Entering Class Size
January 9th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Preliminary ABA figures show that entering JD class size fell 9% at ABA-accredited schools in the fall of 2012. The fall 2012 enrollment of 44,481 students was 15% lower than the historic high of 52,488 students enrolled in the fall of 2010. This year’s JD entering class is the lowest recorded since 2000, when 43,518 students began their first-year studies.
Some of this attrition was planned. The University of California’s Hastings College of the Law, for example, announced a class-size reduction as part of a comprehensive strategic plan. Other reductions were ad hoc, as schools struggled to find sufficient students after a rapid decline in applications.
We’re deep into another year of declining applications, and many schools are considering both their fall 2013 enrollment and their longer term plans. Entering class size plays an important role in any law school budget or strategic plan. What are the benefits and costs of reducing class size? I list below the considerations I’ve heard from faculty, students, and practitioners around the country.
Please add your thoughts in the comments; I will post an updated list after hearing your feedback. Rather than think through this issue in isolation, we can pool some of our insights here. The right approach for individual schools, of course, may vary widely. But what are the factors for schools to weigh?
Benefits of Reducing Class Size
1. Schools should adjust class size in accordance with the job market. Some observers advance this principle as a moral one, arguing that schools should not charge students for expensive degrees that they know their graduates will have difficulty using. Others adopt a pragmatic approach, noting that informed consumers follow the market: If fewer jobs are available, then fewer students will apply to law school. The market will reduce class sizes for schools, and they might as well adopt a pro-active stance.
2. As applications fall, a reduced class size may be essential to preserve the quality of the student body. Student quality affects classroom instruction, peer interaction, graduate quality, the school’s reputation, and–last but far from least–U.S. News ranking.
3. A reduced class size can improve instructional quality, extracurricular activities, and other aspects of the law school experience. Reducing class size, for example, will allow a school to offer clinical spots to a larger percentage of the class. Similarly, a higher percentage of students may be able to join journals, compete on moot court teams, enroll in popular seminars or simulations, interact closely with faculty, and find mentors among graduates.
4. Reducing class size might improve a school’s U.S. News ranking on several metrics. In addition to maintaining the credentials of entering students, a reduced class size usually will improve a school’s JD acceptance rate, student/faculty ratio, and expenditures per student. Down the road, a reduced class size may also improve placement success and bar passage rates. The change might also improve reputation among members of the bar, if those respondents perceive the action as improving the quality of a school’s graduates or as a responsible action on the school’s part.
5. If other schools reduce class size, then reductions may be necessary simply to keep up with those schools on the U.S. News metrics described above.
6. On-line instruction is advancing rapidly. As these programs improve, schools may be able to maintain a wide selection of courses–even with a smaller number of enrolled students and full-time faculty. To distinguish themselves in an on-line world, in fact, schools may need to offer many more hands-on courses featuring extensive interaction with faculty. Reducing class size now will prepare schools for that shift.
7. Reduced class sizes may allow schools to focus on the education that practitioners and students consider essential: hands-on experience in problem solving, counseling, writing, and the other tasks that form the core of law practice.
Costs of Reducing Class Size
1. If a school reduces class size but maintains its current budget, then tuition will rise for other students. Tuition and graduate debt already are too high. Increasing these burdens further may be professionally irresponsible (as argued by some observers) or counter-productive (if students choose cheaper schools or other career options).
2. Schools may not be able to provide as many educational opportunities to a smaller student base. Some seminars and smaller classes may fail to draw sufficient enrollment. Some student journals, moot court teams, and extracurricular activities may also lack sufficient participation.
3. This fall-off in participation may disproportionately affect newer additions to the law school curriculum. Students, for example, may continue to participate in appellate moot court teams–which have a long pedigree at most schools. They may under-subscribe counseling competitions, transactional meets, and other newer programs that would provide better educational value if they had a chance to gain acceptance.
