View Bill Henderson's original article here. Posted by LST on June 29, 2012.

Excerpt:

In a few short years, [the ABA's new employment] data are going to fundamental reshape our industry. The changes will make the industry better and stronger, but the journey to this better place is going to painful and disorienting for all law schools—that’s right, even the elite national law schools will be affected.

This is worth explaining in very simple and concrete terms. The Class of 2011 employment data consists of 134 variables on 200 ABA-accredited — 26,800 discrete data points, which is enough fill a phonebook. For a long time, the policy of the ABA was to do just that – publish a phonebook of data in the form of the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to Law Schools. Well, decisions on where to attend law school are not free. They require time and effort. When a prospective student has to wade through a phonebook to assemble relevant data to make important decisions, many (most) will forgo the exercise altogether.

This has two very important effects:

• The quality of enrollment decisions goes down because, from the student perspective, the costs are too high. That’s error #1. But it is forgivable—decisionmaking is a skill taught in a top-notch legal program, not a prerequisite for applying.
• To simplify their decisions, students gravitate to U.S. News ranking, which is a compact 4-page table that contains easy-to-understand comparative data.

Yes, the U.S. News has serious flaws; and every year, overreliance on them produces tragic consequences in the form of excessive student debt. Now, with the ABA employment “phonebook” in spreadsheet format, those a with modicum statistical skills and an internet connection can analyze, simplify and publish relevant statistics that will better inform the decision to attend law school.

Consider the chart below:

When I created with this simple pie chart, I started with a simple premise: If I am applying to law school, my minimum hope is that nine months after graduation I will be able to obtain a full-time, permanent professional job. The phonebook has three columns of data that speak to this hope:

• Bar Passaged Required Jobs, FTLT (i.e., Full-time, Long-Term)
• JD-Advantage Jobs, FTLT
• Professional Jobs, FTLT.

All the other myriad data columns, parsing things by part-time, short-term, non-professional, unemployed, unknown, etc., do not meet the minimum hope. So they are lumped together as “Other Outcomes.” Clearly, for 1/3 of the Class of 2001, their full-time, permanent professional ambitions have not yet materialized.

A reasonable next question is how these figures vary by U.S. News rank. The answer is reflected in the chart below.

Some observations:

• Least surprising. The outcomes are better at “national law school”–almost 90% are FTLT professional jobs. I used the T14 cutoff because the composition of this group has not change in two decades of U.S. News rankings. Few people would disagree that these schools have strong pull among legal employers.

• Most surprising. There is a whole lot of Purple–i.e., “Other Outcomes”–throughout Tiers 1, 2, 3, and 4. For over 90% of law schools, this is a very challenging legal market.

• Biggest reality check. The JD-Advantaged and Professional jobs appear to be, on balance, less desirable than those requiring bar passage. They increase nearly three times in relative proportion as we move from T14 to Tier 1 to Tier 2. Many are likely compromise jobs—not as good as practicing law, but better than non-professional alternatives.

With these relative benchmarks in place, a prospective law student can look for law schools that are outperforming their U.S. News rankings. And there are quite few.

For example, in Tier 4, St. Mary’s (Texas) has 78.3% Bar Passage Required placement; Mississippi College’s figure is 75.3%; and Campbell (NC) is 71.4%. These schools aren’t feeding BigLaw, but their graduates appear to be full-time practicing lawyer nine months after graduation. What accounts for their success? Most of their graduates are probably in cities and towns far away from corporate practice. Nonetheless, these schools have a clear niche they are filling.

In contrast, there are 20 schools in Tiers 1 and 2 that have less than 50% Bar Passage Required jobs. What do they have in common? Many are in big cities in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic or California–large urban markets that are attractive for young professionals. It is likely that too many young lawyers are chancing after a finite set of legal jobs. It is worth noting, however, that these same schools also have rates of placements in JD Advantage and Professional jobs that are higher than other law schools at statistically significant levels.

