Monthly Archives: December 2012

JUXTAPOSITIONS

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Shortly after Thanksgiving, a California court denied Thomas Jefferson Law School’s motion to dismiss its alumni’s fraud claims. The school made headlines in early 2011 when some graduates claimed that misleading employment statistics caused them to incur staggering debt for a degree that didn’t lead to a legal job. It was the first school to face such a suit and is now the third one to lose a motion to dismiss the claims.

Reasonable consumers?

Last summer, two other law schools failed to get the cases against them thrown out: the University of San Francisco and Golden Gate University. A California state court judge hearing both cases ruled that whether those schools’ representations were “likely to deceive a reasonable consumer is a question of fact.”

The court observed, “[P]laintiffs allege that they were in fact deceived by the statements they attribute to defendant, and there is nothing before me to suggest that any of the plaintiffs were not reasonable consumers of a law school education.”

Sophisticated consumers?

The California court in the USF and Golden Gate University cases distinguished an earlier ruling that went the other way. In a similar case against New York Law School (not NYU), a New York state court judge described prospective law students as “a sophisticated subset of education consumers.” He thought that they should have looked more carefully at the numbers that the school touted, as well as data available to them from other sources. The losing plaintiffs have asked the appellate court to take another look at the issue.

Likewise, courts in Michigan and Illinois have dismissed four other lawsuits against Thomas M. Cooley Law School, DePaul University College of Law, John Marshall Law School, and Chicago-Kent Law School. Wait for the results of more appeals before accepting as definitive the schools’ quick claims of vindication.

Who’s right about these prospective consumers of legal education? Are they a special class of individuals who possess unique skills in evaluating law school representations about their graduates’ fate? Do they have special strength that allows them to resist the promise of a well-paying legal job as the reward for three years’ work and a $100,000+ investment?

Either way, aren’t they somebody’s kids?

Today, it’s seems easy to say that students who believed law school claims of 90+% employment rates and six-figure starting salaries for their graduates should have known better. But abandon such hindsight for a moment and think back to 2004, when some of the current plaintiffs were thinking about attending law school.

The lawyer bubble was growing, but until the summer of 2012 the ABA didn’t require schools to provide meaningful employment data to prospective students. Full-time, part-time, non-degree-required, and law school-funded positions were lumped together to create a rosy picture of job security that was, in fact, a cruel illusion. As the Great Recession began in 2007, that picture looked even more appealing to young people who were looking for any employment lifeboat in a sinking economy.

Accountability

So far, no plaintiff has prevailed on the merits of any claim against any law school. The preliminary rulings in California mean only that those plaintiffs get an opportunity to prove their cases. As that process unfolds, no one should let would-be law students off the hook completely. But confirmation bias is a powerful force; it takes uncommon perception to see things that contradict preconceived notions, including some students’ naive dreams about what life as a lawyer might mean.

If law schools continue to act without any serious accountability for their roles in creating the massive and growing oversupply of lawyers, greater student introspection alone won’t solve the problem. Case Western Reserve Law School Dean Lawrence E. Mitchell proved that point in his recent (and flawed) New York Times op-ed, “Law School is Worth the Money.” For those who prefer data and analysis to self-serving salesmanship, Vanderbilt Law School professor Herwig Schlunk has a response: for too many young lawyers, it isn’t.

For far too long, deans have avoided accountability for behavior that has created the lawyer bubble.  At long last, perhaps some judges will correct that injustice.

THE LAWYER BUBBLE

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Case Western Reserve Law School Dean Lawrence E. Mitchell’s recent op-ed in the New York Times proves that, like many law school deans, he is living in a bubble. Indeed, the views he expresses are one reason that I wrote THE LAWYER BUBBLE – A Profession in Crisis, which Basic Books will publish in April 2013. (Another reason is the troubling transformation of most big law firms, but that’s for another day.)

Mitchell’s spirited defense in “Law School Is Worth the Money” concludes that the “overwrought atmosphere has created irrationalities that prevent talented students from realizing their ambitions.” Apparently, he thinks everyone should just calm down, ignore facts, and keep pushing naive undergraduates into law schools, without regard to what will happen to them thereafter. He’s wrong.

Employment

Mitchell argues that a legal career is no worse choice than any other because the job market is bad in many industries. He notes that the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects growth in the number of lawyers’ jobs from 2010 to 2020 at 10 percent — about as fast as the average for all occupations.

Here’s the thing: that 10 percent growth is for the entire ten years from 2010 to 2020 — a total net increase in the number of lawyer jobs of 73,600. And that number is down from a 2008 BLS estimate of 98,500. As 44,000 new law graduates hit the market each year, law schools are pumping out enough new attorneys for a decade every two years.

Other studies factoring in attrition suggest that, given the mismatch between supply and demand, there might be law jobs for about half of all graduates over the next 10 years. Case Western Reserve, where Mitchell is dean, is typical of mid-range law schools: it’s a fine institution, but according to the ABA, nine months after graduation, only 94 of the 201-member class of 2011 had full-time long-term job requiring bar passage.

Excessive tuition

With respect to the cost of a legal education, Mitchell says that “one report shows that tuition at private law schools has increased 160 percent from 1985 to 2011.” He doesn’t identify his source, but according to the ABA, median private law school tuition in 1985 was $7,385. In 2011, it was $39,496 — a more than 400 percent increase. The rate of increase for resident public law school tuition was far greater. Assuming that he’s adjusting for constant dollars, that’s still a whopping increase.

Then Mitchell compares legal education with medical schools where, even by his calculations, tuition has increased less (63 percent since 1985). But he excuses law school excesses by arguing that medical schools began the period with average tuition four times higher. That’s a false equivalence.

It should cost far less to train a lawyer than a doctor — as it did in 1985. But today it doesn’t. Why not? Because law schools have become cash cows, returning as much as 30 percent of tuition revenues to their universities. Moreover, pandering to U.S. News ranking criteria encourages law school expenditures without regard to value added. Federally guaranteed student loans fuel the system in ways that relieve law schools from meaningful accountability as they glut the market.

Debt

Mitchell dismisses the fact that average law school debt exceeds $125,000 with the cavalier assertion that “the average lawyer’s salary exceeds that number. You’d consider a home mortgage at that ratio to be pretty sweet.” He notes that attorneys’ average starting salaries have increased 125 percent since 1985.

Unfortunately, the average includes only those who actually have lawyer jobs, and it doesn’t consider the fact that, as Above the Law’s Elie Mystal emphasizes often, the average masks the bimodal distribution of attorney income. Thanks to the skewing effect of big law firm compensation (where only 15 percent of lawyers practice), most lawyers earn far less than the industry average. Moreover, median starting salaries for new attorneys have been dropping like a rock — from $72,000 to $60,000 since 2009. Meanwhile, law school tuition keeps going the other way.

Mitchell’s real complaint is probably that prospective law students are finally beginning to see the legal world more clearly and, at long last, the results may be showing up in reduced applications to schools below the top tier. But he need not worry because ongoing market distortions make equilibrium far, far away. In 2012, almost 70,000 prospective lawyers applied for almost 50,000 law school spots — even though there may be legal jobs for only half of them.

Armed with complete information about the challenges and rewards of a legal career, the best and the brightest future lawyers will still enter the profession. They’ll incur six-figure debt that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy because they’ll conclude that the investment is worth the risk — but they’ll consider the risk. Making an informed decision requires them to separate facts from magical thinking. For that, they’re on their own because, as Dean Mitchell reveals, most deans don’t — or won’t.