PARDON MY CYNICISM

Posted on March 27, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

A friend sent me a letter that he received recently from Wake Forest University, where his son is a sophomore. Actually, it came from the Law School, which was “excited to announce” a “Pre-Law Program for Undergraduates.” Last summer, the school offered a single course, “Legal Theory, Practice, and Communication.” It was such a hit that the school has now added a second summer prelaw class, “Advocacy, Debate, and the Law.”

Noble motives

The letter outlines a laudable premise: “The primary purpose of this Program is to show undergraduates what law school is like. Some college students in the past have applied to law school simply because they could not decide what else to do after graduation.”

So far, so good. The letter then acknowledges that law school “is now far too expensive to engage in a ‘test drive’ for a whole year. This Program gives college students a realistic view of law student life and educates them about the career opportunities of lawyers.”

Again, so far, so good.

A worthy endeavor

Adequately informing undergraduates tracking themselves to law school is a vitally important educational mission that is long overdue. Colleges and universities have largely refrained from efforts to penetrate the confirmation bias of young people who think they’ll lead lives depicted in Law & Order, The Good Wife, and Suits. A legal career can be personally and professionally rewarding, but it’s not for everyone.

Wake Forest boasts that its program “gives college students a realistic view of law student life and educates them about the career opportunities of lawyers.” It’s nice to give undergraduates a taste of the Socratic method so it doesn’t upend them in law school. But other aspects are far more important.

Does the program include data on new graduates’ dismal job opportunities? For example, nine months after graduation, only 56 percent of the Wake Forest Law School class of 2011 secured full-time, long-term jobs requiring a legal degree — the same as the overall average for all law schools.

Likewise, does Wake Forest’s prelaw program cover the staggering six-figure debt that now burdens the vast majority of new attorneys generally, whose median starting salaries have fallen to $60,000? Does it discuss the widespread career dissatisfaction among practicing attorneys? Let’s hope so.

Troublesome turns

Assuming Wake Forest has, indeed, included these and other essential elements of a truly valuable prelaw curriculum, other aspects of the program suggest competing agendas at work.

Why does Wake Forest offer its prelaw program only in the summer — at a cost of $3,240 per course? (“An interested student would receive maximum benefit from enrolling in both courses,” the letter notes.) Why not offer a course that provides meaningful insights into law school and the profession during the regular academic year? And don’t tell me that professorial teaching loads have become too burdensome.

Another item gave me pause. The press release announcing the Wake Forest program included this enticing remark from the law professor who co-teaches the classes: “Since we will have gotten to know the students, we will also gladly write letters of recommendation about the student’s ability to do law school work.”

His colleague added this: “In fact, we are very excited that one of our students, who applied to law school this year with our help, was accepted at several top-ranked law schools.”

Those comments don’t neutralize student confirmation bias; they reinforce it.

Closing the deal

And then there’s this: The law school admissions office “will waive the $60.00 application fee for any student who attended the summer Program this year who later applies to Wake Forest Law School.” More applications — even from unqualified students — lower a school’s acceptance rate and thereby raise its U.S. News ranking.

But that’s not all. Again, directly from the press release: “[I]f that student is admitted and enrolls at Wake Forest law school, the student will receive a tuition credit for the first year equal to the amount spent for tuition in attending the summer program. That’s right—you could get the law school to pay you back for the money spent on tuition this year for the Summer Pre-Law Program!”

Here are the only words missing from the pitch: Act now while supplies last!

Something is amiss when the lines used to sell a prelaw education read like a late-night infomercial for steak knives.

SOMEBODY’S CHILD

Posted on March 20, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Nine years ago, Senator Rob Portman (R-Ohio) supported a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. Now he wants Congress to repeal the provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act that deny federal recognition to such marriages. Apparently, his reversal on this issue began two years ago when his college freshman son told Portman and his wife that he was gay.

Plenty of prominent national figures have similarly changed their views. The tide of history seems overwhelming, even to conservative commentator George Will. Others can debate whether Portman and those who have announced newly acquired positions favoring gay rights are courageous, hypocrites, opportunists, or something else.

For me, the more important point is that his own child’s connection to the issue caused Portman to think differently about it. Applied to lawyers, the question become simple:

What if the profession’s influential players treated the young people pursuing a legal career as their own children?

Portman’s explanation

In 2011, Portman knew that his son was gay when 100 law graduates walked out of his commencement address at the University of Michigan.

“But you know,” he told CNN recently, “what happened to me is really personal. I mean, I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue. Again, my focus has been on other issues over my public policy career.”

His key phrases are pregnant with larger implications: “[W]hat happened to me is really personal….I hadn’t thought a lot about this issue.”

Start with law school deans

As the lawyer bubble grew over the past decade, some deans and university administrators might have behaved differently if a “really personal” dimension required them to think “a lot” about their approaches. Perhaps they would have jettisoned a myopic focus on maximizing their law school rankings and revenues.

At a minimum, most deans probably would have disclosed earlier than 2012 that fewer than half of recent graduates had long-term full-time jobs requiring a legal degree. It seems unlikely that, year after year, they would have told their own kids that those employment rates exceeded 90 percent. Perhaps, too, deans would have resisted rather than embraced skyrocketing tuition increases that have produced six-figure non-dischargeable educational debt for 85 percent of today’s youngest attorneys.

Then consider big firm senior partners

At the economic pinnacle of the profession, big firms have become a particular source of not only attorney wealth, but also career dissatisfaction. In substantial part, both phenomena happened — and continue to happen — because managing partners have obsessed over short-term metrics aimed at maximizing current year profits and mindless growth.

For example, the billable hour is the bane of every lawyer’s (and most clients’) existence, but it’s lucrative for equity partners. If senior partners found themselves pushing their own kids to increase their hours as a way to boost those partners’ already astonishing profits, maybe they’d rethink the worst consequences of a destructive regime.

Similarly, the average attorney-to-equity partner leverage ratio for the Am Law 100 has doubled since 1985 (from 1.75 to 3.5). Perhaps managing partners wouldn’t have been so quick to pull up the ladder on lawyers who sat at their Thanksgiving tables every year, alongside those managing partners’ grandchildren who accompanied them. Not every young associate in a big firm should advance to equity partner. But offering a 5 to 10 percent chance of success following 7 to 12 years of hard work isn’t a motivator. It invites new attorneys to prepare for failure.

Finally, compared to the stability of a functional family, the current big law firm lateral partner hiring frenzy adopts the equivalent of periodic divorce as a cultural norm. Pursued as a growth strategy, it destroys institutional continuity, cohesion, community, and morale. Ironically, according to Professor William Henderson’s recent American Lawyer article “Playing Not to Lose,” it offers little or no net economic value in return.

Adopting a family outlook or a parental perspective isn’t a foolproof cure for what ails the legal profession. Indeed, running law schools and big firms according to the Lannister family’s values (“The Game of Thrones”) — or those of Don Corleone’s (“The Godfather”) — might not change things very much at all.

It’s also worth remembering that Oedipus was somebody’s child, too.

ANOTHER LAW SCHOOL DEAN MISSES THE TARGET

Posted on March 6, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Today’s chapter in the continuing story of proposals to reform legal education comes from James L. Huffman, emeritus dean at Lewis & Clark Law School. His February 20 Wall Street Journal op-ed recommends eliminating ABA law school accreditation requirements. Maybe that’s a good idea, but not for the reasons that Huffman offers.

Mischaracterizing the crisis

Huffman notes that the sharp decline in the number of law school applicants has created “a true crisis, and law schools are scrambling to figure out how to manage with fewer tuition-paying students.” He proposes to end that crisis by helping marginal law schools devise a way to remain in business. Specifically, he thinks that removing most accreditation requirements would unleash a wave of innovation in legal education and “let a thousand flowers bloom.”

Here’s a better idea: prune the garden.

A thread of insight

Staggering student debt accompanying dismal job prospects for recent graduates causes Huffman to lament the oversupply of lawyers. He suggests that the ABA’s task force “should start by looking within: The organization is a major source of the problem.” Then he lambasts the organization’s accreditation standards as too restrictive.

Huffman’s non sequitur fails to mention the ABA’s most obvious contribution to attorney oversupply: accrediting too many new schools — 15 since 2003 alone. Likewise, Huffman observes correctly that the ABA has become a victim of regulatory capture, but he doesn’t connect it directly to the worst consequences of that victimization: deans free to engage in deceptive behavior to fill their classrooms. Graduate employment rates looked great when schools could include short-term and part-time jobs, work that didn’t require a law degree, and temporary positions that the schools themselves had created.

Missing the real target

Why did deans do it? Because everybody did. Greater transparency risked deterring applicants, which had implications for a school’s U.S. News ranking. Unilateral candor threatened the business model.

Likewise, the rankings methodology has created powerful incentives to maximize spending on expensive new facilities. No ABA accreditation standard requires an established law school to construct a new library. But building one can help to attract applicants, and its added cost boosts the “average expenditures per student” component of a school’s ranking.

Who’s to blame?

Huffman is correct that the ABA has failed the profession. But so have deans who have allowed U.S. News rankings criteria to displace their independent judgment. Rankings have become central to their business models and the youngest generation of lawyers is paying the price.

Some metrics relating to emeritus dean Huffman’s own school prove it:

— At the time of Huffman’s op-ed, the “Admissions” section of Lewis & Clark’s website displayed this headline: “Law school surges in U.S. News & World Report rankings.” The link took the reader to an article about the school’s nine-place jump to 58th in the 2013 edition.

— Full-time tuition and fees at Lewis & Clark currently exceed $38,000 — a 50 percent increase over 2005, when it was around $25,000.

— Lewis & Clark’s annual entries in the 2006 through 2012 ABA Official Law School Guides included employment rates nine months after graduation ranging from 89 to 97 percent. But like most law schools, it achieved those spectacular results using the ABA’s expansive definition of employed. Under the new rules first applicable to the class of 2011, nine months after graduation only 46 percent of Lewis & Clark graduates had full-time long-term jobs requiring a legal degree.

Reality therapy

Huffman’s rhetoric about ABA accreditation requirements as entry barriers that inhibit competition and innovation misses the mark. Allowing schools to experiment with what he calls a “bonanza of legal education alternatives” ignores a harsh reality: There aren’t enough law jobs for the number of graduates that schools already produce, and there won’t be for a long time.

Allowing schools to increase their use of cheaper non-tenured faculty and to offer on-line classes, as Huffman suggests, won’t solve that problem. In fact, absent other necessary reforms, cost reductions leading to lower tuition would likely increase the oversupply of lawyers.

The plethora of deans publishing op-eds in major newspapers presents a new danger. When they Identify false issues and propose ineffectual reforms, they divert needed attention from the real causes of the current crisis. A thorough search for the origins of the lawyer bubble should lead most deans to a painful encounter with a mirror.

That’s an op-ed I’m eager to read.

MORE LAW SCHOOL NON-REFORM

Posted on February 20, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Every week, there’s a new proposal to reform legal education. In a recent New York Times op-ed, John J. Farmer Jr., dean of the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, offered his suggestion: two-year apprenticeships.

Most deans operate in good faith and are genuinely concerned about the current state of the profession. In fact, a core element of dean Farmer’s idea is quite sound. Hands-on training was a good idea when Clarence Darrow studied under the tutelage of a practicing attorney, and it still is. The British placement system of training contracts has kept its lawyer bubble smaller than ours.

But Darrow began his apprenticeship after one year of classes. Farmer’s suggestion of a two-year residency following three years of law school misses the mark, as do his predictions about what it would accomplish.

Problems of mysterious origin

Farmer begins where he must: a collapsing job market; law school deception in creating the oversupply of lawyers; record tuition levels and student debt. But he ignores an important question: How did those things happen? The answer: a flawed law school business model.

