OPINION
8 Obiter Dicta
How Bad is it Really?
Giving Canada’s “Articling Crisis” Another Assessment
marie park › arts & culture editor
W
e’ve heard it for years, we’ve given
it a name now and talk about it incessantly - the “articling crisis” that
haunts the halls of law schools across
the nation, an unprecedented mountain the legal
profession has not seen before.
The worry is not as bad in first year, as everyone is just starting off fresh in building the resumes
and experiences that will become the basis of hiring
decisions in the summers to come. Come time for
OCIs, the crisis begins to loom on a not-distant horizon, where the outcome of the second summer hires
will become a critical factor in whether or not one
can find shelter from the seemingly impending mass
panic. For those who continue to be jobless into
third year (and
mind you, this is
a large number),
the nightmare is
a real and persistent itch that
never gets better until that elusive articling position
is secured.
This is a narrative that applies to many of us, perhaps much more acutely to third years who are still
looking. We feel a sense of hopelessness as the weeks
go by, combined with a lingering disdain for the
unfortunate mix of factors that have catalyzed this
situation in recent years. We try to be positive about
it, but in the end keep asking - why us?
I too have been in this negativity camp for a long
while, until I began to try to see beyond my myopia.
We can all acknowledge that law school is a bubble
of its own, and the same goes for the legal profession. As an exchange student at Tokyo’s Waseda
University Law School, I have recently been blessed
with the opportunity to broaden my mind’s eye - not
only have I learned a lot about the Japanese legal job
market, I’ve come to better appreciate the “crisis” as
a global situation, and not just our own.
Waseda law students are among the top in Japan
- consistently ranking high in the country for their
bar exam pass rates, the Japanese method of ranking law schools. Initially, when I learned that
Japan does not have the equivalent of our articling
requirement, I thought maybe this would then make
the path towards practice that much more painless. Apparently, though, Japanese law students do
not have it any easier than we do. I would say the
opposite - the bar exam pass rate has been historically reported to be the most abysmal in the world,
with a rate of just 6% passing in 2010. Though the
system has been
given wholesale
modifications in
recent years, such
as including the
requirement of
attending a law school (which was not, traditionally,
a requirement), the pass rate is still at an incredible
low of about 24%.
Putting that into perspective, though LSUC does
not publish its bar exam pass rates, it is well known
that it is very high. The bar exam, for most of us,
is more or less taken as a symbolic rite of passage,
rather than an actual test of a candidate’s aptitude
to practice. For us, the real test takes the form of the
longer-term challenge to find and secure an articling
placement, which is a significant factor that bars
some from licensure - recently, the LSUC reported
that up to 12.1% of Ontario law school graduates
did not get hired for articles in 2010/2011. One may
“. . . the ‘crisis’ is a global situation,
and not just our own.”
ê If you thought interviews on Bay Street were demoralizing, try battling the mean streets of Tokyo.
ê Always remember that there is an entire world full of
opportunites for those who choose to see them.
argue, then, that the challenges for law students of
various countries lie at different checkpoints, but
that all countries are common in having a specific
threshold mechanism.
But that is not the end of this discussion - the
global legal job market decline since the recession has added to the already arduous path towards
becoming a lawyer in jurisdictions where the bar
exam stands as the main selection process. My
Japanese friends comment that even after passing the bar, the lack of jobs post-bar is yet another
hurdle that has been thrown at the legal profession.
From what I hear, the challenge to find employment
as a lawyer in Japan may be much tougher than our
articling “crisis,” as we so call it.
The moral of this piece is that it is not so bad after
all. It is all a matter of perspective.
In the end, we too often only react to the perceived hardships that we ourselves are subjected to,
as our own problems are the only real problems of
importance to our narrow-minded selves. We forget
to try to understand our challenges relative to the
bigger picture, and in doing so, create the storms of
our own gloom. Among the most lasting impressions
the Japanese law students have had on me is their
unrelenting optimism despite the bleaker future of
the legal profession in Japan. People do not complain but rather transform that negativity towards a
bubbly attitude that encourages each other to brave
through the long endless days and nights of studying
for the bar. This is something Canadians should learn
to do - channel the worry into something good, to
see beyond our woes, and bring the right kind of
positive professionalism to the legal landscape. u