4. Reducing enrollment is likely to reduce the number of minority, first-generation, and low-income students admitted to law school. Even if the percentages of those students remain steady, their absolute numbers will decrease. Should schools cut back on enrollment while these groups are still seeking access to the profession? Will smaller absolute numbers of students in these categories affect their critical mass? If these issues are a concern, will schools be able to increase the percentage of students admitted from these categories?
5. Some students, faculty, and alumni view size as strength. If a school cuts enrollment, these individuals may view the school as weak or lacking confidence in its quality compared to other schools.
6. If schools reduce class size (and their accompanying budgets), they may adjust course offerings to satisfy the tastes of tenured faculty. This may yield fewer clinics, simulations, and other experiential courses that students and practitioners find highly valuable.
7. No matter its size, every law school class has a bottom half, third, quarter, and ten percent. Reducing class size, in fact, may push more talented students into those lower ranges. If employers pay close attention to class rank–as many seem to have done in the past–then smaller class sizes may not improve employability for graduates. Even at the top of the class, fewer students will qualify for the top ten percent or top quarter.
Unknowns and Trade-Offs
1. If schools reduce size significantly (e.g., by enough to eliminate one first-year section), they may be able to reduce faculty size accordingly. The latter reduction would eliminate gains in student-faculty ratio or per-student expenditure, but it might prevent excessive tuition increases.
2. How does class size affect administrative costs? Law schools may realize economies of scale; functions like admissions, placement, and library services may be more expensive per student in a smaller school than a larger one. On the other hand, large schools may require more coordination (generating new administrative costs). It is also possible that in a smaller, less administrative-heavy organization, faculty would be more willing to take back some administrative functions.
What do you think? Please add to the discussion here:
Derrick A. Bell, Jr.
January 9th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Derrick A. Bell, Jr., started law school in the mid-1950’s, shortly after the Supreme Court’s momentous Brown decision. It must have been a time of hope for a talented black student, one who had already completed a successful tour in the United States Air Force. But it was also a time when rhetoric conflicted with reality. Bell was the only black student in his law school class, and one of only three black students in the school. He secured a spot in the Justice Department’s prestigious Honors Program after graduation, but the Department forced him to resign when he joined the NAACP.
Bell moved on to work with Thurgood Marshall, Robert L. Carter, and Constance Baker Motley on the difficult post-Brown tasks of dismantling segregation. He supervised more than 300 school desegregation cases, returned briefly to the federal government, and directed a center on law and poverty.
Harvard Law School invited Bell to join its faculty, and in 1971 he became the school’s first tenured black professor. He remained in the academy until his death, teaching at Harvard, Oregon (where he also served as Dean), Stanford, and NYU.
Bell was a controversial member of the academy. He wrote–and spoke–bluntly about racism. His views often offended white professors, but Bell persisted. Throughout his life, he flew at the front of the wedge in confronting racism and promoting integration. Bell’s tenaciousness, insights, and eloquence paid off. He changed, not only the face of the legal academy, but the way in which scholars, lawyers, and ordinary citizens think about racism and the law. On Sunday, the Association of American Law Schools honored Bell with its Triennial Award for Lifetime Service to Legal Education and to the Law.
When Bell began writing about racism in the 1970’s, his work was alien–and deeply unsettling–to white readers. Unease spawned rejection: Many early readers discredited Bell as someone who “complained too much” or “couldn’t get over racism, already.” Those are very mild versions of statements I heard throughout the late 70s and 80s, when Bell’s critical race theory was new.
Today, many more people–inside and outside the academy–perceive the deep roots and subtle shadows of racism. With that understanding, we have made more progress. But we got here only because people like Bell were willing to take us by the shoulders, shake us hard, and force us to re-think our assumptions.
Bell’s fight is far from over, but his victory lies in the truth of these words uttered by his widow, Janet Dewart Bell, when she accepted the award in his honor: “Derrick always worried that his work would die with him. But on this one thing, Derrick Bell was wrong.”*
* I paraphrase (and will update when the AALS tapes are available), but I’ve got the meaning. For more on Bell, please see this official site.
