InfiLaw: A backwater empire of four crappy law schools or the future of the scam?

 

(At Hawk Venture Capital, our goal is to create innovative and lasting partnerships with Rodent Law Schools. We provide committed capital, marketing expertise, experienced leadership, and customized technology to our delicious partners).

Picture a law student walking through the stately common areas of Pretend to be Prestigious School of Law. Enrolling in this school was a terrible gamble, but it could have been worse. At least the school is not one of the three, soon to be four, notoriously scammy for-profit InfiLaw-owned law schools. [1] But the fact that a school is not InfiLaw-owned does not guarantee that it is InfiLaw-free. Even if it cannot own a law school outright, InfiLaw may influence a law school's character and direction via its extensive range of administrative and consulting services, as well as by shaping its distance education.

 

As readers of this blog surely know, InfiLaw Corporation is the proud owner of Florida Coastal, Phoenix, and Charlotte Schools of Law--plus, it has recently inked a deal to acquire Charleston School of Law, over strong local opposition. InfiLaw is controlled by a "growth-oriented private equity" firm called Sterling Partners, which has five billion dollars in assets under management. In September, 2011, Sterling Partners completed a debt recapitalization of InfiLaw, and issued a press release boasting of the "future liquidity opportunities as the business continues to grow." But InfiLaw is more than these four schools-- it also includes two recently launched portfolio companies,  InfiLaw Management Solutions and iLawVentures," which aim to "partner" with non-InfiLaw schools.

 

InfiLaw Management Solutions is headed by C. Peter Goplerud, the former Dean of four law schools, including Drake University, University of Oklahoma, Southern Illinois, and Florida Coastal. In fact, Goplerud has just recently stepped down from the Florida Coastal deanship to assume the Presidency of InfiLaw Management Solutions (IMS). IMS seeks to engage in "services agreements" with law schools, reminiscent perhaps of what Halliburton KBR did for the U.S. military in Iraq, with such spectacular results. IMS’s stated goal is "to build lasting relationships with law schools and universities whereby we focus on the administrative responsibilities, enabling our academic partners to focus their core academic program." IMS’s webpage states that the company’s service portfolio includes the following: accreditation support, bar preparation programs, career services planning, emotional intelligence workshop facilitation, faculty & staff engagement, management engagement, student acquisition programs, and transfer attrition.

iLawVentures, LLC: iLaw Ventures is headed by Ken Randall, until very recently the Dean of first tier University of Alabama School of Law. According to Randall, "[o]nline courses and programs such as iLawVentures can bring in extra revenues that universities need. . .The goal is to partner with interested universities to develop and deliver their courses across the state, across the country and even around the world."

 

Across the country and around the world. When virtual classrooms are commonplace, there will be no logistical impediment to some enterprising law school enrolling an LLM class of thousands. Or to peddling certificate and master’s programs in things like dispute resolution and health care compliance to couch potatoes across the land. Of course, iLawVentures LLC will have to outflank a couple of other e-learning corporations that are pursuing similar partnerships with law schools-- namely, Deltek and Concord/Kaplan. [2] As well, law schools are themselves capable developing and delivering online coursework. For instance, scammy Vermont Law School did not need a corporate partner to graduate its first online class of LLMs and MELPs. [3]

So perhaps InfiLaw is the future of law school. A kid will enroll in some seemingly reputable old law school, only to discover that many of its functions are provided by InfiLaw contractors and employees. The school's online courses will have been developed in conjunction with InfiLaw. Its bar prep will be provided by InfiLaw vendors. The career services employee who tells the student to network with his or her dentist will be an InfiLaw temp. The obstacles that the school imposes to keep the top of the class from transferring to one of the tiny number of schools where graduates have a reasonable shot at a good job will have been fashioned by Infilaw advisors. InfiLaw will be the school's trusted consultant in devising strategies to compel staff, VAPs, and even professors, to accept lower pay, less job security, and less autonomy, with no corresponding benefits for students. [4] Accreditation support– aka, handling those theoretically, but not actually, pesky ABA site inspection teams, will be an InfiLaw speciality. [5] Of course, student recruitment will be InfiLaw too-- marketing is way too important to be left to amateurs. [6]

