Tag Archives: Paul Campos

INFILAW AND THE ABA

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After a setback last summer, Inflilaw has flown under the radar in its quest to acquire the Charleston School of Law. Since July 2013, the private equity owners of Infilaw  — a consortium of three for-profit law schools (Florida Coastal, Charlotte, and Arizona Summit (formerly the Phoenix School of Law)) — have been trying to add Charleston to their portfolio.  (For more on Infilaw, see Paul Campos’ recent article in The Atlantic.)

The persistence of Infilaw’s effort alone says something about the situation: There’s money to be made in legal education. Venture capitalists specialize in finding opportunities for above average investment returns. It doesn’t matter to them that the main source of that money is federal student loans. Nor do they care if the vast majority of students who obtain those loans to attend marginal schools are unable find JD-required employment. If there’s a market failure to exploit for profit, they’re on it.

On November 6, 2014, the ABA Accreditation Committee issued its recommendation of acquiescence — yes, that’s what it’s called — in connection with Infilaw’s proposed acquisition. It found that the desired change in control “will not detract from [Charleston School of Law’s] ability to remain in compliance” with ABA accreditation standards.

The Deal

The ABA recommendation identifies key aspects of the proposed acquisition, but then ignores their implications. For example, under the Asset Purchase Agreement, Infilaw would acquire most of the school’s assets, but it makes no promise of post-acquisition employment for any existing employees. None. Only on the “eve of closing” will Infilaw disclose the faculty members it wants to keep. Nevertheless, the ABA is willing to accept on faith that this pig in a poke — whatever it turns out to be — won’t “detract from the school’s ability” to retain its accreditation.

Under a separate Administrative and Consulting Services Agreement, Infilaw will receive “substantial consideration” to provide “non-academic, administrative, and consulting services” to the law school. Those services probably account for these troubling lines in the ABA committee’s recommendation:

“Infilaw contemplates that…the legal market permitting, it will increase the size of entering classes to approximately 250, or ‘pre-downturn levels.’…The law school will have access to and benefit from the collective knowledge of Infilaw and its three existing law schools with respect to student recruiting and enrollment.”

The Market?

What does “the legal market permitting” mean? Charleston enrolled 145 full-time students for its expected graduating class of 2017. Returning to “pre-downturn” levels would increase that number by 75 percent. Such near-term growth in demand for the school’s new lawyers is a pipe dream. The recent Bureau of Labor Statistics report on legal sector employment confirms painful reality: Over the past year, the number of all legal jobs — not just lawyers — is actually 1,300 lower than a year ago.

But “access to and benefit from” Infilaw’s existing three schools “with respect to student recruiting and enrollment” means law school behavior that has little to do with actual “legal market” employment conditions for new graduates. Rather, as I’ve discussed previously, the current operation of the Inflilaw business model makes the future of Charleston as an Infilaw holding apparent.

A Race To…The Bottom?

The Infilaw model depends on federal student loans to produce revenue streams that create profits for investors. As the demand for lawyers languished during the Great Recession, Infilaw schools increased enrollment and tuition.

Meanwhile, North Carolina bar passage rates for first-time takers graduating from Infilaw’s Charlotte School of Law dropped from 87 percent in July 2010 to 58 percent in July 2013. The school placed seventh (out of seven NC schools) in its July 2014 bar passage rate: 56 percent. Florida Coastal’s first-time rate dropped from 75 percent in July 2012 to 67 percent in July 2013. Its first-time Florida bar passage rate in July 2014 was 58 percent (10th out of 11 Florida schools). Arizona Summit’s first-time bar pass rate in its home state for July 2014 was 55 percent (third out of three Arizona schools).

Overall, only 35 percent of 2013 graduates from Infilaw schools found full-time long-term JD-required employment. By comparison, 53 percent of Charleston School of Law  graduates from the class of 2013 secured full-time long-term JD-required jobs — just below the national average for all law schools.

A Statistic On The Rise

At Florida Coastal, average student loan debt for 2014 graduates was $175,274. The other two Infilaw schools haven’t updated their websites to provide 2014 information. For 2013 graduates of Arizona Summit, average student law school debt was $184,825. At Charlotte, it was $155,697, plus another $20,000 in private student loans. (Average law school debt for Charleston graduates in 2013 was also too high ($146,595). But its 2013 employment outcomes were much better than any Infilaw school.)

Infliaw isn’t home free in its quest. After a closed session of the Accreditation Committee on December 5 in Puerto Rico, the recommendation will go to the ABA’s Council of the Section on Legal Education and Admissions. Then the South Carolina Commission on Higher Education has to approve the deal. Last summer, a committee of that commission voted 3-to-1 against, prompting Infilaw to withdraw its application while promising a return bout that will probably occur in early 2015.

The ABA

People sometimes ask where the ABA has been in the ongoing search for solutions to the current crisis involving law schools whose graduates are incurring staggering debt for JD degrees of dubious value. The answer is becoming clearer.

It’s “acquiescing.”

