A Good Lawyer is Hard to Find (Guest Opinion‪)‬

A recent article in the New York Times described a new test developed by two professors at the University of California, Berkeley, that is supposed to be an improvement over the LSAT (Law School Admission Test) in predicting who will be a good lawyer. The LSAT has been in wide use for many years, though perhaps not as far back as some folks think. In my day (circa "Remember The Maine") the only credential submitted with an application to law school was the college transcript. In fact, my law school class was one of the guinea pig groups for the LSAT; after admission, we took a primitive form of the test, and the results were later measured against our actual law school performance. This tends to substantiate the most important criticism of the LSAT, which is that it measures potential achievement in law school, not in the actual practice of law.