The National Law Journal's Law School Review

Wrapping Things Up

Karen Sloan here from The National Law Journal. I just wanted to thank the contributors, commenters and readers of this forum. This past week or so of discussion has been a helpful roadmap to the challenges facing legal education and has also offered some potential solutions. You can read a condensed version of this forum here.

We did not concieve of this forum as an ongoing project, but The National Law Journal will continue to cover the evolution of law schools. Thanks again for reading.

-Karen Sloan

Law Students Who Do Not Become Lawyers--Legal Educators in Denial

Michael Olivas, the President of AALS, responded to my post showing how law schools benefit from the federal loan program by reiterating a claim often made by legal educators: You can do great things with a legal education even if you don't become a lawyer. 

Legal educators who make this claim never back it up with any concrete support.  It's an article of faith that getting a law degree must be good--no matter what it costs or how much debt a student takes on to get it. 

Olivas fails to mention that what my post showed (based upon data provided by Thomas Jefferson) is that graduates who got jobs as lawyers earned the highest pay of graduates of the class of 2010 at Thomas Jefferson, and even the graduates who landed lawyer jobs did not earn enough to pay off the average debt of the class.  The graduates who did not land jobs as lawyers--two thirds of the class--were undoubtedly worse off.

Consequently, while the many graduates who did not land jobs as lawyers may have benefitted in some way from their law degree (as Olivas claims), most did not benefit financially.  More to the point, almost all of the graduates with the average debt who did not land jobs as lawyers are in dire economic straits.  What good are all these abstract benefits of a law degree to graduates if they have graduated to decades of financial hardship?

What basis does President Olivas have to sanguinely assert that a law degree is still worth it for all those graduates--two thirds of the class-!-who did not get jobs as lawyers?  A good number of them don't have any job at all.  

It is truly unfortunate that legal educators with leading positions (President of AALS, the Chair of ABA Section on Legal Education O'Brien) continue to deny the severity of the situation by invoking old platitudes while making assertions without providing any factual support.

Brian Z. Tamanaha

Gauging The Value of a Law Degree

Professor Tamanaha writes: "Thus, only about one third of graduates actually ended up as lawyers (nine months after graduation), and most of the graduates that landed lawyer jobs did not earn enough to manage the average debt of the class." Kyle McEntee writes "how can Professor Olivas claim that graduates are well trained for a variety of roles, despite the increasing reticence of clients to pay for junior associates?" immediately following Dean O'Brien's post. People would not often confuse Dean O'Brien and me, as he is the good looking one. But I would have said that--as I believe that the worst of all worlds would be to engineer a project for evaluating and measuring placement by narrowly construing what constitutes a lawyer's work. It might be that having gone to law school in DC skewed my perception of this issue, as many lawyers undertake many different kinds of work in the city (and, of course, in every city). But I do not believe that working in a law firm or going to court is the sole measure of lawyers or the only appropriate metric for job placement. In fact, doing so would be a strategic error, especially now when the field is wide open and we are in flux about who will do the measuring and when they will do it.
 
Like many others, I have an idea of what it is that our graduates can do, but I do not know how to measure them doing it. At one end, ginning up a makeshift job or a law school hiring its own recent grads to game the system is wrong, and such temporary positions should not count. But on the continuum to the stereotypical associate's position at the other end, such as those apparently envisioned by the bloggers I cited, and there are many--perhaps most--job descriptions in between that properly count, and that our graduates should consider and take as evidence that the system works.  I only caution that we not make the perfect the enemy of the good. Of course, schools should not lie about their data. Of course there should be increased student-consumer awareness of how well schools do, on these and other dimensions. And, of course, we should have comparable and reliable data so that school output measures are accurate and truthful. But let's not kid ourselves--people who graduate from law school can do many things, and do them better than can non-law-trained employees.  At the least, the data gathering and evaluation efforts should do no harm, and should not create more havoc than is currently the case.
 
—Michael A. Olivas

Love and Character

I love lawyers, law students, and my colleagues in the legal academy.  I participated in this forum because I thought it would be an effective way to protect the objects of my affection.  My goal was to embolden my colleagues, within the context of faculty meetings or other forums of faculty governance, to squarely address structural change and hard choices affecting their institutions.  And if these issues have already been raised (and they have at dozens of schools), to more vigorously push for a plan of action until the school is safely out of danger.

