We at OTLSS have been following the decline of über-toilet Appalachian Law School for years. Now the discordant notes of its swan song resound far from Grundy, Virginia.
A week and a half ago, the supervisors of Buchanan County voted 5–2 to give Appalachian Law School $3.4 million out of the public coffers. This handout still requires approval from the county's Industrial Development Authority, although it appears to have nothing whatsoever to do with industrial development. Half of the money will be disbursed in early March if the IDA agrees and Appalachian tenders financial records that it has previously refused.
Leading this campaign, apparently, within the county government was Supervisor Trey Adkins, who ever so coincidentally "was recently appointed to the law school’s board of trustees". Can you say conflict of interests? Might this little appointment have been a little quid pro quo? How happy will the public be to know that their board of supervisors just voted to hand dying Appalachian 6% of the county's $59M annual budget?
Not very, according to Supervisor Roger Rife—himself a former trustee of Appalachian. Reluctantly voting to give Appalachian "one more chance", he lamented: "What we’re creating is going to come back to bite us." Specifically, he expects the county to raise taxes just for this piece of lagniappe.
Yes, even some of the board members who voted in favor of this pork-barrel graft are anything but sanguine about Appalachian's prospects. Supervisor Craig Stiltner observed that no bank would lend money to an institution perenially swimming in red ink. Appalachian never repaid a $6M loan extended by the Virginia Coalfield Economic Development Authority in 2016.
Adkins promoted this rip-off of the public coffers as an endeavor vital to the survival of Grundy, which happens to be the county seat. Forty-one jobs at the über-toilet depend on it—22 of them held by natives of Buchanan County. In the vulgar expression of Adkins, the IDA would "tear their arm off" to save 22 jobs at the trifling price of $3.4M.
Well, before so dramatic a performance of self-mutilation, the IDA might like to do a bit of arithmetic, if anyone there is up to the task. That sum is more than $150k per job—for the next two or three months. That vastly exceeds the value of those 22 jobs to the county.
Over the past ten years, Buchanan County has lost almost half of its population. As one might guess from the name Appalachian, the county is situate in an area historically devoted to coal mining. In a remote, mountainous county with no economic prospects, whose very geography militates against anything industrial and whose population lacks the education for learned professions (even if demand were present), a law school stands out like a sore thumb, its gleaming brick building and manicured lawn clashing with the scarred, black hillsides and piles of slag that typify the landscape. It does not serve the largely impoverished population that will soon see its taxes go up to pay for a predatory über-toilet that gives Cooley stiff competition for the title of lousiest law skule in the US.
Appalachian can do nothing to help. It turns out to be in dire financial straits: without $2.5M in a big hurry, it will not see the end of the semester. Long-term survival, according to the dean, will require an infusion of some $10M.
Now, if you have just read that paragraph and are still thinking of enrolling at Appalachian, please stop and read the paragraph again. This so-called school had to go begging just to survive for the next two months. It was prepared to shut up shop in the middle of the semester. And if it does get this money for the second half of the current semester, where will it get enough money for the next semester and the one after that? Do you really want to take the evidently high risk of having your über-toilet law school bolt its doors on you in the middle of the term, leaving you to hold an empty bag?
Enrollment, at 184 students, is far below the level of 300 that, in the words of dean David Western, would be needed to sustain Appalachian. Indeed, OTLSS estimated some years ago that a law school cannot survive over the long run with fewer than 75 students per class—and right now Appalachian has only 61.
I admit that Appalachian, evidently because of millions of dollars in welfare payments, has survived longer than I had expected during the wave of shutterings of toilet law schools that started ten years ago. I predict, however, that Appalachian will soon be the seventeenth institution in law-school-scam history to close its doors for good. And when it does, good riddance.
There are already 8 law schools in Virigina, a state with a population of under 9 million people. That is literally almost one entire law school for each one million people in the state. The job market absolutely, positively cannot support 8 entire graduating classes of JD's each year. Frankly, one, perhaps two law schools with moderate sized classes would be all that Virginia needs. The supervisors of Buchanan County are basically throwing tax dollars into a landfill by funding this wholly unnecessary school.
