As I mentioned yesterday, being in the middle of a Dean search forces one to engage in many big-picture conversations about the goals and aspirations of your institution and how best to achieve them.  Michael Froomkin (whose institution is also searching for a Dean), has some thoughts about why he feels that "practitioner deans" (i.e., well-established attorneys, judges, etc.) aren't usually a good idea.  As you can see from the comments, different law school constituencies feel differently about this issue.  Professors seem to be the least amenable, while alumni and students may be more inclined to go with the nonacademic candidate.

The ideal law school dean candidate would be (if it existed) an excellent scholar, an excellent administrator, and an excellent fundraiser.  ( I personally believe that Heidi Hurd came very close to this ideal.)  Once you accept that you probably aren't going to find this ideal candidate, then the next question is which one of these facet your school is wiling to sacrifice, or at least allow for learning on the job.  For different schools, this answer may be different, and for some constituencies within a school, the answer may also be different.  What complicates this is that most law schools, like other parts of a research university, do at least two things.  Law schools train and graduate future attorneys, but they also conduct research and provide valuable contributions into the marketplace for ideas.  At the highest level, law schools use great "legal scientists" who inform the elected and the populace on the issues of the day.  So, as the comments to Michael's post suggest, those who see the first contribution of a law school as training and graduating future attorneys will be more attracted to a well-known attorney or judge who brings great knowledge of the legal profession and the challenges that face the local and national bar.  However, if one is committed to the second contribution of law schools, then one sees a potential disconnect between the nonacademic candidate and the need for a dean to promote and develop meaningful legal scholarship.

In any event, a school is generally looking at candidates whose skills don't entirely map on to that unique skill set that the ideal dean would have.  Teaching and producing excellent scholarship don't teach someone to be able to supervise all the employees of a law school, keep the trains running on time, move the school up the rankings, recruit great students, recruit and retain great faculty, and raise gobs of money.  Being an extremely successful attorney may teach someone an awful lot about an area of the law, the working of the courts or dealmaking, and how to develop clients, but it may not develop some of the skills listed above, as wells as being able to converse internally and externally about the past, present and future of legal scholarship and legal education.  I've always thought it was interesting that in law firms, attorneys who are great litigators or deal lawyers then get elected managing partner, which requires a completely different set of skills, just like the excellent scholar/teacher who gets appointed dean.  In the perfect world, any successful academic candidate will also have some sort of administrative experience, and I would think that the best practitioner candidate would also have some scholarly record.

A very knotty question, but a good conversation worth having.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

I have had the great honor and opportunity for awhile to be on the Dean Search Committee here at UIUC.  As such, I have been a part of many conversations among the many constituencies of the law school about various, and sometimes competing, future goals.  One of the most interesting internal conversations is whether a school like Illinois should focus efforts on building a new building.  We have an average building -- not an eyesore, but not a palace either.  It has many aspects that I like, but we could use more and bigger classrooms and more office space.  So, in talking with different groups, alumni, students, prospective students and faculty, different points of view emerge as to whether a new building is (a) necessary for optimal function; (b) necessary for rankings; (c) necessary to attract students; and (d) necessary to attract faculty.  This discussion of course also includes debates over finances and fundraising priorities.

In the Chronicle of Higher Education this week is an essay by a student at the University of Virginia, Honor Jones, that details her opinion as to whether a public institution should focus resources on buildings.  I found this essay interesting given an assumption by myself and others that students like to spend their formative educational years in posh digs.  Once again, I may be wrong.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

ATL has some survey numbers.

And responses to this question: "How Much Does Your Debt Affect Your Decision To Join, Or Stay At, Your Firm?"

More than half said that their debt affected their choice either "very much" (34.6%) or "more than any other factor" (17.7%).

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Georgetown Law Center for the Study of the Legal Profession is hosting a conference entitled "The Future of the Global Law Firm." Having not studied law firms in my prior work, I am an imposter-presenter at the conference, which has almost everyone who is anyone with respect to the study of the legal profession. The presentations have been uniformly interesting and provocative.

