Update 2: We apologize to the University of Utah S.J. Quinney College of Law. On February 10th, the school provided LST its NALP report, but we did not include it in this story.

On December 14, 2011, we wrote all ABA-approved law school deans to request the class of 2010 NALP report that each school received in June 2011. We are pleased to announce that we have obtained 32 34 of these reports (17.3% of ABA-approved law schools and 17.8% of schools with NALP reports). 29 of the 32 34 law schools sent a report to LST. The other three four were pulled from school websites.

We asked for these reports to help prospective law students find the law schools that best meet their career objectives. Together, these reports provide prospectives access to timely, thorough, and comparable employment information. They make LST’s website an even more valuable source of information for prospective law students. We hope to soon add the employment data contained in the NALP reports to our data clearinghouse. In the meantime, these reports are available here. In addition, the list below links to each school’s NALP report.

Schools Providing the Class of 2010 NALP Report to LST (30):

Arizona

Capital University

Cleveland State

Dayton

Drexel

Florida State

Florida

George Mason

Louisville

Marquette

Memphis

Montana

UNLV

North Carolina

North Dakota

Northern Kentucky University

Ohio State

Oklahoma City University

Oregon

Ole Miss

Penn State

Seton Hall

South Carolina

St. John’s

Tennessee

Tulsa

Utah

Wayne State

William & Mary

Wisconsin

Non-Responding Schools with accessible NALP Reports (4):

Akron

Northern Illinois University

Thomas Jefferson

Indiana — Bloomington

We want to make a special note that six law schools do not submit employment data to NALP and therefore do not have these forms: Columbia, Kentucky, St. Louis, and the three law schools in Puerto Rico. This does not mean that these schools do not have ample employment data, however. Rather, these are the only schools who do not have a prepared form in front of them that can quite easily be disclosed to prospective law students.

Interestingly, the vast majority of schools providing LST with the 2010 NALP reports were public institutions. This may be because these schools interpreted our request as an open records request. Two schools (Wisconsin and UNC) explicitly treated our request in this way.

We received a handful of responses expressly declining to provide LST with the NALP report. Consistent with past communications with law schools, a number of schools indicated that they had meaningful employment information already available on their websites. In almost every case, this was (and remains) false.

In addition, there were two “no” responses that stood out. The full text of the responses is below.

First, Ave Maria argued that its NALP report does not provide meaningful information. Dean Milhizer claimed, “Our school is small with a unique mission, and our employment outcomes are reflective of this.” He suggested that additional information would be needed to assist prospective students. He did not, however, suggest what kind of information would be useful. The school’s website contains little information on what graduates found for work, with much of that information serving to mislead applicants.

Second, Chapman University argued that its report was confidential. Dean Campbell’s response is very misleading. It is true that NALP promises that it will not share the graduate-level data or the reports generated from those data with anyone except the law school. But schools are under no such obligation, either contractually or (for the NALP reports) legally. If it was required to keep the data confidential, Chapman could not provide these employment statistics on its website. Instead, the NALP reports only remain confidential because law schools decline to share them with those who would find the information most useful. Fortunately for prospective students, at least 32 33 schools disagree that the NALP reports are confidential.

Overall, as the Live Transparency Index shows, schools are increasingly sharing more employment information. But the vast majority of law schools still leave critical gaps in their presentation of employment information – gaps which the NALP reports would fill. These 32 34 law schools have demonstrated leadership that is sorely lacking at other law schools. While these schools still need to choose how to share employment information on their websites, they understand the importance of providing free access to comparable information now. Our hope is that these schools pave the way for changes at other schools, many of whom are still acting as if their applicants do not deserve access to comparable consumer information.

Ave Maria School of Law:

Dear Mr. McEntee and Mr. Lynch:

I applaud your efforts to assist prospective law students in obtaining reliable information about the law schools of interest to them. However, Ave Maria School of Law does not believe that its Class of 2010 Summary Report from NALP will provide meaningful information about our school to prospective students. Our school is small with a unique mission, and our employment outcomes are reflective of this. In our judgment, the Summary Report does not provide sufficient information about the types of positions obtained by our 2010 graduates, and so to release the report in a vacuum without additional information would not be of assistance to prospective students.

This year, as in years past, AMSL will comply with NALP’s guidelines on reporting employment outcomes for the Class of 2011, and we will be participating in the ABA’s new annual survey of these outcomes.

Sincerely,

Eugene R. Milhizer
President and Dean

Chapman University:

Dear Law School Transparency,

You have requested that our School of Law send you the otherwise confidential report that we supply to NALP. We have years of experience with NALP, and on that basis, we know that the information we send will be appropriately treated, consistent with good ethics and all applicable federal and state laws. Regrettably, we do not have that kind of basis with your organization. Accordingly, we think it is most appropriate to continue to keep our submission to NALP confidential.