ReplyDeleteDuring the Great Depression, the federal government built post offices everywhere. As in literally, every podunk town in the middle of East Nowhere had a post office. It was good for local politicians-steady well-paid jobs (if only for the select few) they took credit for. And it was no big deal, cost wise, since the federal government prints the money-so what's a few million here and there?
ReplyDeleteIn this case, local politicians are spending millions to support well-paid jobs(if only for a select few). The problem: Buchanan County doesn't print the money, so this sort of profound nonsense will lead-very soon-to disaster. Don't be surprised to read, in a few short months, that Appalachian has failed to pay back any money(no need to use a harsh word like "defaulted") and that county services will get cut dramatically as a consequence.
In Buchanan County, most of the money probably comes from property taxes and other charges on the public. That's why a supervisor said that taxes would have to be raised soon enough. Twenty thousand largely impoverished people are seeing their taxes go up for the sake of an über-toilet headed for its last flush.
DeleteAs I understand, Appalachian will not have to pay anything back: it is getting this money as a grant (I'd say as graft). Without any source of fresh income, it would not be able to repay a loan anyway.
In light of this apparent gift, it would certainly be appropriate-at a minimum-for their to be a forensic accounting of the budget of this county. That's a tremendous amount of money to be given to a single employer by a government that is not swimming in funds.
DeleteSmall towns in particular can often be taken over by private interests. Here we see that some people on the board of supervisors are or have been on the board of Appalachian. Adkins, recently installed on Appalachian's governing board, seems to have acted not only as voting supervisor but also as chief advocate of this pork-barrel scheme.
DeleteReally weird. Normally, an industrial development authority is basically a government agency that says "yes, we deem this organization worthy" which in turn enables certain private organizations (like nonprofit hospitals) to borrow money as if it were a municipal bond. This is attractive to lenders cuz lenders don't pay income taxes on the interest they earn from repayment of a muni bond. This in turn enables them to pass some savings along in the form of lower rates than you'd get with a regular corporate bond, but the bond is still only secured by the assets of the borrower and not by taxpayer funds. So it isn't a true muni bond in that sense, but it gets tax breaks similar to the breaks you get for investing in true muni bonds.
ReplyDeleteIn other words, an IDA is usually a conduit for special financing of the sort a community wants to promote. I've not known them to straight up make giant grants of taxpayer money to private organizations. But hey, maybe its different in Appalachia I have no idea.
I'd rather go to a toilet law school in Florida or San Diego than Appalachian. At least you get to see sexy girls on weekends at sunny beaches for your wasted tuition dollars than see hillbillies named Betty Lou with less teeth than a Halloween pumpkin 🎃
ReplyDeleteI'm sure its not THAT bad of a town, but you have a point about law schools in touristy destinations. Every class comes in flush with loan money that they will spend at local bars and on renting local apartments. It's very much like tourism revenue, except these tourists stay for three years and a fresh crop of them comes in each year to replace the ones exiting. And for all that time, all they do is spend money in the community. If the class is kept full, it's not just a cash cow for the school. Those kids spread that loan money around.
DeleteIt'll be interesting to see what OBBA's elimination of GradPLUS loans might do to that equation. But heretofore, it has indeed worked a lot like tourism for local governments. So you do have to market the location and community as a place someone would want to vacation. Because let's face it, these three years ARE a pseudo vacation for a lot of these kids.
Grundy, Virginia, is indeed pretty bad. Its population, now below 800, has been declining for 70 years. What is the nearest city? Even medium to small cities are far away:
DeleteCharleston, WV: 3.4 hours
Roanoke, VA: 3.5 hours
Asheville, NC: 3.5 hours
Knoxville, TN: 3.6 hours
Lexington, KY: 3.7 hours
Much farther:
Cincinnati, OH: 5.3 hours
Richmond, VA: 6.6 hours
Atlanta, GA: 7.2 hours
Washington, DC: 7.5 hours
The nearest place with a thousand people—and just barely—appears to be Elkhorn City, Kentucky, 0.6 hours away on winding roads.
Grundy looks like a miserable place!
