Update: We were alerted that Indiana–Bloomington had made its NALP report available online prior to this story’s publication. We’ve made this correction throughout this story.

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

The Law Offices of David Anziska, together with Strauss Law PLLC and six other law firms, publicly announced moments ago that they have filed complaints against 12 more law schools. To date, 15 of the country’s 197 ABA-approved law schools are facing class action suits. (Thomas Jefferson, New York Law School, and Thomas Cooley have already been sued, with the first lawsuit already in discovery.)

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

View the press release after the jump »»

We’ve been keeping tabs on the three pending lawsuits against ABA-approved law schools over fraudulent presentation of employment statistics. These cases set the stage for additional class actions against the other 194 ABA-approved law schools, given that the allegedly misleading actions have been the industry norm for quite some time.

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.

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.

Related Stories:

• Wall Street Journal: First Thing We Do, Let's Kill All the Law Schools (January 17, 2012)
• Word on the Streeterville: Wall Street Journal Post on “Killing all the Law Schools”: A Reply (January 17, 2012) (a post by Northwestern Law's dean, Dan Rodriguez)

Today, we’re releasing a new feature on our website. The Transparency Index is an index of every ABA-approved law school website. It measures how transparent law schools are on their websites about their post-graduation outcomes for the class of 2010. From January 1, 2012 to January 3, 2012, the LST team analyzed and documented every site using 19 criteria chosen after contemplating what matters to a prospective law student looking to invest three years and a lot of money in a professional degree. The results from this period are LST’s Winter 2012 Transparency Index.

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.

• Winter 2012 Index Report
• Winter 2012 Index Raw Data
• Index Criteria

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.

With the law school crisis gaining more attention from both the legal media and mainstream news outlets, Law School Transparency is increasingly recognized as a champion of substantive reform. But did you know that LST’s founders got their start in early 2008, before the recession took its toll on the legal job market? That’s right, for nearly four years Kyle McEntee and Patrick Lynch have been working to improve the legal education system, for students, for schools, and for the public at large. Not out of bitterness or buyer’s remorse, but because they saw a problem that needed to be fixed.

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 .

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.

LST’s weekly roundup of legal education reform stories and blog posts

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.

View Ari L. Kaplan's original article here. Posted by LST on January 13, 2012.

Excerpt:

The future of financing a law degree is almost here.

At the Association of American Law Schools annual conference earlier this month, former New York Law School Dean Richard Matasar encouraged audience members to consider various options for transforming legal education.

And, two months ago, Yale Law School professors Akhil Reed Amar and Ian Ayresa published an essay called “Paying Students To Quit Law School,” and initiated an interesting conversation about costs. They suggested that schools refund underperforming students half of their first-year tuition to leave and compared their proposition to the $3,000 offer the successful online shoe retailer Zappos makes to new hires, who may want to quit after completing the company’s training program. …

2012 can be the year to implement a positive shift in the logistics of legal education. The legal academic community has jump-started this discussion by beginning to implement changes to the curriculum, practical training initiatives, and greater transparency in reporting employment statistics.

The time has come to talk more openly about the cost of a legal education and I don’t mean cheaper, I mean different. My suggestions vary from those offered by professors Amar and Ayresa because they are not driven by performance, where schools persuade underperformers to leave, but rather by student preference, where those who find they lack the passion to continue have a realistic choice to walk another road. …

[1] Instead of starting the shift by making law school cheaper, consider restructuring the payment schedule. As the first year seems to be the most commoditized of the three years, with little differentiation among courses and teaching styles, perhaps schools can assign it a lower value. The total cost of a degree would remain the same (for now), but it would give students the option to leave early without an oppressive debt burden. There would be no refund credits necessary.

If, for example and the sake of simplicity, the tuition over three years is $100,000, charge $5,000 per semester in the first year and offer a paralegal certificate the same way that admitted attorneys in some states can automatically become notaries public or licensed real estate brokers. Then charge $22,500 per semester for the following two years. …

[2] Proactively provide students with counseling about whether they should continue with their legal education. Keeping uninspired students may lead to dissatisfied alumni, which is a loss for schools in the long term. Remove the stigma about quitting in favor of alternatives. Have your remarkably creative career services team continue to expand the pool of options for students. Instead of encouraging students to avoid failure, motivate them to seek out their greatest potential for success. That shift could transform the entire profession.

[3] In addition to tuition modifications, we should consider strategies for eliminating some of the ancillary costs associated with the first year as well. For instance, digital publishers must be able to produce fairly standardized casebooks that are supported by ads from bar review companies, research services, local restaurants, and other organizations interested in reaching law students.

Instead of prohibitively expensive print volumes, create versions for the kindle or iPad, and offer premium add-ons like videos from professors similar to those BarBri provided when I studied for the bar in 1997. Perhaps it will include interactive outlines and digital flash cards like those made popular by visionary author Kimm Walton. In fact, there are rumors that Apple is hosting an event in late January to address this very evolution of the textbook market.

This is an extraordinary watershed moment that calls for collective action. Law schools, law firms, legal departments, and even industry analysts, are searching for ways to realign costs with value. Together we can publicize positive proposals and share them with those leaders who can help bring them to fruition.