Nevertheless, our School of Law maintains a very informative website, and we post a great deal of data on our graduates’ employment there. That information is available to the public, and we invite you to consult this source if you would like.

Sincerely,

Tom Campbell
Dean

These lawsuits should be of grave concern to the ABA, both as the only federally-recognized accrediting body and as the legal profession’s largest and most powerful trade organization. Nearly 8% of its member schools have been formally accused of fraud by 74 former students. While positive results for the plaintiffs would further confirm what LST has drawn attention to over the past two years, the underlying problem of poor ABA governance will remain unchanged by the results. Recent efforts to reform the accreditation standards are a start, but the ABA has yet to show that they will take any significant corrective action against schools. While these lawsuits will attempt to hold schools accountable for past misleading actions, it will be up to the ABA to ensure its member schools do not continue the fraud that is widespread throughout American legal education.

The new batch includes 11 schools from Anziska and Strauss’s October 2011 announcement. The twelfth is Golden Gate University School of Law, as Above the Law announced late last year.

All 12 Schools:

• Albany Law School
• Brooklyn Law School
• California Western School of Law
• Chicago-Kent College of Law
• DePaul University College of Law
• Florida Coastal School of Law
• Golden Gate University School of Law
• Hofstra Law School
• John Marshall School of Law (Chicago)
• Southwestern Law School
• University of San Francisco School of Law
• Widener University School of Law

As momentum for holding law schools accountable grows and people start to realize the courts are their only remedy, LST expects more class actions will be filed this year. These allegations concern a long history of consumer-disoriented behavior, which unfortunately continues today at a great number of schools. LST’s Winter 2012 Transparency Index shows just how poor the newly-sued schools are doing when it comes to being honest about what their graduates found for work. Just one of the twelve schools currently discloses the number of graduates who found full-time, permanent jobs for which bar passage was required.

Transparency Index Performance of Newly-Sued Schools

The first of the three class actions, Alaburda v. TJSL, was filed last May in California Superior Court. In addition to alleging that Thomas Jefferson School of Law committed fraud, the plaintiff’s claims of unfair competition and false advertising have been allowed to move forward. While the plaintiff has yet to file for class certification (her attorney expects to do so in six to twelve months), the case has entered into the discovery phase. In the meantime, the lawyers have set up a class action registry for graduates of TJSL. (Link here.)

We inquired for a status update with the lead attorney on the case, Brian Procel of Miller Barondess LLP. Below is his full response.

Good to hear from you. I am very pleased with the progress of our case and recent developments with respect to the disclosure of employment data among law schools.

Thomas Jefferson answered Plaintiff’s complaint on September 23, 2011. We have now stated class action claims for fraud, unfair competition and false advertising. The parties are currently engaged in discovery, including the exchange of documents and other information. We intend to start taking the depositions of the administrators at Thomas Jefferson who were involved in compiling the employment data that was ultimately reported by U.S News & World Report. Thomas Jefferson will send out notice of the class action to all graduates in the near future.

We set up a website, thomasjeffersonclassaction.com. We invite all graduates to register on the website. This will allow us to communicate with the class members and to answer any question they may have directly. By signing up on the website, graduates can also input information that will help us to evaluate whether Thomas Jefferson has been reporting their employment data accurately.

I would like to thank you and your team at lawschooltransparency.com. You are doing great work and we are now starting to see some positive results.

Note to TJSL graduates: Please contact the firm directly using the instructions on the registry if you wish to join the class. LST is not affiliated with this or any lawsuit.

The Transparency Index is not a ranking system. It would not be very meaningful to rank a school by the number of criteria met because different criteria vary in importance. In other words, just because one school meets more criteria than another school does not mean that the first school is more transparent than the second.

It is also important to note that law school websites are fluid and that schools may respond to external stimuli, including LST’s official request for school NALP reports, by improving their web disclosure policies. In fact, some schools may have improved public employment information shortly after our data collection dates.

Over the next few weeks, we will make the Transparency Index more user friendly and update school information when we learn of the updates. Meanwhile, we encourage law schools to learn from the index, to update their websites with the TIQ Criteria in mind, and to alert us when they do so.

Full report is available here.
Winter 2012 Data is available here.
Live Transparency Index is here.

Executive Summary

As a new year unfolds and the debate about legal education reform continues, efforts in furtherance of law school transparency remain critical. While transparency of law schools’ post-graduation employment data will not solve all of legal education’s problems, it can put pressure on the current law school model and thereby act as a catalyst for broader legal education reform. This is true whether it occurs through the process of seeking transparency or because of the information that such disclosure ultimately reveals.

Having had their long-standing practice of withholding basic consumer information called into question, law schools have responded with new attempts at disclosure in advance of the ABA’s new requirements. Adequate disclosure should be easy to achieve; law schools have possessed ample information, in an easy publishable format, for many months. But as the findings of this report show, the vast majority of U.S. law schools are still hiding critical information from their applicants.