Consider Farmer’s point about law school deception. For years, his school joined most others in reporting 90-plus percent employment rates for the newest graduates. In the 2008 ABA Official Law School Guide, Rutgers-Newark showed a 93.3 percent employment rate; as recently as the 2012 Official Guide, it was 91.3 percent.

Starting in 2012, the ABA required schools to reveal which graduates had long-term full-time jobs requiring a legal degree. Rutgers-Newark hit the overall average for all law schools: only 56 percent for the class of 2011.

As for lawyer oversupply, Rutgers-Newark has been a continuing contributor. According to the 2008 Official Guide, Rutgers-Newark matriculated 182 full-time students from 3,010 applicants. Since then, the number of applicants has declined dramatically, but the number of enrollments hasn’t.

The 2013 Official Guide reports that Rutgers-Newark received only 2,218 applicants to its full-time program. Yet the school still matriculated 174 new students. In other words, since 2007, the number of applicants has dropped by 800 (26 percent), but first-year enrollment has declined by only eight students (4 percent).

Farmer also laments record levels of tuition and resulting student debt. The 2008 Official Guide listed Rutgers-Newark’s full-time non-resident tuition and fees at $27,976; residents paid $19,623. Today, non-resident tuition at the school exceeds $37,000 — a 33 percent jump. Resident tuition has increased by almost 30 percent and now exceeds $25,000.

Non-solutions

Ignoring the role of law schools in creating the current crisis leads Farmer to a proposal that won’t solve it. He suggests scrapping the system whereby big firms “hire graduates from a few select schools, paying them exorbitantly.” In its place, he wants a residency program that would allow law firms “to hire more lawyers, at lower rates, and give talented graduates of less prestigious institutions a chance to shine.”

During his proposed two-year apprenticeships, students would work for minimal wages (“repaying their debts could be suspended, as it is for medical residents”). At the end of the period, firms “could then select whom to keep.” For the losers in that contest, job searches would start anew.

Not gonna happen

Apart from retaining the flawed law school business model that has taken the profession to its current state, Farmer’s plan requires a remarkable leap of faith in big law firm behavior. In particular, he hopes that firms would charge lower hourly rates for new associates and, as a result, hire more of them.

Unlike many law school deans, Farmer has extensive experience as a practicing lawyer. But when he tries to predict the behavior of big law firm leaders, he enters tricky terrain.

The prevailing law firm business model perverts the definition of productivity to mean total billable hours, rather than the efficiency with which lawyer inputs produce outputs for clients. The model emphasizes the metrics of near-term profits at the expense of longer-run values. It would view reducing associate labor costs as a godsend to its bottom line, not as a reason to spread the same amount of existing work among more lawyers.

Farmer doesn’t suggest reducing tuition, enrollment, or the duration of law school itself. Such steps would challenge the law school business model directly. That’s the real lesson of dean Farmer’s op-ed: Until deans revisit their roles in creating the current mess, their proposed solutions are likely to remain wanting.

Dean Farmer suggests, “Legal education has not so much failed the profession as mirrored it.” Actually, it’s done both.

LAW SCHOOL DISEQUILIBRIUM

Posted on February 6, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

It sure seems odd. On January 30, The New York Times reported this year’s dramatic decline in law school applications. A day later, a Wall Street Journal article described the many new schools that are in the works. Economists might call that “market disequilibrium.” More appropriate concepts might be incentivized idiocy and subsidized stupidity. U.S. News rankings incentivize the idiocy; taxpayer dollars subsidize the stupidity.

The WSJ article suggested that some administrators began implementing plans to add law schools “before the current drop [in applicants] became apparent.” However, the two schools in the article, Indiana Tech and the University of North Texas-Dallas College of Law, don’t have that excuse.

Indiana Tech didn’t complete its feasibility study of a proposed new law school until May 2011. The Texas legislature authorized the creation of the UNT-Dallas College of Law in 2009, as the Great Recession deepened. In the 2011-2012 state budget, it earmarked $5 million in funding. The school plans to start classes in 2014.

As for other new schools, what exactly wasn’t apparent when they came to life? Only obvious things that those responsible for creating the schools didn’t want to see.

Follow four numbers

First, from 2003 to 2008, the number of law school applicants dropped steadily — from 100,000 to 83,000. As the Great Recession made law school an attractive place to wait out a dismal economy, total applicants rose to 88,000 before resuming a downward trajectory, perhaps to as few as 54,000 for fall 2013 admission.

Second, in the face of an applicant pool that began shrinking ten years ago, first-year enrollment from 2003 to 2009 remained around 49,000. Refugees from the Great Recession pushed it over 51,000 in 2009 and 2010 before it settled back to 48,700 in 2011.

Third, when these 40,000+ students graduate, there will be full-time legal jobs for about half of them. But that’s not a new development, only a newly disclosed one. To game the U.S. News rankings, law schools have been fudging their employment numbers for years, and they know it.

Finally, at the end of 2003, there were 187 accredited law schools in the United States. Today, there are 201. Attempting to convey the magnitude of the current crisis, University of Chicago Law Professor Brian Leiter told the Times that he expects “as many as 10 schools to close over the next decade.” But over the past ten years alone, the ABA has accredited 14.

What are the lessons?

First, a decline in applications alone doesn’t assure any change in the profession’s errant direction. The real-life experiment from 2003 to 2008 proves that for as long as the number of applicants exceeds the number of available places in law school, academic leaders who think they can make money on law students will continue to build schools.

Second, in an effort to reverse the downward trend in applications, some deans beat the bushes for additional students, even as the job market for their graduates shrinks. Case Western Reserve Law School dean Lawrence Mitchell’s recent op-ed in the NY Times is an example. Another example is an article that Professor Carla Pratt, associate dean of academic affairs at Penn State’s Dickinson School of Law, wrote last September for The National Law Journal: “Law School Is Still a Good Investment for African-Americans.”

Yet another example comes from the UNT-Dallas College of Law. According to the January 31 WSJ article, professor and associate dean for academic affairs Ellen S. Pryor, acknowledges that applications have plummeted, but “the fact that the nationwide numbers are down doesn’t dishearten us from thinking we’ll get really good students and fulfill our mission.”

And what might that mission be? According to the Journal, UNT-Dallas hopes to draw a different pool of applicants than other north Texas law schools. In other words, even undergraduates who never before gave serious thought to law school should prepare themselves for an onslaught of sales pitches.

Limited accountability

Here’s one reason for the profound disconnect: Administrators and deans maintain an unhealthy distance from the economic hardships that their worst decisions inflict on graduates. Federally-guaranteed student loans fuel a system that relieves law schools of financial accountability.

Imagine how the world might change if the government as guarantor had recourse to a student’s law school for that graduate’s subsequent loan default. In the absence of such a market solution, educational debt collection has become a growth industry as law schools avoid the messes they’ve made.

Welcome to The Lawyer Bubble.

TWO YEARS TO WHAT?

Posted on January 23, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

It’s no panacea. It may not even be a good idea. But in a recent New York Times op-ed, Northwestern Law School Dean Daniel B. Rodriguez and NYU law professor Samuel Estreicher endorsed a proposal allowing students to sit for the New York bar exam after only two years of law school:

“[I]t could make law school far more accessible to low-income students, help the next generation of law students avoid a heavy burden of debt and lead to improvements in legal education across the United States.”

The state’s top judge told a gathering of “legal educators, practitioners and judges that the concept deserves serious study,” according to the National Law Journal.

Sorting out the facts

If the New York proposal is adopted, what aspects of legal education might change? No one really knows, but the answer may be: less than some people think. That alone doesn’t make it a bad idea, but it could produce unintended consequences, too.

Most students who leave law school after two years will still have staggering debt. The average private law school graduate incurs $125,000 in loans; for public schools, it’s $75,000. Lopping off one-third would help, but it would still leave graduates with significant five-figure burdens.

No degrees

Unfortunately, the current discussion isn’t about eliminating the third year altogether and awarding JD degrees after two years, although it should be. ABA accreditation requirements block that definitive innovation. So do most law schools because many of them couldn’t survive the resulting loss of third-year tuition revenues.

Would a student who has already sunk $100,000 into two years of legal education decide that passing the bar alone was sufficient reward for that investment? Only if the value of the degree itself was worth less than the cost of a third year to get it.

Improving the third year

Finally, even assuming that many students availed themselves of the two-year option, how would most deans respond? In their op-ed, Rodriguez and Estreicher suggest that schools might improve third-year curriculum so that students would stay. But couldn’t schools do that now? Only a handful do.

Perhaps inadvertently, Rodriguez and Estreicher implicitly make the real point: only the threat of losing significant third-year tuition revenues will dramatically change most deans’ behavior. Deans may say that they’re in the business of trying to get students through law school economically, but when they have opportunities to act accordingly, few seem to make the effort. That’s because they’re actually in the business of maximizing their schools’ short-term metrics, including revenues and U.S. News rankings.

The decades-long explosion in tuition costs is one example. Another one appears in the Times op-ed, where Dean Rodriguez identifies his school’s “accelerated program that lets students pursue a three-year course of study in two years, allowing them to take the bar and enter the job market a year earlier.”

Rodriguez doesn’t mention that rushing through in two calendar years (thanks to summer classes and course overloads) won’t save students a penny on their total tuition expense. It’s two years for the price of three because, the school’s website observes, “The Law School prices tuitions based on the degree pursued rather than the length of enrollment.”

In fairness to Dean Rodriquez, he inherited the accelerated JD program and its pricing model from his predecessor, David Van Zandt. Among the program’s stated — and more dubious — goals has been to attract students who otherwise might not have gone to law school at all. Just what the profession has needed, right?

Taking chances with other people’s lives

Given their business models, many law schools seem likely to counteract any loss of third-year tuition revenues with larger entering classes. After all, that adjustment requires less work than improving curriculum, and total applicants overall still exceed the number of available spaces. Moreover, if the two-year option became popular, lowering the price of a legal education by one-third should increase demand, although the profession doesn’t need that, either.

What’s the correct approach to all of these unknown possibilities? According to the NLJ, Verizon’s general counsel Randall Milch urged throwing caution to the wind: “Analysis paralysis is our worst enemy here. If we are going to overanalyze, we’re never going to figure this out. In my opinion, we have to move and see what happens.”

There’s nothing quite like observing a real-life experiment on someone else.

THE LAW SCHOOL STORY OF 2012 — DEANS IN DENIAL

Posted on January 9, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Doubling down on a losing hand is rarely a good move. Case Western Reserve University Law School Dean Lawrence E. Mitchell generated a flurry of criticism — including my earlier post, “The Lawyer Bubble” — for his November 28, 2012 op-ed in the New York Times. On January 4, 2013, he took to the airwaves in a Bloomberg Law interview. It made me wonder whether he hears his own words as he speaks them.

Mitchell has made himself the poster child for deans in denial — the law school story of the year. It emerged in a big way last June when, for the first time, the ABA released meaningful jobs data. Nine months after graduation, only about 50 percent of the law school class of 2011 had full-time, long-term jobs requiring a legal degree. Deans everywhere began dissembling, as reported in the Wall Street Journal.

Sometimes offense isn’t the best defense

As the growing lawyer bubble made headlines, a handful of wise deans followed the lead of University of California Hastings School of Law Dean Frank Wu, who had previously acknowledged, “The critics of legal education are right. There are too many law schools and too many law students and we need to do something about that.”

In contrast, Dean Mitchell went on offense, most recently in a 15-minute interview with Lee Pacchia. To his tenuous op-ed points, Mitchell added a few more.

What oversupply?

For example, he said, “It’s not clear to me that there’s an oversupply problem at all.” As support, he cited low-income people who go without legal services. Pacchia asked him how debt-ridden graduates paying Case more than $40,000 in annual tuition could take on such work full-time.

