawyer," which remains a vital attribute, more emphasis on the actual practice of law would also result in better prepared graduates. While all law schools provide some practical coursework, a much deeper commitment to teaching the real, practical application of the law in today's world is needed. One consideration certainly worth exploring is whether law students would benefit from developing a focus, similar to MBA students selecting a concentration or medical students a specialty. Broad exposure to the law is absolutely required in order to develop into a competent attorney, but a deep and practical exposure to specific practice areas is by no means an inconsistent, unworthy or untenable objective. Students emerging from a practice-oriented education will be that much better prepared to meet the expectations of the clients they will serve, right out of the graduation gate.

Similarly, law schools should complement the practice-specific classroom experience with practical clinics or externships that provide real client interaction. The variety of options for clinical education is remarkable in Pennsylvania's law schools. From tax preparation workshops to clinics for HIV victims, and many areas in between, each clinic provides something that no other law school experience can — client interaction. Clinical education brings law students to the understanding that legal service is client service, as any practicing attorney recognizes.

The variety of clinical experiences offered by law schools should be expanded, and their value should be greatly emphasized to provide more law students with deeper experiences in the practice of law before they graduate.

Another related need is for law schools to actively direct students expressing an interest in a specified practice area to the relevant coursework and clinical opportunities. A great deal of the three-year legal education consists of course electives, and for students intent on becoming business lawyers, criminal defense attorneys, tax specialists, civil litigators, securities lawyers, etc., these elective slots could collectively provide a deep exposure to the relevant, practice-specific legal frameworks. Law schools need to guide students to select those electives and clinical opportunities most closely aligned with their individualized career objectives.

By encouraging and guiding students to a practice-oriented curriculum, the law school will do more to ensure a deeper understanding of the practical, real-world application of the law. Even if following graduation the new lawyer pursues a different area of focus, the benefits derived during law school will never be lost. Skills and knowledge developed through practical education and experiences should apply to any chosen legal specialty.

In discussing the impact of the Great Recession upon the legal industry, the law of supply and demand must also be referenced. The truth is that certain regions and practice areas currently have too many lawyers. Yet the general trend of most law schools continues to be growth.

Law schools need to better assess both the number of lawyers they graduate and the practice areas to which these graduates are headed. It is true that too many lawyers is a smaller problem than too few. However, law schools, their students and the legal industry would all benefit from "rightsizing" the output of law school graduates and their expected areas of practice in the marketplace. Better communication between law schools and the potential employers of law school graduates is needed to foster this symbiotic relationship.

One comforting observation about the Great Recession is that the vital role lawyers play in society has not diminished. Legal services remain very much in demand, in some ways now more than ever. But the Great Recession has accelerated a shift in expectations regarding how legal services are to be delivered, especially to commercial enterprises, nonprofit organizations, governmental entities and other similar clients.

These transformations in the legal industry should drive law schools to evolve in order to maximize the opportunity they have to prepare law students to meet the expectations and realities of the clients they will serve.

Reprinted with permission from the April 13, 2010 edition of the Legal Intelligencer, 2010 ALM Media Properties, LLC. All rights reserved. Further duplication without permission is prohibited.