The problems affecting legal educaton these days are overwhelmingly structural in nature; they have been buildng for decades.  So we miss the mark when we place the blame on failings of character.  That said, a strong showing of character is the only way--the only way--we are going to solve these problems. The single most important thing we can do right now is to set aside our own fears and agendas and focus singlemindedly on the long term interests of students and the profession as a whole.  If we do that, the fate of law professors will more than take care of itself.

We take action to protect the people and institutions we love.  In retrospect, my intent this week was to engage in tough love. (Tough Love I, Tough Love II) I hope my posts were useful and constructive.

-- William Henderson, Indiana University Maurer School of Law 

Changing Legal Education One Classroom at a Time

[Guest post by Rebecca Love Kourlis, a member of the executive committee of Educating Tomorrow's Lawyers. Kourlis is executive director of IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System, and was previously a justice of the Colorado Supreme Court.] 

Will legal education change? This is the question asked by Dean Erwin Chemerinsky in his recent post, responding to Professor Henderson's post that ends with the inevitability of change. It’s a fair question.  We suggest that the answer is that not only is change mandatory at this point in time, but it is also already occurring.  The genie is out of the bottle in classrooms around the country.

Why now? We know that several powerful forces are colliding to create a perfect storm for legal education reform. Law schools and law school graduates are under intense pressure to perform. Clients are resisting the traditional law firm training model that taught new lawyers practical skills on the client’s dime. 

But, of course, systemic change doesn’t happen overnight. Progress will be incremental.  The people who can make it happen are the deans and law professors who are committed to the best possible education for tomorrow’s lawyers.

Throughout the country, many law professors are already forcing progress by changing the one thing over which they have immediate control: the classroom. The 2007 Carnegie Report made recommendations for improving legal education and highlighted the need to blend the teaching of substantive doctrine with development of practical skills and professional identify to graduate lawyers who are ready to practice. The recommendations found in the Carnegie Report can now be seen in action in law classes around the country. And many innovative legal educators have devoted years to creating an integrated experience for their students. Like Roberto Corrada, who teaches labor law by having his class form a union and engage in negotiations with him over every aspect of the class—including the exam. Or Gillian Hadfield, whose students learn advanced contracts by working on complex contractual challenges in teams of four. 

As advocates for legal education innovation, we must support those professors, learn from them, and provide an environment that encourages more experimentation and innovation.

This is why we launched Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers, which leverages the Carnegie Model and the work of law schools and professors committed to legal education reform to align legal education with the needs of an evolving profession.  We provide a supported platform for shared learning, experimentation, ongoing measurement and collective implementation.

So will legal education change? We think it will. In many ways, it already is. Some legal educators are slowly dismantling the status quo, holding onto what works, letting go of what doesn’t, and experimenting with new ways to graduate lawyers who are prepared for modern practice. Change is not an event; it’s a process. We hope you’ll play a role in it.

 

Law Students to the ABA: Wake Up, Get off the Sidelines

[The following guest post is an excerpt of a joint staff editorial by the The Cardozo Jurist of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law and the BLS Advocate of Brooklyn Law School that appears in both publications today]

Our economy is depressed. These are difficult times for all.

While disheartening, we must acknowledge the situation before us. Things have changed in the last few years. Legal jobs are scarce. Law school is hardly a “safe bet” – in fact, it is a perilous one.

In these times, we need an American Bar Association (ABA) that is proactive. An ABA that is present. An ABA that is attentive to the economic climate and what this means for current and future law students.

Instead, as Erik Slepak’s story “ABA Drags Feet in Stopping Law Schools’ Misleading Job Statistics” (see http://www.cardozojurist.com/?p=979) and Warren Allen’s feature article “The Litigating Classes: Taking Their Schools to Court” (see www.blsadvocate.org)  illustrate, the ABA has been reactive when the times call for it to be proactive. We find this deeply disappointing.

Understandably, in past years of economic prosperity, prospective law students weren’t as concerned with post-grad employment statistics. But, in these trying times the stakes are higher. Prospective students want to know: How many graduates have jobs requiring a JD? How many are employed through the law school’s fellowship program? How many have part-time jobs? They have a right to the answers to these questions.