View Don J. DeBenedictis's original article here. Posted by LST on January 12, 2012.

Excerpt:

The State Bar is beginning to explore a radical change to what it takes to become a lawyer in California: requiring would-be attorneys to receive practical training with real clients before they can be licensed.

“The basic concept is that before they begin serving clients, lawyers ought to have some real-world experience,” State Bar President Jon Streeter said Tuesday.

Acting during its annual planning meeting Friday and Saturday, the bar Board of Trustees agreed to create a broadly based task force to “explore adding a pre-admission practical skills requirement … to the requirements for admission to the bar.” …

Streeter said the proposed admissions requirement “is still a concept in its infancy.” The ideas up for consideration include allowing law school clinical courses to meet all or part of the requirement, he said, or having “the equivalent of a legal residency” similar to new doctors.

Jeanine English, a nonlawyer member of the board, said another approach might be the method used in accounting. People who have passed the CPA exam work two to four years for a fully licensed certified public accountant, who closely supervises their work.

Legal educators and other experts seemed cautiously intrigued by the general idea.

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” said Drucilla Stender Ramey, dean of Golden Gate University School of Law and the former longtime director of the Bar Association of San Francisco. “My sense is law firms would welcome it.” …

Berkeley Law School clinical Professor Charles D. Weisselberg said cutting law school down to two years to devote the third year to practice experience would run afoul of American Bar Association accreditation standards. But adding a fourth year would put too great a burden on students.

Law school critic and blogger Kyle P. McEntee noted that California law students already pay $40,000 or $50,000 a year in tuition.

McEntee, founder and executive director of the nonprofit group Law School Transparency, said he believes a practice requirement might be a good idea, but he isn’t sure “whether it’s a Band-Aid … or a bigger solution” to the problems of legal education.

He said he supports an idea posted in a blog late last month by University of Texas law professor Matthew Spitzer, a former dean of USC Gould School of Law, that would allow law students or graduates to earn money while obtaining practical experience.

Spitzer proposed “law schools having a law firm (just as medical schools have hospitals) where students start to learn how to practice under lawyer-professors, who both provide training and who charge clients for their services.”

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

Excerpt:

Judge José Cabranes of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2d Circuit offered a three-part remedy for what ails the U.S. legal academy before a packed ballroom of legal educators who gathers in Washington for the Association of American Law Schools annual meeting.

Cabranes, like others before him, noted that law schools are in “something of a crisis,” given the skyrocketing cost of tuition, ever-higher graduate debts and a growing feeling that legal scholarship is of little use to the bench or practitioners. These themes emerged as the hottest topic of discussion during the four-day conference, which drew about 3,000 legal educators.

“For years, [the rising cost of tuition and growing debt loads] have raised eyebrows. Now, they raise blood pressure,” Cabranes said on Jan. 6. “These developments literally threaten the enterprise of legal education.”

To get back on track, law schools should shift their curricula back to core courses and away from the interdisciplinary classes that have grown in popularity, he said; they should introduce a two-year core law program followed by a yearlong apprenticeship, and increase transparency regarding costs, job prospects and financial aid information. …

Cabranes lamented the move by law schools toward specialized, often interdisciplinary courses that can displace “black-letter” law courses …

Similarly, law schools should give students the option of completing their classroom work in two years, then spend a third year apprenticing with practicing attorneys or working full-time in law school clinics while earning modest stipends, he said. That would give students real-world experience and some income rather than requiring them to pay a third year of tuition. …

Cabranes himself was a law professor at Rutgers University before becoming the general counsel at Yale University and later being appointed to the bench.

View Moira Herbst and David Ingram's original article here. Posted by LST on January 10, 2012.

Excerpt:

The American Bar Association president’s suggestion that unemployed law-school graduates have no one to blame for their predicament but themselves elicited a range of reactions from law professors and administrators at a major law-school conference, with many expressing dismay at what they called insensitive and misguided remarks. …

Some at the conference of the Association of American Law Schools — the largest annual gathering of law professors — called the comments tactless.

“A lack of concern for law graduates — or anyone, for that matter — looking for a job in this economy smacks of questionable character,” said Robert Ashford, a professor at Syracuse University College of Law who founded the AALS’s Section on Socio-Economics, which focuses on economic issues in the legal profession and in legal education.

Others said Robinson was unfairly picking on students.

“Robinson focuses on the individuals who incurred debt rather than the institutions that induced them to incur that debt,” said Kathleen Clark, a professor of law at Washington University in St. Louis. “Individuals can be held responsible for their decisions, but we should also examine the responsibility of institutions that have benefited from those individuals’ ill-advised decisions.”

‘OUT OF TOUCH’

Steven Hobbs, a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, was critical of Robinson’s comment that he sold his car to help pay for law school at the University of Kentucky, from which he graduated in 1971. …

“[Robinson] is out of touch in the sense of understanding the current situation and how to address it,” Hobbs said.

But not all disagreed with Robinson’s remarks.

