Back in 2015, Old Guy wrote this little ditty (based on a famous old dance tune) to an über-toilet called the Charleston School of Law:
♪ Charleston, Charleston,
Made in Carolina.
Some sham, some scam,
You'll take it up the vagina
Down in Charleston, Charleston,
Lord, how they can swindle!
Ev'ry time they pull
O'er your eyes the wool,
Don't believe their bull:
They've made pocketsful.
Damn sham, flim-flam,
Will be a back number;
But at Charleston, yes, at Charleston,
That scam school's surely a comer!
Some time they'll bilk you one time,
The scam school called Charleston,
Made in South Carolin'. ♪
For the early history of Charlatan Charleston, see this old article.
After an unsuccessful bid to sell the dump to InfiLaw (which itself has gone tits up or, more likely, has found another scam-business into which to put its ill-gotten gains), the so-called leadership of Charleston has revived the old plan to go for "non-profit" status: recently it asked the ABA to "acquiesce" to this proposal. Old Guy takes "acquiescence" to be a polite reference to the old-fashioned wink and nod, wherewith the ABA can enjoy plausible deniability of responsibility while the new "non-profit" institution distributes money in less dividend-like ways.
This Civil War paradise of scamry is perfectly odious, drawing much of its class from the 140s on the LSAT and leaving many unable to use their costly Mickey Mouse JDs for purposes much better than lining the spindle in the necessary room. In recent years it has been fingered by the scam-cultivating ABA for falling below so-called standards for success on the bar exams and by the US Department of Education for being one of the two schools whose graduates perfomed so badly in the department of "gainful employment" as to call continued access to student loans into question. Its survival testifies to the degree of entrenchment of the law-school scam.
And now we are told that the owners are just surrendering it to "non-profit" status, without taking a penny for it. Well, as Laocoön wisely put it, Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. The Valparaiso University School of Law, which unaccountably preferred to call itself Valpo, tried to give itself away to distant Middle Tennessee State University, but the Tennessean authorities stepped in to scupper that little Trojan horse. Indiana Tech tried to fob itself off by offering free tuition to an entire entering class, but only fifteen people swallowed the bait—and the über-toilet announced its closure a year later.
Owners who diligently extract money from their plutocratic entity don't ordinarily give away a profitable going concern, so the prudent anti-scam activist will suspect something less savory—perhaps unprofitability, perhaps a veiled quest for filthy lucre. Whatever may be going on, expect the ABA's "acquiescence", which will save the scamsters the trouble of getting out their rubber stamp.
The approval to go nonprofit isn't necessarily a rubber stamp. Look at Florida Coastal, another former Infilaw hellhole. It tried to get approval to go that route, was denied, and had to close.
ReplyDeleteNow, what happened with Coastal was that infilaw was getting worried about the department of ed coming after the parent company for clawbacks. So, presumably after recouping their investment many times over over the years, they decided that they'd had a good run and it was time to divest itself of ownership, as private equity must always have an "exit strategy." Unable to find a buyer, it was going to do so by essentially donating coastal's remaining assets to its new nonprofit incarnation. Problem was, as private equity tends to do, they had already strip mined the place of what they wanted and what was going to be left for the nonprofit version was, in the judgment of the ABA and DoE, essentially undercapitalized. Without infilaw being able to give them lines of credit and whatnot, they couldn't meet financial viability standards on their own, so they had to close.
So, what this approval will basically boil down to is solvency. When a company is for profit, it has owners and those owners can be asked to assume downside risk as well as profit opportunity, like for example a bank might ask for a guaranty from a business' owners if they don't trust the entity enough to lend to lend to without recourse to its owners or parent companies.
So, with no owners to backstop it, can it show that it is viable on its own? That'll prolly be the main regulatory inquiry here, and in that, can this place succeed on the same path that their sister infilaw school tried and failed? It's a lot like a young adult who is trying to convince his first landlord to rent to him without a cosigner.
Can't they get around this the same way other "not for profit" agencies do, through payroll abuse? You know, say "we're a not-for-profit institution" but then pay the law professor $300,000 per year, pay the Dean $750,000 per year, give a massive salary to the head of the Career Services Office, that sort of thing? What, exactly, is the benefit of pretending to be "not for profit"?
ReplyDeleteFor precisely that reason, I've said for ages that there is no fundamental difference between "for-profit" and "non-profit" law schools. The "non-profit" near-totality just siphon the money off through fancy salaries, costly junkets, and other "legitimate" accoutrements of scamdom. The difference between that and a declared dividend is mainly a detail of accounting.