Until two weeks ago, the ABA did not require law schools to provide such information to prospective students. Some law schools voluntarily offered this information to prospective students. But, many other schools opted only to provide rather basic statistics, like percentage of graduates employed nine months from graduation. This figure gives prospective students no sense of how many graduates have part-time legal or non-legal jobs.

 

To read the rest, visit:

http://www.cardozojurist.com/2011/11/staff-editorial-law-students-to-the-aba-wake-up-get-off-the-sidelines/

or

http://blsadvocate.org/

 

Waking Up Law Professors

Brian Tamanaha most recent post, What Federal Loans Do for Law Students and Law Schools, reveals the type of statistics and analysis that would come to the fore in Congressional hearings or a report by the Inspector General.  Because the vast majority of all schools' funding now comes from loans originated by the Dept of Education, the federal government holds all the cards.  If Congress or the Department of Education doesn't like what is happening, they can use the power of the purse to advance what they believe is a better outcome.  Billions of dollars are at stake, and the people who are supposed to benefit from those billions believe they are getting a very bad deal. See Law School Tranparency.

It is absolute madness to argue with students, or their creditors [the US government], over value.  A man convinced against his will; is of the same opinion still. Ignoring them is a mistake of the same magnitude.  We are about to exit the realm of self-regulation because we have failed to take serious issues seriously.  

--William Henderson, Indiana University Maurer School of Law

What Federal Loans Do for Law Students and Law Schools

Federal loans for law students are justified as “providing access” to a legal career for the middle class and poor.  That’s one side.  When you examine how the funding operates, however, it becomes apparent that federal loans are an irresistible (and life-sustaining) drug for revenue addicted law schools.

When a student applies for a federal loan, the law school processes the application.  Loans are granted by the government without any evaluation of the likelihood of repayment.  Accordingly, a student at Thomas Jefferson Law School is treated exactly the same as a student at Harvard Law School, without regard to the fact that the former is far less likely to repay the loan.

Among the 221 graduates of the 2010 class of Thomas Jefferson, only 73 obtained jobs as lawyers.   According to information provided by the school, the highest earners worked in private law firms, with a 75th percentile salary of $77,500 (only 12 of 55 graduates in private firms reported their salary).  Based upon the numbers provided, and making a few reasonable assumptions, we can estimate that at least 80% to 90% of the class earned less than $77,500. 

Now consider that the average debt of 2010 graduates of Thomas Jefferson was $137,000 (95% of the class had debt).   The monthly payment for this debt is $1,600.  Graduates must earn over $100,000 to manage this level of debt.  

Thus, only about one third of graduates actually ended up as lawyers (nine months after graduation), and most of the graduates that landed lawyer jobs did not earn enough to manage the average debt of the class.  It appears that a significant percentage of the class is likely to enroll in IBR, a federal program designed to help graduates in “financial hardship,” paying reduced monthly payments based upon a percentage of their income, with the balance of the loan forgiven after 25 years.  That is what “access” to a legal career comes to for many unfortunate law graduates today.

Let’s now look at things from the law school end.  From 2008 through 2011, Thomas Jefferson law graduates had a total combined debt over $100 million, nearly all of it federally guaranteed or directly borrowed from the government.  How many students with positive outcomes did this money buy?

The combined debt of 2010 law graduates of Cooley was $91 million; at New York Law School it was $48 million; at Suffolk it was $46 million.  Or take Florida Coastal.  In 2008 the combined debt of law graduates was $28 million; in 2009 it was $33 million; in 2010 it was $45 million.  Each year the enrollment went up, and the total debt with it.  Four hundred students graduated in 2010—eight hundred new first years enrolled that August.  One might guess what the combined debt of the class of 2013 will be.

We are talking about real money here—and nearly all of it goes directly from federal coffers to law school bank accounts.  The students are conduits for the money.   These student-conduits bear the burden of the loans in the first instance, and the federal government thereafter.  The average debt of graduates at all of these schools was well above $100,000.  Not all of this debt will be fully paid in the end.  Law schools get their money up front.

This is not just about low-ranked law schools.  In 2010, Georgetown graduates had a combined debt of $71 million, Harvard and American were over $50 million (G.W. just below that), with another half dozen law schools over $40 million.   Remember, these amounts only cover a single year.  High-tuition law schools with large enrollments collect a hundred million dollars of debt-based, government supplied money every two to three years.  Law schools have been ramping up tuition and enrollment without restraint thanks to an obliging federal loan program.