A Livable Calling
January 7th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
The Presidential Program at this year’s AALS Annual Meeting featured a discussion of “Law Schools and Their Critics.” As part of that discussion, Gene Nichol offered a compelling challenge to law faculty.
Paralleling a paper published earlier this year, Nichol suggested that law schools have pushed tuition past the breaking point “without dramatically improving, or perhaps even paying close attention to, the actual learning experience of our students.” How can schools cut costs now that the crisis has arrived?
Nichol’s primary suggestion: Aim solutions at the central cost driver, tenure-track faculty salaries. To do that, Nichol suggested four mechanisms: (a) Return teaching loads to 12 credits per year. (b) Cut back overly generous policies for research leaves and sabbaticals. (c) Require faculty to teach more courses that students need for successful careers. (d) Reduce salaries to more realistic levels.
These are provocative proposals, at least for some faculty. And I offer an immediate caveat that Nichol did not have time in his short presentation to explain how he recommends implementing some of these steps. My imminent airline departure also prevented me from hearing the Q&A portion of this panel. Would Nichol trim salaries over time by cutting at corners (e.g., fewer summer research grants), freezing salaries (perhaps at the highest levels, where some of us have already attained so much), and attrition? Or would he recommend more dramatic steps? I will invite Gene to offer more details here at the Cafe if he’s willing to do so.
Meanwhile, there were three points embedded in Gene’s presentation that deserve particular mention. First, as noted above, he stressed the need to aim solutions at the problem. If high tuition is a problem, and if the high cost of tenure-track faculty lies behind that problem, then we need to address those costs. Making other reforms won’t cure the problem.
Second, Gene gently warned law schools that if we do not cure the problem of high tuition ourselves, then a combination of market and regulatory forces will solve the problem for us–perhaps in ways that are even less palatable to faculty or less supportive of legal education’s mission.
Finally, Gene suggested a silver lining in the cloud of faculty belt tightening. Most of us became teachers and scholars because it was our calling. We wanted to educate new lawyers and help the legal system gain new insights. Most of us, even 25 to 30 years ago, were delighted to learn that being a law professor was a “livable calling.” We would not have to make as many financial sacrifices as our friends who taught history, who became journalists, or who pursued careers in the arts. We could follow our passion, do what we believed in, and have an impact on the next generation, while still living comfortably.
Isn’t it possible, Gene asked, for law faculty to return to a livable calling? Do we need all of the extras that we awarded ourselves over the last few decades?
Employable from the Start
January 4th, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Law schools once were a harbor for college graduates who hadn’t settled on a career. Schools even billed themselves as the equivalent of a “graduate degree in the liberal arts.” But the escalating cost of legal education, combined with a shrunken job market, has made that approach a bad bet for students. Most students who pay to attend law school today want to be lawyers. Should law schools consider the likelihood that individual applicants will achieve that goal? Or that the applicant will appeal to legal employers down the road?
Some business schools, according to the Wall Street Journal, are asking these questions as part of their admissions process. A few of these schools are including career services staff on admissions committees, and others are sending career counselors to admissions fairs. With both techniques, the schools say that they aim to (a) assess an applicant’s plan for using the MBA; (b) judge whether the applicant’s employment background, academic aptitude, career plans, and soft skills will appeal to employers; and (c) give the applicant useful feedback about the likelihood of capitalizing on an MBA.
What if law schools adopted a similar approach? What impacts would that have?
Building employability into the admissions process might force schools themselves to assess job outcomes more realistically. If a school is placing only 50% of its graduates in jobs that require a law license, should the school continue admitting twice as many students eager for those positions? If the school believes that other kinds of jobs are attractive for its graduates, should it admit students who express specific interest in those outcomes? If we believe, for example, that compliance jobs are attractive for part of our graduating class, should we seek applicants who know about those jobs, understand the salaries and career tracks, and are eager to use a JD in that world?
