The Board of Governors of Florida's State University System has warned Florida A&M that its law school may be closed down soon unless performance improves substantially. In particular, despite a target of having 80% of graduates pass a bar exam on their first attempt, the figure for last year was only 41% and was even lower than the previous year's figure.
Programs in health-related fields are also threatened with closure, but it is the law school at Florida A&M that seems to be doing the worst. Readers of OTLSS will not be surprised, since Florida A&M is a notorious über-toilet that draws it students heavily from the 140s (perhaps even lower) on the LSAT. Such unpromising students can be expected to fail bar exams in large numbers, and of course they do.
We at OTLSS urge the Board of Governors to acknowledge immediately that Florida A&M is sunk hopelessly in the mire of toilet-grade students and that it simply is not going to achieve, or even approach, that 80% standard. The merciful course of action is to pull the plug now. "Give us five years" is bullshit: we see time and time again that über-toilets fail even to come close to a respectable standard despite years of dispensations. Shut Florida A&M down.
Gotta ask: with bar passage so low, where was the ABA in all this? Here's a guess: MIA.
ReplyDeleteThree years ago, the ABA cheerfully reported that Florida A&M was in compliance with the ABA's so-called standards:
Deletehttps://www.abajournal.com/news/article/four-more-law-schools-found-to-be-in-compliance-with-bar-passage-standard?
MIA as in missing in action or Miami? Serious question
DeleteMore time, more time (and money) is a huge part of the overall scam. At the individual level it starts out just get that BA or BS and you'll be 'golden'. I used to hear that term a lot 'golden', The BA isn't working out just get that MBA. Oh the market is flooded with state college MBAs? Just get a JD, combined with the MBA you'll be golden. Oh, passed the bar on the first but government agencies or law firms aren't interested, just get an LLM in some arcane specialty and you'll be golden. It never ends.
ReplyDeleteThank you for saying this. To fix the problem these schools have to be defunded along with the never-ending degree chasing.
DeleteOne thing to add is that the work conditions of these professions are awful. Non-professional work conditions are probably worse, but both are at the point that the labor model is lean production and constant hiring/firing model. It's all management knows (and is also liable to).
Deleteby the time of the late 90s, the term 'golden' was not used for any BA--there was an idea it mattered if you went to a prestigious, highly academic university, such as Cornell. This, I suspect was crap then and now, save getting into some kind of network at the Ivy League.
DeleteEven by the late 90s, people knew garden variety MBAs were crap. Do the kids know higher ed is mostly a dead end or is it that the younger generation is incapable of academic pursuits, or physical for that matter?
New report about state-accredited law schools in California, for anyone who cares:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.abajournal.com/web/article/california-bar-examiners-approve-state-law-schools-face-shifts
A 150 lsat minimum outside of a exceptional GPA or compelling need would fix a lot of these problems
ReplyDeleteReally, 150 is rather low—just under the 50th percentile. But it's a hell of a lot better than the scores in the low 140s and even lower—down into the 120s even at the faux-prestigious Univershitty of Texas—that get people into many law schools.
DeleteAnd "exceptional GPA or compelling need" is just the sort of excuse that the scamsters crave for admitting anyone who can fog a mirror. Any minimum score would necessarily be arbitrary, but that doesn't mean that it would be wrong. Sorry, but at some point we have to say that enough is enough. Entire law schools depend on people with 150 or worse.
Florida F&M serves a crucial role in the state as a law HBCU. Without it, there wouldn’t be crucial black representation of clients and in the profession. Every state should have a school like this.
DeleteThat "crucial black representation" doesn't seem to be working out very well, with that abysmal result on the bar exam. And even the graduates that do become lawyers are probably shitty.
DeleteWhen did law become a free-for-all? It is generally accepted that not everyone is cut out to be a professional football player or a physician, yet widely believed that any moron can and should become a lawyer.
I would give a guy with a 147 lsat and a 3.8 GPA shot. I think that guy probably passes the bar. And yeah, it's low but I am proposing it as the near absolute floor for admission so it needs to be low enough to get anyone worth having while also preventing 130 lsat dipping like Cooley did.
DeleteYes but UnFlorida and UnMiami don’t accept black applicants and they have to go somewhere.
DeleteExcuse me, but are you living in the 1950s? Certainly the U of Florida and the U of Miami—themselves toilets—admit Black people.
DeleteAnd, no, people of whatsoever racial category do not "have to go somewhere" for law school. It has been a recurring theme of this Web site that law school—and here we include Harvard—is a bad idea for the great majority of people.
The comments above are just unscrupulous promotion of über-toilets, without regard to any standards at all. Never mind how poorly prepared or incapable the so-called student, we're told; never mind how dreadful the outcome, how high the cost to the public.
If you only allow 170+ LSAT scores to go to law school then it’ll almost be devoid of black and Latino students. They almost never get those scores.
DeleteUMiami and UF are notorious for not having many black students compared to piers. Also, F&M offers in state tuition so the debt is not high.
5:41p The average debt is $62k, which is for law school only, and if you don't have a job because you flunked the bar, that's a lot of debt.
DeleteAnd when 59% of your grads flunk the bar, something is wrong. It's really a slightly different form of theft, to accept students who have no chance of succeeding but to still take their money.
Why are you assuming they don’t have a job, whether in law or otherwise? With so much inflation 62k isn’t that much. What do you tell the 41% who pass and go onto great careers?
DeleteIt's easy for you to say "isn't much" when you aren't paying the bills. And you're assuming a lot of facts not in evidence-as in, what "great careers"? Almost 60% can't pass the bar.
