If You're Going To Law School, Do It Right

The Socratic method is the method used by sage law professors to tease the law's nuances out of the minds of their brilliant pupils. In practice, it leads to lazy law professors with little real world experience calling on whichever gunner feels like talking that day. Law school is very different from most educational experiences. Professors enjoy actively hiding the ball from students. The classes consist of meandering discussions that often have no real point and leave students even more confused than before. Casebooks contain cases that take 20 pages to make a point that could be made in a paragraph. The legal education as hazing ritual model was bad when it began and only persists because the law school educational complex makes so much money selling materials to help explain casebooks and simple points of law to students. 

Taking a bar review course further illustrates how broken the legal education model is. It is only after law school is complete that someone finally thinks to provide materials (at a cost, of course) that explain the law in easy to understand terms. It is at this point that most people see that the law isn't really all that complicated. Why not teach the law in a practical way that encourages students to understand it more definitely while in law school? It's time to flip the script.

If you choose to go to law school in spite of all the warnings presented on this site, then make it as easy as possible for yourself. Go on eBay or Craigslist and look for bar review materials. When I went to law school, BarBri gave out a "First Year's Guide" that was only slightly less oblique than the case books. Forget this piece of garbage. Get the materials that BarBri provides for actual bar review. You can buy them from a sad, jobless law grad who needs the money to make her loan payment. You can try to read the case books and brief cases to help you learn to "think like a lawyer" for the first week or so. After that, do only the reading you need to be prepared for when you will be called upon in class. Use the bar review books to learn the concepts that your law professor refuses to teach you in an efficient way. You will have a lot less stress than the others in your class who want to do things the traditional, stupid way.

Law school is not just a waste of time because of the massive educational debt you incur. It also doesn't really teach students much of anything after their core curriculum classes are complete. Classes are barely tolerated by professors who would rather be working even less than they do now and serve only to obfuscate fairly elementary points that can be picked up with relative ease if presented the right way. Let me give you an example from personal experience. In law school, I was entirely unable to grasp anything about secured transactions. My professor was a nice enough guy, but the classes would have been more comprehensible if he had taught us in a foreign language. Needless to say, I did not do well on the final. When it came time to study for the bar, I read through the section through twice. It made perfect sense when presented in an easy to understand way. I was able to sum up the entire subject on two pages, front and back. The state I took the bar in gave us a breakdown of our scores, and I blew the secured transactions questions out of the water.

It is common knowledge that one's future employment prospects rest largely on 1L first semester grades. Good grades will help you secure a summer associate position after your 1L year, which will help secure a job after your 2L year, which will usually lead to a permanent job offer. If Biglaw is your goal, then this point is even more acute. You must do well straight out of the gate or the profession will leave you behind. It is not up to you to play the law school game fairly or according to tradition. It is up to you to get a job that pays enough so that you might undo this huge financial mistake before your children go to college. Better yet, stay away from law school in the first place.

There, I fixed it

Indiana Tech Law School is advertising for a new dean.  Their ad is riddled with errors though, so I took the liberty of correcting it for them:

Indiana Tech is searching for a new dean receiver for the law school its bankrupt vanity project, located in Fort Wayne, Indiana. This is a short-term temporary position.  The ideal candidate unfortunate soul will have substantial experience in legal education and the legal profession sales (used car preferably, snake oil strongly preferred); possess a vision a weak spine and a delusion for an Indiana Tech Law School that differentiates itself by preparing law students for effective and rewarding careers through providing theoretical training infused with experiential exercises and real-life exposure to lawyers, judges and collaborative opportunities will be, in reality, no more than a feeble replica of every other law school in the United States if it hasn't closed by this time next year. Responsibilities of the dean include developing a sound and innovative curriculum using the same tired curriculum as everywhere else, recruiting duping students simpletons, faculty has-been (or never-were) professors, professional cast-offs, and retirement double-dippers, and staff assorted spongers who add zero value, monitoring and continuously improving performance profits, and creating an atmosphere conducive to the illusion of outstanding teaching and learning. The dean will also be responsible for developing and maintaining law school relationships with begging for handouts (including more "art") from the legal profession, legal education and state and local communities; and misleading the school to provisional and full approval by the American Bar Association in the minimum time required by the Standards for Approval of Law Schools. The dean is expected to be a creative an unimaginative and condestructive team builder narcissist working effectively across to funnel law school profits to all campus departments and into the pockets of faculty and staff via grossly-inflated, unjustifiable compensation packages. The dean will report to be subject to the whims of the President of the university and be a member puppet of the President's Cabinet.

