THE TRUE COST OF THE WEIL LAYOFFS

Posted on June 26, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

The Wall Street Journal describes the layoffs of 60 lawyers and 110 staff as “the starkest sign yet that the legal industry continues to struggle after the recession.” But who, exactly, is struggling?

Not the owners of the business. The overall average profits for equity partners in the Am Law 100 reached record levels in 2012. Even during the darkest days of the Great Recession in 2008, PPP for that group remained comfortably above $1.2 million before resuming the climb toward almost $1.5 million last year.

Not equity partners at Weil, Gotshal & Manges, who earned a reported average PPP of $2.2 million in 2012, according the the American Lawyer.

So Who Suffers?

One group of victims consists of 60 young people who had done everything right until everything went wrong for them on June 24. They’re intelligent, ambitious, and hard-working. Exemplary performance in high school earned them places in good colleges where they graduated at the top of their classes. They attended excellent law schools and excelled, even as the competition got tougher.

All of those accomplishments landed them great jobs. In the midst of a dismal legal job market, they went to work at one of the nation’s most prestigious law firms. Making more than $160,000 a year, many believed that soon they might throw off the yoke of six-figure student loan debt.

Now, they’re unemployed.

Another group of victims consists of 110 staffers who also got the boot. According to the NY Times, approximately half of them were secretaries. These behind-the-scenes workers often go unappreciated by lawyers who mistakenly take all of the credit for their own success.

A third group is a reported 10 percent of partners, many of whom who will suffer compensation cuts of “hundreds of thousands of dollars,” according to the NY Times.

“It’s All About the Future”

Announcing the layoffs, executive partner Barry Wolf described the move as “about the future of the firm and strategically positioning us for the next five years.” But layoffs aren’t about weeding out associates who don’t measure up to the rigorous quality standards necessary for equity partnerships. They’re about matching supply (of associates) with demand (for legal work) according to undisclosed criteria.

In fact, it seems a bit strange to talk about a firm positioning itself for the future while simultaneously dropping a morale bomb on its associates (and some partners) during the height of the summer program. The best and the brightest young prospects are working in big firms where luring that talent into the firms is a top priority. Bad public relations from a high-profile layoff can have a chilling effect that outlasts a single news cycle.

And what is that future going to look like? Will Weil be hiring any new associates over the next 12 months? Or 18 months? Or even 24 months? If so, I know 60 candidates with big firm experience (at Weil) who may be interested.

There is no shortage of current students who will continue to seek high-paying jobs at Weil, Gotshal & Manges. But what if negative publicity dissuades those few with the rare qualities necessary to become superstar partners from even signing up for on-campus interviews? By its very nature, such longer-run damage is impossible to know, much less measure.

Big Law’s Cheerleaders Applaud the Move

Law firm management consultants applauded Weil’s move. That’s not surprising because they have been central players in the profession’s transformation to just another business. They consistently endorse businesslike steps to maximize short-term profits. They expect other firms to follow Weil’s lead, and perhaps some will. Law firm consultant Peter Zeughauser said, “Weil is a bellwether firm and this will be a real wake up call.”

The etymology of bellwether may be relevant. In the mid-15th century, a bell was hung on a wether, a castrated ram that led a domesticated flock. In that way, the noise from the bellwether made it possible to hear the flock coming before anyone saw it.

In an informal Am Law survey, other firm leaders have distanced themselves from Weil. Before following that lead ram, perhaps they’re giving some thought to where it is going.

MY NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED

Posted on June 25, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Today, the Times is running my op-ed ed, “Big Law’s Troubling Trajectory.” Here’s the link: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/25/opinion/big-laws-troubling-trajectory.html?hp&_r=0

ANOTHER COMMENDABLE CONDUCT AWARD

Posted on June 19, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Big law bankruptcy attorneys may have finally killed their golden goose. We’ll never know if less hubris and more thought might have prevented the U.S. Trustee from releasing new attorney compensation guidelines that surely have prominent members of that bar squirming. Those guidelines earn my latest “Commendable Conduct Award.” Starting November 1, we’ll see how many judges have the courage to apply them.

Restraint in the race to $1,000 an hour billing rates to maximize short-term profits might have served practitioners better in the long run. Likewise, more discretion in responding to media inquiries about the lucrative bankruptcy law world might have been wiser than Weil, Gotshal & Manges partner Harvey Miller’s stunning comment to the Wall Street Journal in 2011: “The underlying principle is, if you can get it, get it.”

Flying Under the Radar

The bankruptcy practice in big firms is unique because there’s no real client putting the usual counter-pressure on attorneys seeking to enhance their personal wealth. It’s the billable hour regime at its worst.

Outside bankruptcy, corporate clients everywhere are pushing back on big law firms’ hourly rate increases, refusing to pay for high-priced first-year associates, demanding budgets, scrutinizing attorney activities, and generally seeking greater economy in the delivery of outside legal services. Bankruptcy attorneys have little comparable accountability. They simply set their rates, decide what tasks to perform, and assign manpower as they see fit.

Hello and Good-bye

Unlike corporate clients who dangle the prospect of long-term relationships and future business to encourage their outside attorneys to be more efficient, bankruptcy practitioners have a series of one-shot engagements. When the current proceeding is over, their bankruptcy “client” of the moment disappears, never to return.

Bankruptcy petitions are also vehicles for law firm oligopolists to share pricing information. When most senior big firm bankruptcy partners request $1,000 an hour, it becomes the reasonable and customary rate. But even more remarkable are the $400 an hour and up rates that they can often get for junior associates — the same ones who add so little value that real clients refuse to pay for them at all.

Theoretical Oversight

The U.S. Trustee reviews fee petitions. But to date, those efforts have amounted to quibbling over obviously suspect expenses, such as $500 hotel rooms when cheaper accommodations were available or taking limos when taxis were a reasonable alternative.

Likewise, attorneys representing competing interests in the bankrupt’s estate — creditors, for example — can object to the fees of other attorneys in the proceeding. But none has any incentive to rock the lucrative hourly rate boat in which they all sit. Bankruptcy judges have the final word on attorneys’ fees petitions and they routinely rubber-stamp them.

Now It’s Becoming Real

When the U.S. Trustee first proposed the new guidelines, big firm bankruptcy lawyers throughout the country united in opposition. The most strident objections were to the idea that firms should reveal hourly rates for comparable non-bankruptcy associates and partners working for real clients.

Were firms worried about providing data that would allow the U.S. Trustee and supervising courts to compare hourly rates sought in bankruptcy with those resulting from a market that is at least somewhat more competitive? Soon, we’ll find out.

The new forms accompanying the guidelines require, among other things, that firms reveal the “blended hourly rates” of their personnel in 10 different categories ranging from equity partners to paralegals. In addition to the blended rates sought in the fee petition, firms also must disclose their firmwide (or, in some cases, office wide) blended rates for each category.

A Step on the Road to Transparency

The new guidelines aren’t perfect and attorneys will manipulate them. Budgets are optional. Hourly “step rate” increases are automatic as attorneys gain seniority. Attorney categories are too broad, with a single category for all equity partners and with associates grouped into categories covering three years. An especially large loophole allows firms to report either the “billed” or “collected” comparable hourly rate. (Real clients request discounts from standard hourly rates, and they often get them.)

Even so, the U.S. Trustee deserves credit for moving a dark corner of the profession from opacity to translucence. Free market devotees — of which big law has many — should embrace the changes. So far, big firm partners have resisted them vehemently.

The governing principle for too much of the large law firm world has become “if you can get it, get it.” Perhaps many of those espousing that view are about to “get it” in a much different way than they have in the past.