Connecting placement to admissions, in other words, might give schools a healthy dose of reality about the number of students they admit and the types of work they will find after graduation. The connection could complement–and further enhance–increased transparency about law school job outcomes. More important, it could push schools to think more deeply about the type of jobs that JDs want and that the degree qualifies them for.
What about the admissions process and admitted class? Some prospective students might welcome the opportunity to be judged on their employment background, the seriousness of their career plans, and their interview skills, rather than simply on LSAT scores and GPA. A school that involves career services in admissions might also impress applicants with the school’s attention to that goal.
Students applying to schools with an employability focus would have to research legal careers more thoroughly. They would no longer be able to rely upon essays proclaiming a broad desire “to help the world” or “become a BigLaw associate” if they had to converse with an interviewer knowledgeable about specific areas of law practice. But maybe that’s a good thing. Both law students and their schools might be better off with classes composed of people who have formulated serious career aims. Few people seem to choose medical, dental, or veterinary school as a generic “Plan B.” Does that fact give those schools more professional gravity?
Stressing employability, on the other hand, cuts against two notions that many legal educators cherish deeply. One is the idea that law is a broad intellectual discipline rather than simply a trade. But I don’t think of medical schools, dental schools, or veterinary schools as mere “trade schools.” If they are, I’m pretty thankful for their trade focus when I need a root canal or other help. And to the extent law school once was a program of intellectual study preparing graduates generally for thoughtful careers, we closed that door ourselves by raising tuition as high as we have.
A second strongly held belief is that law practice builds on a general foundation, that students should study many aspects of law, and that students shouldn’t have to specialize too early. If students shouldn’t specialize, then how could we possibly ask applicants to declare planned career paths?
I understand this belief–I certainly didn’t have a clue what I wanted to do when I was 22 years old–but it may be outmoded. We live in a sped-up world in which education is very expensive. People who choose to invest in education, especially graduate programs, may need to have specific plans for that investment.
Perhaps more important, today’s world is much more fluid than the old one. As a result of that, I think students understand (much better than I did thirty years ago) that no initial direction lasts forever. Planning a career involves setting a target, moving toward that target, and remaining adaptable as the environment changes. Ironically, fluidity may require more direction than the more static world of yesterday. If the economy, technology, and job market shift constantly, then someone with no direction may be completely lost–not just maintaining their options. To succeed in today’s rapidly changing world, it may be key to have a firm sense of direction combined with skills that allow continuous monitoring of that goal and adaptation as necessary.
I think of this as the GPS view of careers. A GPS device is exceedingly adaptable; it will take you anywhere you want to go. But the device won’t take you anywhere at all unless you ask for directions to a specific site. Maybe we need to start assessing our applicants’ GPS strength as well as their GPAs.
Hat tip to Richard L. Kaplan for the reference to the Wall Street Journal article.
Inside-Out as Law School Pedagogy
January 3rd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Giovanna Shay, a professor at Western New England School of Law transported her law school seminar to a nearby correctional center. Shay’s transplanted seminar on “Gender and Criminal Law” enrolled both law students and prisoners. Both groups studied the same material, wrote papers, and interacted at a class that met weekly inside the prison. Shay based her model on the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, which sponsors similar classes for undergraduates and prisoners. Shay’s paper describes the profound impact of this class on her law students, as well as on her overall teaching style.
Skeptical readers may view Shay’s course as a luxury: If we need to pare down the cost of law school and prepare students more directly for practice, why we would let classes wander off into prisons? But Shay’s paper intrigues me for three reasons. First, even as we tailor legal education more closely to law practice, we should still educate professionals who are thoughtful about the role of law in society. The law exerts its greatest force when incarcerating individuals; understanding the impact of that power is useful for everyone who will serve the legal system.
