When I think about the past decade in legal education, and the ways in which the work of preparing students for practice has changed, three developments stand out. They are not unrelated, in fact, the most important insight I have taken from my time as dean is that they are deeply connected to one another. But let me take them in turn.
The first is cost and access. Legal education has become increasingly expensive, and concerns over it on the part of students have intensified considerably in recent years.  It is now being reshaped in ways that will require law schools to respond thoughtfully. The recent passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill has capped federal graduate loan borrowing at $50,000 annually. The practical effect on students, particularly those from less affluent backgrounds, is real and immediate. Law schools that are not actively working to expand scholarship support will find themselves in an increasingly difficult competitive position, and more importantly, will be turning away students who deserve the opportunity to pursue a legal career.
Accordingly, at the University of Cincinnati’s Donald P. Klekamp College of Law, we have made this a priority. We have worked hard to keep tuition manageable and to expand scholarship support. We were fortunate this spring to receive a transformational naming gift, the largest in our nearly 200-year history, that will, among other things, significantly expand our ability to offer scholarships that make a Cincinnati legal education accessible to the students we most want to serve. It is a welcome development at a moment when it is very much needed.
The second trend is the rise of experiential learning as an expectation rather than a supplement. A decade ago, clinical and experiential opportunities were something students sought out. Today, they are something students expect, and frankly, something the legal profession rightly demands. 
The challenge for most law schools, including ours, is that the traditional vehicle for experiential education, the in-house clinic with a supervising faculty clinician and a small cohort of students, is not scalable. The clinic plays a vital role, but law schools cannot replicate it across an entire student body without resources that most schools simply do not have. The answer for us lies in expanded externships and off-site clinical partnerships. They offer students a rich and varied range of real-world experiences, and they can reach far more students. At UC Law, more than 95% of our students now engage in a credit-bearing, live client experience before graduation. To make that possible, we had to build real partnerships with law firms, government agencies, nonprofits, and courts. That kind of engagement is just one example of the ways we can continue to benefit through working together toward our common aims and in alignment with our shared values.
The third trend is the most consequential, and in some ways the most difficult to act on: the need for a genuinely integrated approach to student success. Legal education has long operated in silos, experiential learning in one place, academic support in another, wellness programming somewhere else, bar preparation at the end. The problem is that students do not live in silos. The student who struggles with bar passage is often also facing financial stress, mental health challenges, and gaps in professional identity. The student who thrives is usually one whose experience of law school has been coherent, where the doctrinal, practical, and personal dimensions of legal education have reinforced one another.
At UC Law, we have tried to take this seriously in several ways. We recently revised our first-year curriculum to add a required spring-semester course, Client-Centered Legal Practice, which asks students to take what they learned in the fall and apply it in extended simulations that look like actual lawyering. The goal is not to teach new doctrine but to show students how the doctrine they already know becomes client service. We run our academic success programming from pre-orientation through bar preparation, deliberately connected rather than episodic. And we have invested in wellness infrastructure and a genuine community of belonging, because we believe those things are not separate from professional formation, they are part of it.
Cutting across all three of these trends is the emergence of generative AI. It affects how we think about the cost of legal services and access to law. It is transforming the skills that practice-readiness requires. And it raises profound questions about professional identity that are exactly the questions we should be asking our students to wrestle with throughout their legal education. We are actively working on how to integrate AI into the curriculum thoughtfully, not as a prohibition and not uncritically, but as a tool that our students will need to use with skill and discernment. We know that the bar is watching, and that the profession is changing faster than our curricula typically move.
These are genuinely exciting times to be in legal education, even as they are demanding ones. The students coming to law school today are talented, motivated, and clear-eyed about what they need. Our job is to meet them at that level.
Dean Haider Ala Hamoudi has served as Dean of the University of Cincinnati College of Law since 2023, leading a period of significant growth and innovation marked by increased enrollment, enhanced student success outcomes, and expanded experiential learning opportunities. A recognized scholar of Middle Eastern and Islamic law, he serves as Editor-in-Chief of Arab Law Quarterly and previously held senior leadership roles at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law.