So many young law graduates are voting with their feet. Better to stay in the city as a non-lawyer professional than to move to south to be country lawyer doing small firm practice. Although I suspect a large proportion of these grads will fare quite well, it is important to keep in mind that JD-Advantaged and Professional jobs are not a panacea—they are also in short-supply. At most schools in Tiers 1, 2, 3, and 4, between 30% and 42% of graduates are either unemployed and underemployed in jobs that are either nonprofessional, part-time, or short-term. Indeed, 4.3% (1,874) of all jobs for the Class of 2011 were funded by the law schools themselves!

As I have said previously (here and here), the current legal job market reflects a structural change in the legal sector—these numbers aren’t going to turn around in a year or two.
So what is going to happen? Notwithstanding the heady optimism of the “Kaplan kids“, the ABA employment data, thanks to the blogosphere, is going to reduce information costs, making it easier for prospective law students to determine whether law school is a good investment. The needle is going to move, just not as fast as a Chicago School economist might predict.

Further, expect students to aggressively negotiate for scholarship money. Whether schools become more generous in merit aid, admit fewer students, or both, all signs point to shrinking budgets for law schools.

The utter transparency of a changing and stagnant legal market has potentially more dire consequences for law schools. The lifeblood of the entire legal education establishment, including elite law schools, is federal student loans. Our students get the same generous terms as graduates of medical and dental schools, who are not struggling to make six figure incomes. The graphs above suggest that a large proportion of our students will be on Income-Based Repayment (IBR), which is – functionally – insurance in the event a high income fails to materialize in the years following graduation. The downside risk of that insurance – lack of repayment of expected principal and interest—is borne by U.S. taxpayers.

Right now, it is possible to estimate the size and probability of this downside risk. All the Federal Government has to do is add-up the shortfall between the repayment of principal and interest in normal repayment versus the monies actually being collected. What percentage of graduates are on IBR? What portion of their current principal and interest are they able to pay? These are simple numbers that some enterprising journalist will eventually request. Further, they are legitmate public policy questions that we, the legal academy, should face long before the journalists get there.

Lawyers and law schools are not a favored interest group on Capitol Hill. We need to plan for the extremely high probability that the financing of law schools will be dramatically altered in the years to come. The longer we wait, the more painful and disastrous the transition. Every law school will need a damn good story to justify continued federal loans. And right now, many of us lack that story – being in Tier 1 or T14 (where debt loads tend to be the highest) won’t mean anything if the math falls short.

In summary, our ivory tower is crumbling. With the ABA putting the employment data in downloadable format on its website, law schools will have to do something completely new and scary to us—we are going to have to compete to keep our jobs and stay in business. The litmus test is going to be the ability of our graduates to obtain remunerative professional work in a highly competitive global economy. This is very serious work.

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LST's Take:

This has been reposted in (almost) its entirety with permission from Professor Henderson.

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View Brian Tamanaha's original article here. Posted by LST on June 18, 2012.

Excerpt:

My critical book about legal education, Failing Law Schools, is out. About a dozen advance reviews of the book have been published, each with different take, but all in agreement that the book should be read by legal educators. (A few examples: Fish, Kerr, and Henderson.). This recent comment caught my eye:

I just finished reading a book that everyone who cares about legal education in the United States should read: Failing Law Schools by Brian Z. Tamanaha. The book does an excellent job of describing the economic realities of law schools for prospective law students and society as a whole. Tamanaha gives a compelling and highly critical analysis of how law school became so expensive, and what can be done about it now. And, he doesn’t pull punches. If the law school you went to wasn’t mentioned, the law school you teach at, or that your colleagues went to will be named (and shamed). Tamanaha is critical of law schools and law professors from the top 14 to the 4th Tier and every school in between.