Why on earth any legitimate law professor or school administrator (and I use the term "legitimate" very, very loosely indeed) would seek this job is beyond me.  It is without a doubt a career-killer and a reputation-destroyer.  This school will fail; I don't understand why anyone would risk being the one left holding the bag when the doors finally close.

At best, one would expect applications from a handful of non-accredited California law school deans who are looking to move "up" the ladder, or insiders - andre? - who have already tossed away their academic credibility and have nothing else to lose.

Or I suppose it would be attractive to anyone who cares for nothing except a bigger paycheck no matter what the harm caused to others in the process.  I guess that would include the majority of law professors at schools outside the top ten, most of whom know full well they are nothing more than Pied Pipers leading children to lives of debt and depression, most of whom have already silently acquiesced to the existence of this horrendous new establishment, and many of whom could well be dusting off their resumes at this very moment.

Declining Applicants and Declining Standards

Hello Friends, sorry I have not been as active a contributor in the last two months as I have been previously, as work in particular has been heating up and cutting into my scambloggery (Yes, skeptics, many scambloggers are fortunate to have actual work and careers, such as they are).

 

Many others, including yours truly, have lambasted the ABA for their tone-deaf, self-serving attitude and utter disregard of the "working people" in the legal profession.  Yes, if you are a LawProf or ScamDean with friends in high places, or are a fourth-generation progeny of BigLaw, then the ABA certainly has your interests at heart, as the chairpersons, officers and directors of the ABA generally come from the same pool.  All you lower castes, move along.

 

Clearly their ears have been burning, because in an attempt to "level the playing field," lol skewls will apparently be allowed to admit up to 10% of their class without an LSAT score.

 

http://www.abajournal.com/news/article/legal_ed_sections_council_wraps_up_comprehensive_review_of_accreditation/    

 

Why, you may ask?  Why remove the burden of a gate-keeping exam, the LSAT, one that was originally intended in decades past to keep the great, unwashed masses out only admit the best, most qualified applicants?  Have our Promethean Betters had a change of heart?  Do they have another plan for how to best apply legal education in a new century?  Instead of an outdated, meaningless exam, perhaps the ABA wants to try a new methodology to control the flow of applicants into the nation's law schools?  What possible pressure could lead the ABA to adopt such a clear reversal of decades of  prior policy?

 

Look no further than right here:

 

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

 

Oops.  Applicants are down 7.8% over last year, and prior years saw even more precipitous drops.   Just like the Fed running the printing press in order to juice the system with more cash, the ABA is trying to juice the faltering legal profession and law schools by removing any semblance of standards.  Like a NINA loan during the subprime crisis, you don't need "income" or "assets"...just a pulse.

 

Which could be fine, maybe, in some universe, if (1) there was an extreme shortage of lawyers, (2) tuition was reasonable, and (3) if a test like the LSAT was keeping qualified people out of the profession by arbitrary and capricious standards.  Last time we all looked, it was nope, nope, and.....nope...well, mostly nope, because some of those logic puzzles can be gamed and are dumb, frankly, and don't really indicate anything.  Just ask Kaplan.

 

As applications continue to drop, and the ScamDeans head for the hills and the LawProfs sweat, watch for an "open enrollment" policy.  Because nothing says "ethics" and "professionalism" than duping people into going to law school who have no business being there, not necessarily due to drive, passion or smarts, but due to lack of experience with the game.  This is all about the Benjamins, remember that. 

 

Law Schools have been overproducing law grads to available jobs for decades, so why stop now?  The solution to declining applications is to throw open the flood gates.  Put a little more fodder onto the fire, as these sweet no-work salaries with benefits do not grow on trees. 

 

The upper echelons demand and expect nothing less, and it is apparently your job, 0Ls, to make their self-serving dreams come true.

Strict Scrutiny: Erwin Chemerinsky Lays Out UC Irvine's Origin Story

It's been a while since I've done an FJM. In the interest of clarity though, I'm going to start calling these Strict Scrutiny. It rolls off the tongue a bit better and will make more sense to people who aren't Ken Tremendous fans. TaxProf Blog recently ran an excerpt from an article Erwin Chemerinsky wrote in the DePaul Journal of Social Justice as part of his ongoing effort to justify UC Irvine Law School's continued existence. This vanity project continues to take money from student loans and lines Erwin and his wife's pockets. But wait! Erwin is back to talking about how the school is emphasizing "public interest law". Erwin's words are in italics and offset, mine in regular text.

In 2007, I accepted the position to be the founding dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Law. I decided from the outset to create a law school with a strong emphasis on public service. The Chancellor, Michael Drake, and the Provost, Michael Gottfredson, who hired me agreed to the importance of this. But this, of course, was not the only objective. Several other goals also affected what we could do.