DeleteThis is an all-too common example of the corruption and ineptitude of many local governments in the U.S. It's one thing for a politician at the state or federal level to broker a little federal or state pork into their territory. Yet another for a county or municipal government to squander precious resources that could have gone to streets and law enforcement and such. Local-yokels love to pass out corporate welfare in the form of tax abatements and sometimes all-out handouts to their cronies and others with the promise of "job creation" and "economic development" that rarely pans out in the long run. It is no surprise that the law school scamsters would be quite adept at this game.
ReplyDeleteLaugh all you want, but a quick Google search reveals that the campus is right next to a "Super Dollar Food Center", which conveniently sounds like it provides both food and the students' only actual chance of employment after graduation. There's also a Walmart quite close to it, though rumor has it that WallyWorld requires Law Review.
ReplyDeleteAlso, per Appalachian's own website, they charge 43 THOUSAND GODDAMN DOLLARS PER YEAR. That is insane. There are any number of trade programs that charge a miniscule fraction of that and offer much better employment prospects. Hell, Appalachian estimates the total annual cost of attendance at over 80 thousand dollars. For almost a quarter million dollars in debt you could get a CDL, your own truck, and operating authority. At least if that goes south you can sell the truck and pay back part of the loan. Good luck selling back your Appalachian J.D.
Years ago, we reported that the switchboard operator and the janitor at a courthouse in Massachusetts were paid more than some lawyers working there. Yet the operator and the janitor did not have to have and maintain a professional license at great expense, nor did they have to complete a course of training costing hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their jobs.
DeleteBy the way, Vermont Law School is not near any grocery store: the nearest one is half an hour away, in New Hampshire.
DeleteWell, maybe you can count that gas station/convenience store just across the river from the law school--the one with the sign outside advertising maple syrup buckets for sale (at least it was there the last time I looked on Google Maps, lol). It looked like a pretty drive, but not tempting enough to actually go to law school there.
DeleteLololol imagine if some state or the feds created a "degree sellback" system, 10:05.
DeleteIt'd be awesome. Some kind of ALJ type system that has to hear evidence about whether a person tried hard enough for long enough to find good living wage work in their field. Work out all the fine details in the regulations, but basically if the grad wins, the school has to pay off their loans. But the degree is revoked so the person can never use it to do anything that requires the school to send a transcript ever again.
Wonder how many would take that deal, and how many lawyers would ironically find jobs arguing on both sides of the system that adjudicates such claims.
I wrote years ago about that gas station with the handwritten cardboard sign in the window that advertised maple-tapping buckets. Yes, I actually did have a look round Vermont Law School's campus, without going into the building. I haven't been to Appalachian Law School's campus, but I have travelled all over Virginia, and I remember the desolate little places like Grundy. At a gas station in that area, I fell on some sloping pavement and ended up with bursitis in my knee that didn't resolve itself for three or four months.
DeleteVermont doesn't need a law school at all, but the best place for one is Burlington, not the unincorporated crossroads of South Royalton.
But this blog was created by Professor Paul Campos? I'm confused.
ReplyDeleteCampos created Inside the Law School Scam, which hasn't been updated for ten years. Outside the Law School Scam was created and is run by various people who, unlike Campos, are not inside law schools (he is a professor of law).
DeleteUnfortunately the taxpayers in this jurisdiction are being raped in order to keep the music going a couple months longer. There is no way any other deep pocket is going to hand ALS $10 million to bail them out. They need to turn out at the polls and throw out the idiots who are raising their taxes for this fools errand. Regrettably it will probably not stop this allocation but it may stop the next one. The lack of fiduciary responsibility amazes me.
ReplyDeleteI don't believe that $10 million is all that Appalachian needs. A quarter of that would be consumed just this semester. The dean admits that enrollment would have to increase by 60% just for the über-toilet to be sustainable. How likely is that? Appalachian is an unwanted joke of a law school in a desolate place. Money flushed down this toilet will simply disappear, with no benefits for the town.
DeleteAppalachian was even founded on a handout. The county gave it its grounds and buildings (which used to be used for public schools) and even paid for renovations to the buildings. More than thirty years later, über-toilet Appalachian still has its hand out.
ReplyDeleteAnybody remember the site Above the Law? They got big reporting on the layoffs and everybody getting Lathamed back in the day, and last I heard they'd caught Trump Derangement Syndrome and suddenly the law schools were brave resistance fighters....
