2015: THE YEAR THAT THE LAW SCHOOL CRISIS ENDED (OR NOT) — PART II

Posted on January 14, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

Part I of this series addressed the ABA rule change that will allow 2014 law graduates until March 15 — an extra month from prior years — to find jobs before their schools have to report those graduates’ employment results to the ABA (and U.S. News). That change will almost certainly produce higher overall employment rates. But relying on any alleged trend that results solely from an underlying change in the rules of the game — such as extending the reporting period from nine months to ten — would be a mistake.

This post considers a second rule change. It comes from the U.S. Department of Labor, and it’s a whopper.

The Government Makes Things Worse

The Bureau of Labor Statistics recently adopted a new statistical methodology for projecting the nation’s legal employment needs. Just about everyone agrees that, by any measure and for many years, the economy has been producing far more new lawyers than JD-required jobs. But the new BLS methodology declares that any oversupply of attorneys has evaporated. In fact, applying the new methodology retroactively to previous years would lead to the conclusion that the obvious glut of new lawyers never existed at all!

Using its earlier methodology, the Bureau has been revising downward its predictions of new lawyer jobs. In 2008, it projected a net additional 98,500 legal jobs through 2018. In 2012, it dropped that number to 73,600 through 2022. Taking into account retirements, deaths, and other attrition, the BLS separately projected that the profession could absorb about 20,000 new graduates annually for the next ten years. Most knowledgeable observers of the changing market for new lawyers have concurred with that ballpark assessment. Unfortunately, schools have been producing about twice that number (40,000).

Remarkably, the BLS’s new approach more than doubles the number of anticipated new legal jobs over the next 10 years. Rather than annual absorption of about 20,000 new lawyers through 2022, the Bureau now projects room for more than 41,000 a year. Overnight, demand caught up with what had been a chronic oversupply of attorneys.

In Defiance Of Sound Statistical Analysis And Common Sense

There are numerous technical and analytical flaws in the BLS’s new methodology. (See, e.g., Matt Leichter’s recent post, “2016 Grads Shouldn’t Take Comfort in New Jobs Projection Approach.”) Beyond those are common sense tests that the new methodology fails. For example, since 2011 the ABA-required data have revealed a persistent FTLT JD-required employment rate of 55 percent for new graduates. That’s not far from the projections that the BLS’s old methodology produced for a long time.

The BLS’s new approach amounts to saying that, somehow, all of those unemployed graduates must have been finding law jobs after all. As the old joke goes, endless digging in a roomful of manure was worth the effort; there was indeed a pony to be found – with the help of a little regression analysis.

Another common sense test considers actual employment numbers. For example, legal sector employment (including non-lawyers) through December 2014 was 1.133 million — about the same as a year ago and down more than 40,000 from 2006. Although the economy generally has recovered from the Great Recession, total employment in the legal sector is still far below pre-recession levels. If the BLS’s proposed approach were valid, it would suggest a remarkable attrition rate, raise serious questions about the state of the profession, and cause many prelaw students to wonder whether law school was the right choice.

The Bad Beat Goes On

Meanwhile, weak law schools that will benefit most from the ABA and BLS changes remain unaccountable for their graduates’ poor employment outcomes as they lower admission standards to fill classrooms. Median law school debt at graduation currently exceeds $120,000, and some of the schools with the worst employment outcomes burden students with the highest levels of debt. But there’s no financial risk to those schools because the federal government backs the loans and they’re not dischargeable in bankruptcy.

The escape hatch is small. If income-based repayment programs survive austerity demands of the Republican-controlled Congress – a big if – then students who persevere through 20 years of IBR will get a large tax bill because forgiven debt will count as income to them in the year it’s forgiven. The shortfall between the amount IBR students actually pay and the amount they owe will come from the federal purse.

Voila! The Crisis Is Over

Sometime in 2015, the synergy between the new ABA-rules allowing law schools to report 10-month employment data (discussed in Part I of this series) and the new BLS methodology projecting 41,000 new lawyer jobs annually will produce a law school chorus declaring that the crisis in legal education is over, at least in a macroeconomic sense. Indeed, the hype has already begun. Discussing the new BLS approach, Loyola University – Los Angeles School of Law professor Ted Seto observed: “If the new BLS projections are accurate, we should see demand and supply in relative equilibrium in 2015 and a significant excess of demand over supply beginning in 2016.”

The operative word is “if.” As noted in Part I, Seto’s similarly conditional prediction in 2013 didn’t come to pass. Meanwhile, only about half of his school’s 2013 graduating class secured full-time long-term JD-required employment within nine months of receiving their degrees. Average law school debt for the 82 percent of Loyola-LA law graduates who incurred debt was $141,765 — placing it 22nd (of 183) among schools whose students graduate with the most law school debt.

Here’s the real kicker. The vast disparity in individual law school employment outcomes makes broad macroeconomic declarations about opportunities for law graduates disingenuous anyway. It’s no surprise that the loudest voices come from schools where many graduates have great difficulty find any JD-required job.

But even at the macro level, anyone concerned about the fate of marginal law students, exploding student debt, or the future of a noble profession should look beyond any distracting noise about the supposed end of the legal education crisis. At least for now, the real question should be whether anything has really changed — other than the rules of the game.

2015: THE YEAR THAT THE LAW SCHOOL CRISIS ENDED (OR NOT) — PART I

Posted on January 7, 2015 by thebellyofthebeast

Remember that you read it here first: In 2015, many law school deans and professors will declare that the law school crisis is over. After five years of handwringing, relatively minor curriculum changes at most schools, and no improvement whatsoever in the mechanism for funding legal education, the storm has passed. All is well. What a relief.

The building blocks for this house of cards start with first-year law school enrollment that is now below 38,000 – a level not seen since the mid-1970s when there were 53 fewer law schools. The recent drop in the absolute number of future attorneys seems impressive, but without the context of the demand for lawyers, it’s meaningless in assessing proximity to market equilibrium, which remains far away.

The Search for Demand

To boost the projected demand side of the equation, the rhetoric of illusory equilibrium often turns to the “degrees-awarded-per-capita” argument that Professor Ted Seto of Loyola Law School – Los Angeles floated in June 2013. His premise: “Demand for legal services…probably increases as population increases.”

“Unless something truly extraordinary has happened to non-cyclical demand,” Seto continued, “a degrees-awarded-per-capita analysis suggests that beginning in fall 2015 and intensifying into 2016 employers are likely to experience an undersupply of law grads, provided that the economic recovery continues.”

If only wishing could make it so. The economic recovery did, indeed, continue, but the hoped for increase in attorney demand was nowhere to be found. When Seto posted his analysis, total legal services employment (including non-lawyers) at the end of May 2013 was 1,133,800. At the end of November 2014, it was 1,133,700.

Follow That Dream

Professor Rene Reich-Graefe of Western New England University School of Law relied on a similar per capita approach (among other dubious arguments) to assert that today’s students are about to enter “the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country.” His students sure hope he’s right. Only 49 out of 133 members of the Western New England Law class of 2013 — 37 percent — obtained full-time long-term JD-required jobs within nine months of graduation.

It’s easy to hypothesize that population growth should increase the demand for everything, including attorneys. But it’s more precise to say that population growth is relevant to the demand for attorneys only insofar as such growth occurs among those who can actually afford a lawyer. (The degrees-per-capita argument also ignores the profound ways that technological change has reduced the demand for lawyers across many segments of the profession.)

The ABA and the U. S. Department of Labor’s Bureau Labor Statistics have added two new factors that will feed false optimism in 2015. This post considers the ABA’s unfortunate action. Part II will cover the BLS’s contribution to continuing confusion.

The ABA Misfires Again

Since it began requiring law schools to report detailed employment outcomes for their most recent graduates, the overall full-time long-term JD-required employment rate has hovered around 55 percent (excluding law school-funded jobs). For a long time, the cutoff date for schools to report their most recent graduates’ employment status to the ABA (and U.S. News) has been February 15 following the year of graduation.

Starting with the class of 2014, law schools will get an additional month during which their graduates can try to find jobs before schools have to report class-wide employment results. When the employment status cutoff date moves from February 15 to March 15, the reported FTLT JD-required employment rate will go up. Comparisons with prior year outcomes (nine months after graduation) will be disingenuous, but law deans and professors touting an upswing in the legal job market will make them. Market equilibrium, they will proclaim, has made its way to legal education.

The stated reason for the ABA change was that the February 15 cutoff had an unfair impact on schools whose graduates took the bar exam in states reporting results late in the fall, especially New York and California. Schools in those states, the argument went, suffered lower employment rates solely because their graduates couldn’t secure jobs until they had passed the bar. Another month would help their job numbers.

In July 2013, Professor Deborah Merritt offered powerful objections to the ABA’s proposed change: The evidence does not support the principal reason for the change; moving the cutoff date would impair the ability to make yearly comparisons at a time when the profession is undergoing dramatic transformation; prospective students would not have the most recent employment information as they decide where to send their tuition deposits in April; the change would further diminish public trust in law schools and the ABA. The new March 15 cutoff passed by a 10-to-9 vote.

Watch For Obfuscation

In a few months when the new 10-month employment figures for the class of 2014 show “improvement” over the prior year’s nine-month results, think apples-to-oranges as you contemplate whose interests the ABA is really serving. Consider, too, whether any macroeconomic projections of attorney demand are even probative when there is a huge variation in employment opportunities across law schools.

At 33 law schools (including Western New England School of Law), fewer than 40 percent of 2013 graduates found full-time long-term employment requiring a JD. At most of those schools, the vast majority of students incurred staggering six-figure debt for their degrees. (At Western New England, it was $120,677 for the class of 2013.)

In the some corners of the profession, federal student loan dollars are subsidizing an ugly business.

THE BINGHAM CASE STUDY: PART II

Posted on December 10, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Starting with the introduction, Harvard Law Professor Ashish Nanda’s case study on Bingham McCutchen depicts Jay Zimmerman as the architect of the firm’s evolution “from a ‘middle-of-the-road-downtown-pack’ Boston law firm in the early 1990s to a preeminent international law firm by 2010”:

“Zimmerman was elected chairman in 1994. Over the next 15 years, he shepherded the firm through 10 mergers, or ‘combinations’ in the Bingham lexicon, the establishment of 11 new offices, and a ten-fold increase in the firm’s revenues to $800 million… Given its impressive expansion, [journalist Jeffrey] Klineman said, ‘Bingham McCutchen has shown it could probably open an office on the moon.'” (p. 1)

Harvard published the study in September 2011.

Another Case Study

Ten months later, Nanda released another case study, “The Demise of Howrey” — a firm that was dying as he considered Bingham. Interestingly, several footnotes in the Howrey study refer to articles explaining how aggressive inorganic growth compromised that firm’s cohesiveness and hastened its collapse. (E.g., “Howrey’s Lessons” by me, ““Why Howrey Law Firm Could Not Hold It Together”, by the Washington Post’s Steven Pearlstein, and “The Fall of Howrey,” by the American Lawyer’s Julie Triedman) But Nanda’s 15-page narrative of Howrey barely mentions that topic.

Instead, he invites consideration of “the alternative paths Howrey, and managing partner Robert Ruyak, might have taken to avoid dissolution of the firm” after that growth had occurred. The abstract concludes with these suggested discussion points:

“What could Howrey have done differently as clients demanded contingency payment plans and deep discounts? Should Ruyak have been more transparent about the financial difficulties the firm faced? Should he have consulted with a group of senior partners instead of relying on the counsel of outside consultants? Is a litigation-focused firm at a disadvantage when it comes to leadership, as compared to a corporate practice? Participants will reflect on the leadership structure of Howrey while discussing issues related to crisis management.”

With all due respect, those inquiries don’t reach a key lesson of Howrey’s (and now Bingham’s) collapse. The following sentence in the study does, but it goes unexplored:

“Howrey continued to add laterals over the concerns of some partners that increased lateral expansion might detract from the firm’s strategic focus and weaken its cultural glue.” (p. 6)

The Metrics Trap

Nanda’s case studies report that at Howrey. as at Bingham, a few key metrics suggested short-term success: revenues soared, equity partner profits increased, and Am Law rankings went up. But beneath those superficially appealing trends was a long-term danger that such metrics didn’t capture: institutional instability. When Howrey’s projected average partner profits dipped to $850,000 in 2009, many ran for the exits and the death spiral accelerated.

Likewise, Bingham’s record high equity partner profits in 2012 of $1.7 million dropped by 13 percent — far less than Howrey’s 2009 decline of 35 percent — to $1.5 million in 2013. But a steady stream of partner departures led to destabilization and a speedy end.

Balancing the Presentation

According to the final sentence of the Bingham case study abstract, “The case allows participants to explore the positives and negatives of following a strategy of inorganic growth in professional service firms….”

The negatives now dwarf the positives. No one should fault Nanda for failing to predict Bingham’s collapse two years later. The most spectacular law firm failures have come as surprises, even to many insiders at such firms. But the Bingham study emphasizes how Zimmerman conquered the challenges of an aggressive growth strategy, with little consideration to whether the overall strategy itself was wise over the long run.

For example:

— The study notes that after Bingham’s 2002 merger with 300-attorney McCutchen Doyle, “Cultural differences…loomed over the combined organization….” But the study goes on to observe, “[T]hese issues did not slow the firm’s growth on the West Coast.” (p. 11) By 2006, “Bingham had achieved remarkable success and unprecedented growth.” (p. 14)

— The study reports that the firm’s American Lawyer associate satisfaction ranking improved from 107 in 2007 to 79 in 2008, which Bingham’s chief human resources officer attributed to “an appreciation for the leadership of the firm. People have confidence in Jay’s competence.” (p. 17). The study doesn’t mention that the firm’s associate satisfaction ranking dropped to 100 in 2009 and to 106 (out of 137) in 2010. (American Lawyer, Sept. 2010, p. 78)

— “Our management committee has people from all over,” the study quotes Zimmerman. “You don’t have to have been at Bingham Dana forever to lead at the firm.” (p. 15) But the study doesn’t consider how too many laterals parachuting into the top of a firm can produce a concentration of power and a problematic distribution of partner compensation. When Bingham began to unravel, the spread between its highest and lowest paid partners was 12:1.

