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In a recent article, the NY Times reports that researchers at UC Berkeley “have come up with a test that they say is better at predicting success in the field than the widely used Law School Admission Test [LSAT].”

For the uninitiated, the LSAT is the standardized test that all law school hopefuls must endure because the majority of law schools rely very heavily on an applicant’s LSAT score during the admissions process.

But, according to the Times, the LSAT is a poor measure of how the potential law student will actually perform as a lawyer. In response, the aforementioned researchers developed a new test.

• First, the researchers identified 26 factors that measure “raw lawyerly talent.” 
•  Next, they interviewed a variety of individuals in the legal profession, asking them to identify lawyers whom they consider to be “effective.”
• Finally, they administered the test to 1,100 lawyers.

Shockingly, when the results came in, the researchers concluded that the experimental test is much better at “predicting lawyer effectiveness” than the LSAT, which, at best, only predicts how a potential law student will perform in law school. (Note, however, that the LSAT is not regularly administered to lawyers as most lawyers, having already  graduated from law school, have no need to take an admissions test for law school.)

Apparently, the new test relies on questions designed to gauge how well subjects respond to relevant hypothetical situations.

For example, it might describe a company with a policy requiring immediate firing of any employee who lied on an application, then ask what a test taker would do upon discovering that a top-performing employee had omitted something on an application.

Policies? Employees? Personally, I’d call an employment lawyer (just to be on the safe side).

To be fair, the article does note that the researchers realize that the “the participants might have performed differently on it, had they taken the test when they were applying to law school.” (Then again, I would guess that most people who can’t speak Russian would probably perform rather poorly on a test in Russian.)

I’m not trying to defend the LSAT. And, I imagine that the researchers’ new test probably does do a better job at predicting how a subject will perform as a lawyer since it seems to require attending law school in order to answer the questions.

The problem is that we already have a test for law school graduates who would like to become licensed attorneys…

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The Daily Journal (subscription required) states that civil trials in California dropped by 28% during the fiscal year of 2006–07. According to the same article, the reason most often cited by lawyers, judges, and academics is the cost of litigation and trial.

I suppose rising litigation costs could account for a slow decline in the number of civil trials over the course of a decade, but I find it unlikely that such a steep drop in one fiscal year can be solely attributed to the cost of litigation and trial. Maybe it was just a strange year.

Also, I’m not sure how one can draw any conclusions looking at the number of civil trials in a vacuum.

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