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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LST’s Press Release:

Mister Hart, here is a dime. Take it, call your mother, and tell her there is serious doubt about you ever becoming a lawyer.
- Kingsfield, The Paper Chase

The ABA has released Class of 2011 job outcome data for all domestic ABA-approved law schools. The data are far more granular than ever before. Law School Transparency has analyzed the data and made the school-specific data available on its website for easy comparison.

The ABA data shed considerable light on how poorly the 2011 graduates fared. We can now say with certainty that the employment picture is far worse than previously reported. Only 55.2% of all graduates were known to be employed in full-time, long-term legal jobs. A devastating 26.4% of all graduates were underemployed.

According to the ABA data from 195 law schools:

Full-time, Long-Term Legal Jobs:

• These jobs require bar passage or are judicial clerkships and are for at least 35 hours per week and have an expected duration of at least one year.
• The national full-time, long-term legal rate is 55.2%.
• At 73 law schools (37.1%), less than 50% of graduates had these legal jobs.
  • 30 schools (15.2%) had less than 40%
  • 10 schools (5.1%) had less than a 33%
• 89 schools (45.2%) exceeded the national rate of 55.2%.
  • 31 schools (15.7%) had more than 67%
  • 19 schools (9.6%) had more than 75%
  • 5 schools (2.5%) had more than 90%

Underemployed:

• We define a graduate as underemployed when he or she is “Unemployed – Seeking”, pursuing an additional advanced degree, in a non-professional job, or employed in a short-term or part-time job.
• The national underemployment rate is 26.4%.
• 180 schools (91.4%) reported a rate greater than 10%.
  • 144 schools (73.1%) had more than 20%
  • 109 schools (55.3%) had more than 25%
  • 57 schools (28.9%) had more than 33%
  • 20 schools (10.2%) had more than 40%

Large Firms (at least 101 attorneys):

• 10.7% of graduates were employed at large firms in full-time, long-term positions
  • Graduates seek these jobs in part because they’re the jobs that tend to pay the highest salaries.
• At only 45 schools (22.8%) were more than 10% in these jobs.
  • 20 schools (10.2%) had more than 20%
  • 15 schools (5.6%) had more than 33%
  • Only 3 schools were over 50% – Columbia, Northwestern, and Penn.

Law School Transparency’s executive director, Kyle McEntee, urged caution to students planning to enroll this fall. McEntee said, “Law school still costs way too much money compared to post-graduation employment outcomes. If you plan to debt-finance your education or use your hard-earned savings, seriously think twice about attending a law school without a steep discount. For the vast majority of prospective law students who have not received an extensive scholarship, it will make sense to wait for prices to drop.”

There has been some speculation that the class of 2011 may represent the bottom, though this view is grounded more in optimism than evidence. Rather, evidence points to a structural shift in legal employment, especially at the entry-level, that signals a new normal far below pre-recession levels. Technology, globalization, and law firm strategies are substantially changing our profession.

To view every ABA-approved law school’s profile, visit http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/.

To view comparison charts, visit http://www.lawschooltransparency.com/clearinghouse/?show=compare&sub=jobs

Established in 2009, Law School Transparency is a nonprofit legal education policy organization. Our mission is to improve consumer information and to usher in consumer-oriented reforms to the current law school model. We operate independently of any legal institutions, legal employers, or academic reports related to the legal market.

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.

On Saturday (3/17), the Council of the ABA Section of Legal Education, will hold an open session to discuss a variety of topics. (Agenda here.) Most importantly, the Council has an action item on Standard 509, also known as the ABA’s consumer information standard. This standard sets the baseline requirements and operating principles for law school disclosure of consumer information.

Relevant Materials:
Standard 509 Clean Copy
Standard 509 Redlined Version
Conditional Scholarship Data Worksheet
Placement Data Worksheet
Placement Data Worksheet (Questionnaire Committee)

We have submitted a memo for the Council’s consideration. In this memo, we urge the Council to adopt the proposed Standard 509 with several small changes. To view the memo, click here for a PDF or view the entire text below the fold. We expect the Council to pass the proposed Standard 509. We hope that it consider integrating some of the changes before the vote, and that the other recommendations receive due consideration when the Council finalizes the two charts and charts’ directions.

(more…)

• March Statement from LST to Council on Standard 509

The ABA filed a brief today in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Tennessee in response to a complaint filed by Lincoln Memorial University Duncan School of Law.

The lawsuit claims that the ABA violated antitrust laws. “What it says is that in a nutshell, we were denied due process because we met the standards promulgated by the ABA and we didn’t receive accreditation, so what we’re seeking is fair hearing,” said Sydney A. Beckman, vice president and dean of LMU’s law school. “It also alleges antitrust violations because it appears when you deny a school that met accreditation standards, that you’re try to limit the number of law schools.”