Federal loans indeed provide access to a legal career for many, and that is important, although we must also be mindful of the poor results suffered by many individuals.  Law schools, meanwhile, are engorging themselves on the federal loan program.

—Brian Z. Tamanaha

Fighting Law School Sprawl - Sustainability in the Legal Profession

A commenter on my earlier blog post stated that “[w]e need fewer law schools and fewer law students being educated at lower cost, not more law students.” 

I wholeheartedly agree that in the realm of big and medium law firm jobs, we have too many lawyers competing for fewer and fewer jobs. But for all this talk of an oversupply of lawyers, we still have a severe access to justice problem in this country, with a substantial portion of low-income and middle-class Americans not getting their legal needs met.  I believe there are untapped opportunities for lawyers who want to represent low-income and middle-class clients, but this type of career does not carry any of the prestige or stability of a traditional law firm job.    

The reality is that lawyers who choose to start their careers representing individual clients in the public sector or as small firm/solo practitioners will make around $45,000 or less, which is similar to a social worker’s salary.  Though social work is also a profession, in comparison to lawyers, social workers have dramatically different expectations in terms of salary, prestige, and status.  Moreover, with debt loads approaching $100,000 or more, most of today’s law graduates simply cannot afford this career path.

How do we re-boot legal education to ensure that we still have lawyers who can serve individual clients in their communities?  At this point, I'll borrow an idea from the environmental movement and say that I’d like to see legal education commit to fostering sustainability in the legal profession.  Sustainability does not necessarily mean shutting all the law school doors, but it does mean changing and redirecting the current untrammeled growth model. It might mean opting out of the U.S. News/ABA model and founding new community-centered schools operating on a smaller scale. Sustainability would also require law schools to start linking admissions decisions and tuition rates to the number of lawyers entering the profession and the types of careers available to them.

Is sustainability in this context a naive idea?  If we frame the issue in terms of resolving the legal education crisis and saving the legal profession, maybe we can persuade law schools to scale down. After all, in order to save the environment, individual consumers are willing to spend extra money to drive Priuses and buy organic food.  But as many on this blog have noted, convincing entrenched institutions operating in a highly profitable system to change may not be possible.

What we have now is law school sprawl.  And our sprawl makes it too expensive for young lawyers to commit to community-centered or public-service careers.  If we continue down this path, the only lawyers left standing will be the credentialed graduates who can secure jobs at medium and large law firms, which primarily represent business and corporate interests. Non-traditional and non-elite law graduates will have nowhere to go. And low and middle-income clients will continue to be underserved.

-Lucille A. Jewel  

 

Enhancing Law School Education: Making A Case For The Possible

[Guest post by Desiree Moore, founder of legal education program, Greenhorn Legal, and Adjunct Faculty Member at Loyola University Chicago School of Law]

I wrote this before reading Professor Moliterno’s post, “Time To ‘Do,’ Not Talk.”  I believe we are aligned in our thinking with respect to practical skills training and this post proposes something similar to (or compatible with) what Washington and Lee has undertaken:

Law students, whether in their 1L, 2L or 3L year, should participate in an intensive “boot camp” of sorts that covers those practical skills not otherwise offered in a traditional law school curriculum.  This is a streamlined and cost effective solution to the lack of preparedness new lawyers face as they embark on their legal careers.  It is far more practical and easier to implement than any proposal to revamp law school curricula entirely.  An intensive boot camp offered separate and apart from our existing law school curricula will also not interfere with the interests and objectives of our tenured professors (who are getting somewhat of a bad name here but who undeniably have defined so many of our law school experiences; they are not, by any means, disposable) or the venerable purposes of a traditional law school education.     

To be clear, “practical skills” in this instance does not mean trial practice, deposition training, negotiations skills, etc.  These are already being taught in many law schools and, while there is certainly a place for such skills courses, as a member of the hiring committee at a national law firm for many years I can assure you that landing a coveted law firm job (or any job in this market) does not turn on the ability to impeach a witness in a mock trial.  (Clinics are useful, too, but can be disjointed and arbitrary in terms of what comes across a student’s desk and thus do not guarantee that all students who participate are exposed to a similar, wide breadth of skills that will prepare them for any job after law school.)