PROOF OF THE PROFESSION’S CRISIS

Posted on June 5, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

This article won the “Big Law Pick of the Week.” BigLaw‘s weekly newsletter reaches the world’s largest law firms and the general counsel who hire them.

Someone should remind law firm leaders that the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination isn’t just for clients. It can work for them, too. The latest Altman-Weil survey of firm leaders is proof of widespread management incompetence, stupidity, and worse.

The survey went to the chairs or managing partners of 791 firms with 50 or more lawyers. Firms with more than 250 lawyers (that is, mostly Am Law 200 firms) had a much higher response rate (42 percent) than smaller firms (26 percent). In other words, the survey results tilt toward big law firm attitudes.

The troubling big picture

The Am Law Daily’s summary includes comments from the survey’s author, Thomas Clay, who said that too many firms are “almost operating like Corporate America…managing the firm quarter-to-quarter by earnings per share.” That shortsighted approach is “not taking the long view about things like truly changing the way you do things to improve client value and things of that nature.”

For example, 95 percent of respondents view increased pricing competition as an ongoing trend, and 80 percent expect shifts to non-hourly billing structures. But only 29 percent have made significant changes to their own pricing practices in the wake of the recession.

Group stupidity

It gets worse. When asked to identify their greatest challenges over the next 24 months, the item that managers cite most often is “increasing revenue.” The rest of the list is, in order: new business, growth, profitability, management transition, cost management, and attracting talent. If you’re wondering where clients fit — other than as a source of revenue and profits in items one, two, and three — “client value” finished eighth.

Long-term thinking? Forget it. The client silo mentality and resulting culture of short-termism are widespread and deep. Almost 30 percent of law firm leaders say their firms lack adequate mid-level partners to whom they could transition clients. In another set of responses, they reveal why: 78 percent say that “senior partners don’t want to retire”; 73 percent admit that “senior partners don’t want to forfeit current compensation by transitioning client work.”

Lateral incompetence

Meanwhile, lateral hiring remains the prevailing strategy to achieve growth. Ninety percent of respondents plan to hire laterals in 2013; more than 60 percent seek entire practice groups. For firms of more than 250 lawyers, the numbers are even more startling: 100 percent plan to acquire laterals; 92 percent plan to acquire groups.

How much time do lateral partners get to prove their worth? Almost 60 percent of responding firm leaders say two years or more; 30 percent don’t set a time frame.

What happens when laterals don’t meet the expectations that brought them into the firm? Two-thirds of firm leaders said that they “sometimes, rarely or never” tell unproductive lateral hires to leave.

Institutional ineptitude

Almost 40 percent of respondents say their partners’ morale is lower compared to the beginning of 2008. And those partners survived the purges of 2009 and beyond.

If you’re looking for contributors to declining morale, try these. Seventy-two percent of firm leaders report that fewer equity partners will be a permanent trend going forward. Three-fourths have either tightened their standards or take them more seriously. Meanwhile, 92 percent of responding two-tier firms don’t have an up-or-out policy as non-equity partner profit centers grow.

To summarize:

Managing partners know that change is coming and clients are demanding it, but firms aren’t revisiting their basic strategies or business models.

Growth and profits finish far ahead of enhancing client value as most law firm leaders’ top concerns.

Leaders view aggressive lateral hiring as critical to law firm growth, but when laterals don’t produce, most firms don’t do much about it.

Succession planning is problematic because senior partners don’t want to relinquish compensation that is tied to their client billings.

As senior leaders continue to pull up the equity partner ladder on the next generation, morale plummets and managing partners worry about the absence of mid-level talent to serve clients in the future.

Taking all of this together, psychologists would call it a severe case of cognitive dissonance — simultaneously holding contradictory thoughts in your head. Those who assert that most big firms are resilient and face no life-threatening problems are wrong. A crisis of leadership is already upon us as lot of supposedly smart people continue to do some really dumb things. Don’t take my word for it; they’re outing themselves.

MAKING MONEY ON OUR KIDS

Posted on May 29, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Where can an investor earn a 7.9 percent guaranteed annual rate of return? Not 30-year United States Treasury bonds; they pay around 3 percent. Not other countries’ sovereign debt; some of the most economically fragile nations in the Euro zone sell 10-year bonds bearing interest rates of less than 6 percent—and it’s certainly not guaranteed.

Try your kids. The interest rate on subsidized federal student loans is currently 3.4 percent, but it will jump to 6.8 percent on July 1 and covers just a slice of the market anyway. For undergraduates who don’t qualify for the subsidy, it’s already 6.8 percent. For graduate students (including law students), the rate is 7.9 percent.

Big returns with no risk

The program is a moneymaker for the government. According to a February 2013 Congressional Budget Office report, the federal government makes about 36 cents in revenue for every student loan dollar it puts out. Graduate (and law) student loans are especially lucrative — 55 cents on the dollar.

These eye-popping returns are especially juicy because the loans have virtually no risk of non-repayment. If a student defaults, the feds retain a collection agency to pursue the money (total cost of all federally retained debt collectors last year: more than $1 billion). Eventually, they’ll get it because such loans are in that small category of debts that survive a personal bankruptcy filing, along with alimony, child support, certain fines, and taxes. An exception for debtors who can demonstrate “undue hardship” rarely applies.

Bipartisan blame

How did this happen? Good intentions went awry. In the 1960s, Congress followed economist Milton Friedman’s earlier recommendation that the government provide direct loans for higher education. The underlying principle still resonates: a society’s investment in human capital pays long run dividends. The corollary is that those who benefit personally should repay loans for the education that gives them a better life.

Unfortunately, as that better life has become more elusive for so many, the student loan program has converted struggling young people into profit centers for the government. In the trillion-dollar world of educational debt, students entering the professions — including law — are among the most unfortunate victims, in part because both their tuition and their loan interest rates are the highest.

The special plight of young lawyers

Lawyers generate little sympathy from the rest of the population. But 85 percent of today’s law graduates have educational loans exceeding $100,000. The grim market for new attorneys means that only about half of them are finding full-time long-term employment requiring a legal degree. Even fewer earn enough to repay their staggering loans. (Before blaming these young people for their plights, take a close look at the behavior of many law school deans who misled them into the profession with deceptive information about post-graduate employment prospects. Meaningful transparency on that topic is a recent phenomenon.)

As the July 1 deadline nears, proposals that seem to be gaining traction in Washington would preserve all above-market rates and the student loan program’s profitability. They also suggest that we’ve learned little from the subprime mortgage debacle. The House recently passed Rep. John Kline’s (R-MN) bill , resetting the graduate student rate at 4.5 percent above the 10-year Treasury, subject to a 10.5 percent cap.

In the unlikely event that the House bill gets past the Senate, President Obama has threatened to veto it. However, he is willing to have students borrow at a lower variable rate that’s still significantly higher than the 10-year Treasury, but with no cap (although once set, the rate would remain for the life of the loan). Combining the floating rate elements of the House proposal with the president’s plan could produce a truly disastrous compromise. The president also wants income-based repayment and debt forgiveness. Because Republicans with blocking power oppose those partial remedies on the grounds that it will encourage students to take on bigger debt, those proposals seem doomed.

Recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) offered her first bill. For a year, it would cut the student loan rate to 0.75 percent—the same rate that big banks get on their borrowing from the Fed. Unfortunately, a prospective one-year solution is no solution at all. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand has the best current plan: set a 4 percent rate for all student loans and allow graduates with existing debt to refinance at that rate. But that won’t happen, either.

Guiding principles

As policymakers grapple with the growing educational debt bubble, they might consider two governing principles.