For those of us who went to law school before it became so expensive, Tamanaha does an excellent job of breaking down what it means to graduate with $100,000 or $120,000 in student loans for the average law student with the average salary of around $70,000. He also lays out the statistics about how difficult it is, and will probably continue to be, for many law graduates to find full time work as lawyers. This is a situation that Tamanaha argues will continue well past the time when the economy recovers. Tamanaha also describes the shift from needs-based to merit-based scholarships that has, among other problems, made it even tougher for lower income law students to attend law school without high debt. (ADR Prof Blog)

Many legal educators will disagree with my arguments, of course, and I do not claim to know how to solve what I call the “broken economics of legal education.” Indeed, things are so out of whack that I doubt we will solve it.

The opening comment of Bill Henderson’s review was the most jarring observation I have seen so far: “Many legal academics are going to dismiss Brian Tamanaha’s book, Failing Law Schools, without ever reading a page. A larger number may simply ignore it. That is ironic, because this is the response one would expect if Tamanaha’s account of a corrupt, self-indulgence academic culture were true.” I hope Bill is wrong.

What I have tried to do with this book is bring solid data to the debate. I am struck by the fact that the defenders of the legal education status quo so often respond with unverified assumptions, sweeping generalizations, or old platitudes–usually without having read the book.

In an article on the book today in the National Law Journal, for example, the Chair of the ABA Section on Legal Education, John O’Brien, remarks critically, “Nobody feels good that tuitions have gone up. But the claim that a law degree is a bad investment doesn’t hold water.” My precise argument is that a law degree is a good investment for some students, but for many it is a financial disaster.

To see what I mean we need look no further than Dean O’Brien’s own institution, New England School of Law. Nine months after graduation, only 34.4% of the 2011 class had obtained full time, permanent lawyer jobs (see ABA data broken down here). The average debt for 2011 NE law grads was $120,480 (90% of the class had debt). NE claims that the median salary in the private sector for the class of 2010 was $67,500, but only 15% of the grads in private employment reported their salaries so the actual median salary for the class is undoubtedly much lower. People who earn that much will struggle to make the monthly payments ($1,400) due on the average debt.

This is what the book does–it brings numbers to the debate about legal education. I talk about professor teaching loads and salaries, the costs of research and clinics, the remarkable rise of tuition and debt, the salaries our graduates earn at graduation and a few years out, the implications of the transfer phenomenon, the social consequences of our scholarship policies, the ongoing collapse in applicants, and much more.

If you care about the fate of our students, about the fate of your own law school (many will be in trouble soon), or about legal education more generally and its impact on the legal system and society, the information in this book will be sobering.

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View Allison Linn's original article here. Posted by LST on June 14, 2012.

Excerpt:

Lawyers have sometimes taken a ribbing for what they do, but until recently few questioned why they do it: For the good pay and job security.

You can’t necessarily count on either of those things anymore.

The weak economy, globalization and technological advances have dramatically changed the legal industry, and experts say that’s leaving a glut of lawyers coming out of school with massive student loans, high hopes and few job prospects. …

A year after getting their degrees only about 65 percent of last year’s law school graduates had a job that required them to have passed the bar, the association found. What’s more, nearly 10 percent were still looking for any job at all.

The longer-term prognosis isn’t so great, either. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects that employment of lawyers will grow by only 10 percent between 2010 and 2020, while overall jobs are expected to grow by 14 percent.

The declining prospects come as more and more law firms, and their corporate clients, discover what manufacturers figured out a long time ago: Sometimes it’s cheaper to outsource your work. Experts say many companies now rely on cheaper legal minds in India, the Philippines and elsewhere.

“Simple tasks like document review … can now be done in these offshore markets at much lower price points,” said James Leipold, executive director of the National Association of Law Professionals.

Some companies and law firms also are using more contract or temporary workers who cost a lot less than young associates and have little chance of being hired permanently.

The weak economy also has played a role. When companies started to see profits decline at the start of the recession, many took a hard look at their legal expenses and found areas where they could trim fat. Among other things, they told law firms they were no longer willing to pay high hourly rates for the work of young, inexperienced associates.

Henderson, the law professor, said there is also a crop of new legal entrepreneurs who are using technology to do legal work that was once done by hand, at higher cost and with more mistakes.