DeleteWell in fairness, there is a real difference between a dividend and a salary. I mean, the dividend is what you get in return for putting in some capital to buy the ownership interest in the first place; obviously employees who just get hired didn't have to "buy in." Employees are trading their time for money whereas stockholders are trading their initial investment for the prospect of passive income (or capital gains on sale of their stock) coupled with the risk of not seeing ROI at all if the place doesn't do well.
DeleteNow, the IRS has rules for nonprofits that require nonprofit salaries to be "reasonable," but they aren't well enforced and since "fair market value" is obviously based largely on whatever comparable organizations do, high salaries are generally one of those things you can get away with so long as others are doing it too.
Now, at most nonprofits, this isn't an issue because they rely on grants and donations and thus don't have the money to pay big salaries in the first place. But education and healthcare institutions are pretty much the only 501c3 "charities" that EARN their money directly from the services they provide, as opposed to having it donated and then using the donations to provide their service. A homeless shelter doesn't charge rent to the homeless people, for example. But students can take loans and poor patients have Medicaid, so it's a unique situation where people of limited or no means can still pay full freight. The big policy question is whether such places should even be able to have c3 status in the first place.
There are significant differences, yes, in areas such as taxation. The point is that a "non-profit" law school—as someone said, all but two ABA-accredited schools fall into this category—is quite as capable as a for-profit law school of siphoning money off. Fancy salaries, fringe benefits, trips to Tuscany or Hawai‘i for expensive "workshops" or "conventions", cushy jobs for spouses and such—all of these and more are typical "non-profit" rip-offs.
DeleteInterestingly, OG, the higher education act contains a provision that says a college can't get more than 90% of its revenue from federal student aid. 90/10 rule, it's called. But guess what? That rule, generous as it is, only applies to for-profit schools, which is ironic because its the nonprofits that (at least historically) had the endowments (or tax receipts in the case of public schools) that would offset that reliance. But increasingly, they don't. The nonprofits are becoming as tuition-dependent as everyone else.
DeleteAlmost every session, dems introduce a bill to reduce the 90% allowed, and it never goes anywhere. That needs to pass, but it should also be amended to apply to all schools. Better than trying to prohibit the junkets you mention would be to just try and make sure that they either don't have the money to do it, or at least that if they DO have the money to do it, it doesn't come from taxpayers.
According to Wikipedia the February 2023 bar exam pass rate was a laughable 47.5 % pass rate. How long will this dumpster fire stay accredited if this continues? And even the students who did pass the bar most will most likely remain unemployed or underemployed. California online law schools have similar bar passage rates but at least the online law schools you are not graduating $250,000 debt
ReplyDeleteThe ABA's "Standard" 316 requires 75% of graduates who take a bar exam to pass one within two years of graduation, else the institution's accreditation is theoretically in jeopardy. In practice, however, the ABA doesn't do much to skools that fall below—even far below—the so-called standard. Now and then it sends out a letter demanding a "Reliable Plan" for "returning" to compliance with the standard even if the skool has never complied with the damn thing in its whole wretched existence. Almost predictably, the ABA follows up a few months later with the solemn pronouncement that, lo and behold! the skool is in compliance. I can't think of a law skool that has been booted on these grounds.
DeleteFor example, dying über-toilet Golden Gate has been far below the standard for years, but five months ago the ABA gave it a three-year extension of the two-year period to come into compliance. And what will happen when the three-year period is up? Another extension?
Cooley got the same three-year extension last year, even though its results remain abysmal (61% for the class of 2020). The ABA always seems to find a flim-flam excuse for not enforcing its standard. Indeed, it has trotted out COVID-19 as creating exceptional circumstances that it will take into account. Doesn't that amount to a suspension of the "standard" across the board for two or three years?
Good point-when(if ever) did the ABA close a law school by permanently revoking accreditation?
DeleteThe closest case, 8:14, that comes to mind was the Thomas Jefferson School of Law & Tic-Tac-Toe. When the über-toilet was obviously moribund, the ABA cracked down so as to seem dutiful and assertive. Then Thomas Jefferson got some sort of ridiculous extension after all, and soon enough it "volunteered" to relinquish its accreditation, along with nearby La Verne. Both of those, incidentally, finally lost their status a few days ago; they continue as California-accredited unter-über-toilets.
DeleteThat's the closest example that comes to mind. Now and then the scam-enabling ABA does call some toilet up for shittiness, only to back down several months later and assure the public, through unparticularized statements, that all is well and that the toilet remains in good standing. On rare occasions it tries to seem tough by going after a dump that is on the way out anyway. But don't expect a purge.