The participants seem to have reached a few points of consensus. First, the legal profession has changed dramatically in the past two decades and it remains under significant stress, meaning that more change is on the way. Second, the rules that constrain change (e.g., prohibition of non-lawyer ownership, rules relating to conflicts, non-competition rules) should be changed sooner rather than later. Third, the traditional legal form (partnership) is largely irrelevant to the current practice of law, even if law firms want to create an organizational structure that encourages the collegiality of a traditional partnership. Fourth, the law firms that will succeed in the future are those that get the organizational structure right.

On that last point, I have heard a lot of people talking about the need to "think carefully about the changes that will be required." This point came up during the Q&A period of my session, and I made a brief pitch for innovation among law firms. It was not the first time the case has been made for allowing firms to experiment with organizational structure, but I wanted to make the point that innovations usually do not come via deliberation. Innovations come from action. And the problem with the current system is that innovation is impeded by the profession's ethical rules.

Permalink | Conferences| Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (5) | TrackBack (1)

Paul Caron links to a story in the Chicago Daily Law Bulletin about the University of Chicago Law School's decision to shut down the Law School's wireless signal in the classroom wing:

The University of Chicago Law School has removed Internet access in most of its classrooms because of a growing problem of students surfing the Web on laptops during lectures.

"Every teacher underestimates the amount of Internet surfing going on" in his or her classroom, U of C law Dean Saul Levmore said in an interview Thursday.

"Whenever faculty would visit other faculty members' classes, they would come to me and say, 'You just won't believe it. It's astounding what happened.'

"But they never believe it's going on in their own class," he said.

In a recent e-mail message to students and faculty, Levmore wrote, "Remarkably, [Internet] usage appears to be contagious if not epidemic" during law classes.

"Several observers have reported that one student will visit a gossip site or shop for shoes and within 20 minutes, an entire row is shoe shopping.

"Half the time a student is called on, the question needs to be repeated," Levmore added.

Law students' use of laptops to surf the Web, read and write e-mail and play computer games during class has brought changes at a number of schools, including Harvard, Yale and Stanford.

Stanford now has a posted policy that laptops and wireless Internet access may be used only for purposes relevant to the class and "not unreasonably distracting to fellow students."

And Stanford says "Harvard Law and Business [schools] have resorted to shutting down their wired connectivity in classrooms to address such problems" and Yale has considered it.

In his e-mailed announcement Wednesday, Levmore said that U of C law has removed Internet access in most classrooms "in order to ensure the value of the classroom experience."

On Thursday, he said some students object to his new policy.

"There are some who don't like it, who feel it's quite paternalist and so forth," Levmore said. "They are quite vocal.

"There are many who love it, and many who said they would hate it and were very resentful, and now say they love it.... It's gratifying to hear about people who benefit from tough love."

Some students also thought Levmore should have consulted them more about the move.

But Levmore said the question is, "How do you best learn? That's for the faculty to decide."

Whether to allow computers at all in the classroom is a continuing debate in law schools.

When Levmore proposed to the faculty in early March that the school might cut off Internet access in most classrooms, some faculty responded that computers should be banned, he said.

Some professors believe that students who take notes on laptops during lectures interfere with their own learning.

"Back in the day when we took notes by hand," Levmore recalled, "some people took fewer notes and learned more."

He said some law professors already have "no computer" rules during class.

But he said some students convincingly argued that note taking on laptops is a help to them.

The heart of his decision to prevent Web surfing in class, he said, is that the students "are going to go out to law firms and other settings where they're going to miss these years where they had opportunities for human interaction and contemplating ideas.

"And that's partly what the classroom is for. They don’t realize the value of what they’re being distracted from. That's really what I believe in most."

Levmore teaches torts to 1st-year students. He said he walks up and down the aisles, which could limit Internet surfing by students.

But he said a common practice was students sending e-mail to each other about what to say in class.

And "for some students, checking e-mail every 15 minutes is like breathing for us," he added.

The U of C information technology staff initially told Levmore that cutting off wireless Internet capacity in classrooms could not be done.

Recently, Levmore said, they found it could be done for the most part. One classroom continues to have Internet capability to allow computer training.

Levmore also said he discovered while researching the subject "how offensive it often is when phone calls are taken in public and when Blackberry and other e-mail devices are consulted during meetings."

So in his e-mail message to the school, he promised himself "that I will no longer check my Blackberry under the table at university meetings."

So far, he said Thursday, he has stuck to his promise.