It’s a mistake, Mitchell responded, to “measure the worth of higher education by the dollar return on the investment.” Perhaps he has a point, but it’s not really an answer. Earlier in the interview, Mitchell said this about high tuition cost: “Ninety percent of my class receives financial aid. The mean offer is $25,000 a year.” Critics focus on the sticker price, he said, “but law schools discount fairly heavily.”

What proportion of those financial aid packages is grants, rather than loans that can’t be discharged in bankruptcy? Mitchell didn’t say, but here are two clues.

In his op-ed, Mitchell reported accurately that overall average private law school student debt is $125,000. In his April 3, 2012 blog post, he boasted that Case graduates have “almost 22 percent less debt than graduates of other private law schools.” The resulting arithmetic implies that Case’s financial aid packages result in average student loan debt of about $100,000 for its law graduates.

Cost spiral

In another defense of soaring tuition, Mitchell argued that, in 1985, medical school was four times more expensive than law school. So what? In the intervening 25 years, law school tuition has caught up with and, in some cases, surpassed that of medical school. Does that make sense to anyone other than Mitchell?

He also said that schools must pay top dollar for law professors because their opportunity costs are high: they could be making big bucks in big firms. But the only relevant question is, do they want to?

Mitchell’s own experience may provide a partial answer. His CV lists six years as an associate at three different New York law firms from 1981 to 1987. Sometime during that period, he said, it became “hard to get out of bed in the morning and I didn’t like going to work.” So he “took a two-thirds pay cut and went into teaching.”

How about decent jobs?

Throughout the year, Mitchell travels the country, “like Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman,” meeting with hiring partners of big law firms. He interviews his students and writes personal letters of recommendation to help them get jobs. Doesn’t the need for such efforts tell him something?

Yet for all of Mitchell’s laudable sales pitches, Pacchia noted, the Law School Transparency Project reports that 38 percent of 2011 Case Western graduates were still unemployed or underemployed nine months later.

“I haven’t myself taken a snapshot a year out,” Mitchell said, “but I’ve talked to my admissions staff about this a lot and I suspect if you looked a year out, things would change dramatically. I’m really confident if you looked a year and a half out, they would.”

Mitchell offered no supporting data, but he “suspects” and is “really confident” that, eventually, things will turn out just fine.

Optimism untethered to reality

Why is Mitchell convinced that things are better than the available facts suggest? Because, for example, most of his 1981 Columbia Law School class took jobs in big law firms. Ten years later, his class reunion book revealed that “almost nobody was at a law firm.”

It’s hard to know where to begin dissecting Mitchell’s anecdote, but start with the fact that his students aren’t graduating from Columbia Law School.

Just another business

Finally, Mitchell observed, “Of course, we’re running a business at the end of the day.” Without acknowledging the destructive impact of short term business-type metrics, such as the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings, he argues that “using business sense in managing law schools is going to help us get some of these problems under control.”

Until Mitchell and many other deans with similar attitudes get past denial over what is happening to the profession, they’ll never reach, much less overcome, the subsequent stages of grief — anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Perhaps another reading of Death of a Salesman will help.

JUXTAPOSITIONS

Posted on December 11, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

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

Posted on December 5, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

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.

A COMMENDABLE (AND COURAGEOUS) COMMENT AWARD

Posted on October 29, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

As the executive director of National Association for Law Placement (NALP) — the organization that sets the rules whereby big law firm employers and their prospective new hires find each other — James Leipold has a tough job. Sometimes, NALP has looked like a victim of regulatory capture. Students’ interests have often taken a back seat to two constituencies that wield far more economic power, namely, law schools and big law firms.

Such power was one reason that NALP initially “back-pedaled” in early 2010, when big firms balked at NALP’s request to provide detailed information about equity partners’ gender and race. At the time, Leipold acknowledged that some firms threatened to withhold all information from the annual NALP employer directory, which “represents an important revenue source for us.”

Another example of big law firm influence over NALP is the evolution of the rules governing employment offers — including the powerlessness of students when a big firm unilaterally rescinds a previously accepted one. But NALP’s shortcomings are topics for another day.

Today’s commendation goes to Leipold because he recently stood up to deans who wanted him to provide prospective law students with a “better message” about the legal job market. That is, they wanted him to lie. Leipold said he was “surprised” at this turn of events, including deans who asked him to describe the job market as “good.” He refused. But his real act of courage was in revealing that some deans were applying such pressure. They should be ashamed. And they should be named.

Nothing new

Many deans have been hyping their schools with misleading employment statistics for a long time. Truth is finally catching up to a lot of them, notably with the ABA’s newly required data. Harsh reality hit with the news that, nine months after graduation, slightly more than half of all 2011 law graduates were able to get full-time long-term jobs requiring bar passage. The recent past has been bad and the current picture is ugly. So some deans have tried to shape perceptions about the future.

Leipold rightly resisted. The employment prospects for law graduates generally are not likely to brighten any time soon. Leipold could have said even more about that: there are still far more law school applicants than places for them; most estimates project that over the next decade, schools will produce twice as many law graduates as the number of legal jobs available for them. Even at the so-called pinnacle of the profession — big law firms — the total number of attorneys has yet to return to pre-recession levels.

The case for names

What will stop this insanity? Unfortunately, the problematic deans are responding to institutional pressures. That’s because law schools have become large cash cows for their universities. The impulse to run a school as a business that maximizes short-term profits is irresistible to them and their superiors. Every incentive they see encourages them to pump-and-dump: pump up demand for law students and dump debt-ridden graduates on a glutted market. Their unemployed graduates become someone else’s problem.

It turns out that the someone else is not just the victimized students themselves. Eventually, the profession itself suffers. Staggering student debt will haunt some graduates forever because bankruptcy won’t discharge it. Income-based repayment programs will help some of them, but as Professor William Henderson observes, taxpayers could wind up paying large portions of those participants’ ultimate obligations when the federal government picks up the tab for residual unpaid debt.

Will anything make these deans stop? The villains are giving all other deans a bad rap. They know who they are. Now, James Leipold does, too. Perhaps it’s time for the rest of us to learn their names. Where all else has failed to alter unfortunate behavior, maybe public humiliation will help. Nothing else seems to be working.

LAW SCHOOL DYSFUNCTION, ARIZONA STYLE

Posted on October 10, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Anyone holding out hope that the market for new lawyers might self-correct will be disappointed. Two recent developments continue to make that clear.

More lawyers needed?

The first comes from Arizona State University’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law, which is considering a move from Tempe to downtown Phoenix. It’s seeking approval from the ASU Board of Regents for a three-year capital improvement plan that includes $129 million toward construction of a new law school complex.

The proposed site is now a parking lot. Compared to the current 165,000 square feet, the new facility would be 294,000 square feet. Documents reportedly sent to the regents include a business plan that would increase the school’s current enrollment and degrees by 50 percent.

A failing grade

Why would ASU entertain such an idea? Presumably because school officials think they can fill classrooms by using statements like those currently appearing on ASU’s website:

“96% of [2011] graduates seeking employment were employed or continuing their education…82% of those employed secured full-time, long-term employment.”

Those numbers look respectable, but take a closer look at the school’s most recent ABA employment data.

In 2011, ASU awarded 201 law degrees. Nine months later, only 137 of those graduates — 68 percent — had long-term, full-time jobs requiring bar passage. (Ten of them became solo practitioners — a tough beginning for any new graduate.) Another eight had jobs where a J.D. supposedly provided an advantage; another eight held other non-legal professional positions. That’s 153.

The 82 percent “full-time, long-term employment” statistic on the ASU website results from excluding 15 more students: seven unemployed and seeking work, three pursuing graduate degrees, three with unknown employment status, and two unemployed but not seeking work.

As for the rest? The school itself funded full-time, short-term positions for 18 new graduates. Add in the others holding short-term or part-time jobs and — voila! — you reach the stunning “96 percent employed or continuing their education” number.

Curiously, the same article reporting the school’s plans to increase enrollments and degrees by 50 percent also quoted Dean Douglas Sylvester’s comment that the school has “no current plans to grow our J.D. (Juris Doctor) class beyond its historical size and beyond the capacity of the college to continue to find productive employment for all of our graduates.”

If the dean’s remark — “the capacity of the college to find productive employment for all graduates” — defines a passing grade, his school is already failing.

Predictable response to unfortunate stimuli

In March 2012, Dean Sylvester promised “to reduce the cost of attending law school to make it more available to students of different income levels.” So far, there’s no evidence that he is succeeding in that mission, either.

In-state resident tuition at ASU has increased from $19,225 in 2009-2010 to $26,267 for 2011-2012. For non-residents, tuition has risen from $32,619 to $40,815. The stated goal of these dramatic tuition hikes is financial self-sufficiency for the school.

Meanwhile, spending lots of money on new facilities enhances the average-cost-per-student component of any school’s U.S. News & World Report ranking. But if ASU is pandering to that metric, it’s doing so at a steep price to students.

As ASU and other state schools try to eliminate their need for public funds, student loan debt is filling the gap. The average debt for ASU’s law school graduates is $103,436. Together with the school’s employment statistics, such growing indebtedness suggests that techniques aimed at self-sufficiency for the school are having the opposite impact on many of its graduates.

Bouncing back?

Finally, the ongoing glut in the market for lawyers illuminates the second aspect of law school dysfunction. A recent Am Law Daily article heralded the legal sector’s “bounce-back” month in September, adding about 1,000 jobs. “Bounce-back” to what is an interesting question.

From September 2011 to September 2012, the net growth in legal jobs was 5,900. During the same period, law schools graduated more than 44,000 new attorneys. Anyone who thinks that retirements and other natural attrition will close that gap is dreaming. One state-by-state analysis estimates that net lawyer surpluses will exceed 25,000 annually through 2015. Overall, the legal sector is still 50,000 positions below its pre-economic crisis 2008 employment level (1.17 million in 2008 vs. 1.12 million currently).

That takes us back to the contest for the best use of space in downtown Phoenix. If the choice is what’s there now — a parking lot — and a proposed big new ASU law school complex, root for the parking lot.

The Most Unfortunate Comment Award to Date

Posted on September 11, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

The words seem so innocuous — “federally guaranteed student loans.” But what do they mean when someone actually defaults and the government has to make good on its guarantee? A recent article in The New York Times provides the answer.

A brief review of the business model

This post is the latest in what became my unintended series on the law school business model. It began with The Wall Street Journal’s misrepresentation in a lead op-ed piece. The Journal claimed that Congress made student loans non-dischargeable in 1976 because of widespread abuse. That is, graduates benefited from government loans and then declared bankruptcy on the eve of lucrative careers to avoid their debt. There’s no delicate way to put this: The WSJ was perpetuating a thirty-five-year-old myth.

Then I considered law schools that offer tuition discounts in the form of merit scholarships. There’s no mystery there: a secretive process of awarding money facilitates an individualized approach to pricing that maximizes tuition revenues while enhancing a school’s U.S. News ranking.

Most recently, I turned to yet another element of the current law school business model: raising the list price of tuition while reserving the flexibility to move lower as needed to attract particular candidates.

Follow the money

Now consider the source of all that tuition money. Some people are able to pay their own way, regardless of the cost. But they’re in the minority. Matt Leichter reports that the 44,000 law graduates in the class of 2010 took on $3.6 billion in debt, up sharply from $3.1 billion only two years earlier. The number is climbing as tuition goes up.

The chances that recent graduates will secure a job requiring a law degree are about 50-50. Although others will get non-legal jobs that pay reasonably well, the ranks of new lawyers with loans they can’t afford to repay is growing.

So what?

Students now have an income-based repayment (IBR) option for federal loans; that may afford some relief. But as Professor William Henderson explains in “The Law School Tuition Bubble,” two problems arise. First, dedicating fifteen percent of income for the requisite twenty-five years of a total IBR plan is akin to a permanent tax on the already low incomes of those lawyers. Forget about saving for retirement or funding their own kids’ higher education.