Yeah, but that's a lot like jobs. Lots of people resign to avoid being formally fired too, so almost no one forces the ABA to go through the full process. When it appears that revocation of accreditation is inevitable, you submit a teach-out plan so you can squeeze out a few last semesters of that delicious tuition from people foolish enough to stick around, and then you either shut down or (if you think you can make a go of it without student loans and your state allows it) you carry on as one of those unaccredited or state-accredited schools like in California.
DeleteSo I don't think the rarity of going all the way shows ABA failure necessarily in and of itself. Most schools simply choose not to make them go that far. I do, however, agree that the ABA really only targets VERY low-hanging fruit that serves as a sort of "sacrificial lamb" so that the rest of the herd can go right on scammin'.
Hence, the attempt to go nonprofit. For-profits are definitely among that group seen as low hanging fruit. But they're running out of lambs to send to that slaughter. Last I checked there were only two for-profit ABA accredited law schools remaining in the USA, and Charleston is one of them.
It would make sense for the state bar authorities as well as NCBE to do their utmost to ensure that the ABA accredited toilets in their jurisdictions achieve the 75% by designing an exam that all but guarantees that the threshold is met. I would think that today's bar exam is not your grandfather's bar exam. Even then I would think that every year there are a few bottom feeders that have trouble making the requirement.
DeletePlenty of law schools go on year after year falling short, often far short, of the so-called standard. Why don't they give up and close down before the ABA boots them out? Because they know damn well that the ABA won't boot them out: it will just give them an extension based on allegedly well-justified excuses.
DeleteTwo or three, maybe, have pushed their luck. Thomas Jefferson might eventually have forced the ABA's hand. Maybe Florida Coastal, Charlotte, and Arizona Summit would have been similarly placed. But all of these were in serious financial trouble (Charlotte just barred the door without even bothering to shut down in an orderly, ABA-approved way); none seemed capable of holding out for two or three more years of scam-funds if allowed to do so. Why the hell didn't the ABA step in years earlier? Because it is not serious about its so-called standards. Hell, it gives three-year extensions to "standards" that are supposed to be fulfilled within two years.
Charleston School of Law has a "diversity and inclusion" department just like all the other toilet law schools newest sales pitch is to promote underrepresented groups. Your local pub can also claim they have a diversity in who comes in to pay for drinks. All the law schools talk about how they give diverse groups and opportunity to get a legal education but it won't matter on e they graduate unemployed. They are more harmed. Don't expect career services to assist these "traditionally underrepresented" graduates 20 months after graduation once they are still unemployed. The law school submitted to the ABA the employment survey and those unemployed grads are as good as dead to the law school and the law school can cut ties with the hapless graduate.
ReplyDeleteSixty years ago, "diversity" at Charleston would have been a sign on the door saying "Whites only".
DeleteNot really a comment, I wrote this a while back. Maybe you can use it as a new topic on people's backstories...
ReplyDeleteOn October 14, 2020, I wrote:
Old Guy's employment problem following clerkship, despite top law school and grades, is 100% due to his age. Employers don't want junior-level people reporting to supervisors who are much younger than themselves because of the workplace interpersonal problems that inevitably ensue. And, if the junior employee is over 40, any adverse employment action could precipitate an age discrimination complaint / lawsuit, something no employer wants.
(This topic should really have its own blog post.)
The next day, Old Guy responded:
Old Ruster, feel free to write an article; we do take submissions here.
So here is an article of sorts, about my mid-career turn in law school. Hope others find it helpful.
By the late 1980s, shifts in technology had cut a drastic hole in the prospects for remaining in my then-current career, which I did like. So I began to investigate other options, including the law, which I had looked into whilst in college many years earlier, but had decided against as impractical. Now, in looking again at the law I thought, ah! there's a field that computers can't eliminate! Little did I know!
In 1990, there was no Internet let alone scambloggers, and any written career information leaned toward the law as a good career with a wide range of employment settings and decent, if not great, money. I recall going back to my undergraduate school's career office and to my local town library as well as to a much larger public library in a nearby city looking for information. The career office counselor didn't think I was too old, and told me about a mother of three who had just graduated from there and who, in her early 40s, had been accepted at some great law schools. This woman was about 10 years older than me.
The local public library had the U.S. Labor Department's Occupational Handbook which had general career information about lots of careers, and a few other books on the law which gave more detail. I remember one book stated new attorneys often don't get law jobs right off, particularly if they didn't go to the "best" law school in their city. Another book listed credentials and admissions statistics over the previous few years. These statistics suggested that admission to law schools had become less competitive over the previous few years (the mid-1980s), and that, with my GPA, I had a decent shot. The city library had more career-oriented books.