First, those running institutions of higher education should be held accountable financially for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes. Otherwise, federal dollars will continue to worsen the situation as administrators focus myopically on filling classroom seats to maximize tuition revenues. Allowing the discharge of educational debt in bankruptcy and permitting the federal government to seek recourse from schools that impoverish their graduates with tuition loans might alter some schools’ worst behavior.

A second principle should be even easier to implement. No mechanism for funding higher education should convert our kids into profit centers.

COMMENDABLE CONDUCT AWARD

Posted on May 22, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Regular readers know that I’m often critical of many law school deans. But when one of them gets it right, let’s give credit where it’s due. As the glut of new attorneys persists, the University of Kansas School of Law Dean Stephen Mazza became the latest dean to announce significant reductions in incoming class size. With that action, he has earned a “Commendable Conduct Award.”

Not the first

The University of Kansas isn’t the first to implement such cuts. Last year, Frank Wu, chancellor and dean of the University of California Hastings School of Law announced a 20 percent reduction in class size for the fall of 2012.

“The critics of legal education are right,” Wu said. “There are far too many law schools and there are too many law students and we need to do something about that.”

George Washington University, Albany Law School, Creighton University School of Law, and Loyola University Chicago School of Law have reduced entering class size, too. In March, Northwestern Law School Dean Daniel Rodriguez said his school would reduce the fall 2013 class by 10 percent. “We can’t ignore the destabilizing forces that the legal industry is facing today,” he said.

KU deserves special praise

All of these efforts to reduce the size of entering classes are commendable. But there are several unique aspects to the University of Kansas announcement that make it especially noteworthy.

First, the reduction as a percentage of enrollment in prior years is large: from 175 students graduating this year to a target of 120 students for the 2013 entering class and for the foreseeable future.

Equally significant, it appears that KU didn’t have to take its laudable step. The dean said that applications were down only about 10 percent — far less than many other schools. Moreover, an impressive 82 percent of 2012 graduates secured long-term jobs where a JD was required or preferred — far above the national average.

As an added bonus, a KU legal education is a relative bargain compared to many other schools: $18,600 tuition for full-time students who are state residents; $31,500 for out-of-state.

Motivations matter; outcomes matter more

Everyone expects that the decline in the number of law school applicants will produce lower average LSATs and GPAs for the entering 1L class. That, in turn, would hit the selectivity component of a school’s overall U.S. News ranking. It’s possible that some deans have reduced entering class size as part of a strategy to protect their rankings. But if the overall net outcome is that law schools as a group produce fewer lawyers three years from now, then the rankings may have helped to mitigate damage that they have caused since their first appearance in 1987.

Ay, there’s the rub. Will there be fewer total law graduates, or will other schools (and new ones in the pipeline) enroll the students that KU and others don’t accept? Indeed, will some schools expand enrollments solely to increase their tuition revenues? Asking those institutions to consider the long-term well being of the marginal students they recruit, or the sad state of the profession itself, would be asking too much, I guess.

One way to counteract the agendas of deans who refuse to do the right thing is to recognize those who do. Even more important is the task of helping prospective law students make informed decisions before they apply to law school. Over time, perhaps more of them will take advantage of increased transparency to assess realistically their own suitability for a satisfying and successful legal career. But at any age, encounters with confirmation bias are never easy.

Meanwhile, kudos to Dean Stephen Mazza and the University of Kansas School of Law. He’s been dean only since April 2011, but he’s already making a profound difference in the way that matters most — one person at a time. (And thanks to one of my regular readers who brought Dean Mazza’s announcement to my attention.)

UPCOMING EVENTS

Posted on May 21, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Interviews about my new book, THE LAWYER BUBBLE — A Profession in Crisis, continue this week:

WEDNESDAY, MAY 22, 2013, Noon to 1:00 pm (CDT)
“Topical Currents”
WLRN – 91.3 FM (available online at http://wlrn.org/radio/programs/topical-currents)
Miami and South Florida

PBS NEWSHOUR INTERVIEW

Posted on May 16, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

My PBS Newshour interview about THE LAWYER BUBBLE is now available at http://to.pbs.org/143eTTG

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 – PART 2

Posted on May 15, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Part I of this series considered the possibility that a key metric — average partner profits — has lost much of its value in describing anything meaningful about big law firms. In eat-what-you-kill firms, the explosive growth of top-to-bottom spreads within equity partnerships has skewed the distribution of income away from the bell-shaped curve that underpins the statistical validity of any average.

Part II considers the implications.

Searching for explanations beyond the obvious

In recent years, equity partners at the top of most big firms have engineered a massive redistribution of incomes in their favor. Why? The next time a senior partner talks about holding the line on equity partner headcount or reducing entry-level partner compensation as a way to strengthen the partnership, consider the source and scrutinize the claim.

One popular assertion is that the high end of the internal equity partner income gap attracts lateral partners. In fact, some firms boast about their large spreads because they hope it will entice laterals. But Professor William Henderson’s recent analysis demonstrates that lateral hiring typically doesn’t enhance a firm’s profits. Sometimes selective lateral hiring works. But infrequent success doesn’t make aggressive and indiscriminate lateral hiring to enhance top line revenues a wise business plan.

According to Citi’s 2012 Law Firm Leaders Survey, even law firm managing partners acknowledge that, financially, almost half of all lateral hires are no better than a break-even proposition. If leaders are willing to admit that an ongoing strategy has a failure rate approaching 50 percent, imagine how bad the reality must actually be. Even worse, the non-financial implications for the acquiring firm’s culture can be devastating — but there’s no metric for assessing those untoward consequences.

A related argument is that without the high end of the range, legacy partners will leave. Firm leaders should consider resisting such threats. Even if such partners aren’t bluffing, it may be wiser to let them go.

“We’re helping young attorneys and building a future”

Other supposed benefits to recruiting rainmakers at the high end of a firm’s internal partner income distribution are the supposedly new opportunities that they can provide to younger attorneys. But the 2013 Client Advisory from Citi Private Bank-Hildebrandt Consulting shows that lateral partner hiring comes at the expense of associate promotions from within. Homegrown talent is losing the equity partner race to outsiders.

In a similar attempt to spin another current trend as beneficial to young lawyers, some managing partners assert that lower equity partner compensation levels lower the bar for admission, making equity status easier to attain. Someone under consideration for promotion can more persuasively make the business case (i.e., that potential partner’s client billings) required for equity participation.

Such sophistry assumes that an economic test makes any sense for most young partners in today’s big firms. In fact, it never did. But now the prevailing model incentivizes senior partners to hoard billings, preserve their own positions, and build client silos — just in case they someday find themselves searching for a better deal elsewhere in the overheated lateral market.

Finally, senior leaders urge that current growth strategies will better position their firms for the future. Such appealing rhetoric is difficult to reconcile with many partners’ contradictory behavior: guarding client silos, pulling up the equity partner ladder, reducing entry level partner compensation, and making it increasingly difficult for home-grown talent ever to reach the rarified profit participation levels of today’s managing partners.

Broader implications of short-term greed

In his latest book, Tomorrow’s Lawyers, Richard Susskind wrote that most law firm leaders he meets “have only a few years left to serve and hope they can hold out until retirement… Operating as managers rather than leaders, they are more focused on short-term profitability than long-term strategic health.”

Viewed through that lens, the annual Am Law 100 rankings make greed respectable while masking insidious internal equity partner compensation gaps that benefit a relatively few. Annual increases in average partner profits imply the presence of sound leadership and a firm’s financial success. But an undisclosed metric — growing internal inequality — may actually portend failure.

Don’t take my word for it. Ask lawyers from what was once Dewey & LeBoeuf and a host of other recent fatalities. Their average partner profits looked pretty good — all the way to the end.