 

An encouraging vision. Yes, I say that grimly, but without irony. InfiLaw will need to attract law school partners and use those partnerships to generate big profits to feed to those growth-oriented Sterling Partners investors. How?  By saving money for existing law schools through downsizing and demoralizing staff, and by peddling crappy standardized educational products. I could be wrong, but I think that once law schools are in the claws, even partially, of avowed predators who have no long-term stake or commitment to legal education as such, the scam will be too blatant to deceive anybody anymore, and will be shredded like a rodent that has partnered with a hawk.

 

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notes.

[1] Paul Campos: "It’s hard to describe how awful the employment outcomes are at these [InfiLaw] schools. . . . All feature atrocious employment statistics, sky high tuition, enormous class sizes, and graduates with massive debt loads."

[2] h/t: commenter CBR on this Lawyers, Guns and Money thread, at July 18, 2013 at 11:34 am.
 

[3] A MELP is a Master's of Environmental Law and Policy. Vermont Law School assures us that "[w]ell-trained professionals with the MELP degree are needed to become effective agents of change in the nonprofit sector, government, and business." Though dubious, I won't try to refute the assertion-- the employment market's demand for MELPs being outside the scope of this post. But maybe Vermont Law School should have been more attentive to its choice of acronyms. The online urban dictionary offers the following definitions of "melp": "punching a pregnant woman in the stomach," and "sitting in a mud puddle."

[4] Other buzzwords to describe the faculty, staff, and management "engagement" services that  InfiLaw offers to its law school partners include the following, selected from its "sample engagement overview": "institutional needs assessment," "senior administration training," "accountability partnerships," "best practices forums," and "continuation of services."

To flesh out what these buzzwords mean in practice, consider InfiLaw's  "administrative and consulting" services agreement with Charleston Law, which was entered into on July 23, 2013 (and was, ultimately, a springboard for InfiLaw's takeover bid, announced five weeks later). In response to inquiries, Charleston Law School provided a redacted copy of its "administrative and consulting services" agreement with InfiLaw. See p. 7-18, of this link. I call readers' attention to Exhibit A of the agreement, at p. 17-18, which lists the astonishing range of consulting and business support services provided by InfiLaw as part of the agreement. These include "weekly or monthly" forums with functional leaders of key areas of law school operations, disciplined application of process improvement methodologies, human capital management, "individual objective development and cascading," and much else. Seriously, check out Exhibit A at p. 17-18.

For a taste of InfiLaw's approach to staff management, consider the following: (a) InfiLaw-owned school Florida Coastal recently laid off 20% of its faculty--including, according to information provided by a Florida Coastal professor to Paul Campos, "anybody with institutional knowledge [and] the younger faculty members who dared to speak out and questioned some of the school’s practices." and (b) InfiLaw-owned Phoenix School of Law recently fired two tenured professors for allegedly objecting to policies the school implemented to discourage student transfers. These policies include: "refusing to write recommendation letters, changing first-year classes to make them incompatible with other schools, and adopting a pass-fail grading system that would make it hard for other schools to identify top students."

[5] Which might explain the extensive ABA service listed on the biographical squibs of members of InfiLaw's National Policy Board.

[6] "CHICAGO, Jan. 9, 2012 – Sterling Partners, a growth-oriented private equity firm with a long history of successful investing in the education sector, has acquired PlattForm Advertising, a leading provider of comprehensive marketing and enrollment-management services to colleges and universities. . . . PlattForm is a pioneer in the field of marketing for higher education and provides a full suite of marketing services to manage and execute all aspects of a school’s marketing strategy. Through the use of rigorous data and analytics, PlattForm creates, manages and executes mission-critical marketing campaigns for both career schools and traditional colleges and universities."