— Bingham’s final acquisition — McKee Nelson — was the largest law firm combination of 2009. The study doesn’t discuss the destructive impact of accompanying multi-year compensation guarantees that put some McKee Nelson partners at the very top of the Bingham McCutchen pay scale. To be fair, Nanda probably didn’t know about the guarantees, but the omission reveals the limitations of his investigation. The guarantees came to light publicly when the American Lawyer spoke recently with former partners who said that “the size and scope of the McKee Nelson guarantees led to internal fissures…that caused at least some partners to leave the firm.”

No Regrets

Looking to the future, Zimmerman told the Harvard researchers, “[W]e’re competing with the best every day. We know we are among the best.” (p. 19)

I wonder if he would now offer the same self-assessment of his leadership that Robert Ruyak provided to the American Lawyer at the time of Howrey’s bankruptcy, namely, “I don’t have any regrets.” Nanda’s case study on Howrey’s demise concludes with “Ruyak’s Reflections.” The “no regrets” line could lead to interesting classroom discussions about accepting responsibility, but it doesn’t appear in the Howrey study. Ruyak’s explanations for the firm’s failure do.

One explanation that receives no serious attention in the case study is Ruyak’s observation that the partnership lacked patience and loyalty to the firm: “The longer-term Howrey people realized that our profitability jumped around a bit,” he said. “The people who were laterals, maybe, did not.” (p. 15)

Perhaps the potential for institutional instability that can accompany aggressive inorganic law firm growth receives greater emphasis in classroom discussions of Howrey and Bingham than it does in Nanda’s written materials. In that respect, both firms are case studies in management failure that is regrettably pervasive: a wrongheaded vision of success and a reliance on misguided metrics by which to measure it.

THE BINGHAM CASE STUDY — PART I

Posted on December 3, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

“For the first time since I’ve been in this job, we have all the pieces we need to do our job.”

That was former Bingham McCutchen chairman Jay Zimmerman’s penultimate line in the September 2011 Harvard Law School Case Study of his firm.

Oops.

Harvard Law School Professor Ashish Nanda and a research fellow developed the study for classroom use. According to the abstract, it’s a textbook example of successful management. It demonstrates how a firm could evolve “from a ‘middle-of-the-downtown pack’ Boston law firm in the early 1990s to a preeminent international law firm by 2010.”

Oops, again.

Familiar Plaudits

At the time of Nanda’s study, the profession had already witnessed a string of recent big firm failures. He should have taken a closer look at them. In fact, only seven months before publication of the Harvard Study, Howrey LLP was in the highly publicized death throes of what was a preview Bingham’s unfortunate fate.

Bingham’s Zimmerman and Howrey’s last chairman, Robert Ruyak, had several things in common, including accolades for their leadership. Just as Nanda highlighted Zimmerman’s tenure in his study, two years before Howrey’s collapse, Legal Times honored Ruyak as one of the profession’s Visionaries. Along similar lines, less than a month after publication of the Harvard study, Dewey & LeBeouf’s unraveling began as partners learned in October 2011 that the firm was not meeting its revenue projections for the year. But Dewey chairman Steven Davis continued to receive leadership awards.

Perhaps such public acclaim for a senior partner is the big firm equivalent of the Sports Illustrated curse. Being on the cover of that magazine seems to assure disaster down the road. (According to one analyst, the SI curse isn’t the worst in sports history. That distinction belongs to the Chicago Cubs and the Billy Goat hex. But hey, anyone can have a bad century.)

Underlying Behavior

The Lawyer Bubble investigates Howrey, Dewey, and other recent failures of large law firms. The purpose is not to identify what distinguishes them from each other, but to expose common themes that contributed to their demise. With the next printing of the book, I’m going to add an afterword that includes Bingham.

If Nanda had considered those larger themes, he might have viewed Bingham’s evolution much differently from the conclusions set forth in his study. He certainly would have backed away from what he thought was the key development proving Bingham’s success, namely, aggressive growth through law firm mergers and lateral hiring. He might even have considered that such a strategy could contribute to Bingham’s subsequent failure — which it did.

To find those recent precedents, he need not have looked very far. Similar trends undermined Howrey, Dewey, and others dating back to Finley Kumble in 1988. As a profession, we don’t seem to learn much from our mistakes.

The MBA Mentality Strikes Again

What caused Professor Nanda to line up with those who had missed the fault lines that had undone similar firms embracing the “bigger is always better” approach? One answer could be that he’s not a lawyer.

Nanda has a Ph.D in economics from Harvard Business School, where he taught for 13 years before becoming a professor of practice, faculty director of executive education, and research director at the program on the legal profession at Harvard Law School. Before getting his doctorate, he spent five years at the Tata group of companies as an administrative services officer. He co-authored a case book on “Professional Services” and advises law firms and corporate inside counsel.

It’s obvious that Nanda is intelligent. But it seems equally clear that his business orientation focused him on the enticing short-term metrics that have become ubiquitous measures of success. They can also be traps for the unwary.

In Part II of this series, I’ll review some of those traps. Nanda fell into them. As a consequence, he missed clues that should have led him to pause before joining the Bingham cheerleading squad.

Meanwhile, through December 6, Amazon is offering a special deal on my novel, The Partnership: It’s FREE as an ebook download. I’m currently negotiating a sale of the film rights to the book.

LAW & FOOTBALL: RANKINGS DOUBLETHINK

Posted on November 19, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

For many people, the holiday season means an intense focus on college football. This year, a 12-person committee develops weekly team rankings. They will culminate in playoffs that produce head-to-head competition for the national championship in January.

A recent comment from the chairman of that committee, Jeff Long, is reminiscent of something U.S. News rankings czar Robert Morse said about his ranking system last year. Both remarks reveal how those responsible for rankings methodology rationalize distance between themselves and the behavior they incentivize.

Nobody Wants Credit?

Explaining why undefeated Florida State dropped from second to third in the November 11 rankings, Long told ESPN that making distinctions among the top teams was difficult. He explained that the relevant factors include a team’s “body of work, their strength of schedule.” Teams that defeat other strong teams get a higher rank than those beating weaker opponents. So even though Oregon has suffered a loss this year, its three victories against top-25 opponents jumped it ahead of undefeated FSU, which had only two such wins. Long repeated his explanation on November 19: “Strength of schedule is an important factor….”

Whether Oregon should be ahead of FSU isn’t the point. Long’s response to a follow-up question on November 11 is the eye-catcher: Was the committee sending a message to teams that they should schedule games against tougher opponents?

“We don’t think it’s our job to send messages,” he said. “We believe the rankings will do that.”

But who develops the criteria underlying the rankings? Long’s committee. The logic circle is complete.

Agency Moment Lost: Students

In his November 14 column for the New York Times, David Brooks writes more broadly about “The Agency Moment.” It occurs when an individual accepts complete responsibility for his or her decisions. Some people never experience it.

Rankings can provide opportunities for agency moments. For example, some prelaw students avoid serious inquiry into an important question: which law school might be the best fit for their individual circumstances? Instead, I’ve heard undergraduates say they’ll attend the best law school that accepts them, and U.S. News rankings will make that determination.

If they were talking about choosing from law schools in different groups, that would make some sense. There’s a reason that Harvard doesn’t lose students to Boston University. But too many students take the rankings too far. If the choice is between school number 22 and the one ranked number 23, they’re picking number 22, period. That’s idiotic.

In abandoning independent judgment, such students (and their parents) cede one of life’s most important decisions to Robert Morse, the non-lawyer master of the rankings methodology. It’s also an agency moment lost.

Agency Moment Lost: Deans, Administrators, and Alumni

Likewise, deans who let U.S. News dictate their management decisions say they’re just responding to incentives. As long as university administrators, alumni, and prospective students view the rankings as meaningful, they have to act accordingly. Any complaint — and there are many — should go to the person who develops the rankings methodology.

All roads of responsibility lead back to U.S. News’ Robert Morse, they say. But following that trail leads to another lost agency moment. In March 2013, Lee Pacchia of Bloomberg asked Morse if he took any responsibility for what’s ailing legal education today:

“No…U.S. News isn’t the ABA. U.S. News doesn’t regulate the reporting requirements. No….”

Agency Moment Lost: Methodology Masters

Morse went on to say that U.S. News was not responsible for the cost of law school, either. Pacchia didn’t ask him why the methodology rewards a school that increases expenditures without regard to the beneficial impact on student experiences or employment outcomes. Or how schools game the system by aggressively recruiting transfer students whose tuition adds revenue at minimal cost and whose lower LSAT scores don’t count in the school’s ranking methodology. (Vivia Chen recently reported on the dramatic increase in incoming transfer students at some schools.)

Cassius was only half-right. The fault lies not in our stars; but it doesn’t lie anywhere else, either!

The many ways that U.S. News rankings methodology has distorted law school deans’ decision-making is the subject of Part I of my book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis. Part II investigates the analogous behavior of law firm leaders who rely on metrics that maximize short-term Am Law rankings in running their businesses (e.g., billings, billable hours, hourly rates, and leverage ratios).

Aggregate Rankings v. Individual Outcomes

In the end, “sending a message” through a rankings methodology is only one part of an agency equation. The message itself doesn’t require the recipient to engage in any particular behavior. That’s still a choice, although incentive structures can limit perceived options and create first-mover dilemmas.

Importantly, individual outcomes don’t always conform to rankings-based predictions. Successful participants still have to play — and win — each game. That doesn’t always happen. Just ask Mississippi State — ranked number one in the college football playoff sweepstakes after week 12, but then losing to Alabama on November 15. Or even better, look at number 18 ranked Notre Dame, losing on the same day to unranked Northwestern.

Maybe that’s the real lesson for college coaches, prelaw students, law school deans, and law firm leaders. Rather than rely on rankings and pander to the methodology behind them, focus on winning the game.

BULLET DODGED? OR REDIRECTED TOWARD YOU?

Posted on November 5, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

For the past six months, Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego seemed poised to become the first ABA-accredited law school to fail since the Great Recession began. For anyone paying attention to employment trends in the legal sector, the passage of six years without a law school closing somewhere is itself remarkable. It also says much about market dysfunction in legal education.

In his November 5 column in the New York Times, University of California-Berkeley law professor Steven Davidoff Solomon has a different view. Solomon argues that recent enrollment declines prove that a functioning market has corrected itself: “[T]he bottom is almost here for law schools. This is how economics works: Markets tend to overshoot on the way up, and down.”

Solomon urges that the proper course is to keep marginal law schools such as Thomas Jefferson alive for a while “and see what happens.” I disagree.

Take Thomas Jefferson, Please

As I’ve discussed previously, in 2008 the school issued bonds for a new building. When the specter of default loomed large in early 2014, the question was whether some accommodation with bondholders would keep the school alive. Solomon suggests that creditors made the only deal possible and the school is the ultimate winner. He gives little attention to the real losers in this latest example of a legal education market that is not working: Thomas Jefferson’s students, the legal profession, and taxpayers.

In retrospect, the restructuring agreement between the school and its bondholders reveals that a deal was always likely. That’s because both sides could use other people’s money to make it, as they have since 2008.

According to published reports, interest on the taxable portion of the 2008 bond issuance was 11 percent. Tax-exempt bondholders earned more than 7 percent interest. Thanks to federally-backed student tuition loans, taxpayers then subsidized the school’s revenue streams that provided quarterly interest and principal payments to those bondholders.

Outcomes? Irrelevant In This Market

Last year, Thomas Jefferson accepted 80 percent of applicants. According to its latest required ABA disclosures, first-year attrition was over 30 percent. The school’s California bar passage rate for first-time takers in February and July 2012 was 54 percent, compared to the state average of 71 percent.

Solomon cites the school’s other dismal statistics, but ignores their implications. For example, Thomas Jefferson’s low bar passage rate made no difference to most of its graduates because the full-time long-term bar passage-employment rate for the class of 2013 was 29 percent, as it was for the class of 2012.

Meanwhile, its perennially high tuition (currently $44,900 a year) put Thomas Jefferson #1 on the U.S. News list of schools whose students incurred the greatest law school indebtedness: $180,665 for the class of 2013. According to National Jurist, the school generates 95 percent of its income from tuition.

It’s Alive

This invites an obvious question: How did the school survive so long and what is prolonging its life?

First, owing to unemployed recent graduates with massive student loans, bondholders received handsome quarterly payments for more than five years — much of it tax-exempt interest. The disconnect between student outcomes and the easy availability for federal loans blocked a true market response to a deteriorating situation. Bondholders should also give an appreciative nod to federal taxpayers who are guaranteeing those loans and will foot the bill for graduates entering income-based loan forgiveness programs.

Second, headlines touted Thomas Jefferson’s new deal as “slashing debt” by $87 million, but bondholders now own the law school building and will reportedly receive a market rate rent from the school — $5 million a year. Future student loans unrelated to student outcomes will provide those funds.

Third, the school issued $40 million in new bonds that will pay the current bondholders two percent interest. Student loan debt will make those payments possible.

Net-net, win-win, lose-lose

The bottom line benefit for Thomas Jefferson is immediate relief from its current cash crunch. Instead of $12 million in principal and interest payments annually, the school will pay $6 million in rent and bond interest — funded by students who borrow to obtain a Thomas Jefferson law degree of dubious value.

“I think the whole deal is a reflection of the fact that the bondholders were very desirous for us to succeed,” [Thomas Jefferson Dean Thomas] Guernsey said.

Actually, it reflects the bondholders’ ability to tap into the proceeds of future federal student loans as they cut a deal with a wounded adversary. Instead of cash flow corresponding to bond interest rates of 7 and 11 percent, bondholders will receive about half that amount, along with an office building and the tax advantages that come with ownership (e.g., depreciation deductions). Think of it as refinancing your home mortgage, except the bank gets to keep your house.