THE LAWYER BUBBLE on C-SPAN2

Posted on May 9, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

On Saturday, May 11 at 4:45 pm (EDT), C-SPAN 2 (Book TV) will broadcast my earlier appearance at The Book Stall in Winnetka, IL.

Time Magazine review of THE LAWYER BUBBLE

Posted on May 8, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

“The legal profession is facing some fundamental changes and Harper deserves credit for sounding the alarm…[His] big-picture argument is undoubtedly correct, and it is a real cause for concern.” — Adam Cohen, Yale Law School, “Is There A Lawyer Bubble?” in Time Magazine

Additional reviews are collected here.

LAW DEANS SCRAMBLE

Posted on May 7, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Some law school deans are revealing what they regard as innovation in the face of the legal profession’s continuing crisis. Plummeting law school applications have tested their creativity in selling classroom seats. But recent trends — fewer applications amid a dismal job market for law graduates — haven’t deterred some efforts to preserve an unsustainable business model.

Moving through the five stages of grief

As deans confront declining applicant pools, many are moving through the five stages of grief — denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Previously, I looked at deans in stage 1 — especially those who took to the editorial pages of major newspapers, touting the inherent value of a $150,000 legal degree for students who couldn’t get jobs practicing law. Apply now, they urged, because declining applications improved prospects for admission. Then you can do lots of great things that don’t require a JD.

Case Western Law School Dean Lawrence Mitchell made himself a poster child for such deans in denial, but he wasn’t alone. Other deans and former deans have similarly offered analyses that miss the mark on the causes of the lawyer bubble and offer proposals that distract attention from their own culpability. Some have advanced to stage 2 — anger over the situation and anyone who publicizes it.

From anger to bargaining

A few deans have reached stage 3 — bargaining. Some schools have reduced tuition and/or guaranteed freezes during a student’s three years. But Touro Law recently announced a special kind of bargain that targets the least informed potential applicants who are most vulnerable to law schools’ superficial sales pitches.

Under a partnership with the University of Central Florida, prospective law students can apply to an accelerated program whereby they attend UCF for three years and then complete their fourth year at Touro Law. They would receive their UCF bachelor’s degree upon completion of their 1L year at Touro.

Quite a deal, right?

Some things you should know

Touro Law inhabits the world of U.S. News and World Report’s unranked nether regions. Readers know that I’m no fan of those rankings, but it’s safe to say that no one would regard Touro as a top law school by any measure. According to U.S. News, it accepted 64 percent of all applicants last year.

Touro’s recent trends are especially revealing. (The following statistics come from the archives of the LSAC “Official Law School Guide.”)

In 2005, the school awarded 158 JD degrees. Tuition was around $26,000 a year.

In 2009, the school awarded 200 JDs. Annual tuition had increased to more than $36,000.

In 2011, the school awarded 221 JDs. Sixty percent found full-time long-term jobs requiring that degree.

In 2012, the school awarded 244 JDs, but only 53 percent had long-term full-time jobs requiring a JD. Tuition is now $43,000 a year.

In other words, as the Great Recession worsened and the demand for lawyers collapsed — especially for graduates of places such as Touro Law — the school increased both tuition and class size, even as its ability to place graduates in legal jobs declined.

The business model at work

Perhaps it’s unfair to single out Touro for behavior that has pervaded legal education: increasing class size and raising tuition as demand for new lawyers declined. But the school’s latest initiative invites close scrutiny of its motives.

According to Touro Law’s new dean, Patricia Salkin, “It’s a financial bargain for the UCF undergraduates and takes some pressure off the law school application process.”

My guess is that it’s a financial bargain for Touro Law, too, especially if it gets to keep most of the tuition that the UCF students pay to attend first year law school classes. (Annual tuition at UCF is $6,200 for residents; $22,300 for non-residents — compared to $43,000 for Touro Law.)

As for relieving the pressure of the law school application process, Touro can claim that benefit for itself, too. There’s nothing like locking in a law student three years before he or she might otherwise apply.

What are we doing to our kids?

It’s bad enough that current UCF undergraduates are eligible for this “fast-track program.” (Even the name implies a selectivity that sounds enticing, doesn’t it?) But encouraging — or even allowing — woefully uninformed high school students to apply to law school as entering UCF freshmen is something else.

The next step for some law schools seems painfully clear: setting up recruiting tables in middle school cafeterias across the country.

FROM THE USA TODAY…

Posted on May 6, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

“THE LAWYER BUBBLE is a must read for managing partners, law school administrators, and most certainly, prospective law students.”

–Former dean of the Georgetown Law Center, Everett Bellamy, from his review of THE LAWYER BUBBLE in today’s USA TODAY.

MORE REVIEWS AND APPEARANCES

Posted on May 5, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

“[Harper has] a complete mastery of his subject matter, both from an economic and legal perspective…. Not only is Harper a gifted lawyer able to marshal facts, but he is an especially deft writer, and he tells his story as only a gifted author can…. Harper does not simply criticize the current state of affairs; he offers solutions, if only we are wise enough either to embrace them, modify them, or come up with additional curatives…. The Lawyer Bubble is a wake up call for those of us who love our profession, and it is a book that all lawyers should read.”
— Hon. Jeffrey Cole (USDC, ND IL) book review in “Circuit Rider,” the official publication of the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals Bar Association (April 2013)

Bloomberg Business Week recently featured THE LAWYER BUBBLE in two more articles: “The Case Against Law School” and “Howrey’s Bankruptcy and Big Law FIrms’ Small Future.” The latter also appears in the current issue of the print edition.

***

On Tuesday, May 7 at 1:00 pm CDT, U.S. News & World Report is hosting a Google-plus Hangout, during which Simon Owens, Assistant Managing Editor of USN&WR, will interview me. Members of the public can RSVP and participate via this link: https://plus.google.com/events/cu2d4q7klmrcts5eb775iv7jkas

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 — PART I

Posted on May 1, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Every spring, the eyes of big firm attorneys everywhere turn to the American Lawyer rankings — the Am Law 100 — and the contest surrounding its key metric: average profits per equity partner (PPP). But if the goal is to obtain meaningful insight into a firm’s culture, financial strength or profitability for most of its partners, those focusing on PPP are looking at the wrong ball.

Start with the basics

For years, firms have been increasing their PPP by reducing the number of equity partners. American Lawyer reports that cutbacks in equity partners, when done correctly, are “a solid management technique, not financial chicanery.” But as firms are now executing the strategy, it looks more like throwing furniture into the fireplace to keep the equity house warm.

Since 1985, the average leverage ratio (of all attorneys to equity partners) for the Am Law 50 has doubled from 1.76 to more than 3.5. It’s now twice as difficult to become an equity partner as it was when today’s senior partners entered that club. Between 1999 and 2009, the ranks of Am Law 100 non-equity partners grew threefold; the number of equity partners increased by less than one-third.

Arithmetic did the rest: average partner profits for the Am Law 50 soared from $300,000 in 1985 ($650,000 in today’s dollars) to more than $1.7 million in 2012.

The beat goes on

Perhaps it’s not financial chicanery, but many firms admit that they’re still turning the screws on equity partner head count as a way to increase PPP. According to the American Lawyer’s most recent Law Firm Leaders’ Survey, 45 percent of respondent firms de-equitized partners in 2012 and 46 percent planned to do so in 2013.

But even when year-to-year equity headcount remains flat, as it did this year, that nominal result masks a destabilizing trend: the growing concentration of income and power at the top. In fact, it is undermining the very validity of the PPP metric itself.