But wait. The ABA has done one more thing. It has convened a special Task Force on the Financing of Legal Education to recommend fixes for a dysfunctional legal education market. Former Detroit Mayor Dennis W. Archer, the chairman of Infilaw’s National Policy Board, is still chairman of that Task Force. In 2003-2004, he was president of the ABA.

FALSE ADVERTISING POSING AS LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP

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Sometimes everything you need to know about a piece of purported scholarly legal research appears in its opening lines. Take, for example, the first two sentences of “Keep Calm and Carry On” in current issue of The Georgetown Journal of Legal Ethics:

“Supposedly, there is a crisis in legal education. It appears to be touted mostly by those who are in the business of realizing monetary (or, at least, reputational) gain from providing cost-efficient coverage about matters of (rather) little importance.”

At this point, Professor Rene’ Reich-Graefe’s 15-page article offers the second of its 80 footnotes: “For example, in 2011, The New York Times Company reported annual revenues of $2,323,401,000. Of those, approximately 52.57% (or $1,221,497,000) were raised in advertising revenue…”

So it turns out that the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and every other media outlet reporting on the troubled world of American legal education have manufactured a crisis to sell advertising space. Never mind too many law school graduates for too few JD-required jobs, more than a decade of soaring law school tuition, and crippling student debt. Everyone just needs to calm down.

The argument

Professor Reich-Graefe offers what he calls “a brief exercise in some eclectic apologetics of the present state of legal education for those of us who refuse to become card-carrying members of the contemporary ‘Hysterias-R-Us’ legal lemming movement.” Starting with a Bureau of Labor Statistics report that “lawyer employment jobs in 2010 were at 728,200,” he observes that the United States has an additional 500,000 licensed attorneys and concludes:

“One may safely assume that, at present, a good number (though certainly not all) of those licensed lawyers are gainfully employed, too — mainly within the legal profession.”

Then Reich-Graefe posits trends that he says will favor the legal profession: “Over half of currently practicing lawyers in this country will retire over the next 15 to 20 years”; “U.S. population will increase by over 100 million people, i.e., by one third, until 2060, thus, increasing total demand for legal services”; “the two largest intergenerational wealth transfers in the history of mankind…will occur in the United States over the course of the next 30 to 40 years, thus, increasing total demand for legal services even further”; and “everything in the law, by definition, will continue to change…there will be more work for more lawyers.”

His analysis culminates in a breathless conclusion: “[R]ecent law school graduates and current and future law students are standing at the threshold of the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country — a legal market which will grow, exist for, and coincide with their entire professional career [sic].”

The critique

Others have already dissected Reich-Graefe’s statistical arguments in great detail. Suffice it to say that when law professors wander into the world of numbers, someone should subject their work to peer review before publishing it. But Professor Bill Henderson makes an equally important point: Even if Reich-Graefe’s analysis and assumptions are valid, his advice — “Keep Calm and Carry On” — is dangerous.

I would add this nuance: Reich-Graefe’s advice is more dangerous for some law schools than for others. The distinction matters because law schools don’t comprise a single market. That’s not a value judgment; it’s just true. At Professor Reich-Graefe’s school, Western New England University School of Law, only 37 percent of the graduating class of 2013 obtained full-time, long-term jobs requiring a JD. Compare that to graduate employment rates (and salaries) at top schools and then try to convince yourself that all schools serve the same market for new lawyers.

The dual market should have profound implications for any particular school’s mission, but so far it hasn’t. Tuition at some schools with dismal employment outcomes isn’t significantly less than some top schools where graduation practically assures JD-required employment at a six-figure salary.

Likewise, virtually all schools have ridden the wave of dramatic tuition increases. In 2005, full-time tuition and fees at Western New England was $27,000. This year, it’s $40,000.

Shame on us

Reich-Graefe makes many of us accomplices to his claimed conspiracy against facts and reason. Shame on me for writing The Lawyer Bubble. Shame on Richard Susskind for writing Tomorrow’s Lawyers. Shame on Bill Henderson for his favorable review of our books in the April 2014 issue of the Michigan Law Review. Shame on Brian Tamanaha, Paul Campos, Matt Leichter, and every other voice of concern for the future of the profession and those entering it.

Deeply vested interests would prefer to embrace a different message that has a noble heritage: “Keep Calm and Carry On” — as the British government urged its citizenry during World War II. But in this context, what does “carry on” mean?

“Carry on” how, exactly?

Recently on the Legal Whiteboard, Professor Jerry Organ at St. Thomas University School of Law answered that question: filling classrooms by abandoning law school admission standards. Ten years ago, the overall admission rate for applicants was 50 percent; today it’s almost 80 percent. That trend line accompanies a pernicious business model.

It’s still tough to get into top a law school; that segment of the market isn’t sacrificing student quality to fill seats. But most members of the other law school market are. They could proceed differently. They could view the current crisis as an opportunity for dramatic innovation. They could rethink their missions. They could offer prospective students new ways to assess realistically their potential roles as attorneys while providing a practical, financially viable path for graduates to get there.

Alternatively, they can keep calm and carry on. Then they can hope that on the current field of battle they’re not carried off — on their shields.

THE DANGEROUS MILLION-DOLLAR DISTRACTION

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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.