Erroneous Assumptions Produce Dubious Strategies

“This restructuring is a major step toward achieving our goals,” said Thomas Guernsey, dean of Thomas Jefferson. “It puts the school on a solid financial footing.”

Throwing furniture into the fireplace to keep the house warm is not a viable long-run survival strategy. Consider future students and their willingness to borrow as the “furniture” and you have a picture of the Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s business plan.

Meanwhile, Solomon echoes the hopes of law school faculty and administrators everywhere when he says, “[T]he decline in enrollment could lead to a shortage of lawyers five years from now.”

In assuming a unitary market demand for lawyers, he conflates the separate and distinct submarkets for law school graduates. His resulting leap of faith is that a rising tide — even if it arrives — will lift Thomas Jefferson’s boat and the debt-ridden graduates adrift in it. It won’t.

ELON’S “GROUNDBREAKING NEW MODEL”

Posted on October 15, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

On October 9, the Elon University School of Law issued a press release announcing its “groundbreaking new model” of legal education. That’s an overstatement, but the plan has some distinctly positive elements. Unfortunately, it also continues to rely on the prevailing law school business model that has produced the profession’s current crisis.

Elon’s Brief History

Located in Greensboro, North Carolina, Elon was founded in 2006 and received ABA accreditation in 2008 — as the Great Recession began. In one sense, the timing was good because many undergraduates thought law school was a safe place to spend three years waiting for the economy to improve. At the time, that option looked especially attractive because the ABA didn’t require schools to disclose whether recent graduates were obtaining meaningful JD-required jobs. By 2010 , Elon achieved a record-high first-year enrollment of 132 students. Tuition for 2009-2010 was $30,750/year.

As ABA-mandated disclosures began to reveal that almost half of all law graduates nationwide were not getting full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD, the overall number of applicants to all law schools plummeted — from 87,500 in 2010 to 59,400 in 2013. Some deans at less competitive schools lowered admissions standards and raised acceptance rates. Even in a collapsing market for new lawyers, the effort to fill classrooms was a rational response to financial incentives. Federally-backed non-dischargeable student loans for tuition generated revenues for law schools, but schools had no accountability for their graduates’ poor job prospects.

Lowering the Bar

According to U.S. News , Elon accepted 68.4 percent of applicants for fall 2013 and enrolled 107 first-year students — almost 20 percent fewer than in 2010. From 2010 to 2013, the median LSAT for its first-year class dropped from 155 to 150; the median GPA declined from 3.12 to 3.01. At the 25th percentile, from 2010 to 2013, Elon’s LSAT/GPA combination went from 153/2.80 to 146/2.75.

Even as first-year enrollment declined at Elon, tuition increased to almost $38,000/year. Average student debt for 2013 graduates exceeded $108,000. Meanwhile, Elon’s full-time long-term JD-required employment rate for 2013 graduates was 32.8 percent. The school was one of only 13 (out of 201) ABA-accredited schools that placed less than one-third of their graduates in such jobs.

Groundbreaking?

When the school’s new dean, Luke Bierman, joined Elon on June 1 of this year, the school was already more than two years into developing a strategic plan that now includes added experiential learning, residencies with practicing attorneys, faculty-supervised development, and a JD program of seven trimesters replacing three academic years.

Practical training, residencies, and student development efforts that give otherwise unemployed lawyers a few tools to help them scratch out a living with their JDs is a good thing. Everyone should applaud those initiatives. But especially with Duke, UNC, and Wake Forest nearby, such changes are not likely to create more JD-required jobs for Elon graduates.

Pushing students out the door more quickly is not particularly novel. Many schools, including the University of Dayton, Drexel, Pepperdine, Northwestern, Southwestern, and others, have two-year programs. But the really big reform — eliminating the third year altogether — isn’t happening because accreditation rules prevent it. Existing accelerated programs merely cram the requisite workload into a shorter time period.

Money-saving?

Elon claims that its new plan offers two economic benefits to students: they can enter the job market sooner and save money on tuition. Whether becoming eligible for JD-required employment is a benefit for Elon graduates in the current environment (or even a few years from now) isn’t clear. As for the tuition discount, it’s true that an Elon JD will now cost $100,000 for seven trimesters compared to the $114,000 for three years (at $38,000/year) — a nominal student savings of $14,000.

But Elon’s strategic plan probably includes a pro forma projection showing that its new pricing policy benefits the school at least as much. Take the total current cost of $114,000, divide it by nine trimesters (three years), and the result is a per-trimester cost of $12,666.67. If students were paying for seven trimesters at Elon’s current annual tuition rate, the total cost for the degree would be $88,666.67. They’ll now pay $100,000 (or $14,285.71 per trimester). Elon promises to freeze a student’s total cost for the program, but on a price-per-trimester basis the $100,000 fixed cost already includes a tuition increase.

The Real Problem

The short-term economic impact of Elon’s new program is less troubling than the school’s long-term business plan. Because the seven-trimester program will generate less gross revenue per student than its current three-year course of study, the school plans to recover those losses by adding — you guessed it — more students.

The Triad Business Journal reports: “From a business standpoint, Elon Law anticipates offsetting the loss of revenue from tuition reduction by gradually increasing the number of students joining the school each year, up from 112 this fall to about 130 within a number of years.”

Imagine the consequences if every law school that currently places fewer than one-third of its graduates in full-time long-term JD-required jobs were to increase enrollment by 20 to 30 percent “within a number of years.” For the profession, that would be like accelerating in reverse gear toward a brick wall.

The Quest for Meaningful Reform

Elon’s understandable approach to the economics of this situation is important for one more reason. After accepting the deanship in January 2014, Bierman became a member of the ABA’s Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education. If that task force develops a “groundbreaking” plan to supplement a glutted market with more new lawyers from schools where two-thirds of current graduates can’t find full-time long-term JD-required employment, perhaps the ground would be better left unbroken.

More about possible solutions in my address at the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review Symposium at St. John’s University on October 24.

A MYTH THAT MOTIVATES MERGERS

Posted on October 8, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

In a recent interview with The American Lawyer, the chairman of Edwards Wildman, Alan Levin, explained the process that led his firm to combine with Locke Lord. It began with a commissioned study that separated potential merger partners into “tier 1” and “tier 2” firms. The goal was to get bigger.

“Size matters,” he said, “and to be successful today, you really have to be in that Am Law 50.”

When lawyers deal with clients and courts, they focus on evidence. Somehow, that tendency often disappears when they’re evaluating the strategic direction of their own institutions.

Bigger Is…?

There’s no empirical support for the proposition that economies of scale accompany the growth of a law firm. Back in 2003, Altman Weil concluded that 30 years of survey research proved it: “Larger firms almost always spend more per lawyer on staffing, occupancy, equipment, promotion, malpractice and other non-personnel insurance coverages, office supplies and other expenses than do smaller firms.” As firms get bigger, the Altman Weil report continued, maintaining the infrastructure to support continued growth becomes more expensive.

Since 2003, law firms have utilized even more costly ways to grow: multi-year compensation guarantees to overpaid lateral partners. Recently, Ed Newberry, chairman of Patton Boggs, told Forbes, “[L]ateral acquisitions, which many firms are aggressively pursuing now…is a very dangerous strategy because laterals are extremely expensive and have a very low success rate — by some studies lower than 50 percent across firms.”

The Magic of the Am Law 50?

Does success require a place in the Am Law 50? If size is the only measuring stick, then the tautology holds. Big = successful = big. But if something else counts, such as profitability or stability, then the answer is no.

The varied financial performance of firms within the Am Law 50 disproves the “bigger is always better” hypothesis. The profit margins of those firms range from a high of 62 percent (Gibson Dunn) to a low of 14 percent (Squire Sanders — which is in the process of merging with Patton Boggs).

Wachtell has the highest profit margin in the Am Law 100 (64 percent), and it’s not even in the Am Law 50. But that firm’s equity partners aren’t complaining about its 2013 average profits per partner: $4.7 million — good enough for first place on the PPP list. Among the 50 largest firms in gross revenues, 17 have profit margins placing them in the bottom half of the Am Law 100.

Buzzwords Without Meaning

A cottage industry of law firm management consultants has developed special language to reinforce a mindless “size matters” mentality. According to The Legal Intelligencer, Kent Zimmermann of the Zeughauser Group said recently that Morgan Lewis’s contemplated merger with Bingham McCutchen “may be part of a growing crop of law firms that feel they need to be ‘materially larger’ in order to increase brand awareness, [which is] viewed by many of these firms as what it takes to get on the short list for big matters.”

Not so fast. In the Am Law rankings, Morgan Lewis is already 12th in gross revenues and 24th in profit margin (44 percent). It doesn’t need to “increase brand awareness.” That concept might help sell toothpaste; it doesn’t describe the way corporate clients actually select their outside lawyers.

In a recent article, Casey Sullivan and David Ingram at Reuters suggest that Bingham’s twelve-year effort to increase “brand awareness” through an aggressive program of mergers contributed mightily to its current plight. The authors observe that In the early 1990s “[c]onsultants were warning leaders of mid-sized firms that their partnerships would have to merge or die, and [Bingham’s chairman] proved to be a pioneer of the strategy.”

Consultants have given big firms plenty of other bad advice, but that’s a topic for another day. Suffice it to say that Bingham’s subsequent mergers got it into the Am Law 50. However, that didn’t protect the firm from double-digit declines in 2013 revenue and profits, or from a plethora of partner departures in 2014.

In his Legal Intelligencer interview, Kent Zimmermann of Zeughauser also said that he has “seen firms with new leadership in place look to undertake a transformative endeavor like this [Morgan Lewis-Bingham] merger would be.” If Zimmermann’s overall observation about firms with new leadership is true, such leaders should be asking themselves: transform to what? Acting on empty buzzwords risks a “transformative endeavor” to institutional instability.

Soundbites

In contrast to Alan Levin’s “size matters” sound bite, here’s another. A year ago, IBM’s general counsel, Robert Weber, told the Wall Street Journal, “I’m pretty skeptical about the value these big mergers give to clients…I don’t know why it’s better to use a bigger firm.”

Weber should know because he spent 30 years at Jones Day before joining IBM. But is anyone listening? IBM’s long-time outside counsel Cravath, Swaine & Moore probably is. Based on size and gross revenues, Cravath doesn’t qualify for the Am Law 50, but its clients and partners don’t care.

Uncertain Outcomes

Does becoming a legal behemoth add client value? Does it increase institutional nimbleness in a changing environment? Does it enhance morale, collegiality, and long-run firm stability? Do profit margins improve or worsen? Why are many big firm corporate clients — H-P, eBay, Abbott Labs, ConocoPhilllips, Time Warner, DuPont, and Procter & Gamble, among a long list — moving in the opposite direction, namely, toward disaggregation that increases flexibility?

Wearing their “size alone matters” blinders, some firm leaders aren’t even asking those questions. If they don’t, fellow partners should. After all, their skin is in this game, too.

STUDENT LOANS, MORAL HAZARD, AND LAW SCHOOL LOANS – CONCLUSION

Posted on October 1, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

My most recent post in this series discussed manifestations of law school moral hazard at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Quinnipiac Law School. Both institutions have spent millions of dollars on flashy new buildings where attentive students will have a tough time getting jobs requiring the expensive JDs they are pursuing.

The series now concludes with two more schools that illustrate another dimension of the dysfunctional law school market. Recent graduates of Golden Gate University School of Law and Florida Coastal School of Law live in the worst of two worlds: Their schools have unusually low full-time long-term JD-required employment rates and unusually high average law student debt.

Muddy Disclosure

The recent decline in the number of law school applicants has resulted in many schools struggling to fill their classrooms. When a school depends on the continuing flow of student loan-funded revenues, the pressure to bring in bodies can be formidable. One consequence is especially unseemly for a noble profession: dubious marketing tactics.

By now, most people are aware of ABA rule changes that require each school to disclose in some detail its recent graduates’ employment results, specifically, whether jobs are full-time, part-time, short-term, long-term, or JD-required. But those requirements don’t prevent Golden Gate University School of Law’s “Employment Statistics Snapshot” page from touting this aggregate statistic for its 2013 graduates “85.4 percent were employed in jobs that required bar passage…or where a JD provided an advantage.”

The school’s “ABA employment summary” link appears on the same page. But Golden Gate has supposedly made things easier for prospective students by showing its 2013 graduates’ employment results in a large pie chart. According to that chart, nine months after graduation, 38.2 percent of the school’s 2013 graduates had JD-required jobs.

Here’s what the chart doesn’t reveal: Even that unimpressive total (38.2 percent) includes part-time and short-term positions. Golden Gate’s full-time long-term JD-required employment rate for 2013 graduates was 23 percent.

Money to be Made

I’ve written previously about Florida Coastal, one of the InfiLaw system of private, for-profit law schools. Florida Coastal’s website includes all employment outcomes — legal, non-legal, full-time, part-time, long-term, short-term, and a large number of law school-funded jobs — to arrive at its “job placement rate” of 74.3 percent for its 2012 graduates. That number appears on the program overview pages of the school’s website. But you have to dig deeper — and move into the “Professional Development” section — to learn the more recent and relevant data: The overall employment rate dropped to 62 percent for the class of 2013.

However, those overall rates aren’t even the numbers that matter. Anyone persevering to the school’s ABA-mandated employment disclosure summary finds that the full-time long-term JD-required employment rate for Florida Coastal’s 2013 graduates was 31 percent.

The Cost of Market Dysfunction

At Golden Gate, tuition and fees have increased from $26,000 in 2006 to more than $43,000 today. During the same period, Florida Coastal increased its tuition and fees from $23,000 to more than $40,000. That’s why Florida Coastal and Golden Gate rank so high in average law school loan debt for 2013 graduates, with $150,360 and $144,269, respectively.

To its credit, Florida Coastal eliminates any doubt about the trajectory of law school debt for its future students. The median debt for its 2014 graduates rose to more than $175,000 — all of it consisting of federal student loans.

