I think it would be hard to be a competent lawyer without going to law school. Good law schools change the way you think, and that's not something that you can get self studying.
It is true that you can pass the bar without going to school. In fact law school does not prepare you for the bar exam. Most people take a supplemental course after law school just to prep for the exam. I am pretty sure that a reasonably bright person could just do the prep and pass the exam. But the exam itself is sort of a joke in that the material you are tested on is pretty orthogonal to what you'd need to know to be a good lawyer.
I've heard this expressed many times from various people: law schools love engineers because they already know how to think analytically and don't have to be taught that. This is independent of whether they learned any form of engineering in school or not.
As far as the bar exam being a joke, if that's true, that's broken. If the more important thing is going to law school for 3 years, then why put so much emphasis on the bar exam t all? There are people who graduate to law school but never pass the exam, or the ones who try and try again and pass it on their 4th or 5th try, if they went to school why isn't that meaningful? Either the schooling isn't all that it's cracked up to be or the metric doesn't measure the right things, but either way there's an impedance mismatch which means the system is broken.
> law schools love engineers because they already know how to think analytically and don't have to be taught that
I went to engineering school as an undergraduate. In my opinion, the biggest value of a traditional engineering education is that you learn how to solve problems. This works very well in the software industry where X is supposed to do Y but does Z.
First year: Traditional coresciences. Physics, Chemistry. Very structured problem sets (well defined problems, well defined answers)
Second year: Core engineering classes. Statics, Dynamics, Materials. More specialized problem sets, less definition.
Third year: The hardest year. Labs, beginning of long-term group projects. Problems are now more general. Doing a homework problem now is much more difficult because if you get off track early - you don't get the textbook correct answer. Lots of engineering labs where you have to collect a lot of raw data and use a cookbook of formulas to write the analysis.
Routine now on tests to not solve many problems in time allotted. It's really a test of your problem solving process now. The point is you could probably solve all of the problems given enough time but in the real world you have time constraints so the faculty is helping you adjust your analytical skills to be quicker.
Fourth year: This is the year where you work on a Capstone project. Very big problem with some constraints. All the design is up to you. It's your problem to solve.
It is true that you can pass the bar without going to school. In fact law school does not prepare you for the bar exam. Most people take a supplemental course after law school just to prep for the exam. I am pretty sure that a reasonably bright person could just do the prep and pass the exam. But the exam itself is sort of a joke in that the material you are tested on is pretty orthogonal to what you'd need to know to be a good lawyer.