Those changes mean that big law firms don’t need as many young law school grads. That’s leaving a lot of young lawyers stuck in dead-end, entry-level or less lucrative jobs, or not practicing law at all. …

Some critics blame law schools for the glut of lawyers, arguing they paint too rosy of a picture of life after law school to recruit more students.

The American Bar Association recently made changes aimed at giving a more accurate picture of the market for law school graduates, and how many are really taking home fat paychecks.

The changes come in the wake of harsh criticism from groups such as Law School Transparency. They have argued that law schools have distorted the numbers by hiring grads for a short period of time to bulk up employment numbers, for example, or only including the small sample who responded when reporting stellar average starting salaries.

“Everyone is saying, ‘Oh, law school is a great investment. It’ll be a way to make a lot of money,’” said Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency. “It turns out that wasn’t actually true.”

McEntee, who graduated from Vanderbilt Law School in 2011, actually started the project before it became apparent just how much tight the job market was going to get for lawyers. He says he doesn’t want to keep people from going to law school; he just wants them to go in with their eyes open.

“My goal is not to scare people away,” he said. “I just so happen to think that the informed decision is, don’t go.”

Leipold, of the lawyer’s association, thinks it’s possible that the class of 2011 represented the worst of things, and that job prospects will slowly start to improve. But he also said that some of the changes in the legal profession are likely permanent.

“I don’t expect a dramatic turnaround,” he said. …

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View Karen Sloan's original article here. Posted by LST on June 10, 2012.

Excerpt:

The American Bar Association and NALP are not “indispensible absent parties” to a proposed fraud class action brought by 12 recent graduates against the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, a federal judge has ruled.

U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist’s June 7 ruling dealt a blow to Cooley’s argument that it was “just following orders” by providing the job figures required by NALP … and the ABA …

“So far, we’re two for two on that,” [Jesse] Strauss said, noting that a New York state trial judge in March rejected a similar argument by New York Law School before dismissing the larger suit. …

In its motion to dismiss, Cooley argued that the plaintiffs’ claims are aimed primarily at the ABA and NALP, and that failing to include those organizations as defendants was ground to dismiss the complaint.

“Plaintiffs ask for an “industry”-wide rewrite of those standards, but fail to name as defendants the very entities whose standards they want the court to rewrite,” Cooley argued in its motion.

Quist disagreed, ruling that the ABA and NALP’s reporting requirements “are a floor, not a ceiling,” and that Cooley could provide employment information beyond what those organization mandate.

“Even though the plaintiffs’ goal may be to fix systemic problems in law school employment data reporting, that goal is not what they seek to accomplish with this particular lawsuit,” Quist wrote. “Plaintiffs seek damages and equitable relief solely from Cooley and its agents.”

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View Mitch Smith's original article here. Posted by LST on March 22, 2012.

Excerpt:

A lawsuit alleging misleading recruitment by New York Law School was dismissed Wednesday …

A state judge, Melvin L. Schweitzer, rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that misleading statistics led them to overvalue their legal education, ruling that New York Law School framed its data accurately and that prospective law students are “sophisticated consumers” capable of analyzing that information. …

Among the issues in the New York case was whether employment and salary information for positions which don’t require a law degree should be included in statistics presented to students. The plaintiffs said they assumed the employment rates referred only to graduates working full-time in law, while the court ruled nothing in New York Law’s admissions materials said that was the case. The plaintiffs also suggested that the law school misled them by publishing statistics based on relatively small samples, never more than 30 percent. The court disagreed.