ReplyDeleteHow AI is Replacing Attorney Jobs:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z7fC2z02d4c
Sweden’s Legora just raised $550M at a $5.5B valuation to supercharge legal automation, and junior attorneys, paralegals, and even law students are directly in the crosshairs.
I looked at their website. It's the same as all the others, really: biglaw, biglaw, and more biglaw. Cuz of stuff like SEC EDGAR. Gives them vast reams of contracts to train the models on because of all the public disclosure required of public companies.
DeleteI have no doubt that biglaw's armies of M&A "deal monkeys" are in a vulnerable position. I'm not so sure how well that extends out though, because there simply isn't nearly as much material to train AI on outside of biglaw. And I don't just mean trial lawyers; even transactional seems OK ***IF*** the transactions you work on are unconventional and don't involve public companies etc. I use AI as a great second pair of eyes. But if I let it just take over and spit something out? Its absolute garbage on every model I've tried.
Not saying non-elite lawyers are sitting pretty. They're starving for a whole host of other reasons. But AI specifically is MUCH more of a threat to the associate classes of major law firms, and specifically M&A, than it is just about any other kind of lawyer.
I mean just look at any legal AI startup. I can't find any that aren't targeted to either biglaw, or to pro pers who'd never have hired anyone anyway, i.e. the next incarnation of legal zoom.
I'm still unclear as to what the impact AI is supposed have on the legal profession. Is it just an elaborate DIY? DIY work product is great until it gets tested and challenged in court.
DeleteI don't use AI at all. Many lawyers, however, have been caught submitting garbage generated by AI in the form of briefs and similar materials. It's a disgrace: citations to fake cases, worthless arguments, and so on.
DeleteWhy pay a lawyer hundreds an hour when you can generate your own crapola in the same way?
All the AI bros repeat the same hive mind message: If your job involves sitting at a desk, then AI is coming for it and it is getting "exponentially" better at both your job and everything else you could retrain for.
DeleteTwo problems with that. First, there's increasing evidence that the improvement is NOT exponential, and may in fact plateau in the near term. The most popular study (METR) was actually just based on AI beating software engineers in finishing coding projects faster. Not only are most people not code monkeys, the study also used unrealistic scenarios to get raw numbers on "time to completion," like putting out challenges needing no input from anyone else, i.e. not like a workplace at all.
And second, near and dear to the heart of most lawyers, is the importance of blame. When something goes wrong and it's due to some kind of ineptitude, there always has to be a head to roll. Are we really going to turn every automobile accident into a products liability suit? Well until we are ready to do that, even a perfect "self driving" car still needs a sober licensed driver who is ultimately responsible for it and who is the one the cops put in cuffs when a pedestrian gets mowed down.
Same is true with legal professional services, management consulting, etc. Sure we may USE AI if it gets good enough, but if the consumer bypasses the professional entirely and goes DIY, then they lose the ability to blame someone else for messing something up.
As the old saying goes. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM." You similarly won't get fired for hiring the McKinsey or Delloitte or Skadden or whatever. But you most certainly COULD get fired for saying "I decided to let AI handle that." That's a decision that leaves no head to roll but your own. It's cynical, but hiring a consultant or whatever is often a way to ensure that you can take credit for stuff that succeeds while simultaneously avoiding blame in the event of failure. AI can provide no such insulation. This matters more than most want to admit.
Also, professional services firms usually have a core business model that means you buy someone's time at a wholesale price and sell it at a retail price. Marking up time. Pay the associate X and bill him out at Y. That's all most any professional group really does. If you make a margin on every associate, well then labor is no longer a cost. Their time is your product. That does not create an incentive to replace people, as doing so would only decrease revenue.
AI will change a lot of things. But it is not going to replace the white collar workforce. The progress is neither exponential nor infinite and will probably hit a sort of Moore's law type situation, and I actually think that's going to happen pretty soon. And moreover, the incentives for it to replace huge swaths of the workforce aren't what people assume them to be. Because most of us aren't on the knowledge-work equivalent of an assembly line in the way (for example) a software engineer often is.
AI spend for 2026 is over $700 Billion just in the US. Get ready because jobs are going to be wiped out like never before.
