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Some law schools are turning their backs on established tradition by replacing textbook courses with classes that teach practical skills.

The bulk of the 15 new faculty hires made at New York Law School in the last two years were recruited from the ranks of working lawyers. Their mission: to teach practical skills in negotiation, counseling and fact investigation. In the past, new hires like these were usually those focused on legal research.

At Indianas Maurer School of Law offers a course on “emotional intelligence”. The class uses personality assessments and peer reviews to develop students interpersonal skills. There is no textbook.

Other law schools have adapted their third year programs to feature case-based simulations run by practicing lawyers. Even renowned programs are initiating significant curriculum changes. Harvard Law School last year launched a problem-solving class for first-year students, and Stanford Law School is considering making a full-time clinical course—which entails several 40-hour plus weeks of actual case work—a graduation requirement. Changes have been in response to complaints from law firms that recent graduates are not well school in the “practice” of law as distinguished from the intellectual rigor of the profession.

Law firms are saying, Youre sending us people who are not in a position to do anything useful for clients. This is a first effort to try and fix that, says the law dean at Stanford.

These drastic changes are taking place amid a simultaneous downturn in the legal job market. Only about one-quarter of last years graduating law-school classes managed to land jobs at the more prestigious law firms.according to the National Association for Law Placement.

Historically, law firm could bill clients for a new lawyers hours spent working on a client’s account. Now, in tougher economic times,corporate clients have started limiting the number of hours a firm could charge and made it a policy not to pay for first-year associates, explains the general counsel for Xerox Corp. This is all taking place at a time when demand for new law school graduates is way down, coinciding with an overall economic downturn. In 2010, there were more than twice as many people—about 54,000—who passed the bar exam than there were legal job openings in the U.S., according to an analysis by consultants at Economic Modeling Specialists Inc.

While medical school graduation requires practical hands-on training by practicing physicians to supplement class work, law school classes are usually taught by legal academics who have opted to teach rather than be actively engaged in the profession. Law schools have generally lagged behind other, more real-world oriented institutions like business schools in piloting practical improvements, as law professors tend to focus on scholarly work, says a professor at Maurer. And curriculum change tends to move like a glacier, he adds.

While changes in course requirements to include more practical aspects of legal training have been instituted in many university programs, it has yet to be demonstrated with any certainty that the job market will be enhanced by these changes, and many remain skeptical that in this economic downturn new approaches to education will have a meaningful impact on the ability of lawyers to land jo

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