An unpublished metric more important than PPP

The internal top-to-bottom spread within the equity ranks of most firms doesn’t appear in the Am Law survey or anywhere else, but it should, along with the distribution of partners at various data points. As meaningful metrics, they’re far more important than PPP.

Even as overall leverage ratios have increased dramatically, the internal gap within equity partnerships has skyrocketed. A few firms adhere to lock-step equity partner compensation within a narrow overall range (3-to-1 or 4-to-1). But most have adopted higher spreads. In its 2012 financial statement, K&L Gates disclosed an 8-to-1 gap — up from 6-to-1 in 2011. Dewey & LeBoeuf’s range exceeded 20-to-1.

This growing internal gap undermines the informational value of PPP. In any statistical analysis, an average is meaningful if the underlying sample is distributed normally (i.e., along a bell-shaped curve where the average is the peak). But the distribution of incomes within most big firm equity partnerships bears no resemblance to such a curve.

Cultural consequences

Rules governing statistical validity have real world implications. Growing internal income spreads render even nominally stable equity partner head counts misleading. Lower minimum profit participation levels make room for more equity partner bodies, but what results over time is Dewey & LeBoeuf’s “barbell” system. A handful of rainmakers dominates one side of the barbell; many more so-called service partners populate the other — and they rarely advance very far.

As Edwin B. Reeser and Patrick J. McKenna wrote last year, in Am Law 200 firms, “Typically, two-thirds of the equity partners earn less, and some perhaps only half, of the average PPP.” Statisticians know that for such a skewed distribution, the arithmetic average conveys little that is useful about the underlying population from which it is drawn.

Why it matters

For firms that don’t have lock-step partner compensation, the PPP metric doesn’t reveal very much. For example, consider a firm with two partners and an 8-to-1 equity partner spread. If Partner A earns $4 million and Partner B earns $500,000, average PPP is $2.25 million — a number that doesn’t describe either partner’s situation or the stability of the firm itself. But the underlying details say quite a bit about the culture of that partnership.

Firms with the courage to do so would follow the lead of K&L Gates and disclose what that firm calls its “compression ratio” and then take it a step farther: reveal their internal income distributions as well. But such revelations might lead to uncomfortable conversations about why, especially during the last decade, managing partners have engineered explosive increases in internal equity partner income gaps.

A future post will consider that topic. It’s not pretty.

WHY THE BILLABLE HOUR ENDURES

Posted on April 24, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Last month, I wrote a New York Times op-ed discussing the billable hour regime and its unfortunate consequences for the legal profession. The piece generated a lot of response, most of which supported my themes. Readers generally agreed that the system rewards unproductive behavior, invites abuse, and pits attorneys’ financial self-interest against their clients’ goals.

Defending the billable hour

Even so, the Times published a responsive letter to the editor from the general counsel of Veolia Transportation — “the largest private sector operator of multiple modes of transit in North America,” according to its website — who defended hourly billing. He noted that alternatives to the billable hour “have not caught on because they do not allow the client the same opportunity to see the work as it is being done, evaluate its worth, and challenge when appropriate the relationship of time, task and cost.”

Theoretically, he has a point. In fact, the billable hour system arose from a desire for greater transparency. Before it gained widespread use, clients typically received a bill that included a single line: “For services rendered.” When today’s senior partners entered the profession, firms kept track of their time but didn’t impose mandatory minimum billable hour requirements. In fact, a 1958 ABA pamphlet recommended that attorneys maintain better time records and strive to bill clients 1,300 hours a year.

Unfortunately, transparency gave way to short-term profit-maximizing behavior that distorted the billable hour into an internal law firm measure of “productivity.” Quantity of time billed became more important than the quality or effectiveness of effort expended. Today’s required annual minimum hours typically run close to 2,000 — and most associates understand that enhancing their prospects for advancement requires many more.

Transparency yields to abuse

In theory, Veolia’s general counsel is correct about the billable hour’s transparency. But in practice, few clients are well-positioned to challenge “the relationship of time, task and cost.” For a complex case, what motions should be filed and how much time should their preparation take? How many witness depositions are needed? And of what length? What’s the right level of staffing to maximize the chances for success?

Some in-house counsel possess the sophistication to provide meaningful answers to these and other questions that underlie any effort to assess the relationship of hourly fees to “time, task and cost.” But most don’t. They trust their lawyers to do the right thing under an incentive structure that pushes those lawyers in the opposite direction.

Bankruptcy as a poster child

Embarrassing reports of billing deceit are rare. But the real problem isn’t such well-publicized abuses. Rather, it’s the cultural impact of the incentive structure. In most large law firms, one practice area is particularly revealing: big bankruptcy cases.

Large numbers of bodies billed at enormous hourly rates get thrown into such matters. All of the activity shows up in detailed time records accompanying massive fee petitions that courts routinely approve. Like the U.S. Trustee’s office that also reviews such filings, courts lack the resources to provide meaningful scrutiny of “time, task and cost.”

Petitions seeking hourly rates of $700 for associates and $1,000 for partners routinely go unchallenged, as do the listed activities that consume these attorneys’ time. Last year, when the U.S. Trustee proposed that firms disclose whether they charge higher hourly rates for the same attorneys performing non-bankruptcy work, the profession united in opposition.

The moral

The billable hour regime endures because, like the general counsel of Veolia, clients think they have it under control. But that requires a leap of faith as outside lawyers resolve the ongoing dilemma of a system that pits fiduciary responsibility to a client against the attorneys’ financial self-interest. With law firms obsessing over current year profits and partners seeking to maximize personal books of business to preserve their own positions in an eat-what-you-kill world of frenetic lateral partner movement, that dilemma becomes profound.

As for the billable hour’s impact on other aspects of the profession’s culture, another Times letter to the editor offered this: “Appearing before St. Peter, a young law firm associate asked why he was being taken at age 29. Taken aback, St. Peter said the associate’s billable hours made the associate appear to be 95.”

OH, CANADA!

Posted on April 23, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis is currently #8 on the “Globe & Mail” (Canada) list of bestselling business books.

Meanwhile, tonight (April 23) at 7:00 pm, C-SPAN 2 will be taping my appearance at The Book Stall at Chestnut Court, 811 Elm Street, Winnetka, IL for broadcast at a later date.

UPCOMING EVENTS

Posted on April 18, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

My next appearances to discuss THE LAWYER BUBBLE – A Profession in Crisis:

MONDAY, APRIL 22, 2013 at 5:35 am
“The Bill Leff Show”
WGN Radio – 720 AM (available online at http://wgnradio.com/bill-leff/)

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013, 7:00 pm (CDT) (C-SPAN 2 is planning to cover this event for broadcast at a later date)
The Book Stall at Chestnut Court
811 Elm Street
Winnetka, IL

MONDAY, APRIL 29, 2013, 6:40 pm (CDT)
“The Journey Home”
KSFR – 101.1 FM (available online at http://www.ksfr.org/programs/journey-home-ksfr)
Santa Fe, NM

THREE EMBARRASSING DATA POINTS

Posted on April 17, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Three recently released numbers tell an unhappy tale of what ails the legal profession in particular and society in general. Specifically, those data points reveal profound intergenerational antagonisms that are getting worse.

Dismal job prospects persist

First, the ABA reports that only 56 percent of law school graduates in the class of 2012 secured full-time, long-term jobs requiring a legal degree. The good news is that this result is no worse than last year’s. The bad news is the number of 2012 law graduates reached an all-time record high — more than 46,000. The even worse news is that the graduating class of 2013 is expected to be even bigger.

Sure, the number of students taking the LSAT has trended downward. So has the number of law school applicants. But students seeking to attend law school still outnumber the available places. Meanwhile, the number of attorneys working in big law firms has not yet returned to pre-recession levels of 2007. If, as many hope, the market for attorneys is moving toward an equilibrium between supply and demand, it has a long way to go.