“I think [Robinson] is absolutely right,” said Paul R. Baier, a law professor at Louisiana State University. “The dire economy is obvious. In law we have a doctrine: You are assumed to know the law. I’d add to that and say you must know the economy.”

Robinson did not respond to email or phone messages left Friday afternoon. An ABA spokeswoman said he was not available for comment, but said, “We are very concerned about the way William Robinson’s quotes were used out of context by Reuters.” …

David Logan, dean of Roger Williams University School of Law, who did not attend the conference, said he agreed with Robinson that “law students are adults who should be expected to make reasonable decisions about their future.” But, he said, there remains “a broad consensus about the need for more transparency about costs and outcomes than has been required by the ABA up to this point.”

View Don J. DeBenedictis's original article here. Posted by LST on January 10, 2012.

Excerpt:

Late last summer, Dean Bryant G. Garth asked Southwestern University School of Law’s newest entering class members if they had a friend or relative share a New York Times article exposing the financial risks of going to law school.

“Every person raised their hand,” Garth recalled.

The front-page story last January focused national attention on a rising chorus of complaints by law students that schools had suckered them into taking on huge debt with false promises of six-figure salaries immediately upon graduation.

Those complaints went on last year to spark several lawsuits, new rules from the American Bar Association’s accreditation arm and demands from U.S. senators for answers. …

“When the market for lawyers is good … there’s less stress in legal education,” said Dean Erwin Chemerinsky of the UCI School of Law. “At a time when the market is bad, there’s more stress in legal education.”

But others say the source of the problems lies deeper.

“I think that law students and the public are starting to take a good, hard look at legal education in this country for the better,” said Brian A. Procel of Miller Barondess LLP, who is suing San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law under consumer protection laws. “They’re just starting to realize this industry is not being run correctly.”

Vanderbilt law graduate and blogger Kyle P. McEntee said his nonprofit, called “Law School Transparency,” is exploring a number of alternative models, such as having more classes taught by part-time adjunct professors – practicing lawyers – who would command lower salaries.

Underlying all the complaints is concern over the accuracy of schools’ employment data.

Many schools report that 80 percent to 90 percent of graduates have jobs nine months after graduation, earning a median salary of $160,000. But those numbers can be misleading. …

And as McEntee and his colleagues have shown, only a small percentage of a school’s graduates may actually earn $160,000. The figure qualifies as the statistical median because only the graduates with good jobs tend to report their pay to their schools – a fact [Susan Westerberg Prager, the former UCLA law dean who now heads the Association of American Law Schools], said means employment data is “inherently flawed.” …

The uproar also prompted California Sen. Barbara Boxer and two of her Republican colleagues to write letters to the ABA and the Department of Education demanding improvements.

In response to the transparency movement, U.S. News & World Report took steps in 2011 to post greater detail about law graduates’ employment.

The ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar, which accredits law schools, is beginning to collect detailed annual graduate employment data directly from schools rather than second-hand from the National Association for Law Placement.

But even that effort generated controversy in the fall when the ABA said it would drop questions for the class of 2010 about how many graduates had jobs requiring bar admission or preferring a law degree. The committee said it would bring back the questions for the class of 2011 but needed more time to thrash out the definition of “preferred.” …

Critics have latched onto job data because of the high cost of legal education. At Thomas Jefferson, tuition is about $40,000 a year, and the average graduate’s debt is $135,000. Nationally, law graduates’ average debt load is about $100,000, and some new lawyers carry $200,000.

“That’s too much to pay for an education,” McEntee said. …

All of the bad news has begun to trickle down to potential students. …

“I actually think one of the tragedies of this is the number of people who are deciding not to go to law school now,” the AALS chief said. “I happen to believe that legal education is a great, broad education … in which you develop skills that are useful in many, many other realms.”

LST's Take:

This is a good synopsis of the last year in legal education. We expect scrutiny to be just as critical and widespread in 2012.

View Libby A. Nelson's original article here. Posted by LST on January 09, 2012.

Excerpt:

As scrutiny of law schools has increased over the past year, with students bearing increasing loan debt and having more difficulty finding jobs to pay it off, law school deans and professors have come in for criticism. But on the front lines of the battle, dealing with sometimes skeptical prospective students, has been another group: admissions officers.

In a session at the Association of American Law Schools’ conference here Friday, admissions officers spoke of their balancing act: recruiting students without promising more than law school can provide.

“You can run the risk of being a little overzealous in your sales techniques,” said Alicia Cramer, assistant dean of admissions at the South Texas College of Law. …

Not surprisingly, Cramer and her fellow panelists said that admissions offices should be as transparent as possible with prospective students, including disclosing job placement statistics that are as detailed as possible. But they also suggested a few ways to deflect the rising concern, such as emphasizing students’ own responsibilities in finding a job. And when prospective students set their hearts on a certain law school, panelists said, they sometimes hear what they want to hear. …

“We really aren’t doing ourselves, nor are we doing the applicants, a service if we don’t share the information with them,” [Tracy] Simmons [of Chapman University School of Law] said. …

Even with increased transparency, they said, some students will never be satisfied.