DeleteMathematician Explains Why LLMs Are a Dead End (limitations of AI):
Deletehttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LaNJe8FA9Ks
Re: "It's cynical, but hiring a consultant or whatever is often a way to ensure that you can take credit for stuff that succeeds while simultaneously avoiding blame in the event of failure"
DeleteAn astute client once mentioned some comment about my charging attorneys fees. I corrected him and said, "I don't charge 'attorneys fees,' I charge 'insurance premiums.' I'm gambling that the premium I charge will be more than the cost if my advice comes up short."
He truly understood that his having my advice made me and my malpractice insurer part of his insurance strategy. I evaluate every case from the standpoint of how much trouble can this get me in.
" I evaluate every case from the standpoint of how much trouble can this get me in."
DeleteVery true, 12:03. Indeed, its why I really feel for the lawyers who do high-conflict divorces. Year after year, my state reports more bar complaints for that practice area than any other, and often more than all others combined. And no wonder. You're up against a pro per more often than not. Over 95% of those have one side or the other or both unrepresented, and a good portion of the remaining five percent eventually run out of money and go pro per too.
And it's no wonder. Who the hell wants to sign up to help poor people fight over custody until the sun goes supernova? You can always petition to modify anytime there's "changed circumstances," so these cases don't even end if you take them all the way to trial. The retainer will run out long before you can ever GET out, and you're a veritable lightning rod for bar complaints from both the client and the (usually pro per) opposing party.
Today the first payment of $1.7M was approved; another will follow in three months. Stupid people are in charge of the public coffers.
ReplyDeletePatent lawyers no longer needed:
ReplyDeletehttps://patentpal.fileityourself.org/landing.html?rdt_cid=5385794608234421791
I read a reddit post today where a poster stated that going to a particular law school (4th tier USNWR) was the biggest mistake of their life. I would have to agree that it was the biggest financial mistake of my life. I think it actually has affected me psychologically.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry that it has turned out badly for you, but I am not surprised. Toilet and über-toilet law schools must be avoided. Their false promise of opportunity deceives many.
DeleteSince we're on the subject of Appalachian, it is worth mentioning that Appalachian years ago promoted itself with a list of allegedly successful graduates, few of whom were real lawyers. The list went back a dozen years, yet still the ones with the best outcomes were far from glorious. One gloated of coming from a line of lawyers seven generations long. Even he seemed to be washed up within a few years.
Just in case anyone still disputes the value of toilet schools and insists that their kids who attend them are going to be 'just fine'. I'm proud to at least to be a living example as to the futility of attending a lowest tier toilet. And of lower tier higher education in general.
DeleteWill AI Put Lawyers Out of Work?:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/322E6vRsd8w
Claude AI is a lot cheaper than a lawyer.
A lot cheaper...and a lot less accountable, 8:59. I've seen plenty of pro pers try that AI-generated nonsense in court and I have yet to see a judge impressed by it. We've all read about lawyers using it too, usually in the context of it hallucinating some case that doesn't exist and then the lawyer getting reamed for it.
DeleteAnd this, by the way, is fundamental to how a large language model operates, and its increasing capabilities won't fix it. LLMs work by using massive amounts of data and what users tend to like or dislike to predict the most likely next word in every word they say. That means that no matter how good it gets, you have to give it a good "prompt" to get a good answer. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten it to change its conclusion completely by continuing the dialogue and asking it questions like "but what about [x]" where X is a question you need lawyering experience to even know to ask.
That is why LLM-based AI will always be a tool more than a replacement for its wielder, except perhaps in HEAVILY standardized transactions for which extensive training data exists, fortune 500 M&A (ironically, given its prestige) being the practice area in which that is most the case.
A lot of contracts already use standard forms. Really, so does much legal drafting.