DeleteI pay my bills like anyone else not in bankruptcy. And some become judges and corporate lawyers and in house and civil rights advocates out of A&M. Just go on LinkedIn and search the alums. A lot do well in the state.
DeleteIt's all "everybody knows" with you; no actual data-just "you could look it up". And you totally ignore that both UF and UM highlight their minority student populations-it's right on their websites...you could look it up.
DeleteAt best your view is: sacrifice the many for the few-with 60% flunking, those 40% are really going to make money. Notwithstanding your appreciation of legal Darwinism, there's zero proof that "a lot do well in the state."
"Florida F&M serves a crucial role in the state as a law HBCU. Without it, there wouldn’t be crucial black representation of clients and in the profession"
DeleteI'm hoping this is parody...
Crucial role? When 59% of your grads flunk the bar, the only thing the A&M is doing is saddling its grads with massive debt and wasting three years of their lives. 83% borrow an average of $62k....with the inability to pass the bar, that's all dead weight for those students.
ReplyDeleteThe only thing "crucial" about A&M is its function as a loan conduit.
And the minority that manage to pass the bar exam are hardly likely to be great lawyers. The bar exam represents the bare minimum; it is not a standard of excellence.
DeleteThere's a reason for which wealthy people and large corporations don't retain counsel from über-toilets.
62k can be paid back reasonably. The FL bar is considered much harder than NY or CA, the other schools don’t have as high of pass rates in state. Black students at F&M score way higher than those at UF or Miami.
DeleteNonsense; if you don't have a job because you've flunked the bar, $62k can't be paid back at all, let alone "reasonably." And UM claims 55% "students of color". UF claims 36% "racial/ethnic diversity". So no need for a very poor A&M to exist at all-other than as a loan conduit organization.
DeleteThere are 10 states, based on pass rate, with a tougher bar than Florida, and California is one of them, so that argument holds no weight. And there is zero evidence regarding the relative pass rates of black students, so that's a specious argument, too.
DeleteThe reality is that a 41% pass rate is atrocious, with the school existing only to waste three years of the students' time and then saddle them with debt.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/hardest-bar-exams-by-state
With a 41% Bar Pass Rate, the school is obviously doing something wrong. Either the quality of instruction is poor (reason in itself for shutting it down), or they are letting in way too many unqualified students for whatever reason, setting them up for failure and/or a lifetime of debt, an outcome surely inconsistent with the goals of an HBCU. A progressive, forward-thinking school, accrediting organization, and funding source (Hello Uncle Sam!) would be competing with each other to see who will be the first to pull a bottom card out from this flimsy house of cards.
ReplyDeleteThe Black colleges and universities offered opportunity in a deeply white-chauvinist society at a time when oppression of Black people was overt and clad in legal garb (as opposed to being covert and nominally illegal but still widespread and systemic today). They were no place for the lousy or the lazy. On the contrary, WEB DuBois wrote of the "talented tenth", an élite group of Black people (typically, like himself, from relatively privileged backgrounds, to the extent that Black people could be privileged in a white-supremacist society) whose advancement, in his view, would raise the entire Black nation. He sought to pave the way for those who through circumstance and ability could profit from academic opportunities. He would have been scandalized by the suggestion that every mouth-breathing semiliterate belonged in law school.
DeleteThose who tout blaxploitation gigs such as Florida A&M should be ashamed of themselves.
And where should a black A&M student attend them? UM and UF will not accept them without a crazy high LSAT and GPA, and we know how bigoted both exams are
DeleteNo, the exams are not bigoted. And plenty of Black people do score well enough to get into schools of far better quality than über-toilet Florida A&M.
DeleteIf Black people as a group do poorly on the LSAT, the reason is racial disparities in education. The solution is to correct those disparities, not to defend rotten über-toilet law schools that exploit Black people for their ability to extract student loans from the government.
There is no chance those disparities in education will be significantly rectified in my lifetime, and I’m not an old guy. This would ensure the profession remains very very white. I’m uncomfortable with the idea of denying that 40% that passes the bar the chance of being a lawyer.
DeleteThis discussion has reached the "everybody knows" stage, with zero proof that non-white applicants to UM and UF need "crazy high" LSAT scores. Both of those law schools note minority representation of over one third of the entering classes, which 11:57 has consistently ignored, instead preferring to saddle the 60% of A&M grads who flunk the bar with three wasted years and 62k in compound interest accruing debt.
DeleteIndeed, what we see is an unscrupulous scamster-type defense of a horrible über-toilet, with scarcely a word about the über-toilet itself but a lot of unsupported—and false—claims about its being the only salvation of Black people.
DeleteUF has some data behind it: https://classbias.blogspot.com/2023/04/class-bias-and-deanship-of-laura.html?m=1 if it were up to me, minority law schools could keep on as they are but with like $5k a semester tuition. If it works, it works if not the debt isn't too big to walk away from.
DeleteAnd yet, the only thing they could do to raise passage rates would be to buy better students with discounts ("scholarships").
ReplyDeleteI don't think the parent university would like that either. When I picture the relationship of a parent university to its law school, I picture a mob boss sitting in some pizza shop front business. His capo comes in and hands him a manila envelope of the boss' "cut" from whatever racket the capo is in charge of. He looks at it and says "you're short." If that manila envelope is too light for too long, the capo gets whacked.
