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Virtually every consumer-facing industry requires some form of disclosure. From your mortgage to your Meat Lover’s® pizza, we live in a world where some statute, regulation, or ordinance requires vendors to disclose certain key facts about the products and services we buy every day. Some businesses have even started adopting practices from other industries, such as Apple’s “Privacy Nutrition Labels” that aim to import a widely recognized practice — standardized nutrition disclosures on packaged foods — into a new domain.
We’ve come to expect this kind of structured disclosure in nearly every major purchase — except, oddly, the ones that may matter most: higher education, and especially legal education. I can’t buy an air conditioner without a sticker that tells me how much manatee habitat it will destroy during its expected useful life, but I can still buy a $200,000 law degree without much understanding of what I’m getting or how it might (or might not) serve my needs.
To be fair, legal education does have some transparency practices. In 2012, 90 years after it first established standards for legal education, the American Bar Association revised Standard 509 that requires accredited law schools to publish on their websites information about admission standards, attrition, employment outcomes, graduate salary data, and various demographic data, in a format that makes it easier for prospective students to compare schools.
But Standard 509 says nothing about law school curriculum, and certainly not at the course level. It’s great to know that 87% of graduates got jobs, but what courses and law school experiences got them there? What is the difference between “Media Law” and “Entertainment Law?” Is “Negotiations” going to expose me to hands-on negotiated exercises, or is it an examination of negotiation theory?
Simply put, at most schools there is no requirement to explain to students what they will learn in a particular class, how it relates to their other courses, or what kind of real-world roles it might support. And that is where students can be left adrift — navigating course selection with little more than word of mouth, cryptic and often overly rosy catalog copy, and urban legends handed down from upper-division students.
While students may be assigned an advisor who at least nominally assists with course selection, it is unreasonable to expect that person to have deep insight into every course in the curriculum or every practice area that a student may want to pursue.
The Course Compass
Enter the Course Compass: a concise, one-page disclosure that helps students understand how a particular course fits into their academic path and future career goals — outlining its practical relevance, real-world applications, and related coursework.
A well designed course compass document should contain, at a minimum, the following elements:
- Real-World Relevance: What kinds of problems does this course help students solve? Which industries, practice areas, or client types will find it most applicable?
- Theory vs. Practice: Is the course mostly academic or hands-on? Will students analyze doctrine, draft legal documents, or both?
- Career Utility: What roles, internships, or practice areas align best with this course? Are there related clinics or residencies
- Bar Relevance: Does the course cover content or skills tested on most bar exams?
- Curriculum Adjacency & Learning Advancement: What courses naturally complement this one? Are there relevant CLEs, student organizations, or professional associations?
Bonus Points: Alignment with Professional Competency Frameworks
Another valuable component for a Course Compass is a brief note on how a course aligns with established professional competency frameworks — particularly the Foundations for Practice model developed by the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System (IAALS). Based on feedback from over 24,000 lawyers, that model identifies a wide range of competencies new lawyers need to thrive, including legal analysis, client interaction, time and project management, and teamwork.
Notably, the IAALS framework builds on earlier efforts like the ABA’s MacCrate Report, the Carnegie Report’s call for integration of knowledge, skills, and professional identity, and more recent articulations like The Whole Lawyer and the NCBE’s NextGen Bar Exam content areas. Including a note in the Course Compass about which competencies a course cultivates can help students better connect coursework to professional development and future roles.
It also invites faculty to think intentionally about how their teaching prepares students for practice — not just to pass exams, but to actually serve clients and contribute meaningfully to the legal profession.
This All Sounds Suspiciously Like a Syllabus
Not quite. Syllabi are internal documents, often released after registration, and typically structured to facilitate course administration and management for students who have already enrolled; not helping students decide whether they should enroll. You might think of a Course Compass as a travel brochure, and the syllabus is a comprehensive itinerary. One is about expectations once you’re on the trip; the other helps you decide whether to go on the trip in the first place.
You can also think of a Course Compass like the declarations page of an insurance policy. The “dec sheet” generally includes the material terms of a policy, such as the named insured, the property or person that is covered, coverage limits, deductibles, and the premium. The formal legal agreement between the insurer and the insured is in the pages that follow.
Ideally, the Course Compass becomes a scaffolding device for students and faculty alike. For students, the context supplied by the document will encourage strategic course selection, beyond the usual cadre of reasons for picking a course: “this sounds interesting,” “my friend is taking it,” or “it fits into my schedule.”
For faculty, the process of summarizing a course will help identify areas where a course may benefit from additional perspectives, new teaching approaches, and potential collaboration with other faculty members teaching adjacent courses.
The Course Compass and Academic Freedom
Some may worry the Course Compass would be burdensome to faculty or constrain academic freedom. But a well-designed Compass is less about regulating what faculty teach, and more about inviting them to explain why it matters — and for whom. Most professors already have this clarity in their head; they just don’t write it down anywhere, and even if they do, it’s generally not accessible to students before the registration period opens.
If anything, developing a Course Compass creates an opportunity for professors to showcase the real-world utility of their course, and attract the students who will be most engaged. It also builds bridges across doctrinal and practice-based faculty, highlighting how even foundational or theory-heavy courses can connect to legal competencies and outcomes.
Start Small; Scale in Time
I would expect that most schools wouldn’t want to roll something like this out overnight. Upper-division courses seems like the most logical place to start since students have the most choice over their curriculum at that stage, and the importance of aligning their program to future career objectives becomes paramount.
Even though students do not generally have much choice with respect to the first-year curriculum, I believe the Course Compass model could be useful for required courses as well. While it would have less value as a decisionmaking tool, since students have few decisions to make, it would still be useful for some students who want to better understand how their required curriculum fits into their law school roadmap.
Eventually, just as Standard 509 data is now an expected part of most law schools, the Course Compass could become a basline expectation for modern legal curriculum — something that students expect in advance of each semester’s registration, and something that faculty prepare as part of the course approval process.
In Sum
One of the ironies of legal education is that we theoretically train students to make client-centered decisions in practice, but the law schools themselves offer little in the way of client-centeredness. No practitioner would ever tell a paying client: “You’ll figure out what this contract means after you sign it.” But that’s more or less what we tell students every time we expect them to sign up for class with nothing more than a list of courses and some generic descriptions that often haven’t been updated to match the current version of a particular course.
The Course Compass is about extending the logic of informed consent — so central to lawyering — to the law students themselves. It doesn’t dictate choices, but it ensures those choices are made with eyes open.
Try it Yourself: Examples & Template
Below is an example Course Compass document I created for my Media Law course that I teach in the hybrid J.D. program at the University of New Hampshire Franklin Pierce School of Law (you can download a PDF copy by clicking on the image below).
Ready to try it for yourself? Click here for a blank Course Compass template in Microsoft Word DOC format. Of course, you should experiment with your own structure and style, but this may help you get started.