Second, Shay’s technique fits with the concept of “unbottling” legal education. To make law schools more adaptive, we need to think about educating students in many ways, times, and places. Shay’s inside-out may not work for your school, but the concept may prompt other novel ideas. What about a school-sponsored CLE course that takes practicing lawyers into a prison for a seminar like this? That would be less convenient than a talking-head video broadcast, but much more interesting and provocative.
Finally, Shay’s experiment prompts me to think about other ways in which law students can learn alongside other people—raising the educational value for both groups. What about a criminal procedure course that enrolls both law students and aspiring police officers? How about a copyright course that includes both students and writers? Or a small business course for students and entrepreneurs? Those initiatives might raise educational value while also developing new revenue sources–taking some of the pressure off JD tuition.
This is a short essay about an unusual initiative, but it is one that can prompt many outside-the-box thoughts.
Tuition Breaks for Externships
January 3rd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
I’ve grown to like the idea of workplace externships. Properly supervised, students can learn quite a bit from an externship. Today’s employers undeniably want that type of proven experience in new hires. Working at an externship also puts a student “on the spot” when an employer wants to hire. Externships won’t create jobs, but they may make a school’s graduates more competitive for the ones that exist.
On the other hand, I’m a bit queasy about charging students tuition while they work somewhere else for free. That seems like a negative wage, rather than a minimum one. When an externship constitutes just part of a student’s course load, and the school charges a flat fee for full-time students, the concern is small. It costs the school something to supervise the externship, the student’s marginal cost may be zero, and we don’t differentiate other credits based on the number of students in the class, the professor’s salary, or other cost factors.
But what about externships that consume an entire semester? Or ones that occur during the summer? For these externships, students pay high fees for the privilege of providing free workplace services. Here, as Northwestern’s Dean Dan Rodriguez suggests on PrawfsBlawg, tuition reductions might be appropriate.
Sure, the school will lose revenue from those students but the market is going to force us to reduce the cost of law school attendance in one way or another. We already subsidize lots of law school credits through scholarships. Reduced-cost externships are just another targeted means of reducing tuition–and it’s a mechanism that might prove quite attractive to students.
Suppose, for example, that a school told every student: “We provide one no-cost summer externship to any student who wants one. We’ll help you find a suitable placement, provide appropriate classroom instruction, and award up to 5 hours of credit–all with no tuition charge to you. You can take advantage of this externship opportunity after either your first or second year; joint degree candidates may use the opportunity during any semester of their degree program.”
To me, that seems like an attractive way to discount tuition. It tells prospective students that a school recognizes the importance of workplace experience and will help every student obtain that opportunity. A strong externship program can also complement a school’s career services office: the ties with externship organizations can yield regular placement opportunities. And alumni are likely workplace supervisors, solidifying their ties with the school.
How much would this cost a school? You would have to include (a) the costs of externship supervisors, including the time they would spend identifying good externship oppportunities; (b) any charges the central university would impose on these subsidized credits; and (c) forgone tuition from students who would use summer credits to graduate a semester early. In past years, relatively few students have used summer credits to graduate early, but that number may increase in coming years.
For full-semester externships the calculus is similar–except that the risk of forgone tuition is closer to certainty. Few students enjoy law school so much that they will stay for a seventh semester. Still, as pressures mount to reduce the cost and length of law school, a no- or reduced-cost externship semester could draw students to a particular law school.
What other costs and benefits do you see? Are there other ways to structure externships to serve students and keep down educational costs?
Does Cost Matter?
January 3rd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
When assembling a faculty, does cost matter? Should law schools consider cost when deciding whether to offer courses through tenure-track faculty, non-tenure-track faculty, part-time adjuncts, or other types of instructors? Or should law schools embrace the highest quality instruction, regardless of cost?
Even posing the question seems silly: Of course cost matters. Cost affects everything, even the availability of lifesaving treatment. Few of us can afford to exalt quality entirely over cost in a purchase. When we do opt for the highest quality in one part of our personal budgets (say housing), we necessarily limit options in other categories (such as entertainment). Law schools face the same constraints: few, if any, schools have the type of resources that make cost irrelevant in choosing faculty.