Law school for all the wrong reasons

A second data point is even more distressing. According to a survey that test-prep company Kaplan Inc. conducted, 43 percent of pre-law students plan to use their degrees to find jobs in the business world, rather than in the legal industry. Even more poignantly, 42 percent said they would attend business school instead of law school, were they not already “set to go to law school.”

I don’t know what “set to go” means to these individuals, but if they want to go into business, first spending more than $100,000 and three years of their lives on a legal degree makes no sense. That’s especially true in light of another survey result: Only 5 percent said they were pursuing a career primarily for the money; 71 percent said they were “motivated by pursuing a career they are passionate about.”

Maybe these conflicted pre-law students are confused by the chorus of law school deans now writing regularly that a legal degree is a valuable vehicle to other pursuits. Let’s hope not. Many deans are simply trying to drum up student demand for their schools in the face of declining applicant pools.

Follow the money

The third data point relates to the money that fuels this dysfunctional system: federal loan dollars that are disconnected from law school accountability for student outcomes. Recently, the New York Times reported that on July 1, many student loan rates were set to double — from 3.4 percent to 6.8 percent.

Young law school graduates are among the unenviable one-percenters in this group because 85 percent of them hold, on average, more than $100,000 in debt (compared to the overall average of $27,000 for all students). Like all other educational loans, those debts survive a bankruptcy filing.

In the current economic environment, an investor would search in vain for a guaranteed 6.8 percent return and virtually no risk. According to one estimate cited in the Times article, the federal government makes 36 cents on every student loan dollar it puts out.

Kids as profit centers

Ironically, those who favor raising the current 3.4 percent interest rate on many federal student loans to 6.8 percent are the same people who express concerns that growing federal deficits will saddle the next generation. The reality is that we already treat that generation as a profit center. For too many people, there’s money to be made in sustaining the lawyer bubble.

Until it bursts.

THE LAWYER BUBBLE Update — More Reviews and Appearances

Posted on April 8, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

A few more reviews:

“The perfect book for a terrible time. If every Biglaw partner, law professor, and law school dean read this book and followed its prescriptions, we just might get our profession back on track.” — The Lawyerist

“In addition to actual solutions, along with a comprehensive analysis of the problems, Harper provides a masterpiece of fine writing. There is no choice but to grab a magic marker and keep underlining phrases and whole sentences which resonate.” — Law and More

Meanwhile, Salon.com has posted an excerpt of The Lawyer Bubble.

***

Last week’s appearances included The Diane Rehm Show in DC, The Brian Lehrer Show in NYC, THINK in North Texas, FOCUS in Illinois, and many others.

Upcoming events include:

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2013, 8:00 am to 9:00 am (CDT)
“The Joy Cardin Show”
Wisconsin Public Radio (available online at http://www.wpr.org/cardin/)

FRIDAY, APRIL 12, 2013
“The Shrinking Pyramid: Implications for Law Practice and the Legal Profession” — Panel discussion
Georgetown University Law Center
Center for the Study of the Legal Profession
600 New Jersey Avenue NW
Location: Gewirz – 12th floor
Washington, D.C.

FRIDAY, APRIL 19, 2013 at 11:00 am
“Roundtable” with Joe Donahue
WAMC -NY (available online at http://www.wamc.org/programs/roundtable)

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013, 7:00 pm (CDT) (C-SPAN 2 is tentatively planning to cover this event)
The Book Stall at Chestnut Court
811 Elm Street
Winnetka, IL

MORE TO COME….

THE LAWYER BUBBLE — Early Reviews and Upcoming Events

Posted on March 29, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

The New York Times published my op-ed, “The Tyranny of the Billable Hour,” tackling the larger implications of the recent DLA Piper hourly billing controversy.

And there’s this from Bloomberg Business Week: “Big Law Firms Are in ‘Crisis.’ Retired Lawyer Says.”

In related news, with the release of my new book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis, my weekly posts will give way (temporarily) to a growing calendar of events, including:

TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 2013, 10:00 am to 11:00 am (CDT)
Illinois Public Media
“Focus” with Jim Meadows
WILL-AM – 580 (listen online at http://will.illinois.edu/focus)

TUESDAY, APRIL 2, 2013, 1:00 pm to 2:00 pm (CDT)
“Think” with Krys Boyd
KERA – Public Media for North Texas – 90.1 FM (online at http://www.kera.org/think/)

THURSDAY, APRIL 4, 2013, 11:00 am to Noon (EDT)
Washington, DC
“The Diane Rehm Show”
WAMU (88.5 FM in DC area) and NPR

FRIDAY, APRIL 5, 2013, 10:45 am to 11:00 am (EDT)
New York City
“The Brian Lehrer Show”
WNYC/NPR (93.9 FM/820 AM in NYC area)
(http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/)

SATURDAY, APRIL 6, 2013, Noon (EDT)
New Hampshire Public Radio
“Word of Mouth” with Virginia Prescott
WEVO – 89.1 FM in Concord; available online at http://nhpr.org/post/lawyer-bubble)

WEDNESDAY, APRIL 10, 2013, 8:00 am to 9:00 am (CDT)
“The Joy Cardin Show”
Wisconsin Public Radio (available online at http://www.wpr.org/cardin/)

TUESDAY, APRIL 23, 2013, 7:00 pm (CDT) (C-SPAN 2 is tentatively planning to cover this event)
The Book Stall at Chestnut Court
811 Elm Street
Winnetka, IL

Here are some early reviews:

“The Lawyer Bubble is an important book, carefully researched, cogently argued and compellingly written. It demonstrates how two honorable callings – legal education and the practice of law – have become, far too often, unscrupulous rackets.”
—Scott Turow, author of Presumed Innocent and other novel

“Harper is a seasoned insider unafraid to say what many other lawyers in his position might…written with keen insight and scathing accusations…. Harper brings his analytical and persuasive abilities to bear in a highly entertaining and riveting narrative…. The Lawyer Bubbleis recommended reading for anyone working in a law related field. And for law school students—especially prospective ones—it really should be required reading.”
—New York Journal of Books

“Anyone looking into a career in law would be well advised to read this thoroughly eye-opening warning.”
—Booklist, starred review

“[Harper] is perfectly positioned to reflect on alarming developments that have brought the legal profession to a most unfortunate place…. Essential reading for anyone contemplating a legal career.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“[Harper] burns his bridges in this scathing indictment of law schools and big law firms…. his insights and admonitions are consistently on point.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Imagine that the elite lawyers of BigLaw and the legal academy were put on trial for their alleged negligence and failed stewardship. Imagine further that the State had at its disposal one of the nation’s most tenacious trial lawyers to doggedly build a complete factual record and then argue the case. The result would be The Lawyer Bubble. If I were counsel to the elite lawyers of BigLaw and the legal academy, I would advise my clients to settle the case.”
—William D. Henderson, Director of the Center on the Global Legal Profession and Professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law

“With wit and insight,The Lawyer Bubble offers a compelling portrait of the growing crisis in legal education and the practice of law. This book is essential reading for anyone concerned about the profession or contemplating a legal career.”
—Deborah L. Rhode, Professor of Law and Director of the Center on the Legal Profession, Stanford University

“This is a fine and important book, thoughtful and beautifully written. It makes the case – in a responsible and sober tone – that we are producing far too many lawyers for far too small a segment of American society. It is a must-read for leaders of law firms, law schools, and the bar, as the legal profession continues its wrenching transition from a profession into just another business.”
—Daniel S. Bowling III, Senior Lecturing Fellow, Duke Law School