“The court does not view these post-graduate employment statistics to be misleading in a material way for a reasonable consumer acting reasonably,” the judge wrote. “As to the salary data being misleading because it allegedly was based on a ‘deliberately selected’ small sample of graduates, the relatively small percentage of responding students was disclosed whenever the salary data included the average salary statistic.” …

In its dismissal ruling, Schweitzer was critical of the plaintiffs, suggesting they should have known employment was not assured and that students at higher-ranked law schools tended to receive the best jobs. …

“In researching law school options, it also should have come as no surprise to these law school consumers that the most lucrative jobs often are associated with having attended a high ranking law school,” Schweitzer wrote. “It is also difficult for the court to conceive that somehow lost on these plaintiffs is the fact that a goodly number of law school graduates toil (perhaps part-time) in drudgery or have less than hugely successful careers.” …

Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency, a policy organization working to reduce the cost of legal education, worries the court “missed the point.” While prospective law schools students are usually smart, McEntee said they don’t fit the court’s definition of a sophisticated consumer. That’s because the prevailing belief in this country is that a law degree prepares one for a lucrative career. Law School Transparency is not involved in the New York Law case or any other suits filed against law schools.

“This is not a sophisticated group, and though they tend to be very intelligent, for a long time [there's] been this culturally embedded view that law school is a ticket to financial security,” McEntee said. “It’s with this belief that prospective students read and interpret these employment statistics.”

Students at other law schools have made similar claims, and suits are pending at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and Thomas M. Cooley Law School. McEntee said the New York findings could be “instructive” in cases elsewhere, but that it shouldn’t determine the outcome of those suits because they are filed in different states with different laws.

If nothing else, he said, the attention given to the cases in New York and elsewhere have helped further the idea that students and their parents need to be more savvy consumers of legal education.

“They’ve brought the idea that schools aren’t being forthright to the front of discussion,” McEntee said. …

Schweitzer acknowledged problems in the current structure of the legal profession and stressed the need to provide students with “the most transparent data of the state of our profession that we can possibly assemble so that they can make the most informed decisions that affect their livelihoods.” He added that suits like the one they dismissed might stress the need for that frank assessment of future lawyers’ career prospects.

“If lawsuits such as this have done nothing else, they have served to focus the attention of all constituents on this current problem facing the legal profession,” Schweitzer wrote. “To the extent law schools are turning out too many graduates for the positions available, market forces will begin to correct themselves, hopefully in short order. But that does not itself excuse our collective responsibility to those who have been unfortunate enough to have been caught in the midst of the maelstrom.”

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View Karen Sloan's original article here. Posted by LST on March 21, 2012.

Excerpt:

It looks as though the American Bar Association may not require law schools to disclose detailed graduate salary information after all.

The ABA’s Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admission to the Bar on March 17 gave preliminary approval to a new accreditation standard that would require law schools to report additional details about their scholarship retention rates and the jobs that their graduates land.

But the council rejected a recommendation that it require law schools to report school-specific salary data. Transparency advocates said the omission would leave prospective students without important information about their earning prospects.

“This is the council’s latest mistake in a string of mistakes,” said Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency, a nonprofit organization that pushes for better law school consumer information. …

“There should be no doubt that the section is fully committed to the clarity and accuracy of law school placement data,” [Council chair John O'Brien, dean of the New England School of Law,] said. “Current and prospective law students will now have more timely access to detailed information that will help them make important decisions about their futures.”

The ABA has undertaken a comprehensive review of its law school accreditation standards, and a special standards review committee has spent the past three years developing recommendations. During a two-day meeting Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., the council took up changes to Standard 509, which deals with consumer information; and to Rule 16, which outlines the penalties schools may face for violations. …

After about an hour of discussion, the council gave initial approval to the committee’s recommended rewriting of Standard 509 and Rule 16. Schools would be required to publicly disclose on their Web sites their admissions data; tuition rates and fees; enrollment data; faculty size; curricular offerings; library resources and facilities; employment data; and bar passage rates. They would have to disclose the number of graduates who factor into any published salary figure.

The standard itself does not spell out what details the schools must report; rather, they were included on a supplemental chart developed by the standards review committee. Schools would also have to report the number of graduates employed in jobs that require bar passage; jobs in which a juris doctor degree is preferred; professional and nonprofessional jobs; and the numbers of graduates pursuing further education and unemployed.

For each of those categories, schools would have to report whether those graduates were in full-time or part-time jobs, and whether they were long-term or short-term positions. Finally, the committee recommended that schools report the number and percentage of graduates with jobs that are funded by the law schools themselves.

