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Progress

New: Read LST's 2025 Vision report, which outlines plans and proposals to help law schools be more accessible, affordable, and innovative.

A Way Forward

We can talk endlessly about who or what is to blame for the exorbitant cost of law school, but it's far more productive to focus on changing what needs to change. This initiative does just that by confronting the structural barriers that hold schools back. We envision lower tuition, less financially-stressed graduates, and a more diverse profession. On this page, you can read a bit about how we hope to get there.

Much of our focus is on a de facto regulator of law schools, U.S. News & World Report—a ranking that does not consider how it impacts the modern and future law school. The incentives it creates and hierarchy it reinforces complicate even the most basic reform conversations within law schools. Decision-makers need new systems of measurement that produce better incentives, yet still offer consumers valuable information as they decide where to attend law school. We also plan to also continue to work with the actual regulator, the ABA Section of Legal Education & Admissions to the Bar, on how it can better nurture innovation and help schools responsibly discharge their duties to our profession and those we serve. Regulatory change can affect the cost of joining the legal profession in big and small ways.

We don't quite know what the future holds for law schools. Who will they educate? How? When? What we do know that we are not satisfied with the current path. We can diverge, however, if people throughout our profession work together. We need structural change to achieve more accessible, affordable, and innovative law schools.

Primary Contacts

Kyle McEntee
Co-Founder, Law School Transparency
[email protected]

Kyle Fry
Assistant General Counsel, Kent Corporation
Iowa State Bar Association
[email protected]

Summary Materials

Project Summaries
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Partnerships

Together with the Iowa State Bar Association Young Lawyers Division and others concerned about the future of legal education, Law School Transparency is leading the Blue Sky Initiative. Our financial partners include the Iowa State Bar Association, the Iowa State Bar Assication Young Lawyers Division, the Stanford Center on the Legal Profession, the Nebraska State Bar Association Young Lawyers Section, JD Advising, the ABA Young Lawyers Division, and individuals.

Track our Work

In Progress, March 2020 to February 2023. Revised ABA Standards

LST will work with the ABA Section of Legal Education to improve the accreditation standards according to three themes:

  1. Fewer Limits on Innovation: remove barriers to help schools meet societal needs
  2. More Consumer Protection: thoughtful accreditation enhancements to ensure the seal of ABA approval continues to mean something to the public
  3. More Transparency: more data to serve as the foundation for reform and as an impetus for change

Specific plans and proposals related to these themes are available in LST's 2025 Vision.

September 2021: Unified LST Tools/Brands

We fully integrated all of our prelaw tools into a single website. This furthers our goal of increaseing access to and usage of high-quality information for prelaw students and their advisors. This will help us continue to serve diverse and low-income students who want to go to law school navigate the admissions process, make informed choices about where to attend and how much to pay, and establish skills and knowledge that will help them enter the legal profession upon graduation.

June - August 2021: ABA Commits to More Diversity Data

The Council for the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar voted to track the total number of students receiving a tuition discount at each ABA-accredited law school by race and gender. This decision builds upon the council’s decision earlier this summer to track borrowing rates by race and gender. In practice, this will allow consumers, the public, and researchers to identify law schools where long-marginalized groups borrow or pay full price in greater numbers. Read more.

December 2020: The New LST Reports

Updated the current, market-leading tools for prospective law students and released a new professional development and student management platform for prelaw advisors. Together, these tools increase access to and usage of high-quality information for prelaw students. In particular, the new resources help diverse and low-income students who want to go to law school navigate the admissions process, make informed choices about where to attend and how much to pay, and establish skills and knowledge that will help them enter the legal profession upon graduation.

March 2020: LST's 2025 Vision: A Modern Blueprint for Change

Reports sometimes just sit on shelves. Blueprints signal something ambitious and yet-to-be accomplished. This initiative is a collection of projects that fit into a bigger picture. This report outlines that bigger picture and highlights how we will bring about significant change in legal education.

Coming Soon, Fall 2020: Increase Voluntary Transparency

Goal: Increase the percentage of law schools that publish their annual NALP Report to 75%.

