As tuition rises and the number of job openings shrink, the legal world is attempting to deal with a looming crisis.  For a long time, bloggers have been writing about the “law school scam.”  Using charts and graphs to compare the value of a law school to its cost has become a popular past time.  Articles claiming to identify which school’s law degree will bring you the most financial value have begun appearing all over the internet.  Input the search term “law school value” into Google and you’ll receive 245 million results.  And with few signs of improvement for legal job prospects, debate surrounding the value of a legal degree has only grown fiercer.

In the summer of 2012, the American Bar Association created a task force to address some of these concerns. In February, the task force presented its findings to the American Bar Association.  It proposed overhauling the law school model, including shortening the time required to two years.  It also proposed changes to accreditation and bar admission standards and proposed creating a greater reliance on legal specialists who do not hold a law degree.

What effect these recommendations might have remains uncertain.  But it’s clear that schools have taken notice.  In addition to the implementation of tuition freezes at some schools, just this month the University Of Arizona Board Of Regents voted to actually decrease tuition for both residents and non-residents.  It’s a bold move, the first of its kind.  But as law school applications head towards a 30-year low, it’s not likely to slow the decline in matriculating students.

With the average debt of private law school graduates in 2011 coming in at $125,000, and with the rise of online legal services such as LegalZoom (which lets you create common legal documents online), the legal field requires a much more drastic change.  Part of that change may come from a realignment in expectations.  On April 9th, Reuters reported that New York law firm Shearman & Sterling, LLP was reducing pay for high earners in order to decrease the pay ratio between its employees.  Their new model intends to better reward individual performance and to quell grumbling from junior partners.

But if a sudden revival in the legal job market remains elusive, great changes in both legal education and legal practice may occur over the next few years.  The current imbalance between the supply of debt-burdened new lawyers and the demand for traditional legal services puts a great deal of pressure on the legal world to adapt.  Some have suggested following the example of the medical field by creating new roles for advanced legal practitioners who hold higher certifications than a paralegal but who lack a Juris Doctor (the standard degree obtained after three years of law school).  It’s an interesting proposal, one which Washington State has fully embraced, though the details of the training and the effectiveness of such practitioners remain to be seen.  Still, despite such upheaval, one thing remains certain: people still need lawyers. Just who will fulfill that role in the future–and how they will be trained–remains an unanswered question.