Law School and Career Switching - more on Concord Law School Blog

Following up from a comment to the 22 July post, here is a Concord Law School blog.

As mentioned earlier, Concord Law School's website is http://www.concordlawschool.edu.

As a lawyer might say, no endorsement of either CLS or the above blog is implied - like "fair use" in a different context, this is for education and discussion purposes only.

I have several questions about this which I will continue to follow.

The top level question I have is, what is the value of law school in career development in the first place?

I'm known enough attorneys to know that there are many different kinds and flavors of attorney careers in at least several different working environments - that's a topic which deserves its own blog, and probably they're already out there.

But credentials can also have "off-label" value (in the pharmaceutical sense) in developing a career.

Is it possible that a person who has no real intention of becoming an attorney could still find it useful to get a law degree? There are very successful people with law degrees who are not practicing attorneys - by their choice, not necessarily because they got in trouble.

Did the law degree lead to that success or was it a wrong turn? If a person was seeking to model that success, would they want to include law school in the model?

The movie The Great Buck Howard has this as a plot hook where the Colin Hanks/Troy Gable character quits law school to be a writer and ends up being the road manager for the wacky Buck Howard stage magician.

Aside from the character hating law school, did he need to quit law school to do that?

A second and related question: Does having a law degree (or name the degree of your choice) give a person more career options? Or does it actually reduce a person's career options?

A third question is, given that one has decided for whatever reason that a law degree is a worthwhile mid-career/career switch pursuit, about Concord Law School itself and its model of legal education. Law school isn't just about academics. My understanding of first-year law school, even part-time law school, may be wrong, but it is that the usual model is an intensive and intimidating classroom experience which I can't imagine could be simulated in an on-line course - where people are called on at random to stand up and recite cases which hopefully they read beforehand. And lack of attendance is fatal - I've heard things like 4 absences for any reason is auto-flunk. It's like a kind of cultish boot camp to acculturate minds in a certain way.

I'm not at all saying that they can't do it, but I'm wondering how CLS's pedagogy, given that online courses would have to be radically different from the Law 1 classroom experience, would achieve the same result.