The American Bar Association Board of Governors are backing a proposal that would allow law school graduates that cannot take the bar (if it is not offered in the Summer of 2020) be able to have a limited practice while they await the bar exam and subsequent scores. In Illinois, a 711 license is used in public practice exclusively, it cannot be used in public practice, but allows students to get practical knowledge underneath a seasoned attorney. I personally had the ability to use the 711 license with a States Attorney’s office during the summer break between my 2L and 3L year. Normally the 711 license has a limit on how long it can be used and does not allow for use after the 3L year without approval of the dean of their respective law school and still can only practice in the public sector. That is great, under normal circumstances. During this pandemic we are facing the struggle of each state regulating when their law school graduates will sit for the bar examination. Many states aren’t seeing the end of this pandemic possibly until June or July. As of right now, the Illinois Board of Admissions are still planning on sitting the July 2020 exam. However, should the state extend the stay at home order the Illinois Board of Admissions may have to postpone the bar examination. What this means is that many of these attorneys that would be taking the bar exam in July and getting their scores in October won’t possibly see the inside of an exam room until later in 2020. This puts potential attorneys, law firms, and attorneys who are planning to retire in a bind because there could be a real shortage of attorneys. As someone who just started a firm and is like “yes I need clients” this means that I might have the ability to take on more clients. However, in some areas this will overwhelm the attorney population. In the pandemic when courts are closed we aren’t necessarily getting a ton of new cases and we definitely are not getting new court dates. But as soon as the courts and society gets back going, our cases are going to skyrocket. We are going to need the new attorneys to help take on the backlog of cases, work, and clients we are going to get.
The American Bar Association is backing something that would let graduates waiting on the bar to practice in limited circumstances. This only applies to graduates from the 2020 school year and they must take the exam by 2021. If a graduate would fail the exam then they would not be eligible to be able to use this exception. The American Bar Association’s proposal would extend the ability from just public practices to private practices as well. The licensed attorney that would be supervising would have to sign a form and the graduates would have to meet all other requirements that an attorney is required to have, except for sitting for the bar exam. I am sure that for the malpractice companies they are like whoa whoa whoa. Let’s be real attorney’s sometimes make mistakes. Someone who hasn’t even passed the bar yet and may end up not being able to practice in the future may be practicing. Hopefully under the careful supervision of an experienced attorney. This would be good for our practice because we will be able to get more training in for attorneys prior to sending them out on their own. My own experience was being sent to court on the first day I started any attorney position and being sent to trial on a second day. I walked around not knowing where anything was not knowing anyone and not even having been in my office yet. I was just out of law school. This was two months after I had passed the bar exam and I had been working for a friend of my mom’s ordering products to stock his store online (which is helping me a lot now that I’m running my own business by the way, thanks Alan). My only court experience was clerking in a federal district court, clerking in a much smaller county court, and practicing as a 711 under local states attorney in traffic court. I had not touched family law in college, let alone practiced any of it. I also had been to St. Clair County in general maybe once during my entire life and never to the court house. Coming straight out of law school it was a lot. Now some five years later I’m comfortable moving around court houses and types of cases, but coming out of law school it was not the case. I think this will give our new attorneys more confidence and education in the practical areas that aren’t taught in law school.
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