Yesterday my son brought home his high school's newspaper, and the front page featured tips for texting during class. Under the table. Behind the textbook. Exactly what you would expect. Apparently, the only teachers in the universe who would be surprised at this subterfuge all happened to end up at the University of Chicago Law School! What will they do when they discover law students engaged in precisely this behavior? (Ban mobile phones!) Or, worse yet, when they discover that students have equipped their laptops with mobile broadband? (That's it, we are banning all electronic devices!)

For the record, I don't believe that the professors at the University of Chicago Law School are as naive as the story portrays them ("they never believe it's going on in their own class"), but I do believe that shutting down the wireless signal is a short-term fix, at best. I have become convinced that the problems accompanying laptops in the classroom are behavioral, not technological.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (14) | TrackBack (0)

Michael Hunter Schwartz is writing a book about law teaching, which is evergreen fashionable. He is only in Phase 1 of the Project (collecting nominations), but this looks like it could generate some interesting discussion.

Over this past year, I have been working with the BYU Center for Teaching and Learning on new teaching strategies. Our experiments have produced mixed results, from my perspective, but I am encouraged to continue studying and experimenting.

One keeper: student teams for in-class discussions and in-term assignments. I will write more about this after the semester is complete and I have graded the assignments and read the evaluations, but a substantial body of research supports the value of team-based learning and a number of my students have offered positive oral reports. I need to get more comfortable using teams, but I like the fact that students are actively engaged during class, rather than being (mostly) passive participants.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Deven Desai has organized a moblog over at Madisonian around the question, "What Kind of Institution Do We Want A Law School To Be?" The first entry is from Erwin Chemerinsky, who was subjected to a slew of unsolicited advice at the hands of Paul Caron last fall. Take a look at Chemerinsky's vision of the new law school:

My vision for a law school of the 21st century, and for our new law school in particular, has two key components: experiential learning and interdisciplinary learning. I also want to make sure that there are more opportunities for students to have smaller classes, especially in the first year. For example, I think that it is essential that all students have one course in a "small section" during both the fall and spring of the first year. In this course, there should be multiple evaluations of students' work, rather than the usual one exam at the end of the semester with no feedback.

Read the whole post, then tell me whether that looks like a blueprint for a "new approach to legal education." Maybe everything has been tried, but I didn't see a single fresh idea in the whole post.

Then again, maybe execution is the key. Aside from the foregoing post, about the only thing I know about Chemerinsky's new law school is that my friend Dan Burk is going to be on the faculty. Dan is extremely creative and energetic, and a faculty filled with people like Dan would make even the most mundane business plan come to life.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

For many years, Illinois has hosted a more-or-less informal VAP program for its own graduates, one of the more famous (infamous?) being my colleague Bob Lawless.  Starting now, under the leadership of our new Associate Dean for Faculty & Research, Larry Solum, Illinois is expanding this program to all aspiring legal scholars who are interested in joining the academy.  The Illinois Academic Fellowship Program invites applicants for one- or two-year posts:

The Illinois Academic Fellowship Program prepares future legal academics, who spend one or two years in residence at the College of Law devoted to scholarly research and writing (under the close mentorship of Illinois faculty), teaching one course per semester, and fully participating in the College's famously rich intellectual environment. By treating Illinois Academic Fellows as the virtual equivalent of tenure-track faculty (although with a light teaching load and no administrative responsibilities) and providing Fellows the support and counseling necessary to the development of a serious scholarly portfolio, we expect Fellows to be competitive for tenure-track positions at leading law schools.

More info is here.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

As noted below (and on every other law blog, it seems), this year's law school rankings by U.S. News have leaked. Ranking methodologies are not my forte, but I am responding to Dan Solove's invitation to discuss possible improvements. In the interests of full disclosure, one of the sub-items on my agenda is to speak to the alumni and students of BYU's law school about our numbers.

As to the overall ranking, Brian Leiter makes a convincing arguments that it "combines too many factors, in an inexplicable formula, and much of the underlying data isn't reliable, and some of it (e.g., expenditures on secretarial salaries and electriciy) isn't even relevant." Nevertheless, that overall ranking seems to be as important as it has ever been, judging by traffic on discussion boards and local conversations. And it's not clear to me that a proliferation of other rankings (like this new one from Vault) or the distribution of other information is going to change that.