I also went to the LSAS Law Forum in New York (at the then World Trade Center), where I picked up the application materials for the schools I would apply to, to fill out and mail in. As I was most interested in working for Uncle Sam (job security, health insurance, and retirement benefits were big concerns to me), I applied to schools in Washington, D.C., as well as in my home state. I visited three schools in person.
I was accepted and ultimately went to a school I shall call "Almostprestigious University" in Washington, D.C. I had been accepted at one other D.C. school and two schools in my home state. At the time, according to U.S. News & World Report's rankings, "Almostprestigious University" was the third-highest "ranked" law school in the D.C. area, and the highest "ranked" of all the schools I was accepted at. Then, as now, the prevalent advice was "Go to the best school you can get into." I had no reason to question this advice, and had no reason to suspect that law schools in general, and "Almostprestigious University" in particular, ever had anything other than their students' best interests in mind.
ReplyDeleteAt "Accepted Students Day" I attended, among other events, the financial aid presentation, at which we were advised to focus on our studies during law school, and not to worry about the loans until after graduating. There wasn't much other advice given about the money aspect of things, just don't worry about it.
I started law school at 35 years old, turning 36 during first semester. In 1992, "non-traditional" (older) students were not then considered an asset for their contribution toward the "diversity of student body". (I am also from an immigrant family and the first in the family to go to college, although those details were not considered "diversity" assets either at that time.) My section had 95 students, all but one of whom was younger than me. The one older was 60 years old, retired, and there for reasons other than to start a career as a lawyer. A few students were in their late 20s, but the vast majority were 22 or 23, fresh out of college. I had absolutely nothing in common with any of them.
After first semester came the anxious wait for first-semester grades, and also the start of the hunt for a substantive, resume-enhancing 1L summer job, preferably in the Federal government, consistent with my career ambitions. The arrival of my first-semester grades took forever for some classes, not arriving until after I had paid the tuition and fees for second semester and classes were well underway. Many, many years later I learned from the scamblogs that slow grades were one of the tricks the schools play to discourage students with poor grades from dropping out before committing themselves to staying for the second semester.
The 1L summer clerk postings at my school included very few paid jobs in the government. As I later found out, this was because Federal agencies had learned long ago that the sheer abundance of 1Ls that descend upon the nation's capitol each summer eager for a substantive, resume-enhancing 1L summer job in a Federal agency, meant that they could get 1L summer clerks for free. Moreover, many law schools, including "Almostprestigious University" had programs where summer work at a Federal agency would count for academic credits. These programs were touted to the participating agencies as a means of getting a more serious level of unpaid summer law clerk, and to the students as a way to ensure their summer gig would consist of substantive projects with written components worthy of law school credit, rather than the lesser work that student volunteers are typically given.
In February I submitted application packages for three positions in this program. My resume was short and sweet, with a few highlights of my undergrad studies but no dates; and dates for only my most recent job. (This was how older people entering new fields were advised to set things out; entry-level resumes weren't too scrutinized in those days.) The idea was to not scare 'em with my age right off. I looked ten years younger than I was (thanks Mom!), and I wanted them to see that at my interviews. I remember the interview with an attorney at "Agency A" who was at least several years younger than me. I kept it chatty, and it did go well.
ReplyDeleteIn April, I formally enrolled in the school's program, paying about $1100 for two credits and a full summer of work at "Agency A". Surely with a good, substantive, resume-enhancing 1L summer job in a Federal agency under my belt, my 2L summer job would be better, and certainly it would be paid, or so I thought. And it would make up for the extra cost of 1L summer.
After second semester came another eternal wait for grades, the all-important 1L grade-point average, and the opportunity at long last to see how I stacked up against all the other 1Ls.
As had happened after first semester, most of the professors posted grades on their office doors as soon as exams were graded, and these postings gave students not only their grade in that class, but also the ability to determine where they stood vis-à-vis other members of their section. Based on these postings, I determined I was well into the top third of my section. Not good enough for law review, but certainly good enough for government work.
Official grades, in those days, were sent by U.S. Mail. When my grades finally arrived, they were accompanied by a letter stating the school's policy is not to directly rank students within their class until they graduate. The reason given was to reduce competition among students and thus avoid needless stress. This soothing (NOT!) letter went on to tell us that, for resume purposes, we were to report our class rank based on the GPAs of the class that had just graduated. In other words, if a just-graduated student with a Final GPA of 3.50 had ranked at 48% from the top of his class, then I would have to tell my potential employers that my 1L GPA of 3.50 put me in the top 48% of my 1L class. Even if I had other information that my 3.5 GPA actually put me in the top 33% of my class.