The response states that Duncan School of Law was not in “substantial compliance” with all of the section’s Standards for Approval of Law Schools, including Standard 203 (Strategic Planning and Assessment), Standards 303(a) and (c) and Interpretation 303-3 (Academic Standards and Achievements), and Standard 501(b) and Interpretation 501-3 (Admissions and Student Services). The response also suggests that Duncan School of Law has not exhausted its right to appeal the decision by the Council of the Section of Legal Education to deny provisional accreditation.

• ABA Motion in Opposition of a Temporary Restraining Order
• ABA Motion Appendix
• Section Consultant Askew's Declaration

View Karen Sloan's original article here. Posted by LST on December 31, 2011.

Excerpt:

[Top 10 Legal Education Stories]

1. PANTS ON FIRE
… [U.S. News rankings] pressure got the better of some administrators at Villanova University School of Law, who admitted in February to goosing the numbers reported to the American Bar Association and U.S. News for years. … [LSAC] now is considering whether to audit the figures law schools report, and the ABA is mulling tougher penalties for schools that lie.

2. SUE YOUR SCHOOL
Instead of asking alumni for money, maybe law schools should ask graduates to pledge not to sue them. 2011 will go down as the year law students got litigious — at least against their alma maters. … This could be the first sign of a litigation wave. The lawyers involved in the New York Law School and Cooley cases are looking for plaintiffs for class actions against another 15 schools.

3. U.S. SENATORS GIVE THE ABA THE STINKEYE
… A number of U.S. senators this year zeroed in on the American Bar Association’s oversight of law schools — or what they apparently see as a lack thereof. For months, senators including Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) fired off letters to the ABA expressing concern over the accuracy of the job information law schools release and requesting detailed information about student loan defaults, accreditation policies and more. The ABA insisted that it shares those concerns, but more often than not the senators were unsatisfied with its responses. Boxer and Coburn in October asked the U.S. Department of Education to compile a decade’s worth of law school data. Rumors have been swirling that the U.S. Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee will hold hearings on law schools next year. Stay tuned.

4. ANYBODY WANT TO GO TO LAW SCHOOL?
It was bound to happen. Applications to American Bar Association-accredited law schools declined by 10 percent in 2011 after increasing during each of the previous two years as recent college graduates sought to ride out the dismal job market in law school. …

5. SHOW ME THE DATA!
The movement to improve law school consumer information started when the legal job market dried up several years ago, but really hit its stride during 2011. Law School Transparency — a nonprofit founded by two Vanderbilt University Law School graduates — lobbied individual schools and the American Bar Association to improve the reporting of job and salary data, and saw results. …

8. THE GRAY LADY HAS SOMETHING TO SAY
Law school is expensive and some law graduates struggle to repay their loans. Not all law students will retain their merit-based scholarships. Law school curricula center on theory rather than practical skills. None of this was news in the legal world, but a series of front-page articles by David Segal of The New York Times brought long-standing critiques of legal education to a wider audience. This, in turn, prompted handwringing by law professors and administrators, who alternately acknowledged problems identified by the Times and dismissed the coverage as overly simplistic and negative. Legal academics were particularly galled by a Nov. 19 piece that painted them as ivory tower-dwelling chin strokers who neglect to teach their students how to practice law.

9. NO TENURE, NO LSAT
Slowly but surely, the American Bar Association is changing its process for accrediting law schools. A review committee discussed proposals including elimination of what many see as a venerable requirement that law schools protect tenure — an idea that raised the ire of many a law professor but that would give schools more flexibility to offer low-cost education. …

View Georgiana Vines's original article here. Posted by LST on December 29, 2011.

Excerpt:

The man for whom Lincoln Memorial University’s law school was named said Friday he believes a national economy that has left young lawyers unable to repay taxpayer-backed student loans played a part in the school being denied partial accreditation by the American Bar Association.

U.S. Rep. John J. Duncan Jr., R-Knoxville, said as far as he knew, “the law school did everything right (and) got top ratings on just about everything. They’re really a victim of the recession.”

Duncan said a lot of young lawyers around the country were being laid off and unable to repay student loans for law schools they attended. Debts can amount to tens of thousands of dollars.

“Sen. (Chuck) Grassley and Sen. (Barbara) Boxer came down really hard on that, demanding that the Department of Education and the American Bar Association do something to remedy the situation. Because of the timing, if that had not happened, they would have flown through with flying colors,” the congressman said.

Grassley is an Iowa Republican and Boxer a California Democrat. Grassley’s communications director, Jill Kozeny, said Friday the senator’s office has talked extensively with the ABA over defaulted student loans.

“Substantively, the issue is whether students get an accurate sense of their job prospects when signing onto law school debt. Even in the best economy, the ABA or law schools shouldn’t misrepresent job prospects and post-graduate employment rates,” Kozeny said in an email.

