Law Schools: A Peek at the Pros

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The nation's "esoteric" law schools "fail to help the practicing lawyer," fumes E. Donald Shapiro. "They prattle about great principles, but who is helping the slob in Cedar Rapids?"

The answer has to be Shapiro, 34, the choleric boss of Michigan's thriving Institute of Continuing Legal Education on the state university campus at Ann Arbor. Last year Shapiro lured 2,500 U.S. lawyers through a blinding blizzard to Michigan's Annual Advocacy Institute. This year 3,500 lawyers showed up from 49 states, Canada and Mexico. For two days in Ann Arbor, they positively drooled as leading judges presided over mock personal-injury trials and master cross-examiners demolished hapless witnesses.

Promoter Shapiro, once a Philadelphia lawyer noted for proving a ship unseaworthy because one of its mates had malaria, got into the teaching business because he was apparently avid for audiences bigger than juries. He now tours 14 Michigan cities with 53 programs for practicing lawyers. Delighted to be called "dean," Shapiro is wont to order lawyer-aides to pick up his children at school, or require them to don white coats and serve cocktails. He first-names Michigan Supreme Court justices, tells everyone who will listen that "educators should get off their duffs," papers the country with lawyer-luring ads that make academic purists swallow their pipestems. For all that, Shapiro has made Michigan's I.C.L.E. one of the best of its kind in the U.S.

Careless Defendant. At this year's Advocacy Institute ($35), Shapiro's 3,500 students first boned up on two tomes of theory, plus detailed, fictitious depositions. After Yale Professor Fleming James lectured on "reasonable standard of care," they watched courtroom maestros examine "Thomas Covington III," an alert lawyer-actor who insisted that he had taken every precaution before burning grass on his property. A sudden wind gust just happened to whip up the flames that incinerated Neighbor Harvey Williams' $75,000 house, stables and horses.

For Plaintiff Williams, San Francisco's famed, ferocious Lawyer Marvin E. Lewis grilled Covington:

Q. Did you think of calling the Williamses? ,4. No.

Q. Did you think of getting a hose ready?

A. No.

Q. Did you think about the possibility of a change in the weather?

A. No.

"All right!" shouted Lewis, rushing to a blackboard and scrawling in huge letters: DID NOT THINK. The "jurors" roared.