That said, I'm surprised the nursing school has that same problem. There's a nationwide shortage of RNs and the would-be students know it. As a result, there's a massive demand for seats in the nursing schools . They have the exact opposite problem as law schools, which is that they simply cannot pump out enough nurses anywhere near fast enough to meet demand. As a result, the nursing schools can all be pretty selective. So I'm surprised they had to do any scraping of the bottoms of any barrels just to fill a class.
Buying a class works only for the likes of Irvine—trap schools with piles of money, a location that many people unaccountably find appealing, and the cachet of a fancy name (in this case that of the U of California system).
DeleteIndiana Tech tried it and failed. In its third and penultimate year, Indiana Tech reduced tuition to $0 for the entire entering class. Still only 15 people signed up. Golden Gate recently tried something similar and fell flat on its ass.
Why can't an über-toilet bribe people of higher quality in significant numbers? Because it fucking stinks! People with bribe-worthy LSAT scores would turn a Florida A&M down, even at zero tuition, in favor of a mediocre toilet school—and they would be right to do so (if they have to go to law school at all; the correct decision, of course, is to stay out of law school).
Suppose that you score 155 on the LSAT—a rather poor score, but good enough to get you into some such toilety law school as the U of Cincinnati, with only a small discount or none at all. Over at Florida A&M, however, your score makes them salivate. If they offer you zero tuition, perhaps even a $5k bribe, should you take it? No. First, if you play your cards right, you may be able to wring a small discount out of a Cincinnati-calibre law school, so the difference may not be so great after all. Second, you will have high living expenses at any law school, so the "free" offer at Florida A&M is still expensive. Third, your chances of a job in law, though far from great, are much better at some mediocre toilet. If you're going to go to law school (and you shouldn't), the Cincinnati at full or nearly full price is better than Florida A&M at zero.
How is the OC “unaccountably” appealing? It is the American dream to get rich and move there.
DeleteAnyone who supposes that a Mickey Mouse law degree from über-toilet Florida A&M leads to a lucrative career can have a look at this:
ReplyDeletehttps://cew.georgetown.edu/cew-reports/law/
The average income of graduates of Florida A&M, net of payments towards student loans, four years after graduation is $44,900. This is in a state with expensive housing.
Even this data is skewed as it only includes debt payments for federal loans and doesn't include loans taken from private lenders. The net income is actually much lower than in the Georgetown report.
DeleteYes but how much were they making before law? The degree could have easily doubled their income. And once debt is repaid they’re swimming in it
DeleteLet's not factor in institutional racism and the country club mentality. It's alive and well. So the few black students who do pass the bar will have to contend with non so obvious racism at law firms' hiring department. To deny such racism exists would be to deny reality. You would be denied employment for simply being first generation and no legal connections and coming from a blue collar family. Much worse discrimination awaits those from racial minorities.
DeleteFor one thing, why is there a tab right next to it about masters degrees in legal research? No discernible reason, other than the fact that the number one "net of loans" return is Georgetown's own masters. Coincidence? I think not. Most of those masters degrees are pretty much just the 1L curriculum so it's a cash cow - admit more students without hurting USNWR ranks, and you can admit the top performers from there to the JD as well, because first year performance can then be used as the "reliable admissions test" for ABA accreditation rules, once again sidestepping the LSAT and any related impact on USNWR rank.
DeleteIn addition, idk how they're getting these "net of" numbers. Student loans are no longer really loans at all, more like a tax on a certain percentage of your income for a certain number of years. You don't pay the fully amortized payment unless your income is very high or your debt is very low. For most big borrowers, balance is irrelevant to what your payment is if you can figure out how to fill out the forms for income-driven repayment. (Not that this fact makes law school a good idea, but it does mean that what you actually repay depends on how well you do).
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ReplyDeleteThe law school isn't A&M's only problem:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.yahoo.com/news/famu-president-resigns-months-donation-190000008.html
A new scam law schools are promoting as an advertising ploy is their concept of "professional identity formation" at career services as though they can fill a niche for everyone looking for employment. It's just another play on words for the diversity scam.
ReplyDeleteThe professional identity formation won't help when you are unemployed
Shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic. They pose as finding specialized jobs for people who can't even get interviews anywhere.
DeleteThe "professional identity" is likely to involve flipping hamburgers or gathering shopping carts.
I think we should contact JD Vance and discuss our concerns about law schools and student debt. He despises elites and law professors. He could push legislation to kill the scam.
ReplyDeleteMy “professional identity” for the first 2 years out of law school was handyman, document review and patent searcher.
ReplyDeleteIndiana Tech started a collection of clothing that would be useful to its graduates in their future work. I offered an apron and a pair of steel-toed boots.
DeleteHow about the law schools tell students they can go solo if they don't land a job upon graduation. So a freshly minted graduate at least $250,000 in nondischargeable debt both undergraduate and law school will need a lot of legal treatises at his or her solo office to do legal research just so they don't commit legal malpractice. Let's say for an example they want to specialize in New York Matrimonial Law Practice. If they wanted to buy the treatises from Thompson Reuters to do an effective job representing their clients they will spend over $4,000 for just this title:
ReplyDelete" Law and The Family New York, 2023 ed. (New York Practice Library) "
Let's then include office space rent, malpractice insurance, Paralegals, etch. Everything adds up. What creditor will give someone credit to a newly minted lawyer going solo already having $250,000 in student loans unless they graduated first in their class at Harvard? And even that is risky.
That's another good point. Law school does not at all equip a person for the practice of law. Indeed, many other countries, including some from the same common-law tradition (such as Canada and England), require a period of supervised practical work—something like a physician's internship—for admission to the bar.
