IF KIM KARDASHIAN CAN DO IT, COULD YOU?

IF KIM KARDASHIAN CAN DO IT, COULD YOU?

Did you know that famous lawyers, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, Daniel Webster and Clarence Darrow never went to law school? I didn’t know until today that law school was only one of a few alternative ways to become a lawyer. In order to save on the high cost of tuition and living expenses, about $150,000, a student can chose to do an apprenticeship in lieu of law school. Well, that was a surprise to me!

California is one of only four states (California, Virginia, Vermont, and Washington) where you don't need a law degree in order to take the bar exam. Instead, you can enter into an apprenticeship. In California, this option is called the “Law Office Study Program”. All lawyers seeking to forego law school must meet the following stipulations:

- Sit in a practicing attorney’s office for 18 hours per week for a period of four continuous years for 48 weeks per year
- Passage of the First-Year Law Students’ Examination
- A positive moral character determination
- Passage of the Multi-state Professional Responsibility Examination
- Passage of the California Bar Examination

This path is quite uncommon. In 2015, only three out of 13,084 Californians who took the bar exam were educated through the “law office study” option and only two of them passed. In 2022, a rather surprising candidate plans to take the bar exam using the apprenticeship option - Kim Kardashian West - the American media personality, businesswoman, socialite, and model.

Although Kardashian West has never received a bachelor’s degree in any discipline, she began apprenticing with a lawyer in the summer of 2018 and plans to take the California bar exam in 2022. I speculate that this would be a very difficult alternative to going to law school, where you must learn the exact same legal content that regular students study over three intensive years of college. I wish Ms Kardashian every success, but am a little skeptical that she will be able to commit to the rigours of 18 hours a week for 48 weeks a year for four years!

I then wondered if the medical profession might follow the example of the legal profession by offering apprenticeships in medicine. If a junior medical student were to follow a practising doctor for 4years, for 48 weeks a year for 24 hours a week and study the Gray’s Anatomy textbook from cover to cover, would they be qualified to become a doctor. Or possibly my wife has discovered an alternatively successful method of becoming an expert physician. She has carefully watched and absorbed every television episode of The Good Doctor, Chicago Med, The Resident, House, Code Black, and New Amsterdam and is well versed in both ordinary illnesses and exotic diseases. She often informs our own GP that, “Dr House would now how to cure my cold in minutes, why can’t you?”

It is nice to now know that the apprenticeship practice has now extended beyond plumbing, electrical work, and sheet metal work into the practice of law. Can baby faced young men and women with a copy of Gray’s Anatomy clutched under their arm and practising medicine be far behind?