Ironies of the Legal Profession?

Funny to see the juxtaposition in the New York Times of a piece berating law schools for the irrelevance of their curriculum and then a piece about our former co-blogger Elizabeth Warren, a law professor whose work can be called anything but irrelevant (unless you think conceiving and standing up a new government agency that some think is the Leviathan itself is irrelevant). 

There's lots to say about what's right and what's wrong in the NYT piece on law schools--maybe for a future post--but for now let's just say that it paints with too broad of a brush. There are certainly real problems with the law school curriculum and legal scholarship, but the NYT didn't quite capture them.  The bigger problem with the piece, I think was that it accepted the idea that law schools should be preparing students with practice knowledge like where to file a certificate of merger. Baked into this critique is an acceptance of the beleagured economics of the legal profession, where billing is usually by the hour, rather than by the service, so clients often pay premium rates for non-premium services (that frankly don't require a legal education). This is what clients are increasingly pushing against--why pay laywers for work that doesn't really involve much training or knowledge? If law schools aren't succeeding in training their graduates to perform the non-premium services, is that really a failing? Or are law schools actually training students in the critical thinking skills-- statutory interpretation skills and policy argument skills--that can sustain premium billing rates?