The first comment to this Juan Non-Volokh post (inviting comments on the usefulness of the third year of law school) sums up the problem:
However, as a practicing attorney, I'm embarrassed to admit that I like the fact that there are so many barriers to entry into the legal services market, like expensive tuition and a difficult first year. If an extra year at $15K or $20K keeps a lot of poor but smart people out of the profession, so much the better.
Back in January, I posted on the lack of respect (particularly titular) afforded the JD, and (only half-jokingly) insisted that JDs should be commonly addressed as "Doctor" (at least as much as PhDs). I think that the JD serves a distinct academic purpose, yet one not fully realized by most students, who fetishize lucrative jobs that (statistically) most will loathe within a few months actual employment. The effects BIGLAW fetish manifests, curricularly, in students as an obsession with taking the "right" and "practical" courses. While these can prove useful, their actual value is sorely limited.
There's an extremely high utility to each class in the first year, where one truly learns to "think like a lawyer". But, once assimilated into the lawyering culture, additional coursework in "substantive" areas is necessarily artificial and, as far too many 3Ls can attest to, extremely banal. One is probably better served by taking non-doctrinal courses, such as seminars, that can actually shape and develop the way one thinks about the law, instead of spoon-feeding tiny slivers of the vast amount of "black letter" law a practicing attorney should know in their field. Practice admission ought to have the most minimal, if any, formal education requirements. (I hesitate to say insist on none because there's also ample reason to doubt that current bar exams are a proper barrier to entry as well, and I think that some minimum competency should be demonstrated through a formal institution, be it educational or by examination.)
Again, I think the JD serves a useful purpose, but not as an appropriate minimal qualification to enter into the practice of law. A modified business school approach to law degree-granting would be a vast improvement (the MBA as a graduate professional degree, the longer and curricularly different PhD as the academic degree; two different law degrees doesn't seem unreasonable). A several-tiered hierarchy of law school degrees seems especially promising to me, perhaps to award the LLB after the first year (and allow admission to the bar; people often seem to forget the, in the U.S., the LLB was generally a second degree, even though baccalaureate), the LLM after the second (in specific concentrations), the JD after the third, perhaps even with the addition of a dissertation requirement. Of course, this plan would lead to the elimination of SJDs/JSDs, but they're quite uncommon among U.S.-trained lawyers as it is. And my plan would also eliminate the exceedingly silly master's degree beyond the doctorate.