The committee recommended that for each of those job categories, schools report the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentile salaries their graduates earn. Those salary figures would also have to be provided for 15 jobs categories ranging from small and large firms to government, public interest and academia.

Against the advice of the standards committee, the council decided to eliminate all salary fields from the chart — meaning that schools would not have to report that salary data at all.

That outcome was not totally unexpected, said Jeffrey Lewis, a professor at Saint Louis University School of Law and the chairman of the standards review committee.

The inclusion of salary data “was controversial even within the standards review committee,” Lewis said. “The pro argument was that the more information you have, the better. The con argument was that it’s really hard for the schools to gather salary information from graduates, and the response rates tend to be low. That means the information might not be useful or might be misleading.”

By striking the salary data, the council has brought the accreditation requirements in line with changes already made by the ABA’s questionnaire committee — a separate group that designs the questionnaire that all accredited law schools must fill out every year. The questionnaire committee decided last year that instead of school-specific salary data, schools should disclose the three states in which the largest percentage of their graduates found jobs. Prospective students or other interested parties could then look at state-specific salary information.

Without the school-specific salary reporting, there is no way for prospective law students to differentiate between the graduate salaries of lower and higher-ranking law schools in any given state, McEntee said.

“If this decision really has to do with quality of salary information schools provide and not wanting it to be misleading, why not adjust how the information is collected and provided. You could say, ‘Don’t provide a number unless you have at least ten graduates responding.’ Why stick with the status quo?”

The council’s March 17 vote was not the final word on the matter. With preliminary approval secured, the council is soliciting public comments and will hold a public hearing in the future. After the comment period and possible revisions, the council will again vote on the standard. The standard will not be final until the ABA’s House of Delegates votes on the entire package, which will happen no sooner that August.

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View David Segal's original article here. Posted by LST on March 21, 2012.

Excerpt:

The organization behind the Law School Admission Test reported that the number of tests it administered this year dropped by more than 16 percent, the largest decline in more than a decade. … In all, the number of test takers has fallen by nearly 25 percent in the last two years.

The decline reflects a spreading view that the legal market in the United States is in terrible shape and will have a hard time absorbing the roughly 45,000 students who are expected to graduate from law school in each of the next three years. And the problem may be deep and systemic.

Many lawyers and law professors have argued in recent years that the legal market will either stagnate or shrink as technology allows more low-end legal work to be handled overseas, and as corporations demand more cost-efficient fee arrangements from their firms.

That argument, and news that so many new lawyers are struggling with immense debt, is changing the way law school is perceived by undergrads. Word is getting through that law school is no longer a safe place to sit out an economic downturn — an article of faith for years — and that strong grades at an above-average school no longer guarantees a six-figure law firm job.

“For a long time there has been this culturally embedded perception that if you go to law school, it will be worth the money,” said Kyle McEntee of Law School Transparency, a legal education policy organization. “The idea that law school is an easy ticket to financial security is finally breaking down.” …

For some law schools, the dwindling number of test-takers represents a serious long-term challenge.

“What I’d anticipate is that you’ll see the biggest falloff in applications in the bottom end of the law school food chain,” said Andrew Morriss of the University of Alabama School of Law. “Those schools are going to have significant difficulty because they are dependent on tuition to fund themselves and they’ll either have to cut class size to maintain standards, or accept students with lower credentials.”

If they take the second course, Mr. Morriss said, it would hurt the school three years later because there is a strong correlation between poor performance on the LSAT and poor performance on the bar exam. If students start failing the bar, then the prestige of the school will drop, which would mean lowering standards even more. “At that point,” Mr. Morriss said, “the school is risking a death spiral.”

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View Mark Giangrande's original article here. Posted by LST on January 22, 2012.