Law schools, in fact, show considerable price sensitivity when deciding what types of faculty to hire and what kinds of courses to teach. Schools frequently observe that adding clinics is “too expensive” because clinics cost more per student-credit-hour than large doctrinal courses do. The same has been said for legal writing courses taught by tenure-track faculty. The use of low-cost adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty has grown substantially over the last few decades. Law schools have been quite strategic in accounting for cost while building a curriculum.
Kyle McEntee, Patrick Lynch, and Derek Tokaz build on this reality in a recent paper that explores new models of legal education. McEntee, Lynch, and Tokaz (“MLT”) propose that “cost must be a factor” in determining faculty composition and that “faculty composition should be the optimal balance of cost and teaching quality, as analyzed in terms of legal education’s purposes.” The trio acknowledge that scholarship is also important in hiring faculty but, given the high cost of legal education, “it must be subservient to learning outcomes.”
Many faculty will disagree with making scholarship “subservient.” As one of them, I would add scholarship as an independent factor in the balance, saying something like “faculty composition should reflect the optimal balance among cost, teaching quality, and support for ongoing research, as analyzed in terms of legal education’s purposes.”
Some faculty (including me) would add another factor to the “optimal balance”–questions of workplace equity. When composing a faculty, I would consider both positive and negative aspects of maintaining a professorial caste system. Some professors welcome a status that allows them to teach full-time without producing scholarship; others enjoy teaching part-time while pursuing a law practice. But some of these “other status” faculty accept part-time or nontenure-track positions because they can’t find full-time jobs on the tenure track. As employers and professional role models, how far will we go in pushing workers into contingent positions–especially if the workers lack benefits from other employers?
The important point, however, is that cost should count in any decision about faculty composition. Whether the overall calculus includes two factors (as MLT suggest), four (adding scholarship and workplace equity), or some other number, cost is an essential part of the balance. As tenured faculty, we have been very nimble in accounting for cost when it benefits us. We hire adjuncts and non-tenure track faculty to teach courses that we prefer not to teach. We also resist the expansion of skills offerings on the ground that teaching them would be expensive while (we assume) doing little to further the school’s collective scholarship.
We are much less willing to account for cost when that would benefit students by lowering tuition. MLT remind us that we need to look at all faculty expenditures with cost in mind. At many law schools, the number of tenured faculty members has grown significantly over the last decade. Do we really need that many full-time, tenure-track faculty when we balance the cost against both teaching quality and other benefits these faculty may confer?
Before we discuss that question, it seems worth affirming that costs do matter, that schools already make decisions based on cost, and that both students and future clients have a very strong stake in that cost balance.
Incubators
January 3rd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Several years ago, my city’s bar association started an incubator program for new lawyers. The program is small, but draws positive reviews from a few graduates I know. More recently, I read that IIT Chicago-Kent’s College of Law had started an incubator for its alumni. This article in the Illinois Bar Journal offers a good opportunity to think about incubators–as well as about the relative merits of incubators housed at law schools or in the community.
The Chicago-Kent incubator currently hosts five new lawyers, all of whom graduated from the school. The lawyers receive free office space, along with access to copiers, the school’s law library, and Westlaw/Lexis subscriptions. Clinic faculty mentor the new lawyers and can also refer cases to them. In return, the incubating lawyers donate up to ten hours a week helping the clinic with its cases. An incubator lawyer, for example, might handle a status call that the clinic students are unavailable to cover. The new lawyers also pay for their own malpractice insurance.
Incubators, whether housed in a law school or practice community, have several attractions:
(1) They provide a safety net for new lawyers who want to establish a solo or small practice. Law faculty or practitioners can help the new lawyers handle unfamiliar challenges. Some incubators also develop regular programming to instruct participants in ethical issues, office management, marketing, and other matters.