DeleteUnless one managed to get a summer job or other similar employment with uncommonly good opportunities to participate in real legal work, one is unlikely upon becoming a lawyer to know much of anything about the practice of law, even if one graduated from a Harvard or a Yale. Buying a $4000 book may help, but it won't make up for inexperience and a lack of practical skills.
Even if opening a solo practice in Bumblefuck, Nebraska, could yield an adequate income in theory, the new graduate who tried it without very considerable support would almost certainly make a mess of things and end up in trouble. Fortunately, this sort of venture doesn't usually have much potential to generate income (South Dakota years ago tried to bribe lawyers to set up rural practices), so the countryside is mercifully spared a lot of legal calamities.
Yeah that south dakota program is still around, though it looks like only one town (Rosholt, pop. 379) is currently taking new applicants and there's only 9 lawyers in current contracts throughout the state.
DeleteIt's about 12k/yr for 5 years, but the requirements to get it are quite onerous. Basically like being an employee - submitting timesheets quarterly to prove you really were open at least 35 hours per week, being limited to 21 days of "leave" for vacations, stuff like that. Plus a pro bono obligation that effectively reduces what they're really giving you.
Good idea in concept IMHO, but the devil's in the details. Seems to me they made the requirements way too onerous for the amount of money they were willing to pay. I mean, I get that you want to make sure that the lawyer who takes the check really is running a practice there, but c'mon. 12k ain't enough to live off by itself and few of them are gonna have any other marketable skill, so I doubt there's a real risk of anyone defrauding the program by taking the money and then not practicing, except for situations where there just aren't any damn cases to take which I suspect is a real risk in a town of <400!
But yeah, I guess there's 9 people doing it. Somewhere out there, there's a lawyer in some middle of nowhere SD town with no cases because there isn't any demand, at least not from anyone who can actually pay, still just pointlessly sitting at his desk 35 hours per week waiting for phone calls that never come just so he can keep his 12k per year. Because another ridiculous condition is that you can't just drop out early unless its for a permitted reason. Otherwise, you have to fill the full 5 yr commitment or you risk not only that they stop paying, but that they could claw back everything they've already gave.
Thanks for the information, 2:09. I remembered that the subsidy was about $12k per year, but I didn't know of all the strings that were attached.
DeleteI looked Rosholt up on a map. I had expected it to be two hours' drive from the nearest place of any size, but actually it's not very far from Interstate 29, and in an hour or so one can be in Fargo, North Dakota.
Probably those nine people who are in this program grew up in their little rural towns and can't bear to leave. They may as well take the money, despite the onerous conditions.
Something tells me that the people of Rosholt don't have much money to spend on lawyers, whether or not they need legal services. Probably some of them would show up repeatedly at a local lawyer's with "just one little question" on which they wanted free advice. There might be a will or a divorce now and then. But how could a lawyer maintain a practice in an unassuming town of 400? What do the people there do right now when they need a lawyer? Probably they either do without or go half an hour away to Sisseton—still small, but at least it has a courthouse.
The meagre payment doesn't justify five years of indentured servitude.
An hour's drive in that part of the country during winter can literally be impossible. They close the roads, including the Interstate. If I needed serious legal assistance in South Dakota, I would seek out an attorney in Sioux Falls or Rapid City.
DeleteCould you practice law online, even if only based in a small town, to throw a larger net for potential clients?
DeleteA link to this blog was posted on a reddit forum:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reddit.com/r/patentlaw/comments/1e5y02g/what_is_the_job_market_like_for_patent/
So, is the job market worse or better today than in 2014 for JD's', in particular for IP law? One commenter seems to indicate that it is better.
Patent law employment is flat or declining yet the law school scamsters are trying to tout their LLM degrees in patent law as opening more doors. These LLM programs are just another scheme for more tuition dollars when the JD programs are declining nationwide.
DeleteFor patent prosecution, you need an engineering/science degree just to sit for the patent bar, and to actually compete for jobs you probably need more than just an undergrad engineering degree. Think like hard science PhDs and such.
DeleteObviously, there aren't that many lawyers with that kind of background so in one sense it eliminates a lot of the competition, but patent prosecution is just one type of IP work. All the other types are going to be biglaw or bust like most other non-toilet practice areas, and the patent prosecution thing is like I said, something that relatively few lawyers would even be allowed to do. But it is also a very niche practice area, so in my experience the firms that do it will bend on law school prestige a bit but you probably need more than just enough science education for patent bar eligibility; you tend to see people with engineering/science PhDs and stuff like that. These people are highly qualified scientists in their own right totally independent of legal qualification. An LLM definitely won't help and I don't suggest that someone go to law school just because they happen to have an undergraduate degree in computer engineering or whatever and think patent bar eligibility would in and of itself get them a job.
TLDR: If you want patent prosecution, you might be able to compromise a bit on law school prestige but you need MAJOR hard science credentials, far above the bare minimum for patent bar eligibility if you want to actually get a job. And if you have those credentials, is questionable whether the law would really be better than the other opportunities you'd have.
Indeed, patent prosecution is mainly the province of people with a PhD in the relevant discipline—electrical engineering, chemistry, whatever—and qualification as lawyers. That's a tall order. Ordinarily the PhD comes before the law degree.
DeleteAs a 17 year practitioner, I would not recommend patent law for disaffected engineers. The job market is tight, only EE and CS are in demand, there is significant pressure on rates and new tools like chatgpt will further reduce work for us. Most will never recoup the 3+ lost years of wages and the tuition costs. Just don’t do it.