Progress: For 2009 graduates, no law schools published a NALP Report. Since that time, LST has encouraged schools to publish their individual reports, which contain valuable employment data related to salaries, job offer timing, job offer source, location, and more. These reports help prospective law students make more informed choices about whether and where to go to law school. Since 2012, about 60% of law schools publish their NALP Reports. In 2020, we will activate young lawyers throughout the country; they will augment LST's efforts to increase voluntary transparency by the sizable minority of schools still keeping prospective students in the dark.

August 2019: Conference Kick-Off for the Blue Sky Initiative (now "LST's 2025 Vision")

We hosted a conference within a conference at the ABA Annual Meeting in San Francisco in partnership with the ABA Young Lawyers Division and Iowa Young Lawyers Division, Uncomfortable Conversations About Legal Education—Student Debt, Diversity, and More.

Law schools face an unrelenting system of incentives that make lowering prices, equitable access, and curricular innovation extremely difficult. This half-day program examined how to cause positive change in legal education. It began with a deans panel on obstacles to lowering costs. It continued with lightning talks on open source learning, inequitable pricing, the federal loan program, and income share agreements. Next was a session on U.S. News, the elephant in the room. It ended with a panel on how technology can (and can't) affect costs.

Agenda
Project Packet
June 2019: Publish Data Proposals in Florida International Law Review

Kyle McEntee published More Transparency, Please. in the FIU Law Review. This piece further fleshed out the data policy proposals from the 2018 report, which was endorsed by a variety of bar organizations.

November 2018: Propose Changes to ABA Data Policy to Advance Law School Access and Affordability

Goal: Increase the availability of school-level data related to tuition, debt, and the potential disparate impact of law school pricing strategies on women and people of color.

Progress: We have presented the proposals to key parties at the ABA Section of Legal Education, and received warm reception. Through the rest of 2019 and early 2020, we will work with the Section to implement the proposals.

July 2018: Blue Sky Focus Groups and Interviews

We began to outline our next steps towards our goals through conversations with law school deans, administrators, and faculty; current and former regulators; young and seasoned lawyers; people at legal education nonprofits; and even people outside of the legal profession. We asked them:

Question Prompt: What changes (at law schools, regulators, legislatures, NGOs, etc.) could reduce the cost of legal education? Regardless of challenges or hurdles, consider any changes that could, immediately or over time, bring the cost of legal education down any amount. Once we have a list of ideas, we will analyze them and think through feasibility and effectiveness.

May 2018: Young Lawyer Representation in Law School Accreditation

Goal: Involve multiple young lawyers in the legal education accreditation process through representation on the Council.

Progress: Partially achieved. The Council added one young lawyer for a three-year term beginning in August 2018. Others were nominated but not added. In part, a need exists to create/nurture tomorrow's transformative legal thinkers, which we hope to fulfill through a young lawyer pipeline program. We must ensure a consistent pipeline of young, qualified legal thinkers who are ready to engage in the future of the legal profession

February 2018 Report

LST and the Iowa Young Lawyers published A Way Forward: Transparency in 2018, a report that explores ongoing problems in legal education. The report makes several targeted recommendations for the ABA related to expanding both young lawyer representation in the accreditation process and data transparency, which would shed light on law student debt, inequitable pricing practices, and lasting inequality. The goal is for the increased transparency to help the public and leaders to confront difficult realities, whether high prices, burdensome debt, low bar passage rates, or unfulfilled diversity promises.

Official Endorsements/Support of 2018 Report
  • Iowa State Bar Association Young Lawyers Division
  • Nebraska State Bar Association Young Lawyers Section
  • Florida State Bar Association Young Lawyers Division
  • New Jersey State Bar Association Young Lawyers Division
  • Virgin Islands Bar Association Young Lawyers Division
  • Illinois State Bar Association Young Lawyers Division
  • South Carolina State Bar Young Lawyers Division
  • Washington State Bar Association Young Lawyers Committee
  • ABA Law Student Division
  • ABA Young Lawyers Division
  • Iowa State Bar Association