Tuesday, April 8, 2014

News Roundup: Robot Lawyers, Merit Scholarships and Law School Rankings

Here come the robot lawyers
Money Quote: “But lots of legal work is already being computerized by some firms, including the drafting of simple contracts and the search for evidence in reams of documents.”

Comparing Law School Rankings? Read The Fine Print
Money Quote: “But the US News rankings don’t consider who employs the graduates, so long as they’re employed in a professional position. Some schools have been , and rising in the rankings.”

The Ethics Of Law School Merit Scholarships
Money Quote: “The upshot of all this is that, at most law schools, price discrimination results in poorer, less well-educated students “subsidizing” (paying higher tuition than) richer, better-educated students. “

30 comments:

  1. I'd sooner give my legal work to a computer than entrust it to a typical law-school graduate these days.

    At my own law school, I asked a couple of friends whom among our classmates they would be willing to see as their mother's lawyer. Naming names rather generously, we couldn't come up with even 10% of the class. And this was at an élite school, not a Valpo or a Florida Coastal.

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    1. "Whom." It's the object of "to see." But there's a problem with "their mother's lawyer," unless they all have the same mother. And not even Clifton Webb would put an accent on "elite."

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  2. And these merit scholarships impact especially on minorities. The liberal deans claim to be for social justice but they will use minorities if it benefits them. Case in point: my former dean Nora Demleitner.

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    1. I had a similar sick feeling when I heard about Widener Law School's "Jurist Academy" for college seniors. It's a "free" summer program to help borderline applicants get into and prepare for law school. It sounds so nice and altruistic until you realize that all it's doing is lining up more meat for law school lending machine.

      https://law.widener.edu/Academics/NonJDAdmissions/JuristAcademyAdmissions.aspx

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  3. http://www.lsac.org/lsacresources/data/three-year-volume

    I'm very concerned, applications are rising. They were down close to 11 percent a while a go, and now, just a paltry 8 percent.

    I really don't think the lemmings want to let the message seep into their heads.

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    1. I share your concern. But applications are down almost 10% which means that the applicants are not considering schools toward the bottom of the food chain (and which need to close).

      If the applications go down another 10% next year, we will see real blood.

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    2. I think those data indicate that applicants are still decreasing overall, but a greater proportion are applying later in the cycle.

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    3. That is odd. I thought law schools pulled out all the stops last year to increase applicants. We always have to be vigilant.

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    4. Even some supposedly respectable law schools last year were still accepting applications in July, if not August.

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  4. These scam deans have to know what they are doing. For years liberals have complained how the LSAT is biased against minorities. Yet the scam deans use it as a criteria for merit scholarships. Hey! Protecting your self interest is not being liberal.

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    1. ScamDeans are the original concern trolls. Few can do it better.

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  5. How are law school merit scholarships different from merit scholarships at any level of higher education? Many colleges are tuition dependent, lacking large endowments, so it is the students subsidizing their fellow students' scholarships.

    One could argue that the students at the bottom benefit from their "smarter" peers in many ways -- in the classroom, in terms of school reputation and ranking...

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    1. I think the difference is that undergrad institutions don't usually give substantial amounts based solely on merit, regardless of need.

      Regarding your second paragraph, whatever benefit the lesser admits might gain from higher school ranking etc. is more than outweighed by the detriment of having the limited number of As that much harder to get.

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    2. Who cares about the limited number of A's. The only thing that law students should care about is the extremely limited number of jobs.

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    3. The main factor is that there are so many thousands of undergraduate schools. Other than for the relatively small number that are truly competitive, moving up or down 25 places isn't the same triumph or disaster that it would be for a law school.













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  6. The problem with law schools is that merit scholarships exploit minorities. The deans are supposed to be liberals instead they are hypocrits.

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  7. Hopefully, we are 1 CBO report on student loans away from the Federal government capping borrowing amounts or undertaking some sort of loan reform.

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    1. Buddy, we're one election or Fox News story cycle away from IBR and PAYE being swept under the carpet. Some poor schlep will end up on the news for having borrowed $145 k for a semester of community college and that will be it. IBR and PAYE are stop gap, soft-bankruptcy measures to stave off a flood of defaults. The minute the economy stabilizes, the screws will get tightened.

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  8. Beef prices rose to record highs today. One of the main reasons is the ethanol mandate which, in addition to being useless for the environment, causes a significant amount of corn to be turned into gasoline additive. This makes corn, an animal feed, more expensive, but the corn growers are happy. Its a textbook case of a special interest lobby getting a useless Federal cash giveaway that hurts basically everyone else in America.

    Law schools work similarly.