DeleteFor better or worse-and in this case it's clearly worse-there is nothing harder than closing a state-supported law school, even one with results as poor as this. The local politics just gets too complicated, and the only way it would be closed is if the ABA actually did its job and pulled accreditation-which isn't going to happen.
ReplyDeleteSo that sterling 40% bar pass rate will be there for years and years.
If Kamala could go to Hastings and is now this close to the presidency, what is stopping a flood of applications this upcoming cycle?
ReplyDeleteOn the assumption that just anyone might go to toilet school Hastings and end up close to the presidency?
DeleteIt's funny that so many people treat one atypical person—born into privilege—as typical while marginalizing the great majority. Old Guy has no time to waste on people who "think" in that way.
Plus if the average Hastings grad wants to be Willie Brown's mistress.....
DeleteIt is human nature to underestimate the role of randomness in life, whether it be randomly being in the right place at the right time or just the random accident of birth to people with the right connections etc. So they assume that anyone who goes to Hastings could end up a major presidential party nominee or similar if they just work hard enough. It's also why the same people who have crippling anxiety about flying have no problem driving their cars every day - because of the perception of control and thus NOT having to confront randomness, even though a car wreck is often quite random because you can drive perfectly and still get plowed into by a drunk driver in a stolen car. Randomness creates cognitive dissonance for humans - we don't like it. It's probably hard-wired evolutionarily.
DeleteThe truth, of course, is that you have to follow the mediocrity principle in the absence of contrary evidence. Assume your outcome is more likely than not to be in the middle of whatever the school's bell curve is, unless you have a real concrete reason other than "I'm a hard worker" (such as "my dad owns the biggest firm in town) to believe you'd be an outlier.
Of course, by all means one should then work hard to prove themselves wrong, and maybe they'll succeed. It's not a defeatist attitude. But you have to start from the assumption that your outcome will be the average one and make sure you can live with that before undertaking the activity or investment.
At least those weight loss infomercials put something on the bottom of the screen saying "results not typical" when they show their "before and after" photos of someone turning from Chris Farley to Arnold Schwarzenegger. Law schools get to bury their disclosures on complicated forms buried on an obscure section of the website.
DeleteWe literally hold law school marketing to a lower standard than a 2:00AM weight loss infomercial, and then we loan unlimited federal money to people that want to buy the product at whatever price the school has the unmitigated gall to charge.
A graphic but poignant way to put it, 12:21. Of course, it will be claimed that people who go to law school are too sophisticated to need warnings. I haven't noticed very much sophistication even among graduates of law schools that draw their students from the 160s, never mind people who enrol at schools that dip deep into the 140s.
DeleteGood points, 10:45.
DeleteIf the data are normally distributed (you mentioned a bell curve), 68% of them lie within one standard deviation of the mean. For those with little understanding of statistics, that means that the chance of doing much better than average is poor.
I think most prospective law students look at law school rankings before making the logical fallacy that because Kamala Harris went to such and such a school that I will achieve the same.
DeleteBut I may be wrong.
Very true, OG@1:44. Most of those court cases that attacked law schools on misleading marketing grounds were indeed dismissed mainly on a "sophisticated plaintiff" argument, i.e. the claim that a person who has graduated from college and now seeks to become a lawyer can be expected to be capable of doing due diligence. That's a legal fiction for the reasons you mentioned.
DeleteEnjoy the prestige future debt slaves!!! College is the only way to a proper life!
ReplyDeletehttps://sfist.com/2024/07/22/sf-releases-city-employees-salary-data-one-sfpd-officer-made-465-000-in-overtime-alone-last-year/
This is an interesting snippet from Baylor University Law School's career services website. Makes you wonder what they pay their career services staff for. Basically they are saying you are on your own:
ReplyDelete" And while we're with you through all three years of your law school experience, it's important to remember that the CDO is not a "placement center." This is your career. And it's your search. So, you need to be proactive."
As a lawyer, it pains me to see that. . .it is EXACTLY the kind of CYA (Cover Your Ass) thing sleazy attorneys are known for. "See, we'll create a Career Development Office and lie up a storm about all the amazing jobs its staff will help students get. . .and then insert this language into the 'fine print' that basically says it's up to the student to find a job for himself!" Honestly, at this point criminal con artists could take lessons from dishonest law schools that scam hapless, gullible fools out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, promising theme exciting high-paying jobs that don't exist.
DeleteWhat are they for? Mainly event planning and marketing, frankly. They organize on campus interviews for those at the top of the class, and then massage the ABA data and marketing materials as best they can to make those outcomes look typical.
DeleteThat's why they're the nicest people in the world to 1Ls. They don't yet know who will be top of the class. Once they do, anyone else gets the brushoff and is handed an alumni directory or something and told to network.
Old Guy's experience is slightly different: he was at the top of the class but still didn't get the time of day from the "Career Development Office". The only ones who got that office's attention were those who were bound to get jobs in law whether they did well in law school or not. These were mostly scions of the rich, who abounded at my élite law school. Old Guy was damned by his age (attending law school in his forties), and the event planners of the "Career Development Office" weren't going to waste their time on him even though he excelled in law school.
DeleteAll these misnamed "placement office(s)" are terrible. Was wandering through State U law school lobby(it was air conditioned) and there was a group of students loudly complaining. They also encouraged each other to NOT tell that office is anyone actually got a job, because then the office would take credit for it, when all agreed that office did zero to help anyone in their class actually get jobs.