Yes, like making money, burnishing his "legacy", and creating job opportunities for people like Carrie Menkel-Meadow. Together, they will do for law school what Korea did for pop music.

First, the primary goal articulated by Chancellor Drake and Provost Gottfredson was to create a law school that would be ranked in the top 20, by every measure, from the outset. They were terrific in providing the resources to allow us to pursue being a top 20 law school, but this required that our primary criteria in admission be focused on LSAT and GPA numbers. These are a substantial part of every law school's ranking. Commitment to public service, of course, could be a plus in admissions decisions, especially among those with the requisite grades and test scores. But ultimately our admissions decisions would not be very different from other schools that wish to be in the top 20.

Erwin insists that he is changing the game while still measuring success by metrics that exist in a zombie magazine that has no reason to exist besides telling students where they should be spending those easy to come by loan dollars. How about actually innovating instead of just pretending?

Second, we needed to cultivate close relationships with the large law firms in our area. I spent a great deal of time thinking about how to attract terrific students to a brand new law school. The law school hired 10 founding faculty, all stars from top 20 law schools, to arrive a year before the students. My hope was that this would send a message to prospective students of the quality of the new school. 

Erwin isn't telling us how these professors fit in with his vision to develop a law school specializing in public interest law. A clear plan to implement this vision is more important than recruiting “stars” for his faculty. His obsession with “star” faculty is like a young kid who claims he loves a shoe simply because of its name brand.

We obtained commitments from 75 *4 employers - law firms, government offices and public interest organizations - that they would come and interview our students. This was to communicate to students that they would have job opportunities if they came. My best idea, though, was to offer a full scholarship for all three years of law school to every student in the inaugural class. This received national publicity, and we received about 2,800 applications for the 60 slots and had students turn down many top schools to come. The scholarship money came largely from large law firms in the area. Their incentive was to bring great students to Orange County with the hope they would stay and come to work at their firms. And, of course, we wanted to do all we could to help our students who wanted to go to large firms pursue this.

So after all that deep thought (during time for which he was paid, I'm sure), the best ideas Erwin came up with: get employers to promise to participate in OCI and let the first class attend for free. With the legal field rapidly shrinking, I don't see how simply getting firms to promise to participate in OCI is such a momentous triumph. I know of many people who will sit through time share presentations with no intention of buying simply to get a free trip. How long until these promises are recanted? Or perhaps firms can send the associates at the bottom of the barrel and turn OCI into a glorified mock interview process. I'm sure that the career center will work tirelessly to get jobs for this first class of students, and then fall off as more dopes are reeled in by Erwin's pitch. It all sounds like the lifecycle of the law professor pre and post tenure, doesn't it?

Third, once the founding faculty arrived, major decisions about the school were made by them and then by the faculty who were subsequently hired. There was no assurance that they would share my vision of the school, especially with regard to an emphasis on public service. We were hiring a founding faculty that would make us a top 20 law school; their views on public interest law really did not play a role in the hiring process.

So, in an article about how Erwin created a law school that emphasizes public interest law, he admits that he had no interest in prospective professors' views on public interest law. Erwin tips his hand here. He is only interested in building a cash machine that will redistribute Federal student loans to himself and UC Irvine.

Within these constraints, though, there was a great deal of opportunity to create a law school that put more of an emphasis on public interest law. This essay is a description of some of the things we have done in this regard.

The last sentence is the type of lukewarm statement that indicates that Erwin doesn't have any particular interest in advancing his alleged mission beyond paying it lip service. Erwin, there are ways to measure outcomes. It's called doing a job survey of your graduates.

It is too soon to know whether we have succeeded in producing law students who will pursue public interest careers. We have had only two graduating classes and a significant number of students are doing judicial clerkships. We have some students working full-time in public interest, some in government and many at law firms. We have a large number of students doing public interest work during the summers and doing pro bono work during the school year. We will need more time before assessing whether what we have done makes any difference. I know there is more that we can do. 

At this point, Erwin's lost the thread. He admits that he has no idea if his first class will pursue public interest law. Isn't that what he opened this law school to do? Again, the absence of innovative thought is very evident here. Erwin's law school has simply produced graduates who have the same kinds of outcomes most law schools' graduates have.

This essay describes what we have done in terms of our curricular decisions, our financial assistance, our pro bono program and *5 our career services office. These are not all of the components for designing a law school oriented towards public interest law, but they are certainly crucial aspects of doing this.