Searching for Solutions

My criticisms of current market failures should not be construed as an argument for eliminating the government-backed student loan program for law students. Were it not for federal educational loans, I could not have attended college, much less law school. The program was a good idea when Milton Friedman promoted it in the early 1950s, and it is still a good idea today.

But the core of this good idea has gone bad in its implementation. Shining a light on resulting market dysfunction should generate constructive approaches to a remedy. At the October 24 American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review Symposium at St. John’s University (and my related law review article appearing thereafter), I’ll outline my ideas.

Here’s a preview: Viewing the law school market in the aggregate — as a single market — obfuscates a reasoned analysis of the problem. It protects the weakest law schools from the consequences of their failures. They should pay an immediate price for exploiting the moral hazard resulting from the current system of financing legal education. At a minimum, the government should not be subsidizing their bad behavior.

The profession would be wise to lead itself out of this mess. The financial incentives of the current structure, along with its pervasive vested interests, make that a daunting task. Even so, human decisions created the problem. Better human decisions can fix them.

STUDENT LOANS, MORAL HAZARD, AND A LAW SCHOOL MESS: PART 2

Posted on September 24, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Sometimes law school moral hazard assumes a concrete form — literally.

A School Making Unwanted News

For example, Thomas Jefferson School of Law is now coping with a widely publicized credit downgrade of its bonds to junk status and related concerns about its future. But those financial difficulties date back to late 2008. The deepening recession was decimating the employment market for lawyers generally and hitting Thomas Jefferson graduates especially hard.

That didn’t stop the school from breaking ground in October 2008 on a new building that opened in January 2011. California tax-exempt bonds financed the $90 million project. Government-backed student borrowing for ever-increasing tuition — currently almost $45,000 a year — would provide a revenue stream from which to pay bondholders.

In 2012, new ABA-required disclosures allowed the world to see the school’s dismal employment record for graduates seeking full-time, long-term jobs requiring a JD (63 out of 236, or 27 percent, for the class of 2011). As enrollment declined, so did revenue from student loans. Unfortunately, the building and the bonds issued to pay for it remain, as does the stunning debt that students incurred for their degrees.

Quinnipiac’s New Digs

Recently, Quinnipiac University School of Law celebrated the opening of a new $50 million building in North Haven, Connecticut. Its website boasts that the new facility “is 154,749 square feet and will include a 180-seat two-tiered courtroom with Judge’s Chambers and Jury Room.” The Law Center is one of three interconnected buildings on a graduate school campus that is “expansive and architecturally distinctive, with an array of shared amenities, a beautiful full-service dining commons, bookstore, ample parking, and convenient highway access.”

Quinnipiac’s students — including all 92 entrants to the fall 2014 one-L class — will have luxurious accommodations in which to contemplate their uncertain futures. According to the school’s ABA required disclosures, nine months after graduation only 51 of 148 students in the class of 2013 — 34 percent — had found full-time long-term employment requiring a JD. And a Quinnipiac law degree has become increasingly expensive as tuition and fees alone have risen from $30,280 in 2006 to more than $47,000 today.

Tough Numbers

Such dismal employment outcomes for Quinnipiac are not new. Only 41 percent of its 2012 graduates found full-time long-term employment that required a JD. The rate for the class of 2011 was 35%.

Both Thomas Jefferson and Quinnipiac are among many law schools that must yearn for the good ole’ days — three years ago — when deans didn’t have to disclose whether their most recent graduates held jobs that were short-term, part-time, or had no connection whatsoever to the legal training they had received. ABA-sanctioned opacity allowed law schools as a group to claim — without qualification — that the overall employment rate for current graduating classes exceeded 90 percent.

Back to the Future

At Quinnipiac, the culture of that bygone era apparently endures. The link to its ABA-required disclosures page takes prospective students to “Employment Outcomes” and this:

“82% of the graduating class was employed as of Feb. 15, 2014 in the categories listed below…Bar passage is required, JD is an advantage, other professional jobs, and non-professional jobs.”

But if prospective students want to know the whole truth, they have to click again, go to the school’s ABA questionnaire, and perform a calculation from the raw data that reveals the 34 percent employment rate for the most important job category — full-time, long-term, JD-required jobs.

Law School Marketing

Similarly, the “Career Development” section of Quinnipiac’s current prospective student “Viewbook” leads with the banner headline that its “Employment Rate” for the class of 2012 was a remarkable 84% — “127 of 151 graduates employed.” An asterisk adds this tiny note: “Comprehensive employment outcomes for the class of 2012, including all employment categories as defined by the ABA (full-time/part-time/short term/long term) can be found at emplyomentsummary.abaquestionnare.org.”

Can prospective law students discover the truth? Sure. Should they take the time to do so? You bet. Do all of them make the effort? Not a chance. If they did, the 80+ percent, big-font employment statistics wouldn’t be in Quinnipiac’s recruiting materials. For careful readers, those big numbers are a waste of space.

What, me worry?

Undeterred by its recent graduates’ employment track record, Quinnipiac wants to grow. “There’s a decline in the demand for lawyers,” university president John Lahey said. “Even with the decline, we’re the only school in the country to spend $50 million for a new law school.”

That peculiar boast reflects an “if you build it, they will come” mentality determined to maximize tuition revenues. Unfortunately, that attitude can lead to short-term mischief and long-run calamity. Just ask anyone associated with the Thomas Jefferson School of Law.

Market dysfunction

Law schools remain unaccountable for the poor employment outcomes of their graduates. As most schools raise tuition, many students incur increasing amounts of debt for a degree that won’t get them a JD-required job. Because the federal government backs the vast majority of those loans, you could say that the system is your tax dollar at work.

Quinnipiac didn’t raise tuition for 2014-2015, but 86 percent of its 2013 graduates incurred law school debt averaging $102,000. Down the road at New Haven, 80 percent of Yale’s 2013 graduates with far superior job prospects incurred debt averaging $112,000.

The More Things Change…

The perverse law school response to market forces is a predictable business strategy, especially for law schools whose graduates are having the greatest difficulty finding law jobs. In an interview with the New Haven Register, Quinnipiac University President Lahey said that he hopes enrollment will grow from the current total of 292 students to 500 — the design capacity for the school’s new building.

Now that they’ve built it, will students come? If they value a “beautiful full-service dining commons,” perhaps. If they consider footnotes, read the fine print, and assess realistically their JD-required employment prospects as they peruse recruiting materials touting a Quinnipiac law degree, perhaps not.

STUDENT LOANS, MORAL HAZARD, AND A LAW SCHOOL MESS

Posted on September 10, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Throughout the summer, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has been promoting legislation that would provide relief to students with educational debt. As the Senate concludes its work — and I use that word loosely — before the November elections, she is taking another run at the issue. Most recently, Senator Warren made her case in an article that appeared in the September 9, 2014 edition of the Huffington Post: “The Vote That Could Cut Your Student Loan Bills.”

Her point is simple: Students who took out educational loans prior to July 1, 2013 are locked into an interest rate of nearly 7 percent. “Older loans run 8-9% and even higher,” she writes. She’d like to bring that rate down by allowing graduates (and parents who co-signed their loans) to refinance them.

Politics, You Say?

Election year politics have rendered her proposal dead on arrival. That became clear in June when Senate Republicans filibustered the bill, even though three of them — Senators Bob Corker of Tennessee, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, and Susan Collins of Maine — were among the 56-38 majority that was insufficient to bring it to the floor.

But the gridlock in Washington and resulting inaction may focus attention on a more important underlying problem: How does a system anchored in noble intentions evolve to produce such enormous and unsustainable levels of educational debt in the first place? Some law schools have become poster children for the unfortunate answer to that question.

Blame Professor Friedman

In the 1960’s, Milton Friedman argued that America would benefit if individuals had a way to borrow against future incomes and invest in becoming more valuable workers. In those days, a college education was the surest path to the middle class. To a large extent, it still is.

From Friedman’s idea came the federal student loan program. But over time, Congress and several presidents added features that became problematic. Imagined and unfounded fears of moral hazard — specifically, that students on the cusp of lucrative careers would declare bankruptcy to avoid paying their student loans — resulted in the rule that educational debt survives bankruptcy, except in extreme circumstances that courts rarely find.

Coupled with federal guarantees, the loans eliminated lender risk. That created a new moral hazard: Educational institutions themselves were at least two steps away from any financial accountability for their graduates’ outcomes.

Law School Misbehavior

For law schools, all of this has assumed special significance. Unlike undergraduate colleges that can claim to be creating well-rounded and better informed citizens entering a variety of careers, law schools exist to train people who want to become lawyers. Some law graduates may take rewarding non-legal paths, but undergraduates aspiring to careers in business, for example, typically attend business school. At least, they should.

If the ability of a school’s graduates to use their legal training initially in a JD-required job is an appropriate way to measure a law school’s success, then many are unambiguous failures. For the class of 2013, 33 of 201 ABA-accredited schools placed fewer than 40 percent of their graduates in long-term full-time JD-required employment (excluding law school-funded jobs).

But here’s the kicker. Thanks to the moral hazard that the federally-backed loan program creates, some schools with the worst employment records for recent graduates have students with the highest levels of law school loan debt.

For the class of 2013, three of the top ten schools with the highest average student loan debt at graduation placed less than one-third of their graduates in full-time long-term JD-required jobs (again, excluding law school-funded positions). They were: Thomas Jefferson ($180,000 average student debt; 29 percent employment rate), Whittier ($154,000 average student debt; 27 percent employment rate), and Florida Coastal ($150,000 average student debt; 31 percent employment rate).

Defying the Market

How do these schools and others like them accomplish this economically perverse feat? Large doses of prospective student confirmation bias combine with federally-backed student loans to create a dysfunctional market.

Marginal law schools seek to fill their classrooms to maximize revenues. Next week, I’ll examine a few schools pursuing this goal through recruiting materials that seem to obfuscate ABA-required employment disclosures. For now, the important point is that what happens to those students after they graduate becomes someone else’s problem. Once students pay their tuition bills, law schools have no financial stake in their graduates’ employment outcomes.

Searching for Solutions

This takes us back to Senator Warren’s bill aimed at giving past students a break. In the current low-interest rate environment, it’s reasonable to provide former students with the kind of refinancing opportunities available to homeowners, business proprietors, and other debtors. But that won’t begin to solve the real problem. The current system of financing legal education creates moral hazard that has produced — and will continue to produce — law school misbehavior at great expense, not only to affected students, but also to all of us.

In the coming weeks prior to my October 24 presentation to the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review Symposium at St. John’s University School of Law, I’ll offer some ideas for dealing with that larger problem. Some people won’t like them.

A TALE OF TWO LAW SCHOOLS

Posted on May 28, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Two law schools in the news probably wish that they weren’t. They exemplify market dysfunction in the current system of financing legal education.

Indiana Tech

More than a year ago, I wrote about Indiana Tech Law School, one of several law schools founded after 2010. As proponents completed a feasibility study, newly required ABA disclosures demonstrated that only half of all recent law school graduates were finding full-time, long-term JD-required jobs. But some people thought that Indiana really needed a fifth law school.

Indiana Tech Law School opened its doors in 2013. It enrolled only 28 first-year students, far below the original target of 100. On May 21, 2014, its first dean and university provost Peter Alexander resigned both positions. According to the university press release, “Alexander cited the achievement of the goals he had established for the law school to that point in time and a desire to pursue other employment opportunities as the reasons for his decision to resign.”

An uncertain future?

In addition to promoting Indiana Tech as unique, the school’s website introduces prospective students to the doctrine of caveat emptor:

“Like any new law school, Indiana Tech must be in operation for one year prior to seeking ABA accreditation…The Law School makes no representation to any applicant that it will be approved by the American Bar Association prior to the graduation of any matriculating student.”

In early May, the school stated its intent to seek provisional accreditation. Perhaps ABA Accreditation Standard 201 will be relevant to that determination: “The present and anticipated financial resources of a law school shall be adequate to sustain a sound program of legal education and accomplish its mission.”

At Indiana Tech, tuition is $30,360; estimated living and other expenses and add another $17,800. No data exist on the extent to which the 28 students in the school’s inaugural class borrowed funds for their first year. But it seems likely that federal student loan dollars were central to the following prediction in 2011 — when projected enrollment for the class entering in 2013 was 100 and expected to grow thereafter: “The school [will be] breaking even in 2017, according to the feasibility study. By the fifth year, the law school is projected to start operating at a surplus.”

Without assumptions about growing student loan debt to fund operations, would anyone have thought Indiana Tech Law School was “feasible” in 2011? How about 2014?

Charleston School of Law

Charleston, a for-profit law school, reveals a different kind of market dysfunction. InfiLaw, a for-profit law school group, has been trying to acquire it since last summer. (Recently, I wrote about InfiLaw and one of its national board members who chairs the new ABA Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education.) On May 19, a committee of the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education voted to reject a recommendation that InfiLaw receive a license to operate Charleston Law School.

InfiLaw’s attorney, Kevin Hall, renewed the company’s effort in a public hearing before the full Commission. He described the school as “in a financial tailspin.” According to the Charleston Post and Courier, “The five judges and lawyers who started Charleston School of Law a decade ago with the lofty goal of training attorneys committed to public service… began draining money from the school [in 2010], withdrawing $25 million in profits by 2013 that they split among themselves.”

The three remaining owners “confirmed Hall’s description of the school’s financial situation, and they all agreed that it got that way because owners for years had been pulling profits from the institution.”

Follow the money

What was the source of Charleston’s now-distributed profits? The answer appears on the school’s website:

“Most students will depend on federal student loans to pay for tuition, books and living expenses while in law school. During the 2012-2013 academic year, 88% of our students borrowed student loans to finance their legal education. At graduation, the average student loan debt incurred for those borrowers while attending the Charleston School of Law was $146,595.”

Nine months after graduation, 53 percent of the school’s class of 2013 had found full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD. More than half of those were working in firms of 10 or fewer attorneys.