DeleteThe smart people figure that out BEFORE applying to law school. . .and they get a real degree somewhere else instead. It's not a secret that law school leads to bad outcomes in the workplace. Basically, the entering class of the average law school becomes full of dumber and more gullible people year by year. Some of these fools post ridiculous videos on Youtube, blabbering about how they can't wait to graduate and become a Sports Agent like Tom Cruise in that movie, Show Me the Money. Or they will boast about their "summer job at a law firm" that turns out not to be a job at all, but just and unpaid internship, Of Course.
DeleteSmart students, 3:21. If you have a job, don't even tell them. Taking credit for it is EXACTLY what they'll try to do.
DeletePeople are posting about their expectations of working in the mythological field of "sports law"? Let them land the job in "sports law" (or "international law", "entertainment law", or "environmental law") and then gloat about it.
DeleteI don't know how a person becomes a sports agent, but I rather doubt whether a Mickey Mouse JD from Cooley, Appalachian, or Vermont Law School proves particularly advantageous.
There are some lawyers who are self-proclaimed "lottery lawyers" to allegedly assist people who win the Powerball Lottery. So watch law schools start adding an LLM in lottery law to lure gullible students they will be getting lottery winners calling them all the time in their future profession.
DeleteI have read about these lottery lawyers, OG. What they do is assist people in maintaining anonymity. This is usually done through two or more trusts which get the winner's identity beyond the reach of state freedom of information laws while avoiding unnecessary taxable events.
DeleteMost big jackpot winners are latter-day Jed Clampetts; suddenly in possession of serious wealth but with little or no sophistication. And even the sophisticated ones will be beset by swarms of scam artists and moochers who are hoping they are not sophisticated. Lottery lawyers provide a valuable service and are fortunate to serve people who can pay the freight.
All that having been said, big jackpots are few and far between and I doubt first that even California would need more than three or four such specialists and second that such specialists wouldn't have to do other work to keep the lights turned on. Kind of like grief counselors. I've always wondered what they do between school shootings, but I digress. I once read about a lottery lawyer in Massachusetts who came to learn that his name had been in the news so much claiming jackpots that some people, not getting the concept, thought he was a lottery player with an incredible system.
Actually, its exactly that, OG@12:21. Big lotto winners get to choose between cash and annuity, and most take the cash, even though this will be far less than the advertised number because the advertised number is for the annuity option which guarantees a 4-5% ROI on the lesser cash lump and that's how they arrive at the advertised number for how much the powerball is "up to" or whatever.
DeleteAnyway, if you don't pick the annuity, you probably want the cash award put into an irrevocable trust, because you're going to become a target for lawsuits (and an irrevocable trust would keep creditors from attaching the corpus; they could only intercept distributions as they are made) and long-lost relatives coming out of the woodwork with their hands out, and you probably want a professional trustee managing your "allowance" out of the thing so that you can't just blow the wad and so that the unspent funds are invested well. Setting all that up is where the lotto lawyer comes in, and it will indeed largely be about that initial point of collecting the prize because it is all about where it goes. You'd be a massive idiot to just put it in your checking account, but sadly that's exactly what a lot of winners will do without professional help. It's not exactly the upper crust that plays the lotto all the time.
Of course, a lot of these same issues could be handled by just picking the annuity option in the first place, but people either think they can beat that 5% on their own or they're just too unsophisticated to understand it, which makes them need the professional help all the more.
Not that there's enough of these big winners to support an entire practice, but the people who do win and who want to pick the cash definitely ought to get both a legal and finance/investment professional help. Personally, I'd just pick the annuity and avoid all the hassle (if I played the lotto, which I don't, lol), but to each their own I guess.
I hadn't thought about that as an area of "practice", but I'm not a bit surprised to see that lawyers have found a way to latch their parasitic asses onto parasites who find themselves with undeserved riches.
DeleteOne thing I've never understood about the US legal system is how they dont have standard 'loser pays' costs like the UK/Australia has. This seems to encourage all sorts of fruitless litigation
DeleteCosts are a touchy subject. On the one hand, awarding no costs at all or only a modest amount is often unfair to the victorious litigant, and, as you said, it encourages SLAPP and other abuse. On the other, awarding full costs or other high amounts discourages valid claims from people who have little money—whose lack of money may be attributable in part to the claims themselves.
DeleteYou're right: awards of costs are typical not only in the UK and Australia but indeed almost everywhere in the world, whatever the legal system may be. The US is an outlier in this respect and many others. Bail is another example: most jurisdictions try not to require a deposit of cash at all, and often by law any deposit must be affordable (otherwise bail is effectively denied though nominally granted). As far as I know, only in the US and the Philippines is bail habitually set at a large amount of cash—and that wasn't done in the Philippines until they were conquered by Uncle Sam through genocidal warfare.
Well, 8:01, the first thing you need to understand is that attorneys fees are not "costs" in the US system. Costs, such as court filing fees and the fees charged by court reporters for transcribing depositions, pretty much always ARE in fact a "loser pays" system.
DeleteSecond, understand that the "American Rule" only applies to common law actions (mainly torts) not causes of action created by statute (such as employment discrimination suits) where the rule on fees is whatever the statute says it is. Statutes can create a loser-pays system (as my state does for breach of contract case), or sometimes they even create a one-sided loser pays system, for example in employment cases where the Plaintiff gets fees if they win, but the defendant does NOT get fees if they win unless the action was frivolous which is a very high bar to meet. This recognizes the David and Goliath nature of the battle; individual plaintiffs would never sue if they took the risk of being bankrupted by losing.
So, back to torts, which is usually the only place where the "American Rule" truly still applies in most cases. The contingency fee system usually used for those cases makes it so that lawyers are expected to be the gatekeepers against frivolous suits, because they, not the client, is the one bearing risk if they lose.