One improvement would be to create clusters of schools (as is done with the lower-ranked schools), rather than the numbered ranking that prevails in the Top 100. Every school that experiences a major shift from one year to the next has a story about a single input or perhaps two inputs that caused the shift. The schools are so tightly clustered that small changes produce huge effects. Last year, for example, BYU dropped 10 spots, a result attributable largely to a small decline in our entering class GPA. You might think that entering class GPA is an important factor in law school quality, but I doubt that BYU is a materially different place as a result of the GPA of one class.

This year, the GPA and LSAT are both up, placing our student numbers comfortably among the Top 20-25 schools on that measure, but our overall ranking declined. We believe that this effect was the result of U.S. News' decision to change the placement calculation. In prior years, students who were not seeking employment were not counted in the denominator. This year, they were counted against our placement numbers. I am told that we have a number of former students who passed the bar, but decided to dedicate themselves to their families rather than to seek employment. I suspect that BYU has an inordinate number of such students, and given the small size of each class (approximately 150 students), this change in calculation dropped our placement number from over 97% to just over 91%. I understand that the category of "students who are not looking" is subject to abuse, but I hope U.S. News revisits their decision to include such students in the denominator.

The bigger issue here is that U.S. News is constantly changing the formula to produce changes in the rankings. This is good marketing, and it curbs to some extent the impulse to play to the rankings. By substituting clusters for numerical ranks, U.S. News would moderate some of the effects of these changes, though that is precisely why it has no incentive to embrace clusters. The interest among readers in small changes from one year to the next is what keeps this machine running. Quite brilliant on their part.

UPDATE: Brian Leiter has posted "An Open Letter to Bob Morse of U.S. News," which focuses on Brian's usual theme of the manipulability of the numbers. Two points in response:

1. Getting data that are not manipulable by the law schools sounds wonderful, but the most meaningful information about a law school may not be objectively verifiable. Brian realizes this, of course, but it bears repeating.

2. I owe Bob Morse an apology in connection with my claim that "U.S. News is constantly changing the formula to produce changes in the rankings." Brian observes,

US News has not made any major adjustments to the ranking formula since 1999, the year you began adjusting expenditures for differences in cost-of-living in different regions of the country.  Since then, U.S. News has made some adjustments to definitions of certain items of data, but those were all minor and were, correctly, designed to increase reliability by more closely tracking ABA data.

Whether the changes were "minor" and "correct" depends on where you sit -- the change in the employment number was not "minor" for BYU and several other schools, but it's hard to see how this change was "correct" in any meaningful sense of that word -- but most of the changes that I know about were prompted by the ABA, not by U.S. News. That includes the manner in which employment is tallied, as described in my original post. I am told that the ABA eliminated the separate category for those "not seeking employment," and I understand that schools that are peculiarly affected by the change are lobbying for a return to the old categories.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

So I was reading the ABA Journal's rehash of all things problematic with the U.S. News rankings of law schools, when I stumbled across this from Robert Morse, who is described as "the man who created the law school rankings for U.S. News":

"It's very nerve-racking. I always lose a lot of weight then," Morse says. "It's definitely anxiety-driven supermetabolism, because I could drink five milkshakes a day and still lose the weight and I can't do that any other time of the year."

Morse is  the director of data research for U.S. News and he develops the methodologies and surveys for the America's Best Colleges and America's Best Graduate Schools annual rankings. (And he has a blog!) But the article implies that only the law school rankings have this effect. Fear of lawsuits, perhaps?

By the way, this year's rankings are due out on Friday, and if you are interested in participating in a live chat with Morse, go to ABAJournal.com on Friday, April 11, from 3 to 4 p.m. ET.

