Strong performance in law school less frequently translates to the intricacies of on-the-job experience. Competency requirements are expanding to better prepare law students to be effective legal professionals.
Each year, thousands of new lawyers enter the profession having met the expectations placed in front of them: completing law school, earning strong grades, and passing the bar exam. Yet a persistent question remains. Are they ready to practice?
This question of practice readiness reflects a broader challenge. The systems that shape the profession — legal education, licensure, and hiring — are not consistently aligned around a shared understanding of what it means for a new lawyer to be ready to practice law.
Beyond academics
Law schools traditionally emphasize academic performance and legal theory. The bar exam, which focuses largely on knowledge of the law, is intended to assess minimum competence for licensure, though research has shown substantial misalignment between what the bar exam tests and the knowledge and skills that constitute minimum competence. At the same time, legal employers are often looking for something more practical in hiring, like the ability to communicate clearly, exercise professional judgment, solve problems, and work effectively with clients in real-world situations.
Hiring decisions continue to rely heavily on proxies such as school attended, class rank, and GPA. These signals are easy to compare, but they offer only a partial view of a candidate’s ability to perform in practice. Still, the practical skills employers are looking for in hiring are not typically directly measured or consistently assessed across education and licensure.
The result is a fundamental disconnect. What is taught, what is tested, and what is rewarded in hiring do not fully line up. This has real consequences. Employers must invest time and resources in developing foundational skills after hiring. Candidates have fewer ways to demonstrate readiness, which can privilege certain pathways over others. Across the profession, this can reinforce inequities by relying on signals that do not fully capture capability.
Meeting today’s needs
A growing number of legal educators, employers, and national organizations — like the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS), and The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) — are working to address this by focusing on competencies rather than proxies. These approaches define practice readiness in terms of observable skills and behaviors, creating clearer expectations for students and more meaningful ways to assess them. Research-driven collaborations are helping build greater alignment across systems that have traditionally operated independently. They create an opportunity to align education, licensure, and hiring around a shared understanding of what it means to be prepared to meet the needs of today’s clients.
Critics of these efforts sometimes worry that they could lower standards. In reality, however, the goal is to strengthen standards by making them clearer, more consistent, and more transparent — and that work is already underway.
The Conference of Chief Justices (CCJ) and the Conference of State Court Administrators (COSCA) recently adopted an evidence-based definition of practice readiness — drawing heavily from IAALS’ research — and aligned it with their definition of minimum competence. That step alone brings the profession closer to a shared foundation. Law schools are beginning to integrate competencies into curriculum and testing. Employers are incorporating them into hiring and professional development.
The result is a more coherent pipeline that strengthens hiring, expands opportunity, and better reflects what it actually takes to succeed as a lawyer in today’s world.