It took several reads before I was certain this letter was not some crazy joke. I was certain, based on my grades and the figures posted on the professors' doors, that I was in the top third of the class. I spoke about this matter with classmates who were also spending the summer in Washington, and their reaction was identical to mine. This nonsensical policy put us all in a bind. We felt that we should be ranked against our own class because grading curves were known to be much harsher in 1L classes than in upper-level classes.
Early in 2L, one courageous student wrote a well-reasoned and SIGNED letter to the student newsmagazine about this issue, arguing that this policy puts the entire school to disadvantage in a very competitive 2L summer job market where employers routinely bin the applications of students not in the upper percentiles of their class. The student letter-writer noted that students had ways of determining where they stood in their class, including door-postings by professors.
No response from the school ever appeared in that newsmagazine. After first semester of 2L, many professors did not post grades, reportedly due to that student's letter.
Many years later, with the help of the scamblogs, I figured out the real reason this school deliberately obscured 1L class rank, and it had nothing to do with the competitive anxiety among 1Ls. The reason was purely self-serving on the part of the school: to deter the topmost students from applying to transfer to better schools after finishing the first year.
ReplyDeleteI don't know if the school still has this policy; however, everytime I think of it, even now, some 30 years later, I still do a slow, angry burn. Class rank was all-important, especially for students from non-prestigious schools like "Almostprestigious University" and to be forced to report to a potential employer a class ranking lower than the one you know you earned was quite a letdown.
My 2L summer was split between Agency A and Agency B, the latter the better place to work by far. Neither job was paid, but because no law-school credit was involved, I at least was spared the indignity of having to write another check to the law school for the privilege of working for free for Uncle Sam. In 3L fall, I continued at Agency B awhile, then took a prestigious (but still unpaid) internship at Agency C. This by far was my best work experience. I finished up there with many positive reviews and a good chance at getting into that agency's version of an honors program the following fall.
At graduation, all my hard work had netted me only a rank of "Top 38%", which I shared with maybe a quarter of the class. (The bottom half was about two-hundredths of a grade-point away, as was the top 20%.) The federal hiring freeze led to almost no job openings for entry-level attorneys, even those who, like me, had worked for free at multiple federal agencies in order to "get a foot in the door". Even people who had honors program slots nailed down lost these positions due to the hiring freeze. I, as well as most of my class of nearly 500 J.D. grads, had no job.
The next 18 months were spent taking and passing two bar exams, working at two different telemarketing organizations that supported liberal causes (I may have been a financial wreck, but I still had a soul!) and two temp agencies, interning at Agency D, and avoiding contact with my very old-school immigrant family to whom "Jobless Indebted Me" was Worry-Topic #1.
Before law school, I was worth $11.00 an hour plus full benefits to my then-employer. After law school, as a member of one state's bar and pending admission in another, with nearly a year's worth of unpaid but very real federal work experience in 4 different agencies in addition to my paid work experiences, my value as a worker amounted to a grand total of $10 an hour, with no benefits, as a litigation support worker.
Finally the federal hiring freeze ended, and I eventually got a real job with one of the agencies I had interned for, so I can say my story ended well, not that I'd ever want to repeat the experience or wish it upon anyone else. Others in my class were still jobless after I was hired and eventually dropped out of sight so I don't know what happened to them.
Did you graduate during 2008-2009? 2009 and 2010 were some lean years for me. Many of my Toilet classmates never got work as attorneys and many others wound up in "JD advantage" jobs, including me.
Delete8:04 a.m. -- I graduated 1995, the year the federal hiring freeze started.
DeleteOld guy -- the above was sent in 4 pieces to you. I guess "comments" cannot be long and lawyerly. Even though it really isn't a comment.
ReplyDeleteI never sought nor was offered an unpaid Federal internship and working for free is pretty much anathema to me, but that account makes one wonder if it is worth the risk. What bastards they are!
DeleteI never truly worked for free in my summers, but I did have to rely on the law school's public interest fellowship program, where basically I would work at a government internship that would otherwise be free but submit time sheets to the school and they would pay me.
DeleteAbsurdity is, the whole group of people in that program had to raise their own pay, in a group pool sort of way. You basically had to do a certain number of shifts cold calling alums for donations, and you had to get at least one person to donate something of value to the public interest auction. Then at the end once they knew how much they'd raised, they'd know how many fellowships they could approve. So it was possible to do all those cold calling shifts and whatnot and still come up empty handed if they didn't raise enough, but fortunately that didn't happen to me.