Second, those IBR participants who make it all the way to the end of the twenty-five years will have their remaining loan balances forgiven. That will add more debt that that the federal treasury will bear — for anyone who worries about such things.

Default

For recent graduates with limited job prospects, IBR is better than nothing. But some will default on their loans, just as their predecessors have. This poses no problem for law schools; they’ve already collected their tuition money and don’t have to return it.

Default poses no problem for lenders, either. That’s because educational debt is not dischargeable in bankruptcy, except in rare cases that satisfy the “undue hardship” requirement.

Moreover, the federal guarantee kicks in for private lenders, at which point the government foots the bill. But that’s not the end of the story. As the Times article explains, the newest growth industry is student loan debt collection. Last year, the government paid more than $1.4 billion to debt collection organizations it hired to track down student defaulters.

A Most Unfortunate Comment

For anyone who doubts that this is unapologetic intergenerational exploitation of the young by the old, consider these comments from Jerry Ashton, a consultant for the debt collection industry and the winner of the most Unfortunate Comment Award to date:

“As I wandered around the crowd of NYU students at their rally protesting student debt at the end of February [2011], I couldn’t believe the accumulated wealth they represented – for our industry. It was lip-smacking.”

Ashton included a photograph of several students to which he added these details: “a girl wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the fine sum of $90,000, another with $65,000, a third with $20,000 and over there a really attractive $120,000 was printed on another shirt.”

Someday this will all come crashing down. I fear that people like Ashton — and merger/acquisitions specialist Mark Russell, who described student loans as the debt collection industry’s “new oil well” — will make money on that event. too. Shame on them. Shame on all of us.

LAW SCHOOLS AS PROFIT CENTERS

Posted on September 4, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Recently, I wrote about law schools using merit scholarships to fill seats in their entering first-year classes. Economists would say that such price-cutting makes sense in a declining market for new students. Today’s topic considers what may seem at first to be a contradictory trend: Average law school tuition continues to rise at more than double the rate of inflation.

An article in The National Law Journal mused that perhaps rising tuition in the face of reduced demand meant that the fundamental laws of economics might not apply to law schools. In fact, rising tuition along with the proliferation of non-need-based scholarships are parts of the same failing model that regards law school as a business for which U.S. News & World Report rankings provide the definitive metric.

Is relevant demand sufficiently low?

There were 68,000 applicants for the fall 2012 entering class. But in 2011, law schools admitted 55,800, of whom 48,700 enrolled. Two points about these numbers are key.

First, admissions and enrollments may be down, but not nearly enough to create equilibrium with the far fewer available legal jobs for new graduates. In fact, the recent drop in enrollments has simply returned them to 2006 levels. (Law schools were producing too many lawyers in those days, too.)

Second, the laws of economics are performing as expected. Student demand (68,000 applicants in 2012) still outstrips supply (48,700 enrollments in 2011). That sends a signal to deans that they can raise the list price that they charge for tuition, provided that the quality of the applicants doesn’t matter to them.

But quality — as measured by U.S. News rankings methodology — does matter to them. That’s where discounts enter the equation. Published tuition is the list price, but many schools are offering individual scholarships (discounts from list price) in an effort to bolster the U.S. News ranking credentials of their entering first-year classes.

As part of a total profit-maximzing strategy, increasing the list price accomplishes two objectives. First, it generates additional revenues from students willing to pay (or borrow to pay) the full amount. That’s easy money for the school.

Second, it enhances pricing flexibility to recruit so-called desirable candidates (that is, those who will enhance the school’s U.S. News ranking). A higher starting price creates more room to maneuver — through selective and even bigger discounts (scholarships) that seal the deal.

What’s ahead?

In this scenario, U.S. News wields stunning power to determine the characteristics of the next generation of lawyers. But the magazine can’t solve the problems that arrive at graduation time. At the current rate of attorney production, only about half of new graduates will find jobs requiring a legal degree. Since the Great Recession began, the Bureau of Labor Statistics has already revised downward its projection of new legal jobs over the next decade. But even that revision results in an estimate that is probably overly optimistic.

Meanwhile, in case you missed it, yet another law school dean departed recently in a dispute over her university’s efforts to funnel law school revenues back to the mother ship. That implicates another U.S. News rankings item as it relates to rising tuition: The ranking methodology incentivizes deans to spend more, regardless whether it adds value to a student’s education or employment prospects.

The victims

Put it all together: Declining admissions aren’t declining enough, rising tuition is rising too much; discounts go to students with desirable LSATs and GPAs at the expense of other students who really need financial aid; law schools return a portion of profits to their universities; and every year the system is still producing far too many attorneys. Added to this is the exploding educational debt that is financing this mess.

The current hype that borders on hysteria suggests that declining student interest in law school heralds a major self-correction of the market that will remedy all of these problems. But the sad truth is that the problems are still growing and the end is nowhere in sight.

BLOOMBERG LAW INTERVIEW

Posted on August 25, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Last week, Bloomberg Law’s Lee Pacchia interviewed me on two topics that are frequent subjects of this blog. Two segments are now up and running on the Bloomberg Law channel. Here are the links:

Law Prof: Why Discharging Student Debt in Bankruptcy is Good for Lenders
http://youtu.be/z4Q3Y4PRwqQ

Ex-Partner: $1M Salaries Should Satisfy BigLaw Partners
http://youtu.be/2TErRjB9j6Y

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL: LAW SCHOOL TUITION!

Posted on August 21, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

A recent article in The Wall Street Journal highlights the efforts of some law schools to generate applicants (and enroll students) in the declining legal market. The print version of the paper included a large photograph of University of Illinois College of Law Dean Bruce P. Smith. It’s an odd time for that school to seek publicity. Not long ago, the ABA fined the school $250,000 for intentionally submitting false LSAT and GPA data.

The new initiatives include scholarships, although for many schools those aren’t really new. For years, some law schools have used non-need-based financial aid to lure students with high LSATs. Lurking behind the current initiatives — and the counterproductive behavior of far too many law school deans — are the ubiquitous U.S. News rankings. Obsession over those rankings created a climate that produced the University of Illinois College of Law’s sanctionable conduct.

There’s just one problem…

The difficulty for many “merit” scholarship recipients is two-fold. First, the money often disappears after year one. For years two and three, the law school business model reasserts its power and, for most students, loans for tuition keep school revenues and profits flowing. The New York Times wrote about that phenomenon last year.

I don’t know what the University of Illinois College of Law’s approach will be, but tuition there is $44,520 for non-residents and $37,100 for residents. Dean Smith said that grants went to every member of the class of 2014 (including those admitted from the wait list) at a total cost of $3.6 million. Maintaining that average of $18,000 per student (assuming enrollment of 200) for all three years would be a daunting task. After all, it’s a state school and Illinois is in terrible financial shape.

Make that two problems…

The more abiding challenge for many students surfaces a bit later: limited job opportunities. For example, the University of Illinois College of Law awarded 190 J.D. degrees in 2011. According to its July 2012 ABA employment report, nine months after graduation, only 96 had full-time long term jobs requiring bar passage.

Other schools mentioned in the WSJ article include:

USC (Gould School of Law): 207 graduates in 2011; nine months after graduation, 134 with full-time long term jobs requiring bar passage.

UCLA: 344 graduates in 2011; 211 with full-time long term jobs requiring bar passage.

George Washington University: 518 graduates in 2011; 421 with full-time long term jobs requiring bar passage.

Brooklyn Law School: 455 graduates in 2011; 215 with full-time long term jobs requiring bar passage.

The overall full-time long term employment rate for all 2011 law school graduates with jobs requiring bar passage was 55 percent.

An old trick

The premise of these scholarship programs is simple. Rather than reduce tuition for everyone, keep the list price high (hotel managers would call it a room’s “rack rate”) for those who can afford it and offer differential discounts to those who are price sensitive at the margin. The secrecy of individual grants creates a perfect environment for implementing what economists might call pricing along the demand curve. Extract as much as possible from each buyer while maximizing total sales (enrollments).

For anyone with a long-run perspective that extends beyond filling up next year’s law school classrooms, the approach might seem a bit perplexing. If there are twice as many law jobs as there are graduating students with J.D.s, might it make more sense to adopt a strategy that reduced total enrollment?

To their credit, some schools, including George Washington University, are doing that. But for the most part, each law school is striving to maintain enrollments and the credentials of entering classes. Insofar as they are now throwing scholarship money at prospective students who are uncertain about whether to attend law school at all, they’re making things even worse.

U.S. News strikes again

Professor William Henderson correctly closes the article with this observation: “It’s the fear of a U.S. News downward spiral. It’s hard to come up in the rankings when your applications are going down.”

Thank goodness the U.S. News rankings’ guru Robert Morse clarified his magazine’s position on all of this: “[T]he rankings should not be a management tool that law school administrators use as the basis for proving that their school is improving or declining.”

Unfortunately, they do.

WHEN FACTS GET IN THE WAY

Posted on July 31, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Facts should matter, especially to newspaper editors. On July 25, The Wall Street Journal based its lead editorial on a factually incorrect premise. I happened to notice the Journal’s error because I’m writing a book about the legal profession’s current crises, one of which is exploding law school debt. But the WSJ blunder raises an important question: How often does the truth lose out to editors’ ideological convictions?

“You Don’t Owe That” suggested that current bankruptcy law proposals to modify the impact of burdensome student loans would “reverse a hard lesson learned during the 1970s.” The editors claimed that provisions barring the discharge of educational loans in bankruptcy occurred “[a]fter a surge in former students declaring bankruptcy to avoid repaying their loans.” For that reason, the WSJ continued, “Congress acted to protect lenders beginning in 1977.”

Not true. There was no such 1970s surge. There was no empirical record of abuse to support the legislative change that began a 30-year slide down a slippery slope, culminating in an even more unfortunate 2005 amendment to the bankruptcy laws.

Perpetuating myths

Old misconceptions die hard. Prior to 1976, all educational debt was dischargeable. That year, Congress amended the Higher Education Act of 1965 to prohibit the discharge of federal educational loans until at least five years had passed since the beginning of the repayment period. Why?

More than 20 years ago, a thorough examination of what some critics characterized as a “loophole” that “allegedly allowed graduating students to discharge their loan obligations through bankruptcy on the eve of lucrative careers” was “more myth and media hype than reality.” More recently, the Congressional Research Service noted that the 1997 Bankruptcy Commission found “no evidence to support the assertion that when student loans were dischargeable the bankruptcy system was ‘systematically abused.’”

Fear and anecdotes — not facts or evidence — resulted in federal student loans joining the same bankruptcy category as child support, overdue taxes and criminal fines. Except for rare exceptions based on undue hardship, a person paid those debts or died, whichever came first.

Bipartisan blame

The Bankruptcy Reform Act of 1978 continued the new five-year rule, even though statistical analyses from the General Accounting Office and a House report confirmed that earlier claims of abuse were “virtually nonexistent.” In 1990, Congress and the first President Bush extended that period to seven years. In 1998, Congress and President Clinton decreed that debtors would never discharge their federal educational loans. In 2005, Congress and the second President Bush extended that protection to private lenders as well.

The recent Journal editorial worries about those private lenders. No one has been able to identify the author of the 2005 amendment giving financial institutions that huge break. It also gave them something else: a new incentive to lend money with less concern for how debtors would repay it.

Framing the question

The WSJ position seems somewhat paradoxical for the otherwise libertarian-leaning newspaper. On the one hand, personal responsibility is an easy argument to make when focusing on young people who incur debt: “They should be careful and make better choices.”