“In this superb book, Steven Harper documents, ties together and suggests remedies for the deceit that motivates expanding law school enrollment in the face of a shrinking job market, the gaming of law school rankings and the pernicious effect of greed on the leadership of many of our nation’s leading law firms. The lessons he draws are symptomatic, and go well beyond the documented particulars.”
—Robert Helman, Partner and former Chairman (1984-98), Mayer Brown LLP; Lecturer, University of Chicago Law School

“Every sentient lawyer realizes that the legal profession is in crisis, but nobody explains the extent of the problem as well as Steven Harper. Fortunately, he also proposes some solutions – so there is still room for hope. This is an essential book.”
—Steven Lubet, author of Fugitive Justice and Lawyers’ Poker

“Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble is an expression of tough love for the law, law firms and the people who work in them. The clear message is take control of your destiny and your firm to avoid the serious jeopardy that confronts far too many firms today. Whether you are a partner, associate, or law student, you should read this compassionate and forceful work.”
—Edwin B. Reeser, Former managing partner, author, and consultant on law practice management

“Harper chronicles the disruption of his once-genteel profession with considerable sadness, and places the blame squarely at the wing-tipped feet of two breeds of scoundrel: law school deans, and executive committees that have run big law firms …” –“Bar Examined” – Book Review in The Washington Monthly (March/April 2013)

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.

“GAMING THE REPORTING”?

Posted on March 13, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

In a recent interview with Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg News, U.S. News & World Report’s director of data research Robert Morse explained this year’s only revision to his law school rankings methodology. Morse gave different weights to various employment outcomes for class of 2011 graduates. But he didn’t disclose precisely what those different weights were.

Morse said that such transparency worried him. Full-time, long-term jobs requiring a legal degree got 100 percent credit. But he didn’t reveal the weight he gave other employment categories (part-time, short-term, non-J.D.-required) because he didn’t want deans “gaming the reporting of their results.” It was an interesting choice of words.

Teapot tempests

In some ways, all of the attention to the changes in this year’s rankings methodology is remarkable. Certainly, a school’s employment success for graduates is important. But the nine-month data point for which the ABA now requires more detailed information accounts for only 14 percent of a school’s total U.S. News ranking score. To put that in context, consider some of the more consequential rankings criteria.

Fifteen percent of every school’s U.S. News score is based on a non-scientific survey of practicing lawyers and judges. The survey response rate this year was only nine percent.

Likewise, the “peer assessment” survey that goes to four faculty members at every accredited law school — dean, dean of academic affairs, chair of faculty appointments, and most recently tenured faculty member — accounts for 25 percent of a school’s ranking score. It asks those four individuals to rate all ABA-accredited law schools from 1-to-5, without requiring that any respondent know anything about the schools he or she assesses.

Taken together, the two so-called “quality assessment” surveys comprising 40 percent of every school’s ranking are a self-reinforcing contest for brand recognition. As measures of substantive educational value, well, you decide.

Game of moans

But if, as Morse suggests, his concern is “gaming the reporting,” he must be worried that some deans would either: 1) self-report inaccurate data; or 2) otherwise change their behavior in an effort to raise their school’s ranking. He’s a bit late to both parties.

Scandals engulfed prominent law schools that submitted false LSAT and GPA statistics for their entering classes. But how many others haven’t been caught cheating? No one knows. As for permissible behavior that accomplishes similar objectives, examples abound.

For years, deans seeking to enhance the 12.5 percent of the rankings component relating to median LSAT scores for J.D. entrants have been “buying” higher LSATs through “merit” scholarships. Need-based financial aid has suffered. Ironically, those merit scholarships often disappear after the first year of law school.

Likewise, the faculty resources component is 15 percent of every school’s ranking. But it encourages expenditures — and skyrocketing tuition — without regard to whether they benefit a student’s educational experience.

Whom to blame

Morse establishes the criteria and methodology that incentivize behavior producing these and many other perverse outcomes. But he doesn’t think that any of the current problems confronting the profession are his fault.

“U.S. News isn’t the ABA,” he told Pacchia. “U.S. News doesn’t regulate the reporting requirements…[W]e’re not responsible for the cost of law school, the state of legal employment, the impact that recession has had on hiring, or the fact that 10 or 20 new law schools have opened over the last couple decades. We’re not responsible for the imbalance of jobs to graduates. No, I think we’re not responsible. I think we’ve helped prospective students understand what they are getting into than they were previously.”

Of course, the problem isn’t just the flawed rankings methodology itself. Also culpable are the decision-makers who regard a single overall ranking as meaningful — students, deans, university administrators, and trustees. Without their blind deference to a superficially appealing metric, the U.S. News rankings would disappear — just as the U.S. News & World Report print news magazine did years ago.

Cultural obsession

Pervasive throughout society, rankings may be a permanent feature of the legal profession. But it’s worth remembering that they’re relatively new. Before the first U.S. News list of only the top 20 law schools in 1987, prospective students and law schools somehow found each other.

Today, rankings facilitate laziness. The illusory comfort of an unambiguous numerical solution is easier than engaging in critical thought and exercising independent judgment. Forgotten along the way is the computer science maxim “garbage in, garbage out.”

EXCERPT FROM “THE LAWYER BUBBLE – A Profession in Crisis”

Posted on March 11, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

The Chronicle of Higher Education just posted an excerpt from my forthcoming book, THE LAWYER BUBBLE – A Profession in Crisis.” The excerpt will also appear in the Chronicle’s March 15 print issue (on the cover, I think). Here’s the link to the online version: http://chronicle.com/article/Pop-Goes-the-Law/137717/

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.

FROM CRAVATH TO CHASE TO CADWALADER

Posted on February 27, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

James Woolery is on the move again. We’ve never met, but I’m beginning to feel as if I know the guy.

Woolery first appeared in my June 3, 2010 post about a policy change at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. The Wall Street Journal featured the then-41-year-old Cravath partner in an article about the firm’s plan to allow lawyers in their 30s and 40s to “make a name for themselves” by taking the lead on client deals. Historically, the WSJ reported, Cravath had reserved that role for partners in their 50s.

Six months later, I wrote about Woolery’s departure from Cravath to become co-head of JP Morgan Chase’s North American mergers and acquisitions group. He told the New York Times that he’d developed a business development focus and the Chase opportunity allowed him to build on those skills. So much for practicing law.

Now, two years after joining Chase, Woolery has become the first firmwide deputy chair of Cadwalader, Wickersham & Taft — a new position apparently created specially for its prominent lateral hire. The Wall Street Journal suggested that the move “is a big personal bet for Mr. Woolery. He is jumping back to the legal industry when it is still struggling with a shortage of work, and he is leaving J.P.Morgan just as mergers are showing new signs of life.”

Regardless of the particular reasons for Woolery’s various moves, the contrast between where he started (Cravath) and where he has now ended (Cadwalader) is remarkable.

Cravath

Whatever else people may think of Cravath, it has an unrivaled reputation for attracting first-rate attorneys. It is also a partnership in the truest sense of that concept: A single tier with a lock-step compensation system that resists an undue emphasis on short-term thinking. The Cravath model promotes longer run values, such as institutional stability.

For example, a lateral hiring frenzy pervades big law, but it’s a relatively rare event at Cravath. The firm focuses on developing talent internally. Its attorneys work hard, run a challenging gauntlet to equity partnership, and reap rich rewards for success.

In May 2007, an American Lawyer interviewer asked Cravath’s then-presiding partner Evan R. Chesler whether partners would stick around if the firm made less money. “I don’t know the answer to that,” he said. “I think there is more glue than just money.”