In theory, I think the American rule really is better. A pure loser-pays system may serve to reduce the workload for courts, but it does not serve justice, because individual litigants going up against big defendants would have to take on more risk than they can bear, no matter how meritorious their cause. The check and balance we are supposed to have is relying on attorneys taking contingency fee risk and thus being incentivized to be gatekeepers.
That probably is better in theory, but we now have so many lawyers scrambling for cases that they aren't being the gatekeepers they were expected to be. If we could get that under control then we could probably have our rule functioning as it should: Making sure the courthouse doors are open to David and Goliath battles when David has a just cause, without throwing those doors open to frivolity either.
Gosh, is there any problem in law that doesn't ultimately trace back to the law school scam simply producing too many lawyers? lol.
Nothing is more horrifying than seeing in September your law school you graduated from years ago and never found a legal job post photos on their official Facebook page of their incoming 1L lemmings smiling thinking they are going to have a lucrative career. Most will be working at Starbucks with a $250,000 nondischargeable student loan.
ReplyDeleteThe law school officials are pimps.
Reading your words, I cannot help thinking of a film of the musical Hair in which hundreds of young men recently drafted for the US's program of genocide in Indochina were shown marching into the black cavern of a military airplane, graphically being swallowed by the army's machinery.
DeleteThere are two issues at play here: 1) Law School Deans, Administrators, and liars at the Career Services Office are very intelligent, savvy, experienced con artists with a whole array of tricks to lure in new law students, and to keep them there until they have extracted a couple of hundred thousand dollars from them over the course of three years and 2) very gullible, uninformed applicants and students with wildly unrealistic expectations. It is very easy to fool people by promising them things they already want to believe. These applicants are crippled by Confirmation Bias that tells them they are making the right decision, so when the law school marketing brochures are full of obvious lies (Let us tell you all about our award-winning International Law Program, or perhaps you would prefer to study Sports Law and become a hip, sexy, wealthy Sports Agent like Tom Cruise in that movie Show Me the Money!) they are profoundly inclined to believe them, and accept this nonsense as the gospel truth. The combination of greedy, dishonest law school administrators and terminally gullible, dumb applicants leads to a massive number of new lawyers coming out of school, each and every year, into a job market that not only does not need them, it does not want them. . .
DeleteEspecially telling, to those with a discerning eye, is the slate of supposed specialties, every one of them sexy and glamorous, that are touted to naïve prospects: international law, sports law, entertainment law, environmental law, and other such lies. Even if those things existed, it would not be hard to understand that few lawyers could pursue them—not substantially the entire classes of law schools from Harvard to Cooley. Really, how could it be the case that thousands upon thousands of new graduates every year would rub elbows professionally with celebrities and diplomats, while hardly any dealt with the criminal charges, wills, divorces, and personal injuries of the hoi polloi? And would some scarcely literate Cooleyite be the prime choice of the high and mighty?
DeleteThe applicants and students are foolish to see themselves in those exalted positions, and the scamsters know damn well that they're lying through their teeth about the chances of getting such work. Yet every über-toilet promotes such fantasies, and not one gloats of its "specialty" in evictions or traffic tickets or other stuff that a Cooleyite might ineptly do if—and it's a big if—she managed to be admitted to the bar.
LOL how awesome would it be if some toilet started offering LLMs in stuff like dogbites, slip and falls, document review, insurance defense, no-asset chapter 7 bankruptcies, workers comp, social security disability, high-conflict-no-asset family law, and DUIs? Bonus for a robust internship program with a wide network of Justices of the Peace and traffic court magistrates.
DeleteOf those things, DUIs are the only one with much potential—and only if the clients are wealthy people who are trying to get out of trouble, and if the lawyer is prepared to accept that function in a legal system that sends the disadvantaged to prison for small matters while the privileged buy their way out of big ones.
DeleteMy friend owns a popular restaurant in town and I have seen teenagers work there while in high school; attend college afterwards; then graduating college are back at the restaurant for years doing the same job but with student loans. Then I hear a few of them say maybe if they go to law school things will get better. Didn't the college administrators lure them in with nice brochures of what they can do with a college degree and misleading statistics of how it will improve their care
ReplyDeleteThere are some systemic issues in place, all through higher education but honestly all across the economy. There are social issues that will arise over time and you're beginning to see it in certain statistics now that I've seen, with Zoomers having less ambition, mental and physical health issues at younger ages, and are just giving up. You can't just violate the social contract endlessly and browbeat younger people, at some point it's too obvious and people just give up.
DeleteI think the Boomer gen doesn't care because they got what they wanted and expect to pass before there are consequences for them. They are probably right. Millennials are mostly a lost generation and Zoomers probably will recover at some point, because wealth and land have to go somewhere. Or maybe not, I don't know, maybe things can get even worse, maybe humanity is in line for a massive dystopia. But history generally indicates at some point people get fed up and overthrow the upper classes and that fixes things at least for a time.
Hi there, Old Guy at 2:18.
ReplyDeleteDon't underestimate the profitability of DUI defense. The market for this area of law is not just among rich people who can buy their way out of trouble. It extends to anyone who needs their driver's license for work or to get to work.
The DUI defendant will find the money to pay the lawyer even if it means going into debt.
True, people can often come up with money if they're desperate enough. Loss of driving privileges is especially hard on people in rural areas, where there is rarely any public transportation.
DeleteAnyway, defending people accused of impaired driving is pretty far removed from hobnobbing with corporate athletes and movie stars, the fantasy sold to naïve lemmings by law-school scamsters all over the US.