Grassley and the ABA are in discussions about the quality of ABA-accredited schools based on a Department of Education advisory committee report, Kozeny said.

LMU filed a federal lawsuit Thursday against the ABA, claiming antitrust violations. The lawsuit said the accreditation was denied as a means of limiting the number of law schools and therefore the number of lawyers practicing across the country. …

“They (council members) had their minds made up. It’s very unfair to students who have been going there (to LMU) for two years. There are almost 200 students. The ABA should have a different procedure in my opinion,” he said.

Related Stories:

• Law School Transparency: Breaking: ABA sued by Duncan School of Law
• Knoxville News Sentinel: LMU suing American Bar Association over law school accreditation
• LMU v. ABA Complaint

View Aaron Taylor's original article here. Posted by LST on December 22, 2011.

Excerpt:

There is [] a pervasive feeling that even though most schools have complied with reporting requirements, some have nonetheless failed to tell the whole story. Caveats were undisclosed. Explanations were unprovided. In short, law schools too often failed to adhere to the heightened standard of conduct they expect of students. …

So what can law schools do to regain the public’s trust and provide prospective students with the most useful data?

The ABA mandates are a step in the right direction, but a framework that borrows components of the Education Department’s “gainful employment” standards would be more useful in contextualizing the outcome data on which many people rely. … [T]he purpose of the framework would not be to set minimum benchmarks, but to provide better information—something law schools should embrace without compulsion.

A gainful employment framework in legal education would contextualize employment and salary data by measuring the extent to which graduates are able to actually pay what is likely their largest debt. The fundamental question the data would seek to answer is, “Are graduates not only working but also able to pay their student loans?” Using the benchmark prompts above, this question would be answered from both macro and micro perspectives. The first prompt would provide a big-picture view of the extent to which graduates are able to pay their loans. The latter two prompts would provide individual-level measures of loan indebtedness. The relative nature of the data would render it less sensitive to differences that may be misleading. For example, median salary differences may be rendered less significant if graduates from schools with lower medians have lower relative indebtedness or pay their student loans at higher rates. Schools could provide short-term and long-term views by aggregating data over different timeframes. …

The so-called crisis of confidence in legal education is not about law school fraud; it is about misinformed expectations. It is about students believing the law degree guarantees lucrative employment—and law schools doing little to temper those unduly optimistic assumptions. Law schools have a duty to ensure that their students know upfront both the potential rewards and possible risks of undertaking legal education. Principles of ethics and integrity require such forthrightness. Gainful employment data would help prospective students make more informed choices regarding legal education, and in the process help law schools regain the public trust.

LST's Take:

Two months ago, Aaron Taylor, a law professor at St. Louis University, published an irresponsible editorial in a prelaw magazine. In his article, Professor Taylor lamented the growing number of law school critics and flatly claimed that “Law school is still worth it.” His justifications were all either demonstrably false or incredibly misleading, much like the information many schools publish when recruiting new students. The editorial demonstrated one professor’s profound ability to bury his head in the sand. (In truth, there are signs that law school is not worth the price for many people.)

Professor Taylor said that “the facts belie the hype” when it comes to the national discussion over shady law school recruiting methods. His piece was designed to allay the fears of prospective law students. He actively encouraged them to attend law school, basing his argument on a handful of statistics, platitudes about the universal value of law degrees, and the privileged opportunity to debt-finance a chance at entering the legal profession. He wanted prospectives to know the time is right and the hype is wrong.

Part of Law School Transparency’s mission is to increase the amount and quality of consumer information so that those looking to invest in law school can make an informed decision. We take issue with unqualified–in both senses of the word–assertions that law school is worth it. Simply put, there is not enough information available to make a strong claim that “law school is still worth it.”

But it seems that Professor Taylor has finally begun to see things more clearly.

In his latest piece (excerpted above from The Lawyerist), he does an about-face and considers how we might devise a reporting standard that will indicate whether law school is worth it.

The suggestion is interesting and substantively getting somewhere. While the “gainful employment” term is strategically and politically problematic, the core of his basic proposal stems from prospective students’ need to have some idea of whether their decisions will significantly impair or improve their social and economic mobility. While Professor Taylor’s proposal is short on details, it is worth exploring further.

Related Stories:

• TaxProf Blog: Taylor: Why Law Schools Should Report 'Gainful Employment' Data (December 23, 2011)
• Nat'l Jurist: Why Law School Is Still Worth It (October 11, 2011)

Update:

Professor Taylor has responded (to Professor Caron, TaxProf) that his two pieces are consistent:

The assertion that my “gainful employment” proposal is in conflict with my previous defense of legal education is erroneous. Legal education remains one of the best educational investments. A range of data supports that assertion. Does that mean it is the best investment for everyone? No. But better information and heightened due diligence by prospective students on the front end can minimize their chances of feeling duped as law students on the back end. Gainful employment data is one way law schools could provide better information regarding the best educational investment. There is no about-face. The two articles are complementary.