Cadwalader

Cravath’s ethos wouldn’t appeal to attorneys drawn to Cadwalader’s culture. In the mid-1990s, Cadwalader began moving aggressively toward what its new chairman Robert O. Link Jr. called a meritocracy. Others call it “eat-what-you-kill.”

In a February 2007 interview with the American Lawyer, Link expressed an attitude about firm culture that differed dramatically from Chesler’s. “Everyone should wake up in the morning and feel a little vulnerable,” he said.

Link meant it. In 1995, the 268-lawyer Cadwalader firm’s two-tier partnership had 76 equity partners, giving it a leverage ratio of three-and-a-half. By 2005, the firm had nearly doubled in size, but it had only 75 equity partners. Its leverage ratio of seven far exceeded that of all other Am Law 100 firms.

Cadwalader’s asset-backed structured finance practice fueled much of its growth. By 2007, it had 645 lawyers and a stunning leverage ratio of eight-and-a-half. But when the residential housing market cratered and took asset-back structured finance legal work with it, the firm’s fortunes slid badly.

By the end of 2012, Cadwalader had 435 lawyers — down more than 200 from five years earlier. Only 55 of them were equity partners — down 20 from 2007. The good news for the survivors was that by 2012, average equity partner profits had recovered almost completely to their 2007 all-time high of $2.7 million.

Differences that transcend metrics

As Cadwalader became smaller, Cravath maintained average partner profits ranging from $2.5 to $3.2 million, a leverage ratio of approximately four, and moderate growth from 412 to 476 attorneys. Even more to the point, it’s hard to imagine any circumstance short of dissolution that would cause Cravath to shed almost a third of its equity partners, as Cadwalader did from 2007 to 2012.

Back in May 2010, Woolery told the Wall Street Journal, “This is not your grandfather’s Cravath.” It’s not clear what that characterization of his former firm means or if it is correct, but offspring sometimes underestimate the value of a grandfather’s gifts. And offspring sometimes grow up to be grandparents themselves.

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.

BIG LAW’S 2012 PERFORMANCE — NUMBERS AND NUANCE

Posted on February 13, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Two recent reports sound a warning that most big law firm leaders should heed. One is the Georgetown Center for the Study of the Legal Profession/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Report on the State of the Legal Profession. The other is Citi Private Bank’s Annual Law Firm Survey.

Lessons from Dewey & LeBoeuf

The Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Report is noteworthy because, at long last, thoughtful analysts are giving Dewey & LeBoeuf’s collapse the larger context that it deserves. For the most past, today’s managing partners have persuaded themselves that Dewey’s failure resulted from a unique confluence of management missteps that they themselves could never make. But most current leaders are making them.

In particular, Dewey wasn’t an outlier; it was among the elite of the Am Law 100. The firm embodied a culmination of prevailing big law firm trends that can—and will—produce future disasters. As the Georgetown/Peer Monitor Report explains, those trends include raising the bar for promoting home-grown talent into equity partnerships while overpaying for lateral equity partner hires, increasing internal compensation spreads to create a subgroup of real players within equity partnerships, and ignoring the importance of morale and institutional loyalty to long-term stability.

Crunching the numbers

Meanwhile, Citi Private Bank’s annual full-year survey of big firms produced this upbeat headline: “Firms Posted a 4.3 Percent Rise in 2012 Profits.” But important underlying details are more troubling.

Although revenue and profits were up by 3.6 and 4.3 percent, respectively, overall demand at the 179 firms in the Citi sample grew by just 0.2 percent in 2012, expenses increased by 3.1 percent, and headcount grew more than demand. It’s a decidedly mixed bag of financial results.

In fact, Citi’s Dan DiPietro and Gretta Rusanow fear that the 2012 fourth quarter revenue surge saving many big firms “may not be sustainable.” For example, “survivorship bias” contributed to the final 2012 numbers. That is, Citi’s analysis removed Dewey & LeBoeuf’s revenue, demand, and equity partner figures from the 2011 base year because the firm disappeared in 2012. But most of Dewey’s revenue went to surviving firms, thereby artificially inflating the overall 2012 numbers. To some extent, it’s like comparing 2012’s apples to 2011’s oranges. Including Dewey’s 2011 numbers would have resulted in negative demand growth in 2012.

Citi also discussed the impact of accelerated year-end collections. They’re an annual event at most firms, but the expiring Bush-era tax cuts gave partners unique incentives to push clients for payment in December 2012. The report also mentioned a related possibility: firms may not have prepaid 2013 expenses.

A more insidious prospect goes unmentioned: some firms may have deferred expenses that were due and owing in December 2012. If the 2013 first quarter Citi report is surprisingly weak, look for a spike in expenses as a factor. Freedom to ignore generally accepted accounting principles in financial reporting gives law firms financial flexibility that can become dangerous.

Or maybe the numbers don’t matter

Transcending all of these possibilities is, perhaps, the simplest. Averages are often deceptive. For example, in a firm where the internal top-to-bottom equity partner income spread is ten-to-one or higher, average partner profits may reveal that some partners are players and most aren’t. But as an economic metric describing a typical partner in the firm, it’s useless.

Just as average profits can mask enormous differences within an equity partnership, so, too, overall average profits for the industry can hide the gap between successful firms and those struggling to survive. That means 2013 could be another year in which some Am Law 200 law firms will fail (or become absorbed in last-resort mergers).

Fragile winners

But even firms that regard themselves as financial winners in 2012 should beware. Many would do well to heed the Georgetown/Thomson Reuters caution about the loss of traditional partnership values that undermined Dewey & LeBouef. Considered from a different perspective, numbers that appear to demonstrate success can actually reveal lurking failure.

After all, as recently as the May 2011 list of the Am Law 100, Dewey was #23 in 2010 average equity partner profits ($1.8 million), #22 in gross revenue per lawyer ($910,000), and #19 on the Am Law profitability index with a profit margin of 36 percent. In February 2012, the firm made Am Law’s annual “most lateral hires” list for 2011, but no public report disclosed the firm’s staggering (but by no means unique) top-to-bottom equity partner income gap.

As a wise friend reminds me periodically, things are rarely as good as they seem — or as bad as they seem. He’s definitely right about the good part.

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.

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The Belly of the Beast

Steven J. Harper, Esq.

THE TRUE COST OF THE WEIL LAYOFFS

MY NEW YORK TIMES OP-ED

ANOTHER COMMENDABLE CONDUCT AWARD

PROOF OF THE PROFESSION’S CRISIS

MAKING MONEY ON OUR KIDS

COMMENDABLE CONDUCT AWARD

UPCOMING EVENTS

PBS NEWSHOUR INTERVIEW

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 – PART 2

THE LAWYER BUBBLE on C-SPAN2

Time Magazine review of THE LAWYER BUBBLE

LAW DEANS SCRAMBLE

FROM THE USA TODAY…

MORE REVIEWS AND APPEARANCES

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 — PART I

WHY THE BILLABLE HOUR ENDURES

OH, CANADA!

UPCOMING EVENTS

THREE EMBARRASSING DATA POINTS

THE LAWYER BUBBLE Update — More Reviews and Appearances

THE LAWYER BUBBLE — Early Reviews and Upcoming Events

PARDON MY CYNICISM

SOMEBODY’S CHILD

“GAMING THE REPORTING”?

EXCERPT FROM “THE LAWYER BUBBLE – A Profession in Crisis”

ANOTHER LAW SCHOOL DEAN MISSES THE TARGET

FROM CRAVATH TO CHASE TO CADWALADER

MORE LAW SCHOOL NON-REFORM

BIG LAW’S 2012 PERFORMANCE — NUMBERS AND NUANCE

LAW SCHOOL DISEQUILIBRIUM

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