Always ground my gears that with all the money the school was pulling in they still couldn't just put in a little bit to fund it. But hey, it paid about 2k a month and back in the early oughts at least, that was enough to survive the summer without doing nonlegal work. So gotta do what ya gotta do.
Not even close to "elite" but doing its best to rake in that government $$$:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.nbcnews.com/business/business-news/grand-canyon-university-fined-37-million-doctoral-program-disclosures-rcna123050
OK. . .respectfully. . .I also attended law school in that time frame and graduated in the mid 90's. I went to law school in a state with a population of over six million people, and only two law schools. One is ranked much higher than the other one, and I went to that one, the best law school in the state. Long story short getting paid work as a 2L was not hard, and literally every single person I graduated with in the mid 90's, from the best law school in a state with only two law schools and a large population, every single person who passed the bar and was serious got a full time job practicing law quickly and without difficulty. So, respectfully, if a person chooses to attend law school in a region saturated with law schools. . .Pennsylvania has 10 ABA accredited law schools as of this writing, for example, although maybe they will open a couple more by the time I finish posting this--then Of Course that graduate will struggle to find work. You have to use your brain and common sense from the moment you even consider law school through post-graduation. There are Six Law Schools in tiny D.C. Six. If you would have counseled me to go to law school in a "District" smaller than most state with half-a-dozen law schools, I would have laughed at you. I am sorry if that sounds harsh, but again, one must use reason, logic, and common sense when making important life-altering decisions, like the decision to attend law school. That way you don't end up competing with six entire graduating classes of lawyers in an area smaller than Rhode Island. I would bet you money that there are lawyers driving Uber, lawyers pouring coffee, and lawyers sweeping floors in Pennsylvania, and that is their own fault, no one else's. Again, I am sorry if that sounds harsh, I practice criminal law, so I am fairly straightforward, there's not much room for nice guys in that practice area.
ReplyDeleteEasy to say to use "common sense" but back in the 90's there were no scam blogs to warn us about the law school scam and a lot of people didn't even have Internet until the late 90's. The law school employment statistics were obfuscated. I graduated from a fourth tier law school in Michigan in the 90's as an out of state student and I was a first generation law student. Only person in my family with even a college degree. Zero professional contacts. Was impossible to find any legal employment so I ended up letting my law license lapse. Now I am working as a home health aide $15 an hour and it took only an hour of orientation to learn to be a home health aide. Contrast that with 3 years of wasted "education." I lost about $150,000 in opportunity cost of if I just worked those years. Today I would have discovered my law school was a scam of I was applying finding this blog in a minute. There is a law school formula:
DeleteFourth Tier Law School + Out of state student + First generation = unemployed for life
Yes, you are being a bit harsh. Based on what you've written, you and I attended the same law school, and my experience-five years before you-was very very different, as fully half my class didn't have jobs at graduation. It was the economy, of course, but more so: where do you think those folks from DC go if they can't get jobs there? To Maryland and Virginia, of course. So you've got (allegedly) bigger name school graduates competing with lowly state-school types. So if you attend law school in Maryland or Virginia, you are always competing with the six law schools in DC. So it's a good things worked out for you, but my experience was much closer to Ruster"s than yours.
DeleteMisfortune can strike anybody, and targeting someone for their economic failure is bad manners. Schools lie about employment outcomes, deny the role of academic prestige rankings, over-pay their professors, and overcharge their students. (Simkovic was whining about law prof salary falling 30 percent in the last decade.) The legal profession became a cage full of under-fed rats, and the last shreds of gentility were lost.
DeleteBack in the day, there wasn't nearly so much info out there, and even today you have to know where to look. So I don't fault the first generation students and stuff like that.
DeleteThat said, there are also some students who got exactly what they bargained for. People who majored in something useless in undergrad so they'd have time to party. Unable to get a job afterwards, they realized that graduate school loans pay rent too and that law school is the only professional grad school program that has no prerequisites. Those people just wanted to take a 3 year vacation in some fancy city while placating their parents that they were doing something practical.
I have little sympathy for that, but I also have trouble understanding the federal system that allows them to do it. GradPLUS loans, being unlimited unlike Stafford loans, are at the absolute core of the problem here. They literally enable the schools to make up their own "student budget" and then the students can borrow any amount the school will certify. In other words, so long as they can convince people to enroll, the schools can pretty much literally print money. And then they can tell the students that they don't really have to pay it back if they don't make the salaries advertised in the viewbook, because they can just sign up for income driven repayment.