Out of curiosity, Old Ruster: I can certainly imagine that desperate times causes people to cough up the dough. But how often can that make a difference? I mean, even if the the charges get dropped there is still an administrative case at the MVD with a much lower burden of proof and which, if it is like most administrative "courts," is pretty much a formality. Your only hope to win (I'm guessing) is if the cop doesn't show up or if they didn't fill out some form correctly. If it's a per se case where they have a test showing .08+, it'd feel like there really aren't any defenses on the admin side. Arguing about the machine's calibration or the probable cause for the stop or whatever might work in criminal court, but I'd imagine an MVD ALJ would just pass arguments like that right over.
DeleteFor those first offense misdemeanor DUIs that most people who "just need to get to work" get, there wouldn't have been jail time anyway so it feels like the criminal case kinda doesn't matter, except maybe for a background check or something. If the MVD will just suspend your license the same as the criminal court would have with only an administrative hearing, what's the point of hiring counsel? What result can they actually achieve in the admin case? I don't do DUIs, so I don't know that answer, I'm just curious to see what lawyers who do these things are actually able to do for people in terms of what is usually going to be their main goal, which as you said, is often simply keeping their ability to drive to get to work.
9:36-while it's certainly potentially lucrative, every small/solo practitioner in the country will take those cases, so once again it's many lawyers chasing a limited number of clients.
DeleteWhy? Because as you point out-especially at the ALJ level-it's a done deal; all defendants lose their license. And even in most of the criminal proceedings, it's become so rote for the cops there's nothing to argue about...it's more a matter of seeking special treatment for your client because they need to get to medical treatment, etc etc.
So yeah, there's money to be made and it's easy work, but every lawyer and his brother wants those cases.
This blog always discusses the glut of attorneys and the doubtful value of most law schools and all this is true but I was thinking that I always had pretty good writing skills but was never able to parlay this into a career in and of itself. I was always steered into careers that involved more quantitative skills which I am more mediocre with. Most of my A's in high school, college, law school, MBA were derived from written papers. I am constantly hearing about the importance of written communication skills but it this really true? Is there really a demand for good writers?
ReplyDeleteOld Guy frequently receives compliments on his writing. But is the skill in great demand? Old Guy has not noticed.
DeleteLawyers and law-school scamsters alike are happy to boast of the writing skills, general knowledge, intelligence, and other traits that supposedly characterize the bar. Don't believe their self-congratulatory bullshit.
I crushed the English and Reading sections of the ACT, and won a graduation medal for getting all A's in Language Arts classes. My college professors complimented my advanced writing ability. After law school, I was brow-beaten by my mother about how "highly educated" I was, and that I had such great writing skills, as evidence that I wasn't really trying to find a job.
DeleteIt might be a filler qualification that doesn't mean anything. It could also be an anachronistic vestige of pre-internet days. The written word is a dead medium, and all industries built upon it are in terminal decline.
In the private practice of law the only skill that matters is the ability to bring business through the door. I have seen some serious hacks do quite well because they can generate business. Some do mostly residential real estate and simple wills and other things where the client doesn't know good work from bad work. But I have also seen a guy who couldn't write to save his life quickly become a partner in a large, well-respecyted
Delete10:01 again. I have to agree. I took the GMAT and scored in the 94th percentile on the verbal test but 45th percentile on quantitative (hey it's a global test). If it were the other way around I might be rich.
DeleteWell it's tricky because it's a low barrier and very subjective. Same as art, acting, and a slew of other fields that most non-professionals insist they are very skilled in. Even beauty, it's very subjective and is in the eye of the beholder, various models and actors that are touted for their looks are no more attractive than the average young person----as evidenced by the success of alternate influencer models of the past decade plus. There's something else to it to get a real career out of these things.
DeleteA "skilled trade" essentially adds barriers, to reduce competition. That's incidentally why law fails as well, the barrier became too low. Contrast that to say being a billionaire tech owner, where the barrier is insanely high but you can be a blithering buffoon and it won't matter. Actual skill or work ethic seem to pale in comparison to privilege and luck.
Yes, indeed, privilege and luck usually trump skill and effort. The privileged and the lucky seldom want to admit that, however: they prefer to flatter themselves by attributing their "success" to their own alleged efforts or excellence. Bill Gates has been honest enough to admit that he benefited immensely from being born to wealthy parents in an urban area, having access to computers as a teenager (only a handful of teenagers in the world would have had access to computers back then), and getting the chance to buy the operating system for the world's first mainstream microcomputer. Those things were matters of privilege and luck.
DeleteThere is indeed a demand for good writers. Not a robust one, but one that does exist. Think of things like technical writing (writing the help/manual documentation for software and such) or grant writing (nonprofit jobs writing out the applications for grants that regular staff don't have time to do). And yeah, there is journalism, but that's a tough row to hoe indeed. I used to be a newspaper reporter and it was all 1099 and paid by the word on absurdly short deadlines. I made enough to make rent, but not by much and no benefits.
DeleteAnd in most any office job, written communication matters, even if it is mostly just email. But anyone with any bachelors degree SHOULD be able to write well enough to meet this modest hurdle. Many of them cannot, this is true, and as an employer it frustrates me. But it's not something most employers would seek out a JD to find.
No, there isn't.
DeleteThere is no shortage of people who believe they have the skills/training/education which proves they are good writers. The best example: students/graduates with journalism majors. And their job prospects are about at the level of a toilet law school grad.
ReplyDelete