So at Charleston, student debtors finance profit distributions to law school owners who have no accountability for poor graduate outcomes. When the school later hits the financial skids, only InfiLaw, another for-profit organization, can rescue it.

Wealth redistribution takes many forms, but none produces results more perverse than the current system for financing — and profiting from — legal education.

DANGEROUS ADVICE FOR LAW FIRM LEADERS

Posted on May 21, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

During the past 25 years, law firm management consulting has grown from cottage industry to big business. In a recent Am Law Daily article, “What Critics of Lateral Hiring Get Wrong,” Brad Hildebrandt, one of its pioneers, provides a comforting message to his constituents:

“Large law firms are weathering the storm of the past five years and continue to transform their businesses to operate with efficiency and agility amid a new set of client expectations.”

Hildebrandt v. Altman Weil

Hildebrandt correctly notes that painting all large firms with a single brush is a mistake. But his general description of most firms today is at odds with the results of Altman Weil’s recent survey, “2014: Law Firms in Transition.” The summary of responses from 803 law firm leaders (including 42 percent of the nation’s largest 350 firms) offers these highlights:

— “The Survey shows clear consensus among law firm leaders on the changing nature of the legal market…. [But] law firms are proceeding without an apparent sense of urgency.”

— “Less than half of the law firms surveyed are responding to the pressures of the current market by significantly changing elements of their traditional business model.”

— “Most firms are not making current investments in a future they acknowledge will be different – and different in seemingly predictable ways.”

— “Only 5.3 percent of firms are routinely looking farther than five years out in their planning.”

Altman Weil’s conclusions comport with its October 2013 Chief Legal Officer Survey. When clients rated outside law firms’ seriousness about changing legal service delivery models to provide greater value, the median score was three out of ten — for the fifth straight year.

Hildebrandt v. Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor and Henderson

So what are most big firms doing? Growth through aggressive lateral hiring. Hildebrandt responds to “academics, journalists, former practicing attorneys, and countless legal bloggers” who question that strategy. Count me among them.

Acquiring a well-vetted lateral partner to fill a specific strategic need is wise. But trouble arises when laterals become little more than portable books of business whose principal purpose is to enhance an acquiring firm’s top line revenues.

“Growth for growth’s sake is not a viable strategy in today’s market,” the 2014 Georgetown/Thomson Reuters Peer Monitor Report on the State of the Legal Market observes. Nevertheless, the report notes, most firms are pursuing exactly that approach: “[Growth] masks a bigger problem — the continuing failure of most firms to focus on strategic issues that are more important….”

Professor William Henderson has done extensive empirical work on this subject. “Is Reliance on Lateral Hiring Destabilizing Law Firms?” concludes: “[T]he data is telling us that for most law firms there is no statistically significant relationship between more lateral partner hiring and higher profits.”

Hildebrandt v. Citi/Hildebrandt

Big law partners acknowledge the truth behind Henderson’s data. According to the 2014 Citi/Hildebrandt Client Advisory, only 57 percent of law firm leaders describe their lateral recruits during 2008-2012 as successful, down from 60 percent last year. If those responsible for their firms’ aggressive lateral hiring strategies acknowledge an almost 50 percent failure rate, imagine how much worse the reality must be. Nevertheless, the lateral hiring frenzy continues, often to the detriment of institutional morale and firm culture.

With respect to culture and morale, Hildebrandt rejects the claim that lateral partner hiring crowds out homegrown associate talent. But the 2013 Citi/Hildebrandt Client Advisory suggests that it does: Comparing “the percentages of new equity partners attributable to lateral hires vs. internal promotions in 2007…with percentages in 2011 reveals a marked shift in favor of laterals” — a 21 percent decrease in associate promotions versus a 10 percent increase in lateral partner additions.

Nevertheless, Hildebrandt offers this assessment:

“In the six years prior to the recession, many firms admitted far too many partners—some into equity partnership, many into income partnership. A driving factor in the number of partners in the lateral marketplace is that firms are coming to grips with the mistakes of the past. Lax admissions standards have been a far greater issue than mistakes made on laterals.”

When I read that passage, it seemed familiar. In fact, Chapter 5 of my latest book, The Lawyer Bubble – A Profession in Crisis, opens with this quotation:

“The real problem of the 1980s was the lax admission standards of associates of all firms to partnerships. The way to fix that now is to make it harder to become a partner. The associate track is longer and more difficult.”

Those were Brad Hildebrandt’s words in September 1996. (“The NLJ 250 Annual Survey of the Nation’s Largest Law Firms: A Special Supplement — More Lawyers Than Ever In 250 Largest Firms,” National Law Journal)

“Fool Me Once, Shame On You…”

Evidently, most firms followed Hildebrandt’s advice in the 1990s because the overall leverage ratio in big law firms has doubled since then. His recent suggestion that “lax admission standards” caused firms to make “far too many” equity partners during the six years prior to the Great Recession of 2008-2009 is particularly puzzling. In the May 2008 issue of American Lawyer, Aric Press noted that during the “Law Firm Golden Age” from 2003 to 2007, “Partners reaped the benefits of hard work — and of pulling up the ladder behind them. Stoking these gains has been a dramatic slowdown in the naming of new equity partners.”

Meanwhile, the swelling ranks of income partners reflect a different strategy: using the non-equity partner tier as a profit center. The strategy is misguided, but pursuing it has been intentional, not a “mistake.” (Take a look at the American Lawyer article, “Crazy Like a Fox,” by Edwin Reeser and Patrick McKenna.)

Even so, Hildebrandt’s words reassure firms that are recruiting laterals for all the wrong reasons and/or tightening the equity partner admission screws. Tough love might better serve the profession.

MORE JOBS, EXCEPT FOR LAWYERS

Posted on May 14, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

During April 2014, job growth exceeded economists’ expectations. The recovery continues, but one line item in the latest detailed Bureau of Labor Statistics report should be particularly troubling to some law school deans and professors who are making bold predictions about the future.

The Facts

As the economy added 288,000 new jobs last month, total legal services employment (including lawyers and non-lawyers) declined by 1,200 positions from March 2014. A single monthly result doesn’t mean much. But over the past year, total legal services employment has increased by only 700 jobs.

In fact, according to the BLS, since December 2007 net legal services employment has shrunk by 37,000 jobs. Meanwhile, law schools have been awarding 40,000 new JD degrees annually for more than a decade.

The Denier’s Plight

Some law school deans and professors still object to any characterization of this situation as a “crisis” in legal education. In fact, one professor proclaimed last summer that now is still a great time to go to law school because a lawyer shortage would be upon us by the fall of 2015! Before rejoicing that we’ve almost reached that promised land, note that in 2011 the same professor, Ted Seto at Loyola Law School – Los Angeles, similarly predicted that the short-term problem of lawyer oversupply would lend itself to a quick and self-correcting resolution when the business cycle turned upward.

Well, the upward turn has been underway for several years, but significant growth in the number of new legal jobs hasn’t accompanied it. Nevertheless, tuition has continued to rise. For prelaw students now contemplating six-figure JD debt, law school deniers have a soothing argument: A degree from anywhere is well worth the cost to anyone who gets it.

Using aggregate data, the deniers ignore dramatic difference in individual outcomes for schools and students. Some deniers even use their lifetime JD-value calculations to defend unrivaled tuition growth rates for law schools generally. In somewhat contradictory rhetoric, they simultaneously promote income-based loan repayment plans as a panacea.

Leadership?

Recently, one dean assured me privately that deniers have now become outliers. If so, the overall reaction of deans as a group remains troubling. In particular, law schools have countered a precipitous drop in applicants with soaring acceptance rates. The likely result will be a fall 2014 class somewhere between 35,000 and 38,000 first-year students.

Likewise, law school sales pitches have devolved into cynical efforts at selling something other than the practice of law. They market the versatility of a JD as preparation for anything else that law graduates might want to do with their lives. But so is medicine. So are lots of things. So what? Medical schools train doctors. Isn’t the core mission of law schools to train lawyers? What will remain after we abandon that sense of professional purpose and identity?

Practicing Law? Oh, I Could Have Done That.

All of this raises a question: How do the law school deans and professors in denial about the state of things deal with unpleasant facts that don’t fit the world view they’re trying to sell others? Ignore them. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, as the self-designated Wizard of Oz might say to Dorothy. Somehow, we’ll get you back to Kansas — where associate admissions dean Steven Freedman at the University of Kansas recently went public with his denial.

Like similar predictions, Freedman’s analysis is suspect. For example, his projections of a lawyer shortage by 2017-2018 ignore the excess inventory of new law graduates that the system has produced over the past several years (and is still producing). (In a follow-up comment to his own post on “The Faculty Lounge,” Freedman defends his resulting calculations on the unsupported grounds that “the vast majority of them retired or changed careers” — an assumption, he acknowledges, that contradicts the real world observations and data of Jim Leipold, executive director of NALP.)

Even worse, Freedman offers a general recommendation to every prospective student — “Enroll today!” was the title of his first installment at “The Faculty Lounge.” But he fails to mention that employment outcomes vary enormously across law schools. His post’s subtitle — “Why 2017-2018 Will Be a Fantastic Time to Graduate from Law School” — is fraught with the danger that accompanies the absence of a nuanced and individualized message.

Ironically, in the real world of clients, judges, and juries, attorneys who ignore the key facts in a case usually lose. Eventually, they have trouble making a living. Someday, perhaps the law school deniers will have that experience, first-hand.

A TROUBLESOME TASK FORCE

Posted on May 7, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

For any lawyer, credibility is everything. A key reason that the ABA Task Force on the Future of Legal Education produced such a worthwhile report and recommendations was the stature and credibility of its participants, especially its chairman, retired Indiana Supreme Court Chief Justice Randall T. Shepard. Although imperfect, the effort and outcome have received widespread and well-deserved praise.

On a vitally important issue, the Task Force punted. With respect to the cost and financing of legal education, a new ABA task force has now stepped into that breach. Unlike its predecessor, the ABA Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education has a credibility problem at the outset.

The Best Intentions

The chairman of the new task force, Dennis W. Archer, is undoubtedly a decent man trying to the right thing. In fact, he has an impressive history of public service. But as a former associate justice of the Michigan Supreme Court, Archer understands that appearances matter. In fact, the mere appearance of impropriety in a case is enough for a judge to step aside. It’s not a question of personal ethics. Rather, it’s a matter of public perceptions about the integrity of a decision-making process and its outcomes.

Since 2010, Archer has been a member of the National Policy Board of InfiLaw, which owns three private ABA-accredited for-profit law schools: Arizona Summit Law School (formerly the Phoenix Law School), Charlotte School of Law, and the Florida Coastal School of Law. The board on which he sits “provides counsel upon the strategic direction and long-term plans for the InfiLaw system of independent law schools….”

The Business Model

Annual tuition and fees at all three InfiLaw schools exceed $40,000. According to their ABA disclosures, the schools have been big beneficiaries of the current dysfunctional system of financing a legal degree. At Arizona Summit, median federal law student debt between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2013 was $184,825. At Florida Coastal, it was $162,549. The Charlotte Law School median was $155,697, plus another $20,018 in private loans.

At all three law schools, students’ “institutional financial plan debt” was zero. The InfiLaw schools have plenty of federal student loan dollars skin in the game, but none of their own.

A Disturbing Trend

Even as the market for lawyers has languished, InfiLaw schools increased enrollment. According to the ABA, the three schools graduated a combined class of 679 students in 2011. Nine months later, only 256 had long-term, full-time jobs requiring a JD. That’s 38 percent.

Last year’s combined graduating class for the three school had soared to 1,191 students. Only 428 found full-time long-term JD-required employment. That’s 36 percent.

All of the schools’ websites follow the format of Arizona Summit’s rosier description of employment outcomes:

“Arizona Summit Law School was able to confirm the employment status of 99% (278 out of 279) of its program completers [sic] who graduated September 1, 2012, through August 31, 2013. The job placement rate for these graduates was 90%. This figure was calculated using the NALP formula for calculating job placement rate. Therefore, the 90% job placement rate was calculated by adding together all the employed graduates (250) and then dividing by the number of graduates whose employment status we were able to confirm (278). In accordance with NALP guidelines, the number of employed graduates includes all employment positions, including legal and non-legal positions, permanent and temporary positions, full-time and part-time positions, and any positions funded by Arizona Summit Law School.”

Clicking to another document on the site reveals that 25 of those jobs were “Law School Funded Positions” — 22 of which were short-term.

The Challenge of Leadership

Perhaps it takes an insider, such as former Justice Archer, to accomplish the kind of monumental change that his InfiLaw constituents may well resist. Perhaps this will be a “Nixon goes to China” moment for him and the profession. Maybe it will be the equivalent of President Lyndon Johnson muscling civil rights legislation through the Senate — a Texan overcoming a resistant South in the 1960s.

On the other hand, if the latest ABA task force produces anything less than revolutionary recommendations that finally make law schools financially accountable for the fate of their graduates, everyone will laugh it off — as they should. Unfortunately, there’s nothing particularly funny about the situation.

THE ILLUSION OF LEISURE TIME

Posted on April 30, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Back in January, newspaper headlines reported a dramatic development in investment banking. Bank of America Merrill Lynch and others announced a reprieve from 80-hour workweeks.

According to the New York Times, Goldman Sachs “instructed junior bankers to stay out of the office on Saturdays.” A Goldman task force recommended that analysts be able to take weekends off whenever possible. Likewise, JP Morgan Chase gave its analysts the option of taking one protected weekend — Saturday and Sunday — each month.

“It’s a generational shift,” a former analyst at Bank of America Merrill Lynch told the Times in January. “Does it really make sense for me to do something I really don’t love and don’t really care about, working 90 hours a week? It really doesn’t make sense. Banks are starting to realize that.”

The Fine Print

There was only one problem with the noble rhetoric that accompanied such trailblazing initiatives: At most of these places, individual employee workloads didn’t change. Recently, one analyst complained to the Times that taking advantage of the new JP Morgan Chase “protected weekend” policy requires an employee to schedule it four weeks in advance.