The Knoxville News Sentinel is reporting that Lincoln Memorial University is suing the ABA in federal court. (View the complaint here.) Earlier this week, LMU’s law school, the John R. Duncan Jr. School of Law, was denied provisional accreditation by the ABA Section of Legal Education because it was not in substantial compliance with Standards 202, 303, and 501, including low admissions standards. The school has already received accreditation from the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools and the Tennessee Board of Law Examiners.

The lawsuit claims that the ABA violated antitrust laws. “What it says is that in a nutshell, we were denied due process because we met the standards promulgated by the ABA and we didn’t receive accreditation, so what we’re seeking is fair hearing,” said Sydney A. Beckman, vice president and dean of LMU’s law school. “It also alleges antitrust violations because it appears when you deny a school that met accreditation standards, that you’re try to limit the number of law schools.”

In the complaint, LMU observes that “”Defendant ABA’s actions also constitute an intentional misuse of its dominate market power as the gatekeeper for for accreditation of law schools and the benefits that accompany that status.” Blank Rome’s Michael Cioffi contributed to this complaint. He also worked on Cooley’s Sixth Circuit appeal for one of its branch campuses back in 2006.

Dean Beckman told the Knoxville NBC affiliate,”We regret having to take this action. We want to work with the ABA to improve legal education, not work against them or have them work against us.”

Whatever the result of this suit, it is clear that the pressure on the ABA will continue until the entire legal education system substantially changes.

Related:

• Above the Law: Duncan Law School Sues ABA for Antitrust Violation (December 22, 2011)
• Nat’l Law Journal: Spurned by the ABA, law school strikes back with antitrust suit (December 22, 2011)
• New York Times: New Law School Sues Bar Association (December 22, 2011)

• LMU v. ABA Complaint

View David Segal's original article here. Posted by LST on December 18, 2011.

Excerpt:

[The Duncan School of Law] needs the seal of approval of the American Bar Association, the government-anointed regulator of law schools.

That means complying with a long list of standards that shape the composition of the faculty, the library and dozens of other particulars. The basic blueprint was established by elite institutions more than a century ago, and according to critics, it all but prohibits the law-school equivalent of the Honda Civic — a low-cost model that delivers.

Instead, virtually every one of the country’s 200 A.B.A.-accredited schools, from the lowliest to the most prestigious, has to build a Cadillac, or at least come close. Duncan’s library costs $750,000 a year to maintain — a bargain when compared with competitors. …

Duncan’s largest single cost is its faculty, which, as with most A.B.A.-accredited law schools, consumes about half its total budget. This is the only expense that Mr. Beckman declines to detail, other than to say that he has three adjuncts and 16 full-time professors. Adjuncts are basically part-timers and far less expensive. But the A.B.A. prohibits an adjuncts-only faculty by requiring that full-time faculty teach a major portion of the entire curriculum. The standards don’t come right out and state that tenure must be offered, but that is strongly implied. It’s also implied that these professors get time to produce scholarship, such as law review articles. This is expensive. It obligates schools to give researching professors lower teaching loads and hire yet more instructors to cover all the classes that students need.

LST's Take:

The latest piece in David Segal’s series on U.S. law school problems identifies the enormous effect that some of the ABA Standards, especially those that affect faculty composition, have on the cost of providing legal education. The dean of the new Duncan School of Law claims that he could charge substantially less (by half or two-thirds) if it were not for the standards. This is not the first time we’ve heard a dean clamor about how expensive the accreditation standards are; in fact, the dean of another new Tennessee law school, Belmont University College of Law, made a similar claim back in the summer of 2010.

Knowing this, we recently advised the ABA Section of Legal Education’s standards review committee to “create a subcommittee to review regulatory barriers preventing law schools from adapting low-cost models.” To date, neither the committee nor the section have not done so.

The profession needs radical change to the law school cost structure. If the answers do not come quickly from legal educators, such as those involved in the Section of Legal Education, the result will be that educators end up forfeiting their right to control the changes. And if the answers have to come from elsewhere, unbreaking the broken law school model will be as painful as it is necessary.

Related Stories:

• Truth on the Market: The NYT on why law school is expensive (December 18, 2011)
• Nat'l Law Journal: Duncan School of Law denied accreditation (December 20, 2011)
• Volokh Conspiracy: The New York Times on ABA Accreditation of Law Schools (December 19, 2011)
• AmLaw Daily: ABA Regulations Don't Cause Tuition Increases, Law Schools Do (December 22, 2011)