DeleteWhile things are bad for JD's these days, I honestly believe that the job market for lawyers is even worse than cynics believe it is. Not only is it very hard (often impossible) for a newly licensed attorney to find a job practicing law, it can also be profoundly difficult to keep one. Lawyers are fired for arbitrary and capricious reasons all the time. I was reading on the lawyer talk reddit about a young lawyer who spent a lot of time/money/energy re-locating to Chicago for a job with a law firm, only to be fired after one month. Now you may think, well that guy must have been a real idiot, but if you read his post that's not how it comes across. Here is the thing: no one would EVER fire a Nurse/Pilot/Accountant in a month, or even in six months, unless they had a VERY good reason to. There is a long-running nursing shortage, to the point that some nurses have literally become serial killers, because even killing your own patients might lead to "Well, we were suspicious, so after a year or so we fired him, but he immediately found a job with another hospital." You can research this, it really happens, these nurses will go from hospital to hospital for years before anyone figures out why so many of their patients die. As for pilots, a commercial airline pilot with a Bachelor's degree can earn $25,000 in a week or two, flying certain routes that are in high demand. A friend of our family is an Air Force Academy grad, and a commercial pilot, and he can earn more in two weeks than I, a solo lawyer with a successful practice, might earn in two (slow) months. Accountants are in high demand as well.
ReplyDeleteNow, what happens after a lawyer is fired? Google the phrase "getting Lathemed" if you want to know how easy it is for a lawyer to be summarily fired for no good reason at all. Well, some respond by sending out literally hundreds of applications, for hundreds of jobs, for months on end, in hope of landing a solitary interview. Think about that. If you were an experienced Nurse, and you lost your job for some reason (and, as discussed supra, it is pretty difficult to get fired if you have a job as a Nurse, generally speaking), well, then, as a Nurse you would send out 2-3 job applications, get 2-3 interviews, and then decide, based on the cash signing bonus each job offered, and the fact that the interviewer tried to sell you on the job, with minimal interests in your own background and qualifications, which job to take. Pilots and accountants, well, they're already getting calls and e-mails from head-hunters, if they somehow managed to lose a job they could have a new one by the end of the week in all likelihood. Law school worked out for me, but I began law school in 1992, in the best law school in my state, in a state with only two law schools, and a population of over six million people. Even so, I did not make any real money until I started my own solo practice. For most, for the last 20 years or so, Law School has been a very bad bet, that often leads to unemployment and deep debt.
ReplyDeleteEven partners at large law firms have been fired in recent years. The field is oversubscribed. Scamsters will say otherwise, but graduates continue to show poor rates of employment. And jobs often do not last long. Lawyers who lose a job will struggle to find another.
DeleteSomething is very wrong here. I will try to be brief: I went to a very good law school, starting back in 1992. It only accepted about 20 percent of the people who applied, and its student body was made up of very smart, serious, hard-working people. Paid jobs for law students were the norm, not "unpaid internships" like today, and we closely tracked the outcomes of the folks a year or two ahead of us post-graduation. Their outcomes were excellent, everyone found jobs practicing law without trouble, from that school, back in the early to mid 1990's. Bottom line: if a lot of our fellow students graduated and couldn't find jobs, the people I was in school with would have dropped out On The Spot. They were smart, serious people, and there is no chance--No Chance At All--that these highly intelligent, very hard-working young men and women, who had been academic all-stars for their entire lives, would have hung around, and taken on debt, only to face unemployment post-graduation. I still stay in touch with some of the people I went to law school with today, over 30Y later, and they are still, for the most part, smart, hard-working, successful people. They would have seen through a scam law school like a freshly-cleaned plate of glass, and the DEFINITELY would have walked away from it, pronto.
DeleteNo disagreement, 7:46, but it bears repeating: it's easy-really easy-to get a JD. There are so many trash law schools begging you and your loan dollars to attend that anyone anywhere is able to find an ABA accredited law school that will accept them. And the non-ABA schools have almost zero admission standards.
DeleteSo you attend a trash law school, take a bar review course, and actually pass the bar. Welcome to the least-exclusive club possible, where you can be fired on whim with next to no notice.
And-to be blunt-comparing law to other professions is unfair...to the other professions.
Want to be an airline pilot? Just go to the Air Force Academy and get rated; don't mind the 7 year additional service commitment. And you get to see the world-hello, Tehran!
An accountant? Basically need a five year bachelor's,then pass a multi-part licensing exam to be a CPA. Yes, there's an actual shortage of CPAs, but geez there aren't any TV shows about them and the work isn't sexy and how do you save the baby whales with a CPA. I want that JD to so I can change the world!