Admittedly, I was unable to read the full article. Maybe Erwin articulated a truly innovative vision in the rest of the article. But I suspect he didn't. All this essay seems to have are platitudes that don't really mean anything. The prestige chasing and emphasis in building that prestige quickly is ultimately designed to create the most efficient system possible to put a spigot in the student loan barrel. The false prestige Erwin wants to quickly create is only to entice students to come and spend entirely too much money for an education that has been proven to be largely worthless in today's job market. Erwin, just admit you're in this because you want to live in the sunshine and maybe buy a Ferrari. That would at least make respect you.

The Battle of Law ScamDeans

L4L / Skadden Farts leads the charge against the ScamDeans, before being cut down by the initial fusillade, circa 2010.

(with apologies to Johnny Horton, "The Battle of New Orleans")

Well, The Calico Cat tried to tell us all the truth,
And the lemmings said that JDJive was totally uncouth,
Scotty Bullock preached anon about Big Debt and Small Law,
And Nando posted pictures of the TTTiolets on his wall.

            And the Scamblogs blogged 'cause they felt it was a calling,
            There weren't as many lemmings as there was awhile ago,
            The Scamblogs jeered as the Cartel found it galling,
            From the T13 to the Law Schools down below.
 
Well, the Valvoline Dean raised tuition with a smirk,
And Joan King told sad grads to go "network,"
Leiter said that law school was cool but yet he lied,
While Tamanaha and Campos were thoroughly decried.

            Chorus

But then they fired a bunch of Profs to try to keep expenses down,
Then they hired a lot of adjuncts 'cause they thought that would be sound,
They filled the class with 1Ls from where ever they could find,
But applications still declined and the ScamDeans lost their minds.

            Chorus

Then Simkovic was talkin' 'bout a "million-buck-degree,"
Ben Barros was convinced that JD jobs would come, just see!
Chemerinsky squeezed UC for every dollar he could goose,
And Illig was relieved his salary was not reduced.

            Chorus

Dean Alexander fled Indy Tech through the alley door,
And Infilaw was sad to see their profits didn't soar,
The rats began to jump from every sinking yacht,
And the scambloggers cheered "Now, who is getting mocked?"

            Chorus

　

The battle continues! Fight the good fight, stay strong, and run the race with endurance! The truth is on our side.

 

Indiana Tech Law School - Doing the Math

To highlight the colossal and destructive waste of money Indiana Tech Law School is, let’s run a few quick calculations. I’d appreciate any input into whether my assumptions and calculations are reasonable or hopelessly inaccurate.

Indiana Tech Law School:

• Tuition per year: $29,500

• 75% of tuition revenue used for salaries, building expenses, library, etc.

• 25% of tuition revenue used for non-essential costs, such as kickbacks to the university, art collection acquisitions, reserve funds etc.

Year One (2013-2014):

• ITLS needed 100 students to meet its goals this first year. This would have brought in $2,950,000 in revenue from tuition.

• Assuming 75% of that was needed to meet the school’s operating costs that year, ITLS would have needed a minimum operating revenue of at least $2,212,500 to stay in the black.

• Actual enrollment was (generously) 30 students, bringing in actual tuition revenue of just $885,000.

• This represents an annual shortfall of $2,065,000 from projected tuition revenue, and a shortfall of $1,327,500 from minimum operating revenue. That’s a significant hole.

• (Factoring in the large number of students on scholarships to get them in the door, the first year deficit is even larger.)

Fully Operational (2015-onwards):

• ITLS seats 350 students. This represents $10,325,000 tuition revenue per year. $7,743,750 of this would be needed to cover essential operating costs.

• Enrolling one third of that – 116 students in total – would bring in a mere $3,422,000 per year, which is $6,903,000 short of projected tuition revenue, and $4,321,750 short of minimum operating costs.

Even from a basic ballpark calculation such as this, one can see the magnitude of Indiana Tech’s screw up. The university is now left with a program that (1) draws laughter from the entire legal community, even Cooley, and (2) will cost the university between four and seven million dollars per year to support.

The writing is on the wall. Trustees of Indiana Tech, shut it down! You have some great new classroom space and lecture halls for your legitimate programs.  How about moving the business school there? Or expanding the computer science programs? You know, education that at least has some positive effect?

Right now, the law school has under thirty students. It would be most cost-effective to shut the school now and refund tuition for just those thirty students, perhaps offering assistance to get them into law schools elsewhere. Keeping the law school open merely compounds this problem; refunding tuition for sixty students, or one hundred students, would be far more expensive. The longer the school remains “in business” (or on life support), the harder and more expensive it’ll become to pull the plug.  Consider the fact that some law schools will close, so why not close yours while it's still small and has few students and no alumni to enrage?

