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

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Excerpt:

Listen to the mp3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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View 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.”

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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View David Ingram's original article here. Posted by LST on January 06, 2012.

Excerpt:

Young lawyers with huge educational debts and no jobs in a depressed U.S. legal market should have known what they were getting into, the president of the American Bar Association [William Robinson] said on Wednesday. …

“It’s inconceivable to me that someone with a college education, or a graduate-level education, would not know before deciding to go to law school that the economy has declined over the last several years and that the job market out there is not as opportune as it might have been five, six, seven, eight years ago,” he said.

College graduates are capable of making “an independent decision and a free choice” to go to law school, he said. …

Critics including two U.S. senators have asked whether the bar association does enough to police law schools, a handful of which face allegations that they inflated statistics about post-graduation employment in order to attract more students.

Robinson said the number of schools in question is “no more than four” out of 200 with ABA accreditation, and he said few lawmakers have expressed interest in the subject. “It hasn’t been a groundswell of comment from Congress,” he said.

Stories in The New York Times and elsewhere have scrutinized the accreditation process, suggesting some ABA standards, such as encouraging tenure, unnecessarily raise law school costs.

Robinson called such suggestions unfounded.

“None of the studies show that the ABA rules of certification are what’s responsible for the cost of legal education,” he said. Other factors, such as competition for professors, are driving the increase in cost, he said. …

Robinson recalled his own experience paying for law school at the University of Kentucky, where he got a degree in 1971.

“When I was going to law school, and I sold my Corvair to make first-semester tuition and books for $330, a sizeable portion of the faculty had tenure. They had tenure then and they have tenure now,” he said.

There are still inexpensive options outside the elite law schools, he said. According to ABA statistics, 68 ABA-accredited law schools have annual tuition at or below $25,000.

Among elite schools that charge double that, the ABA is powerless to hold down costs, he said.

“I should take the lead in telling these schools that they should reduce their tuition to $25,000 a year? No, I don’t think I should do that. I don’t think it would be purposeful. I don’t think it would be meaningful. I don’t think it would accomplish anything for me to do that,” Robinson said.

He said “it’s a complex question as to whether the cost is higher than it should be or is justified.”

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LST's Take:

Transcript from William Robinson’s August 2011 video on law school transparency:

In America, we have absolutely the best system of legal education anywhere in the world. We also have some of the best students in the world. And we have in this country a wonderful opportunity to practice law in a free democracy.

In the face of current economic realities, the ABA supports making financial and job information complete and transparent for students and the public. We want to assure, in working closely with our deans and dedicated faculty members, that these students get all of the needed information to make informed decisions.

We want them to be comfortable that when they take on debt they understand the terms and the dimensions and the responsibilities that go along with that debt.

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View Libby A. Nelson's original article here. Posted by LST on January 05, 2012.

Excerpt:

When the Association of American Law Schools gathers in Washington today for a three-day conference, many big and timely issues will be up for discussion. Presentations will address the financial crisis, the mortgage crisis, the legal fallout of the BP oil spill and, perhaps inevitably, Occupy Wall Street.

But relatively few sessions address a crisis making headlines that falls much closer to home for faculty and administrators from the association’s more than 160 member schools: the increasingly prominent questions about transparency, job placement rates and “value” in American legal education, and the attendant concern that law schools could be next (after the “vocational” and for-profit programs subject to the U.S. government’s new “gainful employment” rules) in line for federal scrutiny and regulation. …

Still, few presentations appear to address a central, rising concern in the past year: the amount of debt that law school students accumulate, and their difficulty finding jobs as lawyers to help them pay it off. Legal hiring has contracted during the recession, but the number of students attending law school has not diminished. The central complaint has been that law schools provide insufficient or even misleading data on students’ employment outcomes, failing to separate full-time and part-time work or not taking into account whether graduates are using their degrees. …

Among observers, there are concerns that this could lead to “gainful employment” rules for law schools. Two senators, Barbara Boxer, a California Democrat, and Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, have requested information on law school data. The next step could be hearings, such as those held in the Education Committee on for-profit education.

But few sessions at the law school conference reflect this concern. In descriptions that run for pages, none mention student debt or employment outcomes. Only a very few address the changes in legal education, focusing instead on changes in the profession and long-term challenges for law schools (such as those related to alumni giving).

“It really makes you wonder how serious they are, how introspective they’re actually being,” said Kyle McEntee, the executive director of Law School Transparency, a new nonprofit group that urges law schools to release better figures on job placement and other student outcomes.

Those sessions that do focus on changing law schools seem to be “tinkering,” McEntee said. “The one critical question is how can we reduce the cost of educating lawyers.” …

[Susan Westerberg] Prager and Linda Jellum, the association’s associate director, also said the conference will take a broader view of the issues than just the questions surrounding transparency and job placement.

“We’re looking at our profession from a much longer-term perspective and how are we going to best equip our students, and that involves a number of various things,” Jellum said. “We’re interested, but we don’t see it in such a narrow aspect.”

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LST's Take:

Neither do we, Ms. Prager. The lack of law school transparency is indicative of great problems, and these problems will be impossible to ignore much longer.

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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. …

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