Likewise, a junior banker at Deutsche Bank commented on the net effect of taking Saturdays off: “If you have 80 hours of work to do in a week, you’re going to have 80 hours of work to do in a week, regardless of whether you’re working Saturdays or not. That work is going to be pushed to Sundays or Friday nights.”

How About Lawyers?

An online comment to the recent Times article observed:

“I work for a major NY law firm. I have worked every day since New Year’s Eve, and billed over 900 hours in 3 months. Setting aside one day a week as ‘sacred’ would be nice, but as these bankers point out, the workload just shifts to other days. The attrition and burnout rate is insane but as long as law school and MBAs cost $100K+, there will be people to fill these roles.”

As the legal profession morphed from a profession to a business, managing partners in many big law firms have become investment banker wannabes. In light of the financial sector’s contribution to the country’s most recent economic collapse, one might reasonably ask why that is still true. The answer is money.

To that end, law firms adopted investment banking-type metrics to maximize partner profits. For example, leverage is the numerical ratio of the firm’s non-owners (consisting of associates, counsel, and income partners) to its owners (equity partners). Goldman Sachs has always had relatively few partners and a stunning leverage ratio.

As most big law firms have played follow-the-investment-banking-leader, overall leverage for the Am Law 50 has doubled since 1985 — from 1.76 to 3.52. In other words, it’s twice as difficult to become an equity partner as it was for those who now run such places. Are their children that much less qualified than they were?

Billables

Likewise, law firms use another business-type metric — billable hours — as a measure of productivity. But billables aren’t an output; they’re an input to achieve client results. Adding time to complete a project without regard to its impact on the outcome is anathema to any consideration of true productivity. A firm’s billable hours might reveal something about utilization, but that’s about it.

Imposing mandatory minimum billables as a prerequisite for an associate’s bonus does accomplishes this feat: Early in his or her career, every young attorney begins to live with the enduring ethical conflict that Scott Turow wrote about seven years ago in “The Billable Hour Must Die.” Specifically, the billable hour fee system pits an attorney’s financial self-interest against the client’s.

The Unmeasured Costs

Using billables as a distorted gauge of productivity also eats away at lawyers’ lives. Economists analyzing the enormous gains in worker productivity since the 1990s cite technology as a key contributor. But they ignore an insidious aspect of that surge: Technology has facilitated a massive conversion of leisure time to working hours — after dinner, after the kids are in bed, weekends, and while on what some people still call a vacation, but isn’t.

Here’s one way to test that hypothesis: The next time you’re away from the office, see how long you can go without checking your smartphone. Now imagine a time when that technological marvel didn’t exist. Welcome to 1998.

When you return to 2014, read messages, and return missed calls, be sure to bill the time.

ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE OP-ED

Posted on April 15, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

The current debate over the future of legal education is critical. Even more important is the need to base that debate on a common understanding of indisputable facts. Perhaps UC-Irvine Dean Erwin Chemerinsky and Professor Carrie Menkel-Meadow just made an honest mistake in misreading employment statistics upon which they rely in their April 14, 2014 New York Times op-ed, “Don’t Skimp on Legal Training.” If so, it was a bad one. (The Times designated my comment that includes some of the data cited in this post as a “NYT pick.”)

The offending paragraph comes early in the effort to dismiss those who use the word “crisis” — their op-ed puts it in quotation marks — to describe the challenges facing the profession. Since that word appears prominently in the subtitle of my latest book, I’ll take the bait.

Wrong From The Start

The authors support their “no crisis” argument with this:

“[A]s recently as 2007, close to 92 percent of law-school graduates reported being employed in a paid-full-time position nine months after law school. True, the employment figures had dropped by 2012, the most recent year for which data is [sic] available, but only to 84.7 percent.”

But the data on which they rely include part-time, short-term, and law school funded jobs — and only those graduates “for whom employment status was known.”

“Facts Are Stubborn Things”

Not until 2010 did the ABA require law schools to identify the types of jobs that their graduates actually obtained. The results have been startling, as data from the class of 2013 demonstrate:

— Nine months after graduation, only 57% of graduates had long-term full-time (LT-FT) jobs requiring bar passage. Another 5% held part-time or short-term positions.

— LT-FT “JD Advantage” jobs went to another 10.1%. This category includes positions — such as accountant, risk manager, human resources employee, and more — for which many graduates are now asking themselves whether law school was worth it.

— Another 4% got law school funded jobs.

— Unemployed law graduates seeking jobs increased to 11.2%.

— Average law school debt for current graduates exceeds $100,000. The rate of tuition increase in law schools between 1998 and 2008 exceeded the rate for colleges and medical schools. One reason is that U.S. News ranking criteria reward expenditures without regard to whether they add value to a student’s education.

— For 33 out of 202 ABA-accredited law schools, the LT-FT JD-required employment rate was under 40%; for 13 schools, it was under 33%.

Federally-backed student loans that survive bankruptcy fuel a dysfunctional system that has removed law schools from accountability for graduates’ employment outcomes. The current regime blocks the very “market mechanisms to weed out the weakest competitors” that the authors cite as providing the ultimate cure. As law school applications have plummeted, most schools have responded with soaring acceptance rates.

If all of that doesn’t add up to a crisis, what will it take?

The Importance of Credibility

The problem with the authors’ unfortunate attempt to minimize the situation is its power to undermine their other points that are, in fact, worth considering.

For example, they note that job prospects “obviously depend on where a person went to school and how he or she performed.” True, but many law professors now touting the happy days ahead for anyone currently contemplating law school ignore that reality.

“The cost of higher education, and the amount of debt that students graduate with, should be of concern to all.” True, but what’s their proposed solution?

“Law schools specifically should do more to provide need-based financial aid to students — rather than what most law schools have been doing in recent years, which is to shift toward financial aid based primarily on merit in order to influence their rankings. This has amounted to ‘buying’ students who have higher grades and test scores.” True, but how many schools are changing their ways? Between 2005 and 2010, law schools increased need-based financial aid from $120 million to $143 million while non-need based aid skyrocketed from $290 million to $520 million.

Like almost every law school dean in America, Dean Chemerinsky has a choice. He can acknowledge the crisis for what it is and be part of the solution, or he can live in denial and remain part of the problem. Earlier this year, National Jurist named Chemerinsky its “Most Influential Person in Legal Education.” Now is the time for him to rise to the challenge of that role.

THE END OF THE LAWYER GLUT?

Posted on March 5, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Could a years-long oversupply of new attorneys finally be on the wane? Based on the trend of recent headlines, it would be easy to reach that conclusion. For example, a December 2013 Wall Street Journal headline read: “First-Year Law School Enrollment at 1977 Levels.” The first sentence of the article described the “plunge” in entering law student enrollments.

Likewise, in January 2014, National Jurist reported on steep enrollment declines at particular schools from 2010 to 2013. The big losers in that compilation were “the University of LaVerne (down 66.2 percent) and Thomas M. Cooley Law School (down 40.6 percent).”

Most recently, the National Law Journal took a closer look at the 13 law schools that saw “1L enrollment drop by 30 percent or more in the span of 12 months, while an additional 27 reported declines of 20 to 30 percent in all.”

Taken together, these reports create an impression that the severe lawyer glut is ending.

How about a job?

For prospective law students, the size of any drop in overall enrollment isn’t relevant; employment prospects upon graduation from a particular school are. According to the ABA, just under 40,000 students began law school in the fall of 2013 — down eight percent from the entering class of 2012. That’s significant, but not all that dramatic.

Meanwhile, for the entire decade ending in 2022, the latest estimate (December 2013) from the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the total number available positions for “Lawyers, judges, and related workers” at around 200,000. That net number takes into account deaths, retirements, and other departures from the profession. More sobering, it’s yet another downward revision from earlier BLS projections.

As the profession makes room for 20,000 new attorneys a year, why all the media attention about 1L enrollments “plunging” to a level that is still almost twice that number?

I think the answer is that some law professors are running around screaming that their hair is on fire because, for many of them, it is. The media are covering that blaze, but the larger conflagration surrounding the crisis in legal education somehow gets lost.

U.S. News to the rescue?

Professor Jerry Organ at the University of St. Thomas School of Law has an interesting analysis of the situation. Schools in trouble are “picking their poison.” One option is to maintain admission standards that preserve LSAT and GPA profiles of their entering classes. Alternatively, they can sacrifice those standards in an effort to fill their classrooms and maximization tuition revenues.

U.S. News & World Report rankings now have an ironic role in this mess. For decades, rankings have contributed to perverse behavioral incentives that have not served law schools, students, or the profession. For example, in search of students with higher LSATs that would improve a ranking, many schools diverted need-based financial aid to so-called “merit scholarships” for those with better test scores.

Likewise, revenue generation also became important in the U.S. News calculus. As the ABA Task Force Report on the Future of Legal Education notes, the ranking formulas don’t measure “programmatic quality or value” and, to that extent, “may provide misleading information to students and consumers.” They also reward “increasing a school’s expenditures for the purpose of affecting ranking, without reference to impact on value delivered or educational outcomes.”

Now the rankings methodology has presented many schools with a Hobson’s choice: If they preserve LSAT/GPA profiles of their entering classes, they will suffer a reduction in current tuition dollars as class size shrinks; if they admit less qualified applicants, they’ll preserve tuition revenues for a while, but they’ll suffer a rankings decline that will hasten their downward slide by deterring applicants for the subsequent year.

As some schools become increasingly desperate, they will be tempted to recruit those who are most vulnerable to cynical rhetoric about illusory prospects on graduation. The incentive for such mischief is obvious: However unqualified such students might be for the profession, the six-figure loans they need to finance a legal education are available with the stroke of a pen. Revenue problem solved.

Some law professors argue that the trend of recent declines in enrollment is sufficient to create a shortfall in law school graduates by 2015. Maybe they’re right. Time will tell — and not much time at that.

I think it’s more likely that over the next decade, a lot of law professors will find themselves looking for work outside academia. Meanwhile, their best hope could be to run out the student loan program clock long enough for them to retire. Then it all becomes someone else’s problem.

LESSONS FROM THE BUSINESS WORLD

Posted on February 19, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

The current issue of the Harvard Business Review has an article that every big law leader should read, “Manage Your Work, Manage Your Life,” by Boris Groysberg and Robin Abrahams. Unfortunately, few law firm managing partners will bother.

It’s not that big law leaders are averse to thinking about their firms in business terms. To the contrary, the legal profession has imported business-type concepts to create the currently prevailing model. Running firms to maximize simple metrics — billables, leverage ratios, and hourly rates — has made many equity partners rich.

The downside is that the myopic focus on near-term revenue growth and current profits comes at a price that most leaders prefer to ignore. Values that can be difficult to quantify often get sacrificed. One example is the loss of balance between an individual’s professional and personal life.

Looking at the same things differently

The HBR article contradicts a popular narrative, namely, that balancing professional and personal demands requires constant juggling. Over a five-year period, the authors surveyed more than 4,000 executives on how they reconciled their personal and professional lives. The results produced a simple recommendation: Rather than juggling to achieve “work-life balance,” treat each — work and life — with the same level of focused determination.

The most successful and satisfied executives (they’re not mutually exclusive descriptors) make deliberate choices about what to pursue in each realm as opportunities present themselves. In other words, they think about life as it unfolds.

According to the authors, the executives’ stories “reflect five main themes: defining success for yourself, managing technology, building support networks at work and home, traveling or relocating selectively, and collaborating with your [home] partner.”

Professional success

Defining professional success is the key foundational step and not everyone agrees on its elements. That’s no surprise.

But some gender distinctions are fascinating. For example, 46 percent of women equated professional success with “individual achievement,” compared to only 24 percent of men. Likewise, more women than men (33 percent v. 21 percent) defined success as “making a difference.” The gender gap was even greater for those defining success as “respect from others” (25 percent of women v. 7 of percent men) and “passion for the work” (21 percent of women v. 5 percent of men). (Respondents could choose more than one element in defining success, so the totals exceed 100 percent.)

On the other hand, more men than women thought that success was “ongoing learning and development and challenges” (24 percent of men v. 13 percent of women), “organizational achievement” (22 percent v. 13 percent), “enjoying work on a daily basis” (14 percent v. 8 percent). More men also saw success in financial terms (16 percent) than did women (4 percent).

Personal success

For men and women, the most widely reported definition of personal success was “rewarding relationships” (59 percent of men; 46 percent of women). (Surprised that more men than women picked that one?) Most other definitions revealed few gender-based differences (“happiness/enjoyment,” “work/life balance,” “a life of meaning/feeling no regrets”).

But big gender gaps again emerged for those defining personal success as “learning and developing” and “financial success.” In fact, zero women equated “financial success” with personal success, but 12 percent of men did.

Putting it all together

After defining success, the next steps seem pretty obvious: master technology, develop support networks, move when necessary, and make life a joint venture with your partner if you have one. But few law firm leaders create a climate that encourages such behavior. Short-term profits flow more readily from environments that a recent Wall Street Journal headline captured: “When The Boss Works Long Hours, Do We All Have To?” In most big law firms, the short answer is yes, even if the boss doesn’t.

In general, the HBR strategy amounts to tackling life outside your career with the same dedication and focus that you apply to your day job.

A few examples:

Are you becoming a prisoner of technology that facilitates 24/7 access to you? Then occasionally turn it off and spend real time with the people around you.

Are you concerned that you’re missing too many family dinners? Then treat them with the same level of importance that you attach to a client meeting.

These and other ideas aren’t excuses to become a slacker. After all, the interview respondents are high-powered business executives. Rather, they comprise a way to anticipate and preempt problems. As one survey respondent said, people tend to ignore work/life balance until “something is wrong. But,” the authors continue, “that kind of disregard is a choice, and not a wise one. Since when do smart executives assume that everything will work out just fine? If that approach makes no sense in the boardroom or on the factory floor, it makes no sense in one’s personal life.”