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    1. So true. This is why spending is never going to be cut. Everyone agrees in the abstract that it should be but everyone has some program they benefit from and want to continue.

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    2. The United States is Gulliver, and its citizens (or enough of them) are Lilliputs.

      I'm afraid this will continue until an economic catastrophe occurs and the whole insane 'pigs at the trough' game is forced to come to an end.

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    3. 85% of Americans disapprove of Congress but 85% of members of Congress get re-elected. Throw the bums out, all except my bum because he serves up nice, tasty pork. I didn't used to believe in term limits but I am starting to think that the only hope is to have a certain percentage of people in Congress at any given moment who have no incentive to try to buy their own re-election with free money giveaways.

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    4. It seems inevitable that an economic catastrophe is on the horizon from all indications. National debt at $17 trillion, Student loan debt over $1 trillion, Bankrupt cities and states, bloated government salaries, hyper-inflation, low interest rates(for those with savings), continuing unemployment and underemployment and businesses in financial trouble(like shopping malls, etc.). I would like to know what event, or events, is going to turn this around...or is this the new normal?

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    5. Hmm, yes. The way the fed government has responded over the years to student loans is par for the course. The feds refuse to allow price deflation in markets that are unaffordable for 99% of the country. So, with prices beyond the cash reach of consumers credit comes in to keep the consumption machine going. And the wide availability and dependency on credit puts downward pressure on wages. So, if you're poor breaking into financial stability is all but impossible. Education is sold as wealth. It's not wealth. It has become just one more life necessity that is too expensive for everyone. My generation in particular faced a dot com recession in high school, a real estate bubble burst when leaving college, and if they went to law school the structural "kaboom" of legal employment. You can't win. You can't rise. You're a fool if you even try.

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    6. To 9:04, the economic catastrophe is no doubt getting closer. The western world's welfare states cannot function without taking on debt that will never be paid off. Even America's relatively smaller welfare system. 58% of Federal spending is on Social Security (24), medical services (22), and safety net programs (12). Most of what the government does is welfare and without borrowing money, it couldn't do this.

      What if the Federal government couldn't borrow money? We'd have a catastrophe on our hands. Either that welfare spending would suddenly stop as the gov't checks are no longer mailed out, OR the central bank would step in and print up free money for the Federal budget -- what led to Zimbabwe and Weimar Germany's hyper-inflation. Either situation would be an economic cataclysm.

      What could trigger the approaching economic catastrophe? I don't know, but I guess one or more of these:

      -US only has ~110% govt debt/GDP ratio... Japan has ~220%. Japanese debt is a financial pile of TNT that is growing every year and will almost certainly one day cause a disaster for them and the world financial system.

      -US interest payments on the debt go up. Currently the Federal budget is 6% allocated to interest payments on the debt. If debt keeps rising and if interest rates normalize (to 5%), then the debt payments could become 20-25% of the Federal budget. That level historically results in a crisis.

      -Stock market crash brings the debt day of reckoning closer by causing the Federal government to borrow more.

      -Downturn in China sends the world into recession, bringing the debt day of reckoning closer by causing the Federal government to borrow more.

      America and other industrialized countries can't borrow, spend, and pile up debt forever. One day there will be a catastrophe that printing money won't solve. Life will become much harder. Are you ready?

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    7. Yes, I'm ready. Suicide will be my way out.

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  9. as an engineer watching this catastrophe unfold... to you guys who aren't technical, you'd be truly amazed at the tasks robots can do.

    we are going to have a very real problem when the amount of work that needs to be done on this planet is FAR less than our total supply of available labor. This goes double for lawyers, but will affect a TON of people.

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    1. Hasn't automation already replaced tons of people . . in all industries where robots now do what men used to do from putting cars together to filling jars of ketchup. Computers have done away with the necessity of a number of secretaries, voice mail with answering services, Westlaw with published books, email with the Postal Service, turbo-tax with tax accountants and on and on and on. Its a new world out there, but there are some areas of law that can never be replaced. That is the ability to meet with, talk to people and reach judgments that only humans can reach.

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    2. all of that is true. but my point is:

      -- there is some finite amount of legal work that needs to be done, that machines can't do, of the sort you describe.
      -- whatever that "amount of work" is, it's far less than the amount of work that people need to stay occupied.

      I'm not saying that it doesn't exist. I'm saying that we have an excess of human capital.

      We can burn off that extra labor by making new art and science, sure, but what I think is more likely is that we'll start wars and fuck each other. Or seek alternate 'escape' realities through drugs, drinking, movies or video games.

      Shit's gonna get real. You lawyers are just the canary in the coal mine.

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