This new empirical study by my colleague (and Dean) Adam Chilton, Peter Joy (Wash U/St. Louis), and Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) could not be more timely.  And if the ABA Council is actually responsive to evidence (that's a big "if") this would get them to change course.

The paper uses data from ABA disclosures to study law schools’ experiential offerings for over a twenty-five-year period, as well as the impact of the 2014 reform where the ABA required students to take six credits to graduate. Three interesting findings:

1.  The key result is figure 15 in the paper. It shows that the 2014 reform — which increased the experiential requirements to six credits — did not increase bar passage rates or employment outcomes (it also didn’t change tuition).  As the authors write:

We…estimate the impact of the ABA’s 2014 reform on students’ post-graduate outcomes and the cost of legal education. To do so, we exploit the considerable differences in the prevalence of experiential offerings across law schools that existed before the ABA reform. In particular, we leverage the fact that some schools already had large numbers of filled experiential positions, while others had relatively few. Comparing the schools that likely witnessed the largest and smallest effects of the reform in a difference-in-differences research design, we find no evidence that the reform affected bar passage rates, employment in JD-advantage jobs, employment in jobs requiring a law license, or law schools’ net tuition.

In other words, the schools that were likely forced to change their curricula the most in response to the reform did not experience improvements in the very student outcomes the ABA uses to evaluate law school performance.

2.  Law schools were already increasing their experiential requirements before the 2014 reform (see Figure 3).  From the paper:

[L]aw schools began increasing available positions well before graduates were required to take a minimum of 6 credits. For example, the share of law schools offering at least five experiential positions per graduating class student increased from 40 percent in 2014 to 56 percent in 2018. That said, the patterns in Figure 3 reveal that the real turning point for experiential offerings at many law schools pre-dated the ABA reform by roughly 6 years, with law schools beginning to offer more and more experiential positions starting in 2009. Although the overall upward trend in offerings continued after the reform, the trend appears to follow the pre-existing linear upward trend that started well before the reform.

3.  The paper also reveals that law schools provide rather different experiential offerings, not explained by their resources (emphasis added, below): 

We [also] study whether differences in experiential offerings across law schools can be explained by their resources. Although some proxies for resources are associated with the number and type of experiential offerings, we find that resources explain only 13 percent of the variation across law schools. Given that there was considerable variation in experiential offerings even among law schools with comparable resources, this suggests that the varied approaches to experiential legal education that law schools took before the ABA’s 2014 reform likely reflected different strategies and philosophies about the best ways to educate different student populations.