The National Law Journal's Law School Review

A Sense of Entitlement?

As recent law graduates continue to strenuously question the benefits of a JD degree, one response has been to suggest that the current generation of JDs suffers from an inflated sense of entitlement.  This argument holds that would-be law students, should they decide to risk borrowing money to pay for an expensive JD, must be willing to take an active, entrepreneurial approach to their career.  For graduates of non-elite schools, being entrepreneurial means hanging up a shingle and making one’s way as a solo practitioner soon after licensure.  Or, it means young lawyers must start their careers on a precariously low rung, servicing their student loans while working as temporary project attorneys paid by the hour or as public sector attorneys with median starting salaries in the range of $42,000 to $50,000.

Even as law schools move toward greater transparency in reporting post-JD employment data, I predict a continuing disconnect between what young lawyers expect from their legal education and the reality they face upon graduation.  The harsh post-graduation reality faced by many JDs greatly conflicts with the implicit story law schools tell students before and during law school.  It may not be something that law schools ever directly state, but law school admissions staff, deans, and professors have long connected legal education with access to a “noble” profession that provides its members with a comfortable and esteemed position in society.  The idea that law provides a clear path toward social mobility and respect, even though it might conflict with a school's actual employment numbers, is a powerful narrative that will continue to draw many to law school.

One of the premises in this implicit story is that successful legal careers will happen to young lawyers as long as they work hard.  This idea has become deeply embedded in our legal culture, perhaps because older generations of lawyers, including most current law professors, began their careers during the height of the so-called Cravath model, where law firms mentored and groomed young lawyers along a set path from summer associate, to associate, to partner.  Success within the Cravath model certainly required hard work, but it also provided a mentoring structure, generous salary, and a certain amount of job security. 

With the current job-market the way it is, working hard is not enough to guarantee success.  For instance, when we suggest that young lawyers take an entrepreneurial approach and hang up their own shingle, we are suggesting a radically different career model, one fraught with financial peril and risk.  In this situation, an unknown and inexperienced attorney is expected to start a successful small business financed by vast amounts of non-dischargeable student-loan debt.  This is not a standard recipe for small business success. 

If entrepreneurship is a solution to the current crisis in legal education, then we must provide graduates with better kindling.  Infusing more practice skills into legal education is one obvious step that most law schools have committed themselves to. But if we want to make it possible for new generations to make their way into the profession and not have it slide into an exclusively elite profession serving exclusively elite clients, then we have an obligation to make the JD radically less expensive. 

Deeply reforming legal education means that legal educators may have to swallow some tough pills concerning their own professional identity and job security.  Those of us who make a living educating soon-to-be lawyers have a moral obligation to put aside our self-interest and consider these issues. 

-- Lucille A. Jewel, Assoc. Prof., Atlanta's John Marshall Law School

 

Reimagining Legal Education

We founded Law School Transparency in 2009 with a pretty basic goal: to spotlight and reform the presentation of law school employment information. In no trivial sense, law schools and the ABA Section of Legal Education were not fulfilling their responsibilities. Law schools were failing to adequately inform their future students. The Section of Legal Education was failing to adequately protect consumers with its accreditation standards, which law schools were more than happy to hide behind as accepted practice.

To a large extent, although strides have been made within the Section of Legal Education to protect consumers, these failings persist. (In a later post, I will explain how.) They signal, along with the fact that there were such significant failures prior to the national attention, much greater problems with law school operations. Law schools are simply not consumer oriented.

With this in mind, we are ready to announce the next phase of Law School Transparency: attempting to reimagine legal education. This has three core parts.

• Structural Transparency
• Identifying Opportunities for Improvement
• Unbreaking the Broken Model

Three common-sense goals color an undeniably difficult process. First, the cost of obtaining a legal education must be substantially reduced. Second, students must have the opportunity to make choices after graduation and must have economic mobility throughout their careers. Third, the education model must meet the needs of students, the legal profession, and clients.

Structural Transparency

This part focuses on understanding the cost structure of providing legal education in the United States. Reducing the cost of obtaining a law degree requires understanding the nuances of the law school model, where the money comes from, and where the money goes. Some of these facts may come from examining public documents like law schools’ Form 990s and recent reports on legal education, but additional transparency is needed. Law schools need to open their books, explain those books, and do so truthfully and in good faith.

Identifying Opportunities for Improvement

Once the facts are on the table, those who are interested in reducing the cost of legal education can identify opportunities for improving the law school model. This introduces a normative inquiry into what it means to provide value.

Like the Section of Legal Education Outcome Measures Committee, we believe that the focus must center on outcomes. Law school should add value in two related ways.

First, law schools should produce graduates who can do things they couldn’t do prior to law school. Learning outcomes must be scrutinized with due consideration to how well graduates serve employers and clients. It is one thing to teach something well, and another to teach something relevant. The report is a great start, though it will be important to generate the discussion among all stakeholders—something the committee admitted it had trouble sparking.

Second, law schools should produce graduates who successfully enter the workforce able to repay law school loans. Based on the report, this was not considered. The committee acknowledges that costs will likely rise after retooling the accreditation standards, but it does not demonstrate any concern for whether education is affordable. I am hopeful that participants in this forum will discuss how this crucial element could possibly have gone unaddressed.

Unbreaking the Broken Model

It’s important to synthesize old and new information about how law schools educate their students. Ultimately, the product of these efforts will help determine the most appropriate, substantive changes to the U.S. legal education model. There is very real pressure to do a better job for students and employers, both of whom can be viewed as consumers of legal education. In making these changes, it will be essential that access and quality are not sacrificed.

How best to achieve the goals outlined above will be a matter of important debate. But regardless of how we manage to eventually unbreak the law school model, it’s clear that change must come. Legal education reform requires a significant commitment by all stakeholders—not just those who currently spend time teaching—to consider why and how we need to reimagine legal education.

— Kyle McEntee, executive director of Law School Transparency, a nonprofit advocating for legal education reform.