On the other hand, what entitles such students’ older, wiser and more knowledgeable bankers to put the government’s heavy thumb (in the form of granting special creditor status to lenders) on the scale? For some law school graduates, the result is enormous educational debt for degrees that won’t lead to jobs necessary for repayment. Shouldn’t lenders feel the consequences of their poor decisions? Might everyone be better off if lenders sat down with pre-law students and asked them what they planned to do with their J.D. degrees before approving loans for tuition?

Moreover, from the debtor’s perspective, the underlying issue involves the exercise of a constitutional right. Against the backdrop of eighteenth century debtors’ prisons, the founders empowered Congress to enact uniform national bankruptcy laws so that a debtor didn’t risk losing all assets in one state only to be thrown in jail for not paying debts in another.

Accountability

Perhaps questions of accountability and personal responsibility turn on the characterization of the issue — and who should be accountable to whom. The Wall Street Journal is accountable to more than two million daily readers. Those readers assume the honesty of editors who include purported facts in an op-ed piece on important policy questions.

This time, readers got what an important newspaper’s editors would like the facts to be, instead of what they are. Even worse, most of them will never know it.

THE NEXT DEBT CRISIS

Posted on July 24, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

One of the next big bubbles is educational debt. A recent article in The New York Times notes that it exceeds one trillion dollars — more than total consumer credit card debt. Meanwhile, according to The Wall Street Journal, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reports that for those aged 40 to 49, the percentage of educational debt on which no payment has been made for at least 90 days has risen to almost 12 percent. Sadly, history will view these as the good old days.

Middle-aged education debt blues

Growing delinquencies among middle-aged debtors result from two phenomena. First, some people took out loans for their own education, such as the 50-year-old who woman told the WSJ that she got her bachelor’s degree in 2008. The recession pushed many newly unemployed workers into higher education as a way of reinventing themselves. For some, the strategy worked.

A second group consists of parents who took out loans to fund their kids’ education. A related Department of Education program is, according to the Journal, “among the fastest-growing of the government’s education loan programs.”

Now extrapolate

For anyone who thinks this problem is bad now, wait until today’s twenty-somethings who went to law school and can’t get jobs reach their forties. Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor William Henderson has analyzed the origins and long-run implications of current trends. His article with Rachel Zahorsky, “The Law School Bubble,” describes them in thoughtful detail.

Recent graduates in particular know where this is going because many are already there: Lots of debt — averaging $100,000 for recent classes — and limited prospects of employment with which to repay it. Meanwhile, the nation’s law schools are turning out more than twice the number of lawyers as there are law jobs.

The problem is growing, but so is denial. Recent headlines proclaimed that a drop in law school applications must be a sign that the market is self-correcting. After all, first-year enrollment fell by seven percent — from 52,500 in 2010 to 48,700 in 2011. Now for some context: The current number is about the same as total one-L enrollment was each year from 2002 to 2006.

How are law schools responding to this continuing crisis? Some better than others.

Law school reactions

Deans at George Washington University, Hastings and Northwestern recently announced that they were considering plans to reduce enrollments. Meanwhile, Thomas M. Cooley Law School opened a new campus in Tampa where it has signed up 104 students — double the number it initially expected. Last month the WSJ quoted Cooley’s Associate Dean James Robb, who said that the school “isn’t interested in reducing the size of its entering class on the basis of the perceived benefit to society.”

All right, let society take care of itself. But how about the school’s students? Two weeks after the Journal article, the ABA reported recent law school graduate employment data that, for the first time, refined one category of “employed” to include only jobs requiring a J.D. degree. For that group, Cooley’s “full-time long-term” rate for the class of 2011 nine months after graduation was 37.5%. Remarkably, more than two dozen law schools did even worse.

I wonder how those who run Cooley — and many other law schools — would feel if they had to bear the risk that some of their alumni might default on their educational loans. For now, we’ll never know because: 1) the federal government backs the vast majority of those loans, and 2) even bankruptcy can’t discharge them.

Meanwhile, a court recently dismissed Cooley alumni’s complaint alleging that the school’s employment statistics misled them into attending. The most revealing line of Senior Judge Gordon Quist’s ruling is the conclusion:

“The bottom line is that the statistics provided by Cooley and other law schools in a format required by the ABA were so vague and incomplete as to be meaningless and could not reasonably be relied upon.”

Too bad for those who did. In some ways, the profession is a terrible mess — and it’s just the beginning.

UNFORTUNATE COMMENT AWARD

Posted on June 26, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Apparently, some law school deans just don’t get it and never will. One of them, Dean Rudy Hasl of Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, wins my latest Unfortunate Comment Award with his remarks reported in The Wall Street Journal:

“You can’t measure the value of a law degree in terms of what your employment number was nine months after graduation.”

All right. Then how should we measure it?

Bad facts and getting worse

Hasl was trying to explain away his school’s position in the bottom five of those reporting the new ABA-required metric: percentage of graduates with full-time long-term jobs requiring a law degree. Thomas Jefferson School of Law reported that only 27 percent of its 2011 class held such jobs nine months after graduation.

Transparency can be unflattering. For the profession overall, the full-time, degree-required, nine-month employment rate for all 2011 law graduates was 55 percent. Predictably, graduates from the top schools fared the best. But the interesting comparisons are with last year — when the ABA and U.S. News allowed schools to include part-time and non-legal jobs in classifying their graduates as employed.

According to the Journal, data that Thomas Jefferson reported to U.S. News under last year’s broader definition showed a 68 percent employment rate nine months out. That’s nothing to brag about, but this year’s 27 percent long-term degree-required employment rate is stunning. Nevertheless, Dean Hasl says not to worry.

What metric matters?

Hasl explained that the nine-month employment rate is inappropriate because a “graduate who takes the California bar exam in July…won’t get the results until late November. Many employers won’t even interview a graduate who hasn’t been licensed.”

That moves his argument to even weaker ground. The July 2011 California bar passage rates for first-time test-takers put Thomas Jefferson School of Law dead last among 20 California ABA-approved schools — with a 33 percent bar passage rate.

Last year, it became the first of many schools facing alumni suits alleging that misleading and deceptive post-graduation employment statistics induced them to attend law school in the first place. Among their defenses, some schools have asserted a variation of the “everyone does it and the ABA says it’s ok” defense. When I was a kid, that sort of excuse for failing to exercise independent judgment didn’t usually work with my parents.

The judge in a similar case against the New York School of Law (not to be confused with NYU) didn’t buy it, either. But the court dismissed that complaint on more tenuous grounds. It thought that college graduates considering law school were “a sophisticated subset of education consumers, capable of sifting through data and weighing alternatives before making a decision regarding their post-college options.”

That reflects some serious magical thinking about the way law schools have bombarded prospective students with dubious information. Only two years ago, the overall percentage of all law school graduates supposedly employed nine months after graduation was in the 90s — but few schools bragged about the ones who were part-time baristas at Starbucks or greeters at Wal-Mart.

Now what?

Thomas Jefferson School of Law will charge full-time students $42,000 for annual tuition in 2012-2013. What are those students buying for their more than $120,000 degrees? A one-in-three chance of passing the California bar on the first try and slightly better than a one-in-four chance of holding a full-time degree-required job nine months after graduation.

If you graduated a few years ago, you might also have a spot in a putative class action against your alma mater. The court hasn’t dismissed that complaint.

DEWEY’S MARTIN BIENENSTOCK: PARTNERSHIP, PROFESSIONALISM AND WHAT TO TELL THE KIDS

Posted on May 24, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

This is the second in a series profiling Dewey & LeBoeuf’s former leaders. Martin Bienenstock (University of Pennsylvania, B.S., Wharton School, 1974; University of Michigan, J.D., 1977) was heralded as “one of the most innovative, creative restructuring attorneys in the country” when the Dewey & LeBoeuf spin machine put him at the center of an April 21, 2012 article in The New York Times. He seemed to be the perfect candidate to save his firm.

One item that probably impressed NY Times’ readers was his presence on the Harvard Law School faculty. That credential showed up on the firm’s Private Placement Memorandum for its 2010 bond offering, too. According to the school’s website, he taught the Corporate Reorganization course during the spring term 2012.

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Apart from imparting substantive knowledge, he — like any educator — is also a role model for students. In that respect, what have future attorneys been learning from Bienenstock?

What does partnership mean?

Every law student learns the basic concepts: partners owe each other fiduciary duties; they share risk, gains and losses; they’re accountable to all other partners. But theoretical partnership principles played out much differently in Bienenstock’s firm after he joined Dewey & LeBoeuf and its Executive Committee in November 2007.

— Multi-year compensation guarantees went to some partners, including Bienenstock, but their pay didn’t depend on performance. Some partners say they were unaware of the scope and magnitude of such deals until an October 2011 partner meeting.

— Partner income spreads reportedly grew to more than twenty-to-one. In “Spread Too Thin,” Patrick McKenna and Edwin Reeser describe the destabilizing effects of that ubiquitous big law trend.

— A 2010 bond issuance obligated future partners to payments of at least $125 million, starting in 2013 and continuing to 2023.

— Top partners, including Bienenstock, thought they were making great sacrifices when the firm missed its income targets in 2011: they “capped” themselves at $2.5 million and took firm IOU’s to make up annual shortfalls from their guaranteed amounts. Continuing strategies that mortgaged the future, Dewey & LeBoeuf planned to dedicate six percent of its income from 2014 to 2020 to repay those IOUs.

— Questions have surfaced about the accuracy and sufficiency of the firm’s financial disclosures to fellow partners and third parties.

What does professionalism mean?

After Steven H. Davis left his management position, the Dewey & LeBoeuf spin machine put Bienenstock center stage as the go-to person who could work a miracle. Maybe it would be a “prepack” – a prepackaged bankruptcy that would allow the firm to shed some debts and become more attractive to a merger partner.

Maybe it would be a traditional merger.

Maybe, maybe, maybe.

One thing Bienenstock made clear throughout: “There are no plans to file bankruptcy. And anyone who says differently doesn’t know what they’re talking about.”

Ten days later, he and members of his bankruptcy group were on their way to Proskauer Rose.

Parsing Bienenstock’s statement about a bankruptcy filing is akin to dissecting President Clinton’s response to questions about his sexual encounters with a White House intern: “It depends on what the meaning of is, is.”

What does leadership mean?

Did Beinenstock have an actual plan for the firm’s survival or did chaos better serve the economic interests of a few top partners? Was he personally committed for the long haul or arranging his own exit? Was anyone really in charge?

Those questions went unanswered as speculation and uncertainty swamped the firm: One-third of the firm’s partners gone by the end of April? A memo invites others to build their own lifeboats, but attorneys and staff should keep working diligently for clients? Use personal credit cards for client copying charges? No mailroom? No IT? Why do senior partners keep asking for empty packing boxes?

Leadership is needed most in times of crisis. As Dewey & LeBoeuf’s Office of the Chairman went from four to three to two to one to none, leadership was nowhere to be found.

Accepting responsibility

When asked who or what was to blame for Dewey’s demise, Bienenstock demurred: “[N]o one saw the new world coming.”

Except plenty of other people did.

Were any of the summer or permanent associates whom Dewey stiffed Bienenstock’s former students at Harvard? If so, their real life experiences of the past three months taught them more about partnership, professionalism and leadership in some big firms than Bienenstock or anyone else could have communicated in years of classes. The question now is whether Bienenstock will be on Harvard’s faculty list next year.

A PLUTOCRAT’S PITTANCE

Posted on May 13, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Recently on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos,” the usually thoughtful George Will practically jumped from his seat at the prospect that the interest rate on student loans might continue at 3.4 percent (based on a federal subsidy that President George W. Bush signed in 2007), rather than move up to 6.8 percent. He was — for him — apoplectic at the idea of creating what he was sure would become yet another “entitlement.”