(2) The incubator reduces overhead costs for fledgling lawyers. Universities and bar associations often can provide heat, light, libraries, and other amenities at lower cost than the lawyers would find on the market. In at least some cases, the incubator provides these services free–drawing upon excess capacity or altruistic motives.
(3) By training lawyers for effective small-office practice, the incubators may help create competent, reasonably priced providers for low- and mid-income clients. Many incubators complement this public purpose by requiring participants to provide some pro bono service during their time in the incubator.
(4) Lawyers won’t make a lot of money while practicing in an incubator, but they’ll make more than they would as volunteer interns. Incubators give new lawyers a chance to develop some practice skills–which they may be able to market to larger firms, government, or corporations–without forfeiting all income.
But, of course, there are downsides:
(1) Incubators will do little to expand the number of clients who can pay for small-office legal services. Incubators can train lawyers, but can they produce enough paying clients to sustain the lawyer in the long run? Will the incubator graduates simply compete with other solo practitioners for a dwindling number of paying clients?
(2) By the same token, incubators won’t solve the problem of unmet legal needs–unless they help lawyers develop ways to deliver legal services at lower cost. The American public doesn’t suffer from a lack of lawyers; it suffers from a lack of lawyers who can afford to deliver services at rates the public is willing to pay.
(3) If solo practice won’t sustain incubator graduates, they may seek work with other employers. But will larger firms, government agencies, and corporations value the work performed in incubators? Employers seem to give less weight to clinical experience than their demand for “hands on” training would suggest. Will they adopt the same attitude toward incubator experience? Will the incubator work prove worthwhile only for jobs in the same legal field?
What about the differences between law school incubators and practice-based ones? A law school incubator can strengthen bonds among current students, alumni, and faculty. If a clinic has strong community connections, it may also be able to feed the incubator clients, benefiting both those clients and the new lawyers. Clinical law faculty are accustomed to mentoring new lawyers; working with recent graduates builds naturally on work with current students. For the school, there is also the attraction of benefiting its own alumni–and enhancing their employment outcomes.
On the other hand, some law school mentors may lack knowledge about issues that matter to new solo practitioners. Many clinics provide free legal services and benefit from university-provided facilities. Do faculty in these clinics have sufficient experience with budgeting for a small office practice, marketing their services, developing client bases, setting fees, and collecting payments from clients? On some of these issues, and depending upon the school, new lawyers might receive better mentoring from bar-hosted incubators. A bar-based incubator can also create important bonds within the legal community; larger mentoring relationships might grow out of the incubator.
The biggest question for all incubator programs may be: Can schools or bar associations take these programs to scale, so that they benefit more new lawyers? If not, what lessons can incubators offer other organizations that mentor new lawyers? Can the incubators teach law schools or employers how to better educate lawyers?
Innovate for What?
January 3rd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Why are students, alumni, and practitioners pressing law schools to change? Why are schools considering innovation? As we talk about change, we need to focus on the problems we’re trying to solve. Here are the major problems that I believe face legal education. In this post, I don’t attempt to substantiate the problems; plenty has been written elsewhere on these issues and we can talk about them more as the discussion unfolds. For now, I want simply to identify the problems that may drive proposals submitted to this site.
(1) The cost of attending a full-time JD program is too high for most students. “Too high” means both that some students are discouraged from attendance and that others find the return on their investment too low.
(2) Law schools are graduating many more JDs than traditional law practice can absorb. That has been true for at least the last four years, and expert predictions suggest that the surplus will continue.
(3) JD graduates are not trained in the ways that today’s marketplace demands. There are a variety of ways to address that problem: Schools could change, employers could change, or some other magic could occur. But the misfit seems clear.
(4) An increasing number of non-lawyers use legal principles quite effectively. Law schools have ignored this trend, which contributes to problem (2) and raises a separate question about schools’ educational mission. Should law schools attempt to educate this broader pool of workers? Addressing the overlap between law practice and law-related fields would also help schools understand the role of “JD Advantage” jobs for law graduates.