That’s seems obvious. But try telling it to managing partners in big law firms who are urging younger colleagues to get their hours up.

Here’s a thought: maybe attorneys should record how they spend their hours at home, too.

THE ONGOING LAW SCHOOL BAILOUT

Posted on January 15, 2014 by thebellyofthebeast

Recently, Senators Dick Durbin (D-IL), Jack Reed (D-RI), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) introduced the “Protect Student Borrowers Act of 2013.” The bill would allow the Secretary of Education to require that colleges and universities pay a penalty for federal student loans in default. The penalty would increase with the school’s default rate.

Default is too long to wait before creating a better nexus between educators’ incentives and their graduates’ fate. Thousands of recent law graduates are living with the consequences of a system that immunizes schools from financial accountability for their students’ poor employment outcomes. Eighty-five percent of today’s newest lawyers have six-figure law school debt. Only about half of all 2012 graduates found full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD. The most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics employment report indicates that between December 2012 and December 2013, employment in the “all legal services” category actually declined by 1,000 people.

Demand down; supply still growing

As the profession was losing a thousand jobs last year, law schools graduated a record number of new lawyers — 46,000 — and big classes are in the pipeline. Sure, law school applications are down, but acceptance rates have gone way, way up to compensate. Recent BLS estimates suggest an ongoing lawyer glut for years to come. (For a more detailed analysis, take a look at Matt Leichter’s recent article in Am Law Daily.) And in the midst of this disaster, law school tuition keeps increasing. It’s all quite perverse.

Unfortunately, it’s also a predictable consequence of structural incentives. Most university administrators (and their law school deans) run their institutions as businesses. In the current system of financing higher education, that approach produces a myopic focus: maximizing short-term tuition revenues by filling classrooms. Added encouragement comes from U.S. News rankings criteria that, for example, actually reward expenditures regardless of added value or lack thereof. The vast majority of students borrow enormous sums to pay tuition. But — and here’s where educational institutions lack the constraints that they would encounter as true businesses — any later failure to repay those loans never becomes the school’s problem.

Instead, virtually all student loans come with the backing of the federal government. In case of default, the schools remain protected. So far, graduate student default rates have remained below those for colleges and vocational schools, but across the board, all rates are trending higher. (I wonder if low JD default rates are attributable, in part, to lawyers’ better understanding of the procedural steps that can forestall default. Attorneys also grasp the counterproductive futility of defaulting: educational debt survives bankruptcy and forcing the government to pursue a default just adds monetary penalties and collection costs to the tab.)

IBR is no panacea

Income-based tuition repayment plans may become an important potential relief valve to some indebted graduates. But IBR is new and it comes with lots of caveats. For example, during the time that a graduate remains in the program, interest on his or her overall debt continues to accrue. Exiting the system before completing the requisite repayment period (typically 25 years; 10 years for public service jobs) can produce an even greater debt than existed upon graduation.

Those who make it all the way to the end of the repayment period are off the hook for their loans and accrued interest, but debt forgiven through IBR is considered taxable income. If Congress doesn’t fix that problem, the result will be a big tax bill for a person who, by definition of ongoing participation in the IBR program, can’t afford it. Moreover, the forgiven amounts still have to come from the federal treasury at taxpayer expense, so there never was or will be a free lunch – except for the schools that received tuition but thereafter had no financial skin in the game. It has the feel of a law school bailout, doesn’t?

A better way

Maybe this three-step approach would help to restore a functioning market: 1) allow educational loans to become dischargeable in bankruptcy; 2) in the course of such a proceeding, require the bankruptcy court to determine whether educational debt was a significant factor in the debtor’s need for bankruptcy protection; and 3) in those cases where it is such a factor, permit the federal government guarantor to seek recompense from the educational institution whose conduct lies at the heart of the mess. (Requiring need-blind admissions as a prerequisite to participation in the federal loan guaranty program generally might counteract a school’s temptation to bias admissions in favor of those who can afford to pay.)

Most people profess confidence in free markets — some with an evangelistic zeal. If they really want to give the market a chance to work in the student debt setting, they’ll support a serious effort to cure the system’s current failures. Personal educational debt currently exceeds $1.2 trillion — more than all consumer credit card debt combined. Every day, that bubble is growing. Just ask a law student.

AS CLIENTS SPEAK, WHO’S LISTENING?

Posted on October 28, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Many big law firms pursue a path of mindless growth through mergers and lateral hiring, but few managing partners seem to question the wisdom of that strategy. Growth for its own sake gets protective cover in false rhetoric about serving clients. But contrary data continue to accumulate on the subject of what clients really want.

Challenging traditional views

Two recent articles ought to send a chill down the spine of big law partners everywhere. The first is a recent article for the Harvard Business Review Blog, “Why the Law Firm Pedigree May Be a Thing of the Past,” by Dina Wang and Firoz Dattu.

As the title suggests, the authors argue that clients are increasingly searching for value and efficiency at the expense of big law firms that rely on their brand alone to attract and retain business at premium rates. Insofar as the authors believe that truly elite law firms may be in mortal danger, I think they overstate their case. The most sophisticated clients with the most complex problems will continue to seek top legal talent. Much of that talent will reside in elite firms that will retain their stature, provided they create environments that appeal to the best young lawyers.

But it’s more difficult to quibble with the authors’ survey of general counsel at 88 major companies. In matters that were high-stakes (but not necessarily bet-the-company), 74 percent were less likely to use an Am Law 20 or Magic Circle firm than a less-pedigreed firm, provided they achieved legal cost savings of at least 30 percent. (The article suggests that the actual cost savings in such situations could exceed 60 percent.)

Follow the money

Now couple that finding with these recent Counsel-Link survey results:

“Among the firms with 201-500 lawyers, referred to as ‘Large Enough’ firms in this report, the share of U.S. legal fees paid by clients has grown from 18% three years ago (July 1, 2009 – June 30, 2010) to 22% in the trailing 12 months that ended June 30, 2013.”

Who’s lunch are the “Large Enough” firms eating? The megafirms’:

“Simultaneously, the share of U.S. legal fees paid by clients with more than 750 lawyers, the ‘Largest 50,’ has gone in the opposite direction — from 26% to 20% over the same period.”

The shift is even more dramatic in higher fee legal work: “‘Large Enough’ firms have almost doubled the share of high fee litigation matters — those matters generating outside counsel fees totaling $1 million or more (High Fee Work). ‘Large Enough’ firms grew their portion of U.S. High Fee Work from 22% three years ago to 41% in the trailing 12 months.”

Disruption as a powerful market force

How are the “Large Enough” firms doing it? Here’s a partial answer: “‘Large Enough’ firms billed nearly twice as much under alternative fee arrangements as did the ‘Largest 50’ firms over the trailing 12 months.”

None of this should come as a surprise. For years, law firm management consultants have been saying that there are no economies of scale in the practice of law once a firm reaches about 100 attorneys. In fact, maintaining the infrastructure to support continuous expansion at the largest firms actually produces diseconomies.

Embedded interests die hard

Firms engaged in aggressive lateral hiring and law firm mergers might be adding top line revenues, but most are also adding disproportionately more costs. According to the 2013 Hildebrandt Consulting Client Advisory, 60 percent of law firm managing partners said (in an anonymous survey) that their lateral hires had been financial successes. If 40 percent are willing to admit to deploying a strategy that is “break even at best,” imagine how worse the reality must be.

Perhaps the accumulating intelligence about clients’ actual desires and the true costs (both financial and cultural) of a growth strategy will cause some managing partners pursuing that strategy to pause. Maybe they’ll reconsider the construction of global behemoths that serve their own egos but little else. Don’t count on it.

ARE LAWYERS BECOMING HAPPIER?

Posted on September 16, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

A recent scholarly study and the 2013 Am Law Midlevel Associates Survey together pose an intriguing question: Is the legal profession becoming happier? If so, that would be a welcome development.

Perhaps the answer is yes and I should take partial credit, at least for improved associate morale in some big firms. After all, for years I’ve been writing and speaking about the extent to which the profession has evolved in ways that undermine attorney well being, especially in large firms. Since the publication of my book, The Lawyer Bubble, many managing partners have invited me to address their partnership meetings on that subject. But before getting too carried away, let’s take a closer look.

No Buyer’s Remorse!

In “Buyers’ Remorse? An Empirical Assessment of the Desirability of a Lawyer Career,” Professors Ronit Dinovitzer (University of Toronto), Bryant Garth (University of California, Irvine – School of Law), and Joyce S. Sterling (University of Denver Strum College of Law) analyzed data from the After the JD project. It tracks about 4,500 lawyers from the class of 2000 who responded to questions in 2003, 2007, and 2012.

Among other things, the authors conclude that “the evidence of mass buyer’s remorse [over getting a legal degree] is thin at best.” (p. 3) I’m not convinced.

First, a new lawyer entering the market in 2000 has enjoyed better times for the profession than graduates of the last several years. That doesn’t render data from the class of 2000 meaningless, but a study based on the experience of those attorneys shouldn’t become a headline-grabber that unduly influences anyone considering a legal career today.

Second, the authors rely only on responses that attorneys provided in 2007. The answers they gave in 2012 are “currently being cleaned and readied for analysis” (p. 5), so the authors didn’t use them. What was the rush to get to print with 2007 data? Why not wait and use the 2012 results to see whether accelerating law firm trends since 2007 affected responses from even the comparatively lucky class of 2000.

(For more on those trends, including partner de-equitizations, salary reductions for non-equity partners, and the environment that has accompanied the accelerating drive to increase short-term profits, read Edwin Reeser’s excellent two-part article in the ABA Journal.)

More on the Data

In the end, After the JD is a useful source of information. But it’s an overstatement to argue, as Dinovitzer et al. assert, “the data from the AJD project are the best (and almost only) data available on the issues currently being debated.” (p. 5)

In fact, there have been dozens of studies on attorney satisfaction, including an October 2007 ABA survey in which six out of ten attorneys who have been practicing 10 years or more said they would not recommend a legal career to a young person. And that was prior to the Great Recession.

Now before defensive academics pull out their knives, let me state clearly that I’m not suggesting that the ABA’s online survey of 800 lawyers is somehow superior to the obviously more comprehensive After the JD project. It’s not. But contrary to the authors’ assertion, AJD is far from “the only data available on the issues currently being debated.”

For example, Professor Jerome A. Organ (University of St Thomas School of Law) recently published a compilation of 28 attorney surveys taken between 1984 and 2007. Rates of satisfied attorneys ranged from a low of 59 percent (South Carolina – 2008) to a high of 93 percent (Minnesota – 1987). The latest national study on Organ’s list (ABA/NALP – 2007) reported a satisfaction rate of 76 percent. (He excluded the ABA’s reported 55 percent satisfaction rate in 2007 because it “was not a random sample of attorneys.” n. 144.)

The Am Law Survey

Meanwhile, Am Law’s annual Midlevel Associates Survey of third-, fourth-, and fifth-year associates reported record high levels of associate satisfaction. Are their lives improving?

Anecdotal evidence of another possibility comes from an observed shift in attitudes among students in my undergraduate and law classes over the past several years. Many members of the youngest generation of lawyers (and would-be lawyers) are so concerned about finding jobs that they are now equating satisfaction with getting and keeping one long enough to repay their staggering student loans. That might explain why the same Am Law survey found that only 10 percent of men and 6.5 percent of women saw themselves as equity partners at their current firms in five years.

Now What?

Even so, inquiries that I receive from law firm managing partners provide more anecdotal proof that some firms have decided to value associate morale. The question is whether firm leaders will have the courage to push positive change into the very heart of the prevailing big law firm business model.

On that front, the news is less encouraging. In March 2013, Forbes reported on a “Career Bliss” survey of 65,000 employees that ranked “law firm associate” first on the list of “Unhappiest Jobs in America.” Likewise, in a recent Altman Weil Flash Survey, 40 percent of managing partners reported that partner morale at their firms in 2013 was lower than at the beginning of 2008 (pre-recession).

The Bottom Line

In the end, Dinovitzer et al. seem encouraged that “the overall trend is that more than three-quarters of respondents, irrespective of debt, express extreme or moderate satisfaction with the decision to become a lawyer.”

That’s supposed to be good news. But there are more than 1.2 million attorneys in the U.S.. Even a 75 to 80 percent satisfaction rate leaves more than 200,000 lawyers with what sure looks like buyer’s remorse.

The profession can do better than a “C.”

LATEST SYMPTOMS OF AN AILING PROFESSION

Posted on September 4, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

Together, three recent stories capture much of what ails the legal profession: 1) law schools continue to produce way too many lawyers for the number of anticipated jobs requiring a JD degree; 2) future attorneys incur staggering debt for a three-year degree that can and should be obtainable in two; and 3) many senior partners in big law firms at the pinnacle of the profession have lost an appreciation for their good fortune and a sense of perspective that comes with it.

The End of Lawyers?

The first story reports a continuing drop in the number of law school applicants — more than 30 percent since 2010! Could this be the beginning of what one law professor has predicted will be an actual shortage of lawyers by 2016?

No.

Using 2010 as a baseline against which to measure the comparative decline in applications is misleading. The Great Recession produced a surge of 2009-2010 applicants seeking a three-year reprieve from an impossible job market. At that time, law school still looked like a safe bet, largely because deans could tout 93 percent employment rates without disclosing which of their graduates held jobs that were short-term, part-time, school-funded, or didn’t require a legal degree.

Another fact is more salient: Overall acceptance rates have increased dramatically. In 2003, about half of the 98,000 applicants were admitted. In 2012, law schools took 75 percent of the 68,000 applicants. Bottom line: prior to the Great Recession, first-year enrollment totaled about 49,000; in 2012, it was 44,500. That drop is certainly affecting some law schools. But the overall decline is not as dramatic as the hyperbolic headlines. If first-year enrollment ever falls below 30,000 and stays there for a few years, that will be newsworthy.

What Are Students Getting For Their Money?