Will opposes such relief because the average college student graduates with around $30,000 in loans and, over a lifetime of earning superiority over non-college graduates, he says, “that’s a pittance.” One man’s pittance is another man’s fortune, I guess. Then again, Will has a much different opinion about a slightly greater amount — $36,900 — when it’s the additional tax he’d pay on a million dollars of annual income if the Bush tax cuts expire.

But rather than search for consistency that can’t be found, put Will’s comment next to Mitt Romney’s related suggestion that young people should do everything they can to attend college, even “borrow from your parents.” If only all college-bound students had parents who could float them six-figure loans for however long it might take to repay them.

About those big salary differences

That leads to the point that Will sidestepped: repayment could take a while. Will’s “pittance” argument relies on studies showing that a college degree produces better lifetime earnings for those who obtain them. Historically, that’s been true. But it ignores what’s been happening to the newest college graduates. The NY Times recently reported how unemployed graduates have been flocking to unpaid internships. Sadly, two years ago it ran a similar piece. Meanwhile, the Times also reports, they and their families are buried in debt.

Ultimately, many who get degrees will fare better than their non-degree counterparts. But at the moment there are more unemployed and underemployed recent college graduates than ever. Studies show that their delayed entry into the labor market will likely translate into huge lifetime earnings losses. As baby boomers defer retirement because the Great Recession wiped out their savings, the plight of young people worsens.

How about lawyers?

Among the most burdened in the youngest generation of debt holders are new attorneys. Their average law school debt exceeds $100,000 — and it’s climbing. So is their reported unemployment rate, especially now that law schools have to start disclosing the truth about their graduates. If you’re wondering why all of those students went to law school when there are legal jobs for, at most, half of them, deceptive deans have been a big contributor.

On their promotional websites, law schools routinely reported more than 90 percent of their graduates as employed. But they didn’t mention that the number included those with part-time jobs, non-lawyer positions (like working at Starbucks), or temporary employment by the law school itself for just long enough to count in their U.S. News ranking.

A compromise

Tavis Smiley responded to Will’s position with this: Wall Street bankers got zero-interest rate loans from the government; why can’t students get a break on theirs? That’s not a bad question. However, not all students need relief from their student loans. Families like the ones Mitt Romney had in mind sure don’t, but many others do. The Wall Street Journal recently profiled one — a 34-year old unemployed attorney with more than $200,000 in educational loans, mostly from law school: “It’s a noose around my neck that I see no way out of.”

Here’s a compromise: get rid of the noose by returning to pre-1976 bankruptcy rules. In those days, any baby boomer who wanted out of even federal student loan debt could get it. Filing for bankruptcy was an extreme step and few did it. In fact, there was never empirical support for changing the rule. There was even less reason for the added protection against discharge that private lenders received in 2005 — a change that no legislator is currently willing to admit sponsoring.

Those who cry “moral hazard” should prove it — not simply list a theoretical parade of horribles that never happened under the old rule. If the bankruptcy option was good enough for baby boomers, it should be good enough for their kids.

DEWEY: COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Posted on May 5, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

The vast failure of knowledge among the nation’s brightest law students remains remarkable. Their comments in the wake of Dewey & LeBoeuf’s stunning implosion make the point regrettably clear. Even as they become collateral damage to a tragic story that has many innocent victims, some persist in allowing hope to triumph over reality.

The NY Times reported on the 30 second-year law students from the nation’s best schools who thought they’d be earning $3,000 a week as Dewey & LeBoeuf summer associates. They’re now scrambling to find another productive way to fill three months that were supposed to be a launching pad for full-time careers with starting compensation at $160,000 a year.

Idealistic dreams meet harsh reality

One Ivy League student expressed optimism that other firms would step up and offer jobs to the displaced:

“A firm may look like a corporation, yes, but we’re all part of a fraternity of lawyers. Next year one becomes a member of the bar association, a linked structure. The firms may be competitors, but at the end of the day this is still the greater legal field. I hope this sensibility that we are part of a profession will also be in the minds of people as they consider us.”

The article doesn’t say which Ivy League law school the student attends, but it — along with his undergraduate institution — has failed the educational mission miserably. Most large law firms, including Dewey & LeBoeuf, ceased membership in a profession years ago and, during the last decade, that trend has accelerated. A myopic focus on short-term business school-type metrics, two of which are growth and equity partner profits — has taken Dewey and many others down a road to unfortunate places.

Most big firms are no longer “part of a profession” that will step up to offer law students or anyone else a life preserver. If they hire people, such as former Dewey lawyers and staff, it’s because they fit those firms’ own business plans. Another student who thought he had a job at Dewey for the summer got it right: “Now every other program is full, and it’s not like they’re going to adjust their plans to accommodate the failure of this one.”

It’s all connected

Everyone wonders why the number of law school applicants continues to outpace the number of law school openings that, in turn, dwarf the demand for lawyers. One answer is that colleges and law schools don’t educate prospective law students about the daunting challenges ahead. In fact, those institutions have the opposite incentives: colleges want to maximize the placement of their graduates in professional schools because that makes them look good; law schools maximize applicants because it pumps up the selectivity component of their U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Those already in the legal profession are well aware of the true state of affairs. The great disconnect is the failure of information to make its way to prospective lawyers who could benefit most from it. The press has increased its attention to the topics — the glut of lawyers; staggering law school debt that now averages more than $100,000; increasing career dissatisfaction among practicing lawyers.

Of course, ubiquitous confirmation bias will continue to encourage prospective lawyers to see what they want to see as they rationalize that they’ll be the lucky ones running the gauntlet successfully. Some will; too many won’t. The remarks of the Ivy Leaguer who spoke with the Times shows how much work remains for those who truly care about the fate of the next generation — lawyers and non-lawyers alike. There are miles to go before any of us should sleep.

EXPLAINING ABA INTRANSIGENCE

Posted on March 27, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Who are these people?

Recently, the ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar rejected an important recommendation of its Special Standards Review Committee. The proposed rule would have required law school-specific disclosure of salary information. No dice, said the Council.

It raises a question that no one seems willing to ask: Who are these Council people, anyway?

Perhaps the Council’s composition is relevant to understanding why it vetoed its own committee’s effort to promote greater candor. In approving a host of other transparency initiatives that have been far too long in coming, the Council stopped short of requiring what might be the most important disclosure of all:

If a student manages to get a job upon graduation, what are the chances that it will pay well enough to cover educational loans, rent, food, and the bare necessities of life?

I don’t know how individual members voted, but their affiliations are interesting. The current chair is dean of the New England School of Law, which has a perennial place in the U.S. News & World Report unranked nether regions. (Regular readers know my disdain for the U.S. News rankings that have transformed deans into contortionists as they pander to its flawed methodology. But as an overall indicator of general quality groups rather than specific ordinal placement, they confirm what most people believe to be true anyway.)

Consider the other academics on the Council. The Chair-elect is also a dean — Washington University School of Law (23rd on the U.S. News list). The Council’s Secretary was dean at the University of Montana School of Law (#145 ). Others deans and former deans on the Council hail from Hamline University Law School (unranked), North Carolina Central University School of Law (unranked), University of Kansas School of Law (#89), University of Miami School of Law (#69), Boston University School of Law (#26). Another member is an associate dean — University of Minnesota Law School (#19). The remaining academic Council members teach at Drexel University (#119) and Georgetown (#13).

Several other Council members who are not full-time professors have teaching affiliations with, for example, Cleveland-Marshall Law School (#135), University of Utah (#47), and Arizona State University (#26, tied with BU and Indiana University).

Each institution has its share of outstanding faculty and graduates; that’s not the point. But if these or most other schools had to disclose their recent graduates’ detailed salary information, would it make any of them look better to prospective students? Not likely.

The “appearance of impropriety” is an important ethical concept in the legal profession. Any dean or former dean on the Council who voted in favor of salary disclosure should say so. Those who don’t should live with the guilt by association that will accompany adverse inferences drawn from their silence.

Here’s the current Chairman’s spin on the situation: “There should be no doubt that the section is fully committed to clarity and accuracy of law school placement data. Current and prospective students will now have more timely access to detailed information that will help them make important decisions.”

Unless, of course, the information that students seek relates to the incomes they’ll earn after forking over $100,000-plus in tuition and incurring debt that they can’t discharge in bankruptcy.

Also from the ABA statement:

“The Council specifically declined to require the collection and publication of salary data because fewer than 45% of law graduates contacted by their law schools report their salaries. The Council felt strongly that the current collection of such data is unreliable and produces distorted information.”

If a forty-five percent response rate is sufficiently low to throw out data as unreliable because it produces distorted information, what does that say about U.S. News‘ survey used to calculate almost one-seventh of every law school’s 2013 ranking? The response rate for its “assessment by lawyers/judges” component was twelve percent.

I know, I know: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” (Emerson, R.W.,”Self-Reliance,” First Essays, 1841)

THE RHETORIC OF MARGINALIZATION

Posted on March 13, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

By now, just about everyone knows about Rush Limbaugh’s vile rant against the third-year Georgetown Law student who had the temerity to speak her mind before Congress. This post isn’t about the subject matter of her testimony. Whether and which employers should provide health insurance plans that include contraception as a preventive care benefit for their employees will remain controversial, even after the U.S. Supreme Court rules on the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

This post isn’t about Rush Limbaugh, either. He is what he is. To some people, he speaks truth in a straightforward, albeit colorful manner. To others, he’s a carnival barker whose hypocritical aim is to rile up 99-percenters in ways that feed his ego and divert attention from his own stunning wealth.

Climate of incivility

Rather, it’s about a climate of incivility that reserves a special rhetorical vitriol for women, especially those like Sandra Fluke. She is smart, articulate, and on the cusp of entering the legal profession from a top law school. Whatever else she learned at Georgetown, it probably didn’t include dealing with public descriptions of her that included words such as “slut” or “prostitute.” Or what to do when someone with a national radio following suggests posting internet videos of her intimate moments “so taxpayers can get their money’s worth.”

Even if he was telling a prolonged off-color joke, Limbaugh’s language was crude. But that’s because it expressed equally crude thoughts. The larger problem is that Limbaugh may have said what many other people — mostly men — were thinking. Any doubters need look no further than Gary McCoy’s cartoon in the March 7 issue of the New York Daily News or other comments throughout the blogosphere echoing support for Limbaugh’s sentiments.

More disturbing is the fact that such attitudes aren’t limited to criticizing women who speak in favor of contraception for health plans. Even conservative columnist Peggy Noonan, who was one of President Reagan’s speechwriters, spoke about the broader issue on the March 11, 2012 episode of “Meet The Press”:

“One of the big problems with discourse in America is the way — forget left and right for a second — it’s the way women are being spoken of. Women in public life. Women in politics. Women and policy questions…Somebody has to stop and notice that this sounds like a horrible, misogynistic war on women. We have got to stop it. I feel like the grown ups have to step in…Left, right and center, it’s getting horrible for women now. Let’s stop it.”

A joke is one thing, but…

Noonan’s complaint goes to the language of marginalization. Relegating another human being to a distasteful subcategory of the species makes evaluating that person on the merits unnecessary. At a minimum, it infects the assessment. As the number of powerful females grows, words of marginalization become interpersonal weapons of mass destruction. Such words are also like cockroaches — for every one that crawls into the public light, a hundred more thrive in darkness.

What’s the relevance to the legal profession? None, some might argue. After all women have risen from a quarter of all law students in 1975 to almost half today. Yet something is amiss. Just look at the dismal representation of women at the top of big law: they comprise only 16 percent of equity partners in firms responding to the latest NALP survey. (Half of all firms refused to respond at all. Draw your own inferences.)

Most of the men running large firms aren’t Limbaughs. In fact, there are many benign reasons for the absence of equity partner gender parity in large firms. But I don’t think those benign reasons are a complete explanation. Drilling down into the growing top-to-bottom compensation gap within equity partnerships would probably reveal another dramatic manifestation of the problem. Whether public or private, the thought is the father to the deed; words of marginalization can bridge the two.