Excerpt:

[An op/ed in the Wall Street Journal provides] an interesting idea but there are logistics for a U.S. implementation, such as funding those law libraries at schools without one, wondering who would be the accrediting agency for such a program, and how would the state Supreme Courts react to the idea of undergraduate bar takers. The upside, in theory, would be a lot more lawyers trained at a lower cost and able to provide legal services to those of more limited means. I wouldn’t hold my breath for this to happen. For all of the criticism directed at them, I believe law schools like the current model. If only the dang market would cooperate and provide the requisite number of jobs. …

[L]aw schools seem to be pushing back on the idea that law school needs to be reformed, if the comments by faculty in the National Law Journal are to be believed. The most recent article covers the reactions of faculty and others at the talk from the recent Association of American Law Schools meeting. It’s sort of a crises, but there is no consensus on how serious it is or if it really requires change. One point in the article is that responding to changes in the profession does not rank high with law faculties. My experience in several law schools is that getting an article published in a good law review is the greatest concern as that assists with promotion. I don’t think the lack of jobs is perceived by the faculty as a threat to the law school, at least not yet.

Some are quoted as saying that employment patterns don’t seem to be changing no matter how the student is trained. The implication is that the cachet of the law school is more important than a graduate’s individual skill. The further implication is why bother changing how law schools operate if that is the situation. I suppose if the inventory of law graduates saddled with significant debt continues to grow compared to the number of jobs available, the number of law applicants may actually drop as that reality continues to exist. That may motivate schools to change.

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View Larry Abramson's original article here. Posted by LST on January 16, 2012.

Excerpt:

Listen to the mp3

It’s often assumed that even in tough times, lawyers can find good jobs. But that proposition is being overturned by a tight legal market, and by a glut of graduates.

The nation’s law schools are facing growing pressure to be more upfront about their graduates’ job prospects. Many students say they were lured in by juicy job numbers, but when they got out, all they ended up with is massive debt.

Chloe Gilgan enrolled at New York Law School in 2005, with one thing in mind: getting a good paying job. She says the school gave her every assurance that she was in the right place …

Three years after graduation, Gilgan says, the only [six]-figure number she’s staring at is her student debt. The only job she found was doing work that did not require a law degree. Gilgan is convinced New York Law twisted its job numbers.

“Nobody can guarantee you’ll have a job for sure,” she says, “but what they can do is give you honest prospects.”

So Gilgan has joined a proposed class action suit against New York Law School, charging that it has deceived students. Attorney David Anziska is lining up plaintiffs who attended primarily lower-tier law schools, paid more than $40,000 a year and feel they got little in return.

New York Law School says it provides all the information required by the American Bar Association and more. Interim Dean Carol Buckler says the school tries hard to counsel students about their employment prospects. …

[Kyle McEntee, who founded Law School Transparency,] says he was outraged to find that the employment data supplied by many lower-tier schools is really part of a recruiting strategy.

“A school might advertise a median salary of $160,000,” McEntee notes, “and not disclose that only 10 percent of a class actually responded to the salary survey.”

Or, McEntee says, schools don’t disclose that some jobs are in fact funded by the law school. …

Activists say more schools need to follow that path. They blame the American Bar Association, which accredits law schools, for letting institutions define what is accurate.

The ABA’s John O’Brian admits that up until now, the schools have chosen which information to provide. So recently, the ABA changed the rules. Starting next year, schools will have to report whether graduates are employed full time and whether the positions graduates get required a law degree. That will help applicants in the future decide if they are picking a school that is turning out employable lawyers.

But O’Brian says it’s still up to students to scrutinize that data, because the ABA can only demand transparency. “These schools are simply required to report. We do not have minimum standards for employment,” he says.

Kyle McEntee says the ABA changes are a good first step, but that they won’t help students already in school. And these measures don’t address larger issues: Why is law school enrollment continuing to rise, when the job market is shrinking in many areas? The legal sector shed 1,800 jobs in December, according to the Labor Department.

McEntee says the biggest challenge is battling a perception of invulnerability. “There’s a culturally embedded view about law school, that it’s this magic ticket to financial security,” he says. “As it turns out, this isn’t the case, and it hasn’t been the case for quite some time.”