And don't get me wrong. The schools do spread that wealth around, because they can also put whatever number they think is right for the living expenses which the students are also borrowing. That, of course, goes right into the pockets of landlords and such. So the scam benefits a lot more than just the school, and that's why you'll see local politicians supporting new law schools in areas where they make no sense too: Make no mistake, the scam also injects quite a bit of money into local economies.
Reason number 5,786,378 not to go to law school:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-12724221/Your-robot-lawyer-Two-AIs-negotiated-contract-time-no-human-involved.html
Your robot lawyer will see you now: Two AIs have negotiated a contract for the first time - with no human involved
Two AIs successfully negotiated a legally-binding non-disclosure agreement
The technology's creators say that AI will free up time for lawyers to work
And reason number 5,786,379 is that lawyers in the main are shitty. Just today someone asked me about a will, and I immediately saw that the existing "will" was not even validly executed. I wonder how much money was thrown away on that piece of ineffective legal work.
DeleteRarely is a battle in court a fair fight: usually the other side shows up with utter bullshit rather than a viable argument. Even simple points of procedure are too much for a great many lawyers.
And, yes, judges too are often horrible. That's no surprise, since they come from the shitty bar.
I'm just sick of the whole endeavor.
Not too worried bout this. I cannot imagine any contract that'd be easier for a computer to analyze than an NDA. There's articles all over the place that an AI can easily digest and which will tell you what's normal and what's not. Heck they probably would've had to tell the AI propounding the first draft to deliberately insert weird things so that the computers would actually have something to negotiate about.
DeleteThese are not the kind of agreements that hold up deals unless one side or the other wants something weird, so not sure how much time having an AI do them would save. Lawyers, at least experienced ones, don't usually have to spend much time haggling over them either. If there's competent counsel on both sides then they both know what's normal and what's not and most will neither propose nor accept weirdness in something that has such widely accepted norms. NDA breaches are also very rarely litigated, so if the AI did screw something up somehow, the parties are unlikely to know it.
Just closed my office after 45 years. Unlike all the big, prestigious firms, never laid off a single attorney. Just a humble nobody.
ReplyDeleteAnd, "lawyers in the main…" Of the 40 to 60 judges I have appeared before, maybe 6 were top quality folks. Another 20 I'd respect, and the rest were serving long after a respectful sunset.
Back to "lawyers in main…"
A client came to me with an installment real estate purchase contract to enforce against a buyer who was not paying.
The contract was missing a page. THE page which provided the enforcement provisions. After a title search, the recorded document was ALSO MISSING the page regarding enforcement provisions.
After a half dozen calls to the law firm that prepared the contract, seeking a copy of the entire contract, (a month and a half), I was told that the file had been located and that there was nothing in the file. Nothing? Yes, nothing.
In medicine, is there not some concept of the "Sanctity of the Chart?"
And further, I received a 3" thick file from a firm of 60 lawyers. None, NONE of the pages of notes indicated the date of the notes, whether a phone call or office conference, who called or was present, on unlined paper. Shuffle the file and the sequencing of client directions is scrambled.
I'll tell you from working in that healthcare sector that while "the chart" certainly does have a lot of sanctity to it, at a lot of practices there are still a lot of things that don't make it into the chart that probably should. Calls from the patient, emails between different providers, that sort of thing. Basically the chart holds the documentation that is needed to substantiate the insurance claim. That will indeed generally be inviolate, at least during the records retention period.
DeleteBut nonbillable activities can be much more hit or miss in terms of how well they are documented and where (or even if) such documentation can be found. And unlike with law, it's not like you can bill for emailing someone or whatever; it's usually face to face only. So if you get a copy of "the chart," I say, always remember that the only thing you can be sure is in there is the stuff to which a claim to insurance/medicare/medicaid would be associated. Anything else, hit or miss.
Sorry for the delayed reply.
DeleteI always documented clearly non billable contacts well as I felt, intuitively, that that is where I had the highest risk of someone claiming malpractice. The "client" has an aggrieve heart, and little, perhaps only one contact with me offering general direction (advice) Never had a claim, but I tried my best to document everything.
Seems like someone beat the Bar: https://turtletalk.blog/2023/02/17/florida-state-bar-authorizes-practices-of-lawyer-admitted-in-st-croix-tribal-court/ and it looks like he still has it and founded an LLC over it: https://www.floridabar.org/directories/find-afah/profile/?num=1040046
ReplyDeleteI don't know if they "beat" the bar. Just persuaded them that a tribal court counts as another jurisdiction for house counsel registration purposes, and it doesn't seem like they were pushing too hard on it either; it's not like he had to take them to court or anything.