The gender-specific aspect to all of this is both vicious and hypocritical. Would Limbaugh have used such reprehensible language to describe another man? What if, during an interlude between one of his four marriages, he had taken Viagra or Cialis and had a prescription drug benefit that paid for it? What would that make him or any other similarly situated male?

Whatever the answers, I have no desire to watch any of Limbaugh’s videos.

WORSE THAN CHEATERS

Posted on February 8, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Scandals involving schools of higher education lying to enhance their U.S. News rankings seem to be appearing more frequently. The most recent confession came from Claremont McKenna College. Its false numbers helped make it the ninth-best liberal arts college in the country. As usual, the school’s top leader blamed a rogue player instead of acknowledging a pervasive problem: deference to idiotic metrics has displaced reasoned judgment and the resulting institutional culture promotes predictable behavior.

Some difficulties flowing from U.S. News rankings methodology make the news. Like other recent instances of misreported data, the focus on Claremont relates to false admissions statistics, namely, SATs. At the University of Illinois College of Law, it was LSATs and GPAs.

Of course, such behavior is reprehensible. But do the rogue villains differ more in degree than in kind from deans who game the system? Some solicit transfer students whose low LSATs led to their rejection as entering one-Ls, but whose scores don’t count when they arrive as tuition-paying 2-Ls. Like the rogues, they seek to boost selectivity scores as measured by LSATs and undergraduate GPAs that comprise more than 20 percent of a law school’s total U.S. News ranking.

Similarly, employment rates at graduation and nine months later account for 18 percent of a law school’s ranking. That encourages deans to hire their own graduates for short-term projects and — until recent ABA revisions become fully effective — permits them to count every part-time, non-legal job as employment.

Expenditures per student account for about 10 percent of a law school’s score. That encourages deans to spend more money and increase tuition to cover the resulting costs while students incur more debt. The resulting vicious circle exacerbates intergenerational antagonisms that are rapidly becoming the legal profession’s — and society’s — next big crisis.

All of the recent attention about bogus admissions and placement numbers shines an important light on some dirty little corners of academia. But more profound rankings methodology problems have gone unnoticed. Specifically, selectivity and placement factors combined barely equal the weight that the ranking system gives to “Quality Assessment” — which accounts for 40 percent of a school’s overall score.

How does the U.S. News perform “Quality Assessment”? Two ways.

First, it sends out surveys to four individuals at all accredited law schools throughout the country: dean, dean of academic affairs, chair of faculty appointments, and the most recently tenured faculty member. The survey asks each recipient to rate all other schools on a scale from marginal (1) to outstanding (5). It doesn’t require that any respondent have any knowledge about any of the 190 schools that he or she rates. (Respondents have a “don’t know” option, but U.S. News doesn’t disclose how many used it. After all, that information would taint its misleading 66 percent response rate.)

A second assessment score comes from lawyers and judges. They, too, get the U.S. News survey asking for (1) to (5) responses about every school. Apart from 750 hiring partners and recruiters at law firms who made the newly developed U.S. News-Best Lawyers list of “Best Law Firms,” information about the “legal professionals, including hiring partners of law firms, state attorneys general, and selected state and federal judges” receiving the survey isn’t disclosed. But the anemic response rate is: 14 percent. One can reasonably ask why such flawed attempts at “quality assessment” should count at all.

One answer is that eliminating them would magnify the importance of the other factors, including test scores. In that respect, there’s a curious aspect of the recent NY Times article about Claremont’s false SATs. It quoted Robert Franek at length. Franek is senior vice president of The Princeton Review, a test-preparation business that has flourished as a principal benefactor of the U.S. News rankings mania.

The Princeton Review does rankings, too. Anyone who regards its list of law schools with the “Best Career Prospects” as meaningful should take a look at the top five for 2012 and ask, “Where are Harvard, Yale and Stanford?”

And then there’s The Princeton Review‘s original October 12, 2010 press release (subsequently revised) that announced the 2011 winner in the “Best Law School Professors” category: Brown.

Brown, of course, doesn’t have a law school.

THE LAW SCHOOL QUANDARY

Posted on January 18, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Law school deans are getting conflicting advice. Let’s sort it out.

“Provide more practical training” has become the latest mantra. At the recent annual meeting of the Association of American Law Schools, Susan Hackett, a legal consultant and former general counsel of the Association of Corporate Counsel, argued for a year of executive-style classes covering business topics and skills. Here’s a better suggestion: students seeking a business school education should attend business school.

Meanwhile, according to the National Law Journal, Peter Kalis, chairman of K&L Gates, said that some current law school criticism is misplaced: “I believe law schools should concentrate on the education of law students from the perspective of acculturating them in the rule of law. Law students should spend that time being immersed in and becoming familiar with common law subjects.” More fee simple, anyone?

Finally, a Northwestern University law professor and a first-year Kirkland & Ellis associate offered a dramatic solution to the shortage of attorneys. You probably didn’t know there was one. Although the U.S. already leads the world in lawyers per capita, the authors concluded that allowing colleges to offer undergraduate law programs would: 1) reduce law school tuition to zero (for such students); 2) produce more lawyers; 3) cause some attorneys to charge lower fees; and 4) assure broader access to legal services for lower- and middle-income Americans. While not prohibiting law schools from offering today’s $150,000 J.D. degree programs, the plan would put most law schools out of business.

Where to begin? One reason the United States has too many lawyers is that law school has long been a default solution for college students. But when youthful expectations clash with the harsh reality that most attorneys endure, career dissatisfaction results. Allowing poorly informed undergraduates to pursue a law degree right out of high school would be exponentially worse — for them and the profession. (Commenters to the on-line version of the article destroyed the authors’ cavalier comparison of their scheme to the UK system. If you’re wondering why The Wall Street Journal editorial board published such a flawed piece, you’re not alone.)

What do students think?

At the same time, today’s law students like the education they’re getting. According to the recently released 2011 Law School Survey of Student Engagement of 33,000 current students at 95 law schools in the U.S. and Canada, 83 percent of respondents said that their experience in law school was “good” or “excellent.” Eighty percent said they definitely or probably would attend the same law school if they could start over again. Maybe most of these students will join the ranks of unhappy scambloggers when they can’t get jobs to repay their loans, but for the moment they’re satisfied.

But the same study revealed that 40 percent of students felt that their legal education had so far contributed only some or very little to their acquisition of job- or work-related knowledge and skills. In other words, some like their law school experience, even if it’s not equipping them in a practical way for positions they hope to obtain.

A final point may resolve this apparent contradiction. When students seek their first law jobs, curriculum makes little difference. Candid big firm interviewers admit that, except insofar as a particular course might give a recruit something interesting to discuss in an interview, subject matter is irrelevant. In fact, dramatic curriculum innovation is underway at many schools and, however worthwhile it otherwise may be, affected students haven’t become more desirable to prospective employers:

“There’s no employer out there right now — not law firms, not the Department of Justice, not the ACLU — that are seeking out these graduates,” Indiana University Maurer School of Law Professor William Henderson observed at the AALS meeting. “These programs haven’t affected hiring patterns. It’s still all sorted out with credentials. It’s based on the brand of the law school.”

If the vast majority of students are happy with the law school experience and changing it won’t improve their job prospects, perhaps the legal academy and its critics should consider focusing attention elsewhere. Here’s an idea: Provide prospective law students better information about the real life that most lawyers lead. For too many of them, it comes as an unpleasant surprise. Forewarned is forearmed.

UNFORTUNATE COMMENT AWARD

Posted on January 10, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Today’s “Unfortunate Comment Award” winner is ABA President William (“Bill”) Robinson III, who thinks he has found those responsible for the glut of unemployed, debt-ridden young lawyers: the lawyers themselves.

“It’s inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago,” he told Reuters during a January 4 interview.

Which year we talkin’ ’bout, Willis?

Recent graduates made the decision to attend law school in the mid-2000s, when the economy was booming. Even most students now in their third year decided to apply by spring 2008 — before the crash — when they registered for the LSAT. Some of those current 3-Ls were undergraduates in the first-ever offering of a course on the legal profession that I still teach at Northwestern. What were they thinking? I’ll tell you.

I’ve written that colleges and law schools still make little effort to bridge a pervasive expectations-reality gap. Anyone investigating law schools in early 2008 saw slick promotional materials that reinforced the pervasive media image of a glamorous legal career.

Jobs? No problem. Prospective students read that for all recent graduates of all law schools, the overall average employment rate was 93 percent. They had no reason to assume that schools self-reported misleading statistics to the ABA, NALP, and the all-powerful U.S. News ranking machine.

But unlike most of their law school-bound peers, my students scrutinized the flawed U.S. News approach. Among other things, they discovered that employment rates based on the ABA’s annual law school questionnaire were cruel jokes. That questionnaire allowed deans to report graduates as employed, even if they were flipping burgers or working for faculty members as temporary research assistants.

Law school websites followed that lead because the U.S. News rankings methodology penalized greater transparency and candor. In his Reuters interview, Robinson suggested that problematic employment statistics afflicted “no more than four” out of 200 accredited institutions, but he’s just plain wrong. Like their prospective students, most deans still obsess over U.S. News rankings as essential elements of their business models.

The beat goes on

With the ABA’s assistance, such law school deception continues today. Only last month — December 2011 — did the Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar finally approve changes in collecting and publishing law graduate placement data: Full- or part-time jobs? Bar passage required? Law school-funded? Some might consider that information relevant to a prospective law student trying to make an informed decision. Until this year, the ABA didn’t. The U.S. News rankings guru, Robert Morse, deferred to the ABA.

The ABA is accelerating the new reporting process so that “the placement data for the class of 2011 will be published during the summer of 2012, not the summer of 2013.” That’s right, even now, a pre-law student looking at ABA-sanctioned employment information won’t find the whole ugly truth. (Notable exceptions include the University of Chicago and Yale.) Consequently, any law school still looks like a decent investment of time and money, but as Professor William Henderson and Rachel Zahorsky note in the January 2012 issue of the ABA Journal, it often isn’t.

Students haven’t been blind to the economy. But bragging about 90+ percent employment rates didn’t (and doesn’t) deter prospective lawyers. Quite the contrary. Law school has long been the last bastion of the liberal arts major who can’t decide what’s next. The promise of a near-certain job in tough times makes that default solution more appealing.

Even the relatively few undergraduates (including the undergraduates in my class) paying close attention to big firm layoffs in 2009 were hopeful. They thought that by the time they came out of law school, the economy and the market for attorneys would improve. So did many smart, informed people. Youthful optimism isn’t a sin.

Which takes me to ABA President Robinson’s most telling comment in the Reuters interview: “We’re not talking about kids who are making these decisions.”

Perhaps we’re not talking about his 20-something offspring, but they’re somebody’s kids. The ABA and most law school deans owed them a better shake than they’ve received.

It’s ironic and unfortunate: one of the most visible spokesmen in a noble profession blames the victims.

TROUBLE IN TEXAS

Posted on January 4, 2012 by thebellyofthebeast

Last month, University of Texas President Bill Powers asked his law school dean, Larry Sager, to resign early — months ahead of his originally planned departure at the end of the academic year. According to the Texas Tribune, Sager’s relationship with the faculty “had become so strained that he was no longer able to serve effectively.” One source of discord was faculty compensation.

The story became more interesting with news that the law school’s foundation — a private non-profit group run by alums and distinguished attorneys — had given Sager a $500,000 “forgivable loan” in 2009. It got juicier when Powers said, “I don’t remember ever being told about the loan to Dean Sager, and that’s the sort of thing I would remember.”

