There have been proposals to shorten the time it takes to get a law school degree, and the grounds for these proposals are usually that law school is very expensive, and law students graduate with a ton of debt and then cannot find legal jobs to enable them to pay off that debt, and meanwhile, a large segment of society is underserved by the legal profession. So one solution is to let law students graduate in two years, which presumably would mean that they have 1/3 less debt, and will be willing to practice law at a lower billable rate, serving clients who can't afford an attorney at current rates. But notice that the law students still will be paying heavily for those two years, and going heavily into debt.
It doesn't take a genius to see that a law school is essentially a group of lecture halls adjacent to a law library. And you hardly even need the law library anymore, given the fact that legal research is mainly done online today. Yes, you need law professors who are excellent teachers, but essentially that is a low overhead operation for most subjects, because a law professor can teach a class of 50-100 law students, and most courses do not involve many graded events.
So if you want to make law school affordable, stop using the law school as a cash cow, and charge less per credit hour. If you want to help law students financially even more, make it a mandatory part of first year that they qualify for and pass the requirements to have a paralegal certificate at the earliest opportunity. In other words, a student finishing first year of law school should already have a paralegal certificate as part of the program. Why? Because insurance companies as a general rule will not pay for law clerk time billed by their panel defense counsel. It's not billable, period. Law clerks are no longer hired by insurance defense firms. But paralegal time is billable and paralegals can find work.
Insurance companies in fact wish to have paralegal level work pushed down to paralegals whenever possible. There are available jobs for paralegals with a paralegal certificate, but many law students have to take multiple unpaid internships during law school to get some experience because there are far fewer law clerk jobs.
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