DeleteThat said, it's not like these registrations let you do very much that you couldn't do anyway. That LLC probably just serves as a mail drop. It has no website and probably does no business. Letter says he works in-house for Fidelity Title, and in house counsel registration is pretty limited - you can only give advice to your employer, can't take on outside clients, and can't appear in court. So it's not like he could run that LLC as any kind of law firm.
As my state bar explained it in a CLE once, they really just created it so that they would "know these people exist" because a lot of them weren't bothering with getting a new bar admit when they moved states for their companies. After all, if you don't appear in court and your only client will handle any problems w/you via the HR process and not a bar complaint, the bar is highly unlikely to encounter you at all.
Reality is, there's a theoretical definition of UPL, and a practical one. In theory, anyone giving legal advice needs a license. But in practice, strict enforcement would jeopardize a lot of what compliance and HR and CFO types do every day, and I see no movement by state bars to come after them for redlining contracts or whatever.
State supreme courts should just define UPL based on a line they can actually draw coherently and really would enforce. That line is simple enough. It's appearing in court for someone else OR otherwise "holding yourself out as." If the client wants to take legal advice from someone they know isn't licensed to give it, that's on them.
Heck, the one benefit I can think of to in house registration is being able to claim attorney/client privilege. But look at the cases where an in-house lawyer tried that. The courts are VERY skeptical of in-house claims to privilege because the line between legal advice and business advice is so blurry. In Europe, they don't consider in house work to be privileged at all and here, it's VERY hit or miss to the point where one begins to wonder why we even bother.
Two things.
DeleteFirst, when I moved from a law firm in one state to a law firm in another state without enough years of practice to waive in I had to take my new state's bar exam. But before I eventually received the (positive) results and got sworn in I, as low man on my new firm's real estate totem pole, took over all residential closings which were almost all relocation closings for executives of a major corporation. I could represent clients at a closing table but not in court. It is, I suppose, essentially the same with in-house counsel.
Second, a few years later an insurance company terminated a guy who was running their local "captive" insurance defense "firm." He went to court and tried to argue that he had an attorney-client relationship with the people for whom he had filed appearances and that only they could fire him from representing them in court. The courts made short work of that theory but I think it illustrates the "neither fish nor fowl" nature of in-house lawyers.
Still, I think it has the possibility to fill a hole in the US legal market. Would be a good way to prevent JDs stocking shelfs at least since as house counsels they could still offer some of their professional services in their state of residence while being tribal attorneys. Could also open up more work with Indian Tribes which count as PSLF employers.
DeleteWho needs buildings? Here's to OG starting his own youtube channel law school...or better yet, put it on tiktok...that would drive the politicians crazy.
ReplyDeletehttps://www.reuters.com/legal/legalindustry/online-law-schools-could-win-aba-blessing-major-policy-shift-2023-11-20/
There's a certain irony associated with the fact that law school is the only professional school that has no real reason it can't be online. There are no labs, and any "hands on" type experiences like clinics or moot court are entirely optional. This may be the only profession I know of where you can get a full unrestricted independent license without a single hour of actual experience. And there are no group projects either, so it's not like knowing your classmates makes a darn bit of difference.
DeleteIn addition, there's also usually only one test per class, per semester, which would be easy to remote proctor or require people to go to one of those contracted "testing centers" that provide in-person proctoring services at convenient locations all over the place. And you certainly don't need a law library or anything; you don't need any materials that aren't in your textbook or on Westlaw (and even the textbooks are a scam unto themselves, since most of what's in them is reprinted cases you could have punched up on westlaw).
I am, therefore, hard-pressed to find a real pedagogical reason anything needs to be in person for a JD. So, I think offering 100% online law schools COULD be a good thing, IF those schools didn't use the unlimited seats they could now offer to admit even more horribly unqualified students, and IF they actually passed the savings on from not having to run brick and mortar to the actual students. Unfortunately, neither of those things would actually happen: They'd charge 50k a year and make obscene profits while admitting students with LSATs in the 130s (if they take it at all).
https://www.reddit.com/r/LawSchool/comments/187o5jk/rip_ggu_school_of_law/ Golden Gate is golden dead.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's nice that one school closed down, but that is a very small drop in a very large bucket. There are still far, far too many law schools in the US.
DeleteHope Old Guy is alright. I was expecting an article on Golden Gate dying.
ReplyDelete