(5) A large number of citizens continue to lack basic legal services–but we cannot address that need by continuing to produce conventionally (and expensively) trained JDs who practice in customized (and expensive) ways. New technologies and management techniques now support cheaper delivery of high-quality legal services, but law schools don’t educate students to practice with those tools. Nor do most schools play an active role in exploring new means of delivering legal services.
(6) Law schools are not providing honest, thoughtful information to prospective students. Despite recent gains in transparency, schools are still inclined to market to consumers rather than engage future professionals. This distorts decisionmaking among prospective students and sets a tone for sharp practices rather than professionalism among lawyers.
(7) The federal loan system seriously distorts the market for legal education. Schools didn’t create the system, but they can work to reform it in ways that benefit students, prospective clients, and taxpayers. As professionals, schools have an obligation to respect those interests.
I welcome your reactions to these problems, as well as additions to the list.
Welcome to the Law School Cafe
January 3rd, 2013 / By Deborah J. Merritt
Law School Cafe is a resource for anyone interested in reshaping legal education. Here is the basic information you need to use the site:
Cafe Tables
The site’s main page includes a series of posts called “Cafe Tables.” Each table focuses on a particular proposal for change. Some innovations are small, others are large. We draw these proposals from many sources: published papers, other websites, formal comments submitted to the ABA’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, and personal conversations. If you have a proposal, please let Deborah Merritt (the cafe manager) know at merritt52@gmail.com. We will be starting new tables regularly.
Each table includes a brief description of the proposal, links to sources, and observations or questions to start the conversation. The comment threads are open: We invite you to offer your reactions, critiques, and ideas for improvement on each proposal (but please read the “Comment Policy” below). The tables offer a way to explore the pros and cons of each proposal, as well as to refine ideas.
If you have experience with a proposed change, or would like to offer an extended comment, please let the cafe manager know (again, that’s merritt52@gmail.com). You can create a “perspective” post for a table, which will appear on the main page together with the original post. The perspectives allow further development of ideas.
Book Club
The Book Club complements the Cafe Tables by offering brief summaries of recent papers or books related to legal education. These pieces don’t always propose specific changes, but they offer useful insights to the problems facing us. Comments are open here as well, so feel free to post your reactions.
Comment Policy
To facilitate discussion in both the Cafe and Book Club, comment threads are open; we do not moderate comments before posting. But we will delete comments in which obsessive whining, trolling, or name calling substantially outweighs probative value. Cf. Federal Rule of Evidence 403.
Cafe Manager and Contributors
Deborah J Merritt manages the Law School Cafe; she is the site’s primary moderator and contributor. DJM is also the John Deaver Drinko/Baker & Hostetler Chair in Law, at Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law, but the Cafe is an independent project. Deborah has written about many facets of legal education, teaches in both doctrinal classrooms and clinics, and has developed a seminar on the Business of Law.
Kyle P McEntee, the Executive Director of Law School Transparency, is the Cafe’s co-moderator, frequent contributor, and website designer. The Law School Cafe is a partner site of Law School Transparency.
About Law School Cafe
Cafe Manager & Co-Moderator
Deborah J. Merritt
Cafe Designer & Co-Moderator
Kyle McEntee
Law School Cafe is a resource for anyone interested in changes in legal education and the legal profession.
Around the Cafe
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Recent Comments
- on Scholarship Advice
- on ExamSoft: New Evidence from NCBE
- on COVID-19 and the Bar Exam
- on Women Law Students: Still Not Equal
- on Ranking Academic Impact
Recent Posts
- The Bot Takes a Bow
- Fundamental Legal Concepts and Principles
- Lay Down the Law
- The Bot Updates the Bar Exam
- GPT-4 Beats the Bar Exam
Monthly Archives
Participate
Have something you think our audience would like to hear about? Interested in writing one or more guest posts? Send an email to the cafe manager at merritt52@gmail.com. We are interested in publishing posts from practitioners, students, faculty, and industry professionals.