Meanwhile, President Obama weighed in on the subject of eliminating the third year of law school. It’s been a great idea for a long time. Of course, the third year will survive the President’s criticism because it accounts for one-third of law school tuition revenues. Such a central component of the law school business model won’t die easily.

Some members of the legal academy defend the third year of formal legal education as necessary for increasingly complex times. That argument may prove too much. After the first year teaches prospective attorneys to think like lawyers and the second year covers basic substantive legal areas, the most relevant legal training occurs outside the classroom under the tutelage of practicing lawyers. Many attorneys develop specialties, but that doesn’t result from taking one or two advanced courses during the third year of law school.

Deans can pass blame for the enduring third year onto the ABA. It has long been a victim of regulatory capture by the institutions it’s supposed to be supervising for the well being of all attorneys and the profession. The vast majority of states require graduation from an ABA-accredited law school and the ABA’s rules insist on course work that requires three academic years to complete. That’s why the few schools that offer accelerated two-year JDs are simply cramming three years of credits into two calendar years.

Moreover, the accelerated programs rarely reduce the cost of law school. Most of the schools offering accelerated programs charge the same total tuition as their traditional three-year programs.

Meanwhile, At Big Firms…

A final story is developing over financial reports concerning the overall performance of big law firms in 2013: Revenues are flat; demand is down. Partner profits might not rise this year!

Where you stand depends on where you sit, I suppose. But what does it say about the most lucrative segment of the profession when law firm management consultants can induce panic at the prospect that average equity partner profits might remain steady or — perish the thought — drop to still-astounding six- or seven-figure levels that seemed remarkably good less than a decade ago?

I think it suggests that too many partners have forgotten why they went to law school in the first place. Very few became attorneys because they thought it would make them rich. But they’ve grown accustomed to that pleasant surprise.

Maybe the next generation will do better.

THE DANGEROUS MILLION-DOLLAR DISTRACTION

Posted on July 24, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

A new study, renamed “The Economic Value of a Law Degree,” is the latest effort to defend a troubled model of legal education. It’s especially disheartening because, before joining Seton Hall University School of Law in 2010, co-author Michael Simkovic was an associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell in 2009-2010. At some level, he must be aware of the difficulties confronting so many young law graduates.

Nevertheless, Simkovic and co-author Frank McIntyre (Rutgers Business School) “reject the claim that law degrees are priced above their value” (p. 41) and “estimate the mean pre-tax lifetime value of a law degree as approximately $1,000,000 (p. 1).”

As the academic debate over data and methodology continues, some professors are already relying on the study to resist necessary change. That’s bad enough. But my concern is for the most vulnerable potential victims caught in the crosshairs of the “Million Dollar Law Degree” media headlines taken from the article’s original title: today’s prelaw students. If they rely on an incomplete understanding of the study’s limitations to reinforce their own confirmation bias in favor of pursuing a legal career primarily for financial reasons, they make a serious mistake.

The naysayers are wrong?

The study targets respected academics (including Professors Herwig Schlunk, Bill Henderson, Jim Chen, Brian Tamanaha, and Paul Campos), along with “scambloggers” and anyone else arguing that legal education has become too expensive while failing to respond to a transformation of the profession that is reducing the value of young lawyers in particular. Professors Campos and Tamanaha have begun responses that are continuing. [UPDATE: Tamanaha’s latest is here.] Professor Brian Leiter’s blog has become the vehicle for Simkovic’s answers.

One obvious problem with touting the $1 million average is that, for the bimodal distribution of lawyer incomes, any average is meaningless. Professor Stephen Diamond offered a rebuttal to Campos that Simkovic endorsed, calculating the net lifetime premium at the median (midpoint) to be $330,000 over a 40-year career. That might be closer to reality. But a degree that returns, at most, a lifetime average of $687 a month in added value for half of the people who get it isn’t much of an attention-getter. As noted below, even that number depends on some questionable assumptions and, at the 25th percentile, the economic prospects are far bleaker.

Causation

In the haze of statistical jargon and the illusory objectivity of numbers, it’s tempting to forget a fundamental point: statisticians investigate correlations. Even sophisticated regression analysis can’t prove causation. Every morning, the rooster crows when the sun rises. After isolating all observable variables, that correlation may be nearly perfect, but the crowing of the rooster still doesn’t cause the sun to rise.

Statistical inference can be a useful tool. But it can’t bridge the many leaps of faith involved in taking a non-random sample of 1,382 JD-degree holders — the most recent of whom graduated in 2008 (before the Great Recession) and 40 percent of whom have jobs that don’t require a JD — and concluding that it should guide the future of legal education in a 1.5 million-member profession. (p. 13 and n. 31)

Caveats

Simkovic and McIntyre provide necessary caveats throughout their analysis, but potential prelaw students (and their parents) aren’t likely to focus on them. For example, with respect to JD-degree holders with jobs that don’t require a JD, they “suggest” causation between the degree and lifetime income premiums, but admit they can’t prove it. (p. 25)

Likewise, they use recessions in the late 1990s and early 2000s as proxies for the impact of the Great Recession on current law graduates (compared to bachelor’s degree holders) (p. 32), minimizing the importance of recent seismic shifts in the legal profession and the impact on students graduating after 2008. (Simkovic graduated in 2007.)

This brings to mind the joke about a law professor who offers his rescue plan to others stranded on a deserted island: “First, assume we have a boat…” The study finesses that issue with this qualification: “[P]ast performance does not guarantee future returns. The return to a law degree in 2020 can only be known in 2020.” (p. 38)

Similarly, the results assume: 1) total tuition expense of $90,000 (presumably including the present value cost of law school loan interest repayments; otherwise, that number is too low and the resulting calculated premium too high); 2) student earnings during law school of $24,000; 3) graduation from law school at age 25 (no break after college); and 4) employment that continues to age 65. (pp. 39-41) More pessimistic assumptions would reduce the study’s calculated premiums at all income levels. At some point below even the Simkovic-McIntyre 25th percentile, there’s no lifetime premium for a JD.

Conclusions

After a long list of their study’s “important limitations” — including my personal favorite, the inability to “determine the earnings premium associated with attending any specific law school” — the authors conclude: “In sum, a law degree is often a good investment.” (p. 50) I agree. The more important inquiry is: When isn’t it?

In his Simkovic-endorsed defense of the study, Professor Diamond offers a basic management principle: any positive net present value means the project should be a go. But attending law school isn’t an aggregate “project.” It’s an individual undertaking for each student. After they graduate, half of them will remain below the median income level — some of them far below it.

The authors dismiss Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections (pp. 6-7), but it’s difficult to ignore current reality. In 2012 alone, law schools graduated 46,000 new attorneys. For that class, nine months out only 10 percent of law schools (20 out of 200) had long-term full-time JD-required job placement rates exceeding 75 percent. The overall JD-job placement average for all law schools was 56 percent.

Some of the remaining 44 percent will do other things because they have no realistic opportunity for legal careers. Financially, it could even turn out okay for a lot of them. (In that respect, you have to admire the boldness of the authors’ footnote 8, citing the percentage of Senators and CEOs with JDs.)

But with better information about their actual prospects as practicing attorneys, how many would have skipped their three-year investments in a JD and taken the alternative path at the outset? That’s the question that the Simkovic/McIntyre study doesn’t pose and that every prospective law student should consider.

More elephants in the room

Notwithstanding the economic benefits of a JD that many graduates certainly enjoy, attorney career dissatisfaction remains pervasive, even among the “winners” who land the most lucrative big firm jobs. That leads to the most important point of all. Anyone desiring to become an attorney shouldn’t do it for the money. Even the Simkovic/Mcntyre study with its many questionable assumptions proves that for thousands of graduates every year the money will never be there.

But the authors are undoubtedly correct about one thing: “The data suggests [sic] that law school loans are profitable for the federal government.” (p. 46) Law schools like them, too.

It doesn’t take a multiple regression analysis to see the problems confronting the legal profession — but it can be used to obscure them.

HOW THE LAWYER BUBBLE GROWS

Posted on July 17, 2013 by thebellyofthebeast

In June, the legal services sector lost more than 3,000 jobs. According to the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the sector has gained only 1,000 net jobs since June 2012. In the last two months, 6,000 positions disappeared.

No market solutions here

In a properly functioning market, reduced demand would prompt suppliers to cut output in search of equilibrium. But the legal profession consists of several distinct and dysfunctional markets.

For example, there’s plenty of unmet demand for lawyers from people who can’t afford them. Reduced federal funding for the Legal Services Corporation has exacerbated that problem. So has the rising cost of law school tuition and resulting student debt. Over the past 25 years, tuition increases for law school have far outpaced the rest of higher education.

In another segment of the legal market, demand for corporate legal work has been flat for years. But law schools business models generally have focused on filling classrooms, regardless of whether students will ever be able to repay their six-figure educational loans. Because most tuition revenue comes from federally guaranteed loans that survive bankruptcy, schools have no financial incentive to restrict enrollments — that is, until they run out of applicants.

When might that happen? Not soon enough, although recent headlines imply otherwise.

High-profile reductions in class size

Some schools have reduced the size of their entering classes. For example, the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law announced that it is reducing enrollment from the current 1,000 to about 600 — an impressive 40 percent drop.

But as Dan Filler observed at the Faculty Lounge, the reality may be less impressive. Although McGeorge graduated 300 new lawyers annually from 2010 through 2012, its first-year enrollment hasn’t kept pace with those numbers. In 2012, the school had 248 (day and evening) first-year students. In 2011, it had 215. A normalized class enrollment of 200 would be a 20 percent reduction from recent levels. That’s positive, but as explained below, not nearly enough.

About those declining applications

A recent Wall Street Journal article about the “plunge” in law school enrollments noted that “applications for the entering class of 2013 were down 36 percent compared with the same point in 2010…” But a more relevant statistic should be more jarring: “Law school first-year enrollments fell 8.5 percent nationwide.”

Here’s another way to look at it: For the fall of 2004 entering class, law schools admitted 55,900 of 98,700 applicants — or about 57 percent. For the fall of 2012 class, law schools admitted 50,600 of 68,000 applicants — almost 75 percent.

About those jobs

The increase in the percentage of admitted applicants is one reason that the lawyer bubble is still growing. Another is the stagnant job market. In 2008, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projected 98,500 net additional attorney positions for the entire decade ending in 2018. In 2010, it revised that estimate downward to project 73,600 net additional positions by the end of 2020.

Even allowing for attrition by retirement, death and otherwise, the BLS now estimates that there will be 235,000 openings for lawyers, judges, and related workers through 2020 — 23,500 a year. Last year alone, law schools graduated 46,000 new attorneys.

If law schools as a group reduced enrollments by 20 percent from last year’s graduating class, they would still produce almost 37,000 new lawyers annually — 370,000 for a decade requiring only 235,000 — not to mention the current backlog that began accumulating even before the Great Recession began.

One more thing

Which takes us back to the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law. According to its ABA submission, only 42 percent of its class of 2012 graduates found full-time long-term jobs requiring a JD. Even if the school caps entering classes at 200, its resulting placement rate would rise to only 64 percent.

U.S. News rankings considerations loom large in all of this. Law schools fear that reducing LSAT/GPA admission standards would hurt their rankings. In that respect, McGeorge’s class size announcement overshadowed a more unpleasant disclosure that new ABA rules now require: scholarship retention rates.

Many law schools try to enhance their U.S. News rankings by offering entering students with high LSATs so-called merit scholarships. But those scholarships sometimes disappear for years two and three. According to Prof. Jerry Organ’s analysis, only 42 percent of students entering McGeorge in the fall of 2011 kept their first-year scholarships. Eleven schools (out of 140 that offered conditional scholarships) did worse.

The overall picture is ugly. Some schools are laying off faculty and staff to counter the financial impact of reduced enrollments. But they’re also keeping tuition high and spending money on LSAT-enhancing scholarships that disappear after the first year, presumably to be replaced with non-dischargeable loans. Meanwhile, almost all of today’s students are incurring staggering educational debt, but many of them won’t find jobs sufficient to repay it.

That’s not a march toward market equilibrium. It’s a growing bubble.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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The Belly of the Beast

Steven J. Harper, Esq.

Tag Archives: legal profession

2015: THE YEAR THAT THE LAW SCHOOL CRISIS ENDED (OR NOT) — PART II

2015: THE YEAR THAT THE LAW SCHOOL CRISIS ENDED (OR NOT) — PART I

THE BINGHAM CASE STUDY: PART II

THE BINGHAM CASE STUDY — PART I

LAW & FOOTBALL: RANKINGS DOUBLETHINK

BULLET DODGED? OR REDIRECTED TOWARD YOU?

ELON’S “GROUNDBREAKING NEW MODEL”

A MYTH THAT MOTIVATES MERGERS

STUDENT LOANS, MORAL HAZARD, AND LAW SCHOOL LOANS – CONCLUSION

STUDENT LOANS, MORAL HAZARD, AND A LAW SCHOOL MESS: PART 2

STUDENT LOANS, MORAL HAZARD, AND A LAW SCHOOL MESS

A TALE OF TWO LAW SCHOOLS

DANGEROUS ADVICE FOR LAW FIRM LEADERS

MORE JOBS, EXCEPT FOR LAWYERS

A TROUBLESOME TASK FORCE

THE ILLUSION OF LEISURE TIME

ANOTHER UNFORTUNATE OP-ED

THE END OF THE LAWYER GLUT?

LESSONS FROM THE BUSINESS WORLD

THE ONGOING LAW SCHOOL BAILOUT

AS CLIENTS SPEAK, WHO’S LISTENING?

ARE LAWYERS BECOMING HAPPIER?

LATEST SYMPTOMS OF AN AILING PROFESSION

THE DANGEROUS MILLION-DOLLAR DISTRACTION

HOW THE LAWYER BUBBLE GROWS

THE TRUE COST OF THE WEIL LAYOFFS

PROOF OF THE PROFESSION’S CRISIS

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 – PART 2

LAW DEANS SCRAMBLE

UGLINESS INSIDE THE AM LAW 100 — PART I

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