This report reflects LST’s analysis of the class of 2010 employment information available on ABA-approved law school websites in early January 2012. The Winter 2012 Index reveals a continued pattern of consumer-disoriented activity. Our chief findings are as follows:

• 27% (54/197) do not provide any evaluable information on their websites for class of 2010 employment outcomes. Of those 54 schools, 22 do not provide any employment information on their website whatsoever. The other 32 schools demonstrate a pattern of consumer-disoriented behavior.
• 51% of schools fail to indicate how many graduates actually responded to their survey. Response rates provide applicants with a way to gauge the usefulness of survey results, a sort of back-of-the-envelope margin of error. Without the rate, schools can advertise employment rates north of 95% without explaining that the true employment rate is unknown, and likely lower.
• Only 26% of law schools indicate how many graduates worked in legal jobs. 11% indicate how many were in full-time legal jobs. Just 1% indicate how many were in full-time, long-term legal jobs.
• 17% of schools indicate how many graduates were employed in full-time vs. part-time jobs. 10% indicate how many were employed in long-term vs. short-term jobs. 10% of schools report how many graduates were employed in school-funded jobs.
• 49% of schools provide at least some salary information, but the vast majority of those schools (78%) provide the information in ways that mislead the reader.

Taken together, these and other findings illustrate how law schools have been slow to react to calls for disclosure, with some schools conjuring ways to repackage employment data to maintain their images. Our findings play into a larger dialogue about law schools and their continued secrecy against a backdrop of stories about admissions data fraud, class action lawsuits, and ever-rising education costs. These findings raise a red flag as to whether schools are capable of making needed changes to the current, unsustainable law school model without being compelled to through government oversight or other external forces.

As you may suspect, such a sustained effort does not come easily, or cheaply. There are organization filing fees, web hosting expenses, the costs of travel, and all the other odds and ends overhead that come with any organization.

Law School Transparency has received some financial support, but most of its expenses are still paid out of the pockets of its staff. Without outside funding, LST’s efforts are hindered, not only by financial limitations, but also by the need to search out other paid work (and then to go do that work, instead of advancing education reform).

You can probably figure out where this is going: Law School Transparency needs your help. And by “help,” we mean money. We’re not trying to raise tens of millions of dollars for a construction project that will benefit the students of just one school. We’re seeking a far smaller sum, $15,000, for basic operation costs to keep us going as we seek grants. With it we hope to improve all law schools for the benefit of an entire generation of young lawyers.

While our most pressing need is for cash donations, there are several ways you can support Law School Transparency. We can accept in-kind donations, such as airline miles or professional services. We also ask that you contact your members of Congress to let them know the importance of LST and law school reform, and while you’re at it, feel free to talk to your professors and deans as well.

Last, but certainly not least, take a moment to think about what your fellow members of the legal profession are going through in this tough economy. Smile at opposing counsel, tell him his tie looks really great, ask him if he’s lost weight. And, when he says “Yes, I have actually lost a few pounds, thanks for noticing,” ask him to donate the money that used to be his potato chip fund to Law School Transparency.

Click to Donate to LST

To make an in-kind donation, or obtain more information about how you can help LST, please email .

Elephant in the Room – Concerns abound as the AALS conference panels largely ignore the looming law school crisis. Original article by Libby A. Nelson from Inside Higher Ed.

AALS hears words of caution from departing dean – Ex-New York Law School dean warns deans and professors that change is coming whether they like it or not. Original article by Karen Sloan from The National Law Journal.

ABA head has little sympathy for jobless lawyers – ABA president William Robinson shows everybody how out of touch he is. Original article by David Ingram from Reuters.

Crisis or Opportunity? – A brief description of an AALS conference workshop dedicated to the future of the legal profession and legal education. Original article by Libby A. Nelson from Inside Higher Ed.

What They See, What They Get – Admissions officers reflect on the ethics and realities of student recruitment. Original article by Libby A. Nelson from Inside Higher Ed.

Legal education under fire from critics – A good synopsis of the last year in legal education reform. Original article by Don J. DeBenedictis from the LA Daily Journal.

Law professors dismayed at ‘out of touch’ comments by ABA pres – Law professors react to ABA president William Robinson’s clueless comments about legal education. Original article by Moira Herbst and David Ingram from Reuters.

A prescription for law schools: Go back to the basics, return to ‘terra firma’ – Judge José Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit offers his thoughts on legal education reform, including job prospects transparency and curriculum changes. Original article by Karen Sloan from The National Law Journal.

[California] Bar considers practical experience requirement for would-be lawyers – State Bar of California creates a task force to explore whether to require more practical experience for bar admission. Original article by Don J. DeBenedictis from the LA Daily Journal.

Applying the alternative fee model to law school tuition – Attorney makes three suggestions to improve legal education. Original article by Ari L. Kaplan in The National Law Journal.