He said — he said

Sager counters with his “clear memory” that Powers knew about the loan, but then distances himself from the foundation’s action: “Whatever else is true about the loan, the decision was made by the president of the foundation, the executive committee of the foundation and the trustees of the foundation as a whole. I would not and could not have dictated this outcome.”

So who determines compensation at the University of Texas School of Law?

The Texas Tribune notes that one of the foundation’s top donor-trustees, Steve Susman (an outstanding attorney) explained the foundation’s laudable purpose:

“If the law school is going to remain just a state law school supported by state money, I think it’s going to drop to being a very mediocre law school. The reason this law school has always been a great law school is because it has always gone to its alumni and said, ‘We need you in it.’”

But that defense is irrelevant to the current controversy. Many colleges and universities have alumni organizations that raise money. Sometimes they solicit for particular causes or programs. No problem. But the UT foundation’s funds apparently became part of a dean’s compensation package and the university’s president claims not to know how or why.

Who’s in charge?

In a lengthy letter to the faculty (downloadable at the Texas Tribune article link), Sager explains that, after becoming dean in 2006, he tried to raise UT’s stature by luring talent from other schools while resisting raids on UT’s. Without naming the foundation, he says that “loan arrangements have come from monies that have been raised and expressly endowed for academic excellence.” He also notes that he “raised the bulk of these funds – which total more than $10 million — for exactly the purpose of recruiting and retaining faculty.”

From there, things get curioser and curioser. Sager’s letter describes university-wide austerity budgets that constrained law school salaries. Meanwhile, according to the school’s response to an Open Records Request, the $500,000 Sager received in May 2009 was by far the biggest of 22 loans made between May 15, 2006 and September 15, 2011. His letter doesn’t mention it.

President Powers says he didn’t know anything about Sager’s loan. Sager says that Powers knew and the loan was recognition for a job well-done, but his reward was a “foundation decision.”

It’s a Texas-sized mess. From the Texas Tribune:

“The day after Sager’s resignation, UT Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa issued a statement calling for a review of how funds flow to the Law School from the Foundation, how these decisions are made,’ in order to ‘enhance processes, procedures and controls for those transactions in the future.’ Cigarroa said the review’s findings would help establish ‘clear and transparent guidelines’ for all UT institutions and affiliated foundations.”

Before rejoicing at this hint of leadership from above, read on:

“A spokesman for the UT System said that while the chancellor has no direct authority over faculty compensation at the law school, he wants to make sure everything is being done in an appropriate fashion.” Atop the UT System sits a Board of Regents, which the governor appoints and the state senate confirms.

All of this leads to two questions: First, who decides whether things are “being done in an appropriate fashion” and, second, who’s responsible for changing things that aren’t?

After Penn State, university trustees and regents everywhere should be pondering those questions. The answers are important — and they’re in the mirror.

A NEW LAW SCHOOL MISSION – PART II

Posted on December 12, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

The second and final installment of “Great Expectations Meet Painful Realities” — my latest contribution to the debate about the legal profession’s growing crisis — is now available in the December 2011 issue of Circuit Rider, the official publication of the Seventh Circuit Bar Association. My article begins on page 26. For those who are interested, here’s the link to Part I.

THE OTHER BIG 10 SCANDAL

Posted on November 16, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

Penn State dominates the headlines, but another Big 10 scandal symbolizes what ails legal education and much of the profession. The two situations aren’t morally equivalent, but it’s too bad there isn’t an attention-getting JoePa at the University of Illinois.

On August 26, the university’s ethics office received a tip about a problem with the U of I College of Law’s LSAT and GPA stats. The resulting ABA investigation continues, but the U of I’s November 7 report identifies a rogue villain.

I think it’s more complicated.

The rogue

Shortly after Paul Pless graduated in 2003, his alma mater hired him (at a salary of $38,500/year) as assistant director for admissions and financial aid. (For years, putting unemployed new grads on the temporary payroll for paltry wages has bolstered schools’ U.S. News rankings. Starting next year, they’ll have to disclose it.) Pless stayed on and, by December 2004, was earning $72,000/year as an assistant dean.

Metrics mania

One of the final report’s first section headings is key:

“Institutional Emphasis on USNWR [U.S. News & World Report] Ranking.”

Not until its 2005 annual report did the school — not Pless — explicitly adopt two new goals: increasing the incoming class’s median LSAT from 163 to 165 and its GPA from 3.42 to 3.5. When the median LSAT came in at 166, then-Dean Heidi Hurd sang Pless’s praises:

“Had we been able to report this increase last year, holding all else equal, we would have moved from 26th to 20th in the U.S. News rankings.”

Except the school hadn’t held “all else equal” to get its historic LSAT boost. The median GPA had plummeted to 3.32 and its overall ranking dropped to 27th. In May 2006, a new strategic plan noted that the admissions emphasis on LSATs had left it “with a GPA profile worse than any other top-50 school.” The new goal: raising the incoming class median LSAT/GPA to 168/3.7 by 2011.

In July, Hurd sought a big pay raise for Pless because, she said, he was “in the hiring sights of every dean in America who wants to improve student rankings.” His salary jumped to $98,000. Up to this point, investigators concluded, there had been relatively minor flaws in the data submitted to the ABA and U.S. News.

The heat is on

Two interim deans served from September 2007 through January 2009. But investigators found that a handful of 2008 discrepancies between actual and reported data for the incoming class of 2011 marked the beginning of a “sustained pattern…that increased in practice and scope through the class of 2014.”

In February 2009, Bruce Smith became dean and had to resolve an open question: should the incoming class of 2012’s median LSAT/GPA target be 165/3.8 or 166/3.7? There had been ongoing internal debate over which combination would maximize the school’s overall U.S. News ranking. Smith described his response to the board of visitors:

“I told Paul [Pless] to push the envelope, think outside the box, take some risk, do things differently…Strive for a 166 [LSAT]/3.8 [GPA]….”

The report exonerates Smith from wrongdoing. But footnote 3 observes that his management style “is goal-oriented and intense, and occasionally intimidating, and that it is not inconceivable that certain employees subordinate to him would be uncomfortable bringing bad news to him.”

For the next two years, Pless didn’t.

“I haven’t let a Dean down yet, and I don’t plan on starting with you Boss,” he’d assured Smith in April 2009.

Median LSATs and GPAs showed continuing improvement; Pless’s salary jumped to $130,000 on the strength of Smith’s glowing review. Indeed, Pless’s exploding compensation at a public university in tough financial straits reveals the power of rankings and deans.

On August 22, 2011, Pless touted the class of 2014’s median LSAT (168) and GPA (3.81). By then, the actual numbers were 163 and 3.7.

Who is to blame? The U of I report says Pless and no one else because he made the data entries. I say read it carefully, draw your own conclusions, and ponder the larger picture. The power of U.S. News rankings and other equally misguided metrics comes from people who rely upon them as definitive measures of the things that matter.

“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars…”

TOO LITTLE; TOO LATE

Posted on October 19, 2011 by thebellyofthebeast

The ABA is thinking about punishing law schools that lie. What courage!

At the front end of the experience, intentionally inflated undergraduate GPAs and LSATs for Villanova’s admitted students led to an ABA censure in August. The school must now employ an independent compliance monitor for two years. Next up in the hot seat: the University of Illinois College of Law. Now, at the back end, the ABA is considering imposing penalties on law schools that misrepresent graduate job placement data.

This one-school-at-a-time approach misses the larger targets. Along with many law schools’ dubious sales tactics, the ABA itself has contributed to the chronic oversupply of lawyers.

Don’t let a recent Wall Street Journal article about the declining number of law school applicants fool you. Excess supply persists. Although total applicants are down ten percent from last year, the number of students starting law school has actually been rising. Meanwhile, the projected growth in new attorney jobs remains far below what’s required to achieve full employment for lawyers hoping to work as lawyers.

In the fall of 2002, first-year enrollment was 48,400. By 2009 — the last year for which the LSAC has published information — it had climbed to 51,600. In other words, demand still exceeds supply. This year’s ten percent applicant drop — to 78,900 — won’t prompt schools to reduce capacity. Rather, it will encourage growth.

And the ABA isn’t stopping them. Between 1970 and 2010, the number of law schools increased from 144 to 200. During the same period, the total number of law students soared from 64,000 to 145,000.

Meanwhile, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that there will be only 98,000 net additional legal jobs for the entire decade ending in 2018. At current enrollments, law schools will produce five times that many graduates; baby boomer retirements won’t bridge that gap.

Last year’s drop in applicants may mean that some recent graduates are giving more thought to whether law school is the right path. That would be great news for them and the profession. Unfortunately, the accreditation of new schools and the growth of existing ones is bad news for many would-be lawyers.

Having facilitated a situation that continues to inflict tragic consequences on many unsuspecting victims, the ABA has avoided leading serious remedial efforts. In light of its recent punt on the requirement that law schools report meaningful information about their graduates’ employment status, its now-contemplated scrutiny of individual schools’ placement statistics rings hollow. To wit: the Wal-Mart greeter with a law degree still counts as employed.

The ABA’s piecemeal approach won’t solve the problem. Most law schools are prisoners of short-term profit-maxizing business models and metrics. That’s why too many resort to half-truths or outright deception to enhance U.S. News rankings, pump up demand, and put tuition-paying butts in classrooms.

Until students understand the deep methodological flaws in the U.S. News rankings, too many deans will continue manipulating them. Independent audit of the data that schools submit would help. But it should be part of a larger strategy: providing better information to prospective law students long before they sit for the LSAT.

The law can be a noble calling, but it’s not for everyone. When those enrolling in law school understand what’s ahead — including the possibility that their dream jobs won’t be there — they make better decisions and the entire profession wins. Here’s the harsh truth that will surprise many recruits: Some deans don’t act with much nobility when it comes to pursuing tuition dollars.

In an 1891 letter to his fiance, Louis Brandeis wrote: “If the broad light of day could be let in upon men’s actions, it would purify them as the sun disinfects.” Twenty years later, he was less optimistic about improving human behavior when he focused instead on practical remedies for misconduct: “Sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”

The ABA isn’t going to start stripping schools of their accreditations, but it can put them under brighter lights. Adding surveillance cameras and a few more cops on the beat wouldn’t hurt, either.

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The Belly of the Beast

Steven J. Harper, Esq.

Category Archives: Law School

PARDON MY CYNICISM

SOMEBODY’S CHILD

ANOTHER LAW SCHOOL DEAN MISSES THE TARGET

MORE LAW SCHOOL NON-REFORM

LAW SCHOOL DISEQUILIBRIUM

TWO YEARS TO WHAT?

THE LAW SCHOOL STORY OF 2012 — DEANS IN DENIAL

JUXTAPOSITIONS

THE LAWYER BUBBLE

A COMMENDABLE (AND COURAGEOUS) COMMENT AWARD

LAW SCHOOL DYSFUNCTION, ARIZONA STYLE

The Most Unfortunate Comment Award to Date

LAW SCHOOLS AS PROFIT CENTERS

BLOOMBERG LAW INTERVIEW

BACK TO SCHOOL SPECIAL: LAW SCHOOL TUITION!

WHEN FACTS GET IN THE WAY

THE NEXT DEBT CRISIS

UNFORTUNATE COMMENT AWARD

DEWEY’S MARTIN BIENENSTOCK: PARTNERSHIP, PROFESSIONALISM AND WHAT TO TELL THE KIDS

A PLUTOCRAT’S PITTANCE

DEWEY: COLLATERAL DAMAGE

EXPLAINING ABA INTRANSIGENCE

THE RHETORIC OF MARGINALIZATION

WORSE THAN CHEATERS

THE LAW SCHOOL QUANDARY

UNFORTUNATE COMMENT AWARD

TROUBLE IN TEXAS

A NEW LAW SCHOOL MISSION – PART II

THE OTHER BIG 10 SCANDAL

TOO LITTLE; TOO LATE

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