And if those with their hands on the “off switch” are concerned that those calling for the school’s closure are just a bunch of disgruntled law grads who are fussing about a system that isn’t broken, you should consider the fact that you listened to the so-called experts and they willfully misled you.  Why on earth would you trust the so-called experts to advise you again?

Students at Indiana Tech  - not just the law school, but the entire university - should be up in arms about this extraordinary misstep on the part of its leadership.

But the bigger question is where all the missing money is coming from.  It's not growing on trees on campus, that's for sure.  Extra cash could be procured from a few places. A bank, perhaps, but that’s got to be paid back at some point, and I can’t imagine any sane banker taking a risk on lending ITLS any money whatsoever given its murky future.  Borrowing merely defers the problem too, although most academic administrators fully subscribe to the idea that as long as the problem doesn’t actually surface until they themselves have retired, it’s not a problem at all.

More likely, the money is coming from general university funds – the tuition of the other students. If you are a current student at Indiana Tech, think about this: a chunk of your tuition dollars may be going not to fund your own education, but to pay for an unaccredited law school that provides you with zero benefit.  Not only that, but the law school is making your degrees less valuable by souring the name of your institution - a double hit.  There are about 6,300 students at Indiana Tech, 1,170 of which are full-time. If the enrollment at the law school stays at its current 30% of capacity (and I see no reason why it will improve), then each student’s portion of the law school deficit will be almost $1,100 per year – each and every student, even the part-timers. If we are just considering the full-time undergrads, from whom much of the overall tuition money comes, each undergrad student will be paying almost $5,900 per year to float the useless, empty law school!  That's almost a quarter of the annual undergraduate tuition.

Or perhaps the missing money could come from the university’s endowment: as Nando pointed out over at Third Tier Reality, Indiana Tech has an endowment of just over $41,000,000. If enrollment at Indiana Tech Law School doesn’t improve, the entire endowment will be depleted in well under a decade. Sucked dry to pay the salaries of law professors and administrative staff.  The law school could literally destroy the future of the entire university.  

It takes a big man to admit a mistake, but people have respect for those who admit they were wrong and who try to do the right thing.  I guess we’ll soon see whether those pulling the strings at Indiana Tech have the backbone to do the right thing for the university.

Patient Zero - Indiana Tech Law School

I've long held the belief that it'll take the failure of just one law school for applicants to finally get the message that attending a low-ranked law school is one of the worst decisions they will make in their entire lives, right up there with marrying a hooker in Vegas or driving after drinking an entire bottle of Jack.  Once applicants see one school flop, reality will finally kick in: they'll question whether they should attend law school at all, starting a chain reaction of failures throughout the low-ranked schools, many of which are already on life support due to dwindling applications, falling student numbers, and evaporating tuition dollars.

And it looks like we've found patient zero: Indiana Tech Law School.

I'll just quote the entire press release:

Fort Wayne, Ind.—Indiana Tech announced today that Law School Dean Peter Alexander has resigned. Alexander has held the position of vice president and dean of the law school and tenured professor and he resigned both positions with Indiana Tech on May 21, 2014. Alexander cited the achievement of the goals he had established for the law school to that point in time and a desire to pursue other employment opportunities as the reasons for his decision to resign.

“Dean Alexander has helped establish a firm foundation here at the law school, which will help us achieve success now and in the future,” said Indiana Tech President Dr. Arthur Snyder. “We appreciate his efforts on behalf of students and our school, and wish him well in all his future endeavors.”

andré douglas pond cummings, associate dean for academic affairs and professor of law at Indiana Tech Law School, has been named interim dean.

Reading between the lines, it would appear Dean Alexander was given the choice of resignation or dismissal.  Why?  One can only speculate at this point in time, but my money is on the fact that this expensive failure of a law school has not only cost Indiana Tech a huge amount of money (and will continue to cost Indiana Tech a huge amount of money in the future), but has turned Indiana Tech from a once-respected regional college into the poster child of academic stupidity and greed.  Enrollment targets have been hopelessly missed, the money promised is not appearing, and Indiana Tech is left with egg (or worse) on its face.  Way to ruin an otherwise reasonable university, although perhaps those in the administration will finally taste what it's like to have their futures wiped out due to law school.

I'm sure information will leak out in the next few days.  We'd be particularly interested to hear from any insiders - rising 2Ls who are now deeply concerned that their school will collapse around them, leaving them with (at the very least) a waste of a year or two of their lives and a stain on their resumes; staff who could well be out of a job very soon; faculty who regret ever giving up their prior academic positions to end up as snake oil salespeople under Dean Alexander; applicants (if there are any) who will now withdraw their applications.

Watch this space for developments.