And as OG has pointed out, there is no similarity between doctors and lawyers. This applies to lawyers and nurses, too. While the academics are less rigorous than medical school, science and math are still involved...and who wants to do that? And the jobs themselves are tough; hours on your feet dealing with cranky sick people(and their families); who needs that?
No, the average JD wants to do as little work as possible, beginning in undergrad. Instead, they want the glamour that is the practice of law.
The simple answer to your question, 2:52, is that times have changed. If your class 34 years ago was peopled with bright and ambitious students, that isn't true today even at a lot of the "better" law schools, to say nothing of scores of toilets and über-toilets. Standards have fallen right through the floor, to the point that they don't even exist at the state-accredited and unaccredited law schools (which will take just about anyone with the money to pay) and don't meaningfully exist at the über-toilets either. It's bad enough that people don't drop out on seeing the dreadful results of graduates; what is worse is that they keep enrolling at these places where a bad result is all but guaranteed.
DeleteThe glamour of the legal profession has been greatly oversold. Lawyers are depicted in films as driving around in expensive cars to meet their rich clients or wowing the court with a flashy act. Reality is very different. Old Guy spends most of his time on correspondence with moronic lawyers. Is that more glamorous than nursing?
Delete@10:00 am someone who can only get admitted to a trash law school, I assume you mean low tier USNWR and not all law schools, is not going to get admitted to the Air Force Academy. Nor will they probably complete the prerequisites to becoming a CPA. Although that is a little more feasible due to the plethora of undergrad accounting programs. But they are certainly not going to become an MD.
Delete@2:52 Of course anyone being accepted to a top ranked law school would not attend a bottom tier one. What is the point of your comment? That the people only accepted to the bottom tier should decline too? Of course they should. But they don't.
DeleteExactly right, 7:46. Even if you do get the "good" outcome in law (i.e. biglaw) its like walking a tightrope over a pit. Biglaw ONLY hires people who are either fresh out of law school or fresh off a federal clerkship, and it only hires "laterals" if they're from other biglaw firms and have either a massive book of business, or they're at a very precise "sweet spot" (not too junior not too senior) when the headhunting firms are interested.
DeleteLeave too early (as with the people who got Lathamed) or too late (stuck around too long after learning they weren't going to make partner) then the tightrope snaps. You fall into the pit, which is often a literal pit in the case of the law firm basements where people doing temp document review gigs for e-discovery are placed).
In other words, despite having had biglaw caliber credentials and securing a coveted associate offer, if that tightrope snaps before you reach the other side (making partner, going in-house/govt, etc) well then your outcomes are pretty much the same as they would've been if you'd gone to an uber toilet.
Even the good outcomes, rare as they are, are fragile. Such is law. So glad you mentioned getting Lathamed. Super illustrative of what happens even to the people for whom the law school investment was, initially, going to pay off.
I have read that the average tenure of a first-year associate at a large law firm is 4Y. I know for a fact that associates flee sweatshops like Cravath in 18M-2Y all the time. A year spent literally sleeping at your desk after working more than 12 hours a day gets pretty old. To me, spending 7Y in higher education--4Y college, 3Y law school followed by a challenging 2 day Bar Exam to get a job that may be over in 24-36 months is a terrible ROI. In addition, the money is not very exciting, if you do the math. A number of years ago the starting salaries at large law firms were 190,000 per year. If a first-year associate works 70 hours a week for 190K per year, he or she will make around 50 bucks and hour, pre-tax. Yeah, I know the salaries have gone up, but so has inflation, the $52.20 cents per hour, pre-tax, that you would have made 10Y ago is probably worth much more than 62 per hour today. Now, when one speaks of an attorney earning 50, or 60 bucks an hour, please understand that an experienced flat-fee criminal defense attorney can, and will, earn $1,200 in 10 minutes doing a quick DUI plea. OK, maybe more like an hour to 90 minutes if you include the easy, basic boilerplate paperwork and discussing the case with the client and the prosecutor, but still, such a lawyer can roll into court at 8:30, chat with the prosecutor for about 2 minutes, gossip with the other lawyers, read a book, judge comes out at 9, plea/sentencing are done and lawyer is out the door by 9:15 a.m. to go transfer the fee from Escrow to Operating Account. Such a lawyer may pay a small fraction of the tax rate of a salaried lawyer as well.
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