When critics attacked for-profit colleges for similar problems, the Department of Education tightened regulations on those schools. But the Department says it has no authority to do the same to the vast majority of law programs.

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View Jim Chen, Dean of Brandeis School of Law, University of Louisville's original article here. Posted by LST on January 15, 2012.

Excerpt:

With his series of articles on legal education, David Segal of the New York Times has left a deep impression. From the beginning of calendar year 2011, Segal has repeatedly criticized some aspects of contemporary legal education. In an age when lawyer salaries have not kept pace with ballooning law school costs and student debts, he has questioned the economic rationality of attending law school. He has accused some law schools of offering financial aid packages that are tied to maintenance of seemingly attainable grade point averages, which then evaporate in the face of tough grading curves and expose scholarship recipients to second- and third-year bills for full tuition. He has challenged universities to prove that they are not running law schools as cash cows for cross-subsidizing lower-revenue units on campus.

But nothing else in David Segal’s portfolio has caught the legal academy’s attention like his November 20, 2011, article called “After Law School, Associates Learn to Be Lawyers.” …

To cap things off, the Times published a staff editorial immediately after Segal’s article on the contrast between law firms’ expectations and law schools’ priorities. “Legal Education Reform” called upon American law schools to adopt sweeping reforms, including wholesale reconsideration of its emphasis on legal reasoning, especially as demonstrated in appellate cases. …

Faced with this challenge to their dignity and their raison d’être, law professors collectively have covered nearly the entire emotional range of the grieving process. Some have reacted with denial and anger. Others actively try to bargain with other branches of the legal profession. Still others, albeit with some measure of depression, have done their best to accept appropriate criticism and to begin framing some form of meaningful, constructive response.

Let me begin with the angry deniers. For my part, I do not believe that law professors and law schools do themselves any favors, in an age of indebted students, unemployed law school graduates, and laid-off lawyers, to trash these criticisms as a “hatchet job” or (better yet) a “bile pile.” It takes a deep measure of cynicism, perhaps even petty selfishness, to characterize the Times as being motivated by their writers and editors failing to get relatives into law school or past the bar exam. A second, less angry cohort of law professors fervently wants to believe that tough times in the legal profession are merely cyclical. Wait a year or two or five, so the wishing goes, and things will be back to the way they always were.

Count me in the third camp. The criticisms are real. They sting. All of us, from law schools and law students to lawyers and law firms, have to do something. Things could, things should be better. …

When it comes to genuine reform of legal education and the profession it serves, casting Segal and the New York Times onto the “bile pile” of academic amusement and aggrandizement accomplishes absolutely nothing.

The hard truth is that law schools could stand to act more like law firms, paying closer heed to what lawyers actually do for a living. Law firms could stand to to act more like law schools, absorbing the cost and the responsibility of training their new recruits instead of expecting law professors to know skills best perfected far from the classroom. Law students would be well served to take a hard, financially sophisticated look at the out-of-pocket and opportunity costs of legal education, to say nothing of the strictly pecuniary returns on their investments in personal capital. The Socratic method and the parsing of written appellate opinions have a firm place in law school. But law schools and bar examiners and hiring partners should all work together to reconsider why and how we teach certain things. Sheer age and force of habit are terrible excuses for doing anything, much less forcing aspiring members of our profession to endure a three-year ordeal. The relative cheapness of traditional lecturing explains why it’s more prevalent than hand-to-hand clinical teaching, but cost alone sheds at best incomplete light on the value of practical as well as intellectual training in law school. And no one, inside or outside the academy, has ever found the perfect way to convey subtle skills that arise over the course of a lifetime of professional activities and interpersonal relationships.

We have to start somewhere. Perhaps we can begin by admitting that everyone is in pain. Law students are in debt. Law schools face budget cuts. Law firms are enduring layoffs and lower per-partner payouts. For once, we might acknowledge that all of us have grievances, that our own complaints may be no more pressing than those of our companions. Fingers we have been too quick to point might yet touch what Abraham Lincoln called the mystic chords of memory — strings that can be struck only by the better angels of our profession.

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