UPDATE: The rankings have leaked again this year. At least some of them.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Harvard Law School plans to waive law school tuition for the third year of law school for students who pledge to spend five years working for the government or a nonprofit organization. The plan stems from the persistent concern that debt and other financial pressures force students otherwise interested in the public sector to choose more lucrative jobs in the for-profit arena. Indeed, in light of my recent post about the salary differences between non-profit and for-profit leaders, it is clear that students cannot hope to make as much money in the public sector. It is also clear that law school cost a lot of money and students who take on the financial burden of law school find themselves unable to turn down jobs that will relieve that burden in order to work in the public sector. To be sure, Harvard already has a loan forgiveness program, but believed it needed to do more. Indeed, the fact that between 2003 and 2006, only 54-67 of Harvard's 550 graduates chose careers in the government or public sector suggest that other measures were needed. Students seeking a tuition waiver must demonstrate some commitment to the public sector while in law school, but those students also will be eligible for the loan forgiveness program. Interestingly, clerkships apparently will count towards the five year commitment. Dean Kagan did note that the law school planned to track students to ensure that they remained in the public sector for the full five years, otherwise students will be asked to return the tuition money. Of course it is not clear what type of impact the program will have. And maybe we will learn that the expressed desire to work in the public sector is more often than not an admissions ploy. However, for those who genuinely find themselves struggling between that desire and their financial commitments, the program seems like a positive development, especially because it reduces students debt load up front while continuing their eligibility for loan forgiveness after the fact. Seems like a commendable step in the right direction.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

A break from Bear Stearns - though can you believe that a firm with a sweet skyscraper in Manhattan, if nothing else, would go for $270 million?  Skyscrapers in that town cost a billion! - to point you to Paul Secunda's how to lateral essay.   He's put it in 10 easy steps.  Given the reception for Jeff Lipshaw's should I be a law professor piece, I think Paul should probably title the paper "How to Win Downloads and Influence People."

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Yesterday I attended BYU Law School's annual Awards Banquet & Barrister's Ball. In addition to being the sort of person who supports Law School events, I was especially looking forward to dancing with my wife. We are not going to appear on television anytime soon, but we know a few basic steps and make the most of it.

When I entered the ballroom, the first person I saw was our associate dean, who said, "Congratuations, Gordon."

"What did I do?"
"No one called you?"
"No. What are you talking about?"

He showed me the program which indicated that I was to receive the "Student Bar Association First Year Professor of the Year Award." Cool!

Last semester, I taught a "small section" (50 students) of first-year Contracts. The students and I had a wonderful experience introducing each other to BYU Law School. I don't know whether students realize how much we professors value our relationships with them, but here is a shout-out to that class: Thanks!

By the way, when my children saw the plaque, they were unimpressed. "How many professors at BYU are in their first year? You're the only one, right?"

I can always count on my children to keep me grounded.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

I've reached the end of my visit.  I want to thank again everyone here at the Conglomerate.  It remains my favorite read in the blogosphere.

For my last post, I return to the topic of changes to the law school curriculum, since that is taking up much of my time and energy at this point.  I blogged previously about some of the changes were are making to our first year curriculum here at Minnesota.  I actually think that more work needs to be done with the third year rather than the first year.  We have started thinking about the third year, and have just begun to develop a series of what we are calling "capstone" courses.  These will be focused on trying to give students a better sense of what practice in some particular areas is like.  They will be simulation-based and team taught.

An example of a possible course of particular interest to readers here is our start-up company capstone proposal.  In this, students would follow a fictional start-up company through critical stages in its development.  One faculty member would teach about choice of entity and formation, and the students would draft certificates and bylaws.  Another faculty would teach about employment law, and the students would draft employment agreements with the founders.  A third professor would teach about IP, and the students would draft IP licensing agreements.  And so on through a variety of possible scenarios.

I know that courses along somewhat similar lines have been around for a while, and others are being started now.  We are beginning to gather material on what other schools are doing along these lines.  Any pointers that anyone would like to provide would be greatly appreciated.  Thanks.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Larry Solum's first iteration of his annual entry-level hiring survey is here.  If you can assist Larry in filling out the report, please do so.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Thank you, Conglomerate Borg-like entity, for having me back, and thanks Vic for the welcome post which reminds me how long we've known each other now in "old law professor years."

I've been thinking a lot about legal education reform issues recently, because of stuff going on here at Minnesota.  Today I'm off to Georgia State in Atlanta (hello, Fred) for a Conference on the Future of Legal Education.  So, I plan to do a few posts on that topic.  I'm also looking forward to Harry Gerla's posts on Caremark over at the Race to the Bottom, since Claire Hill and I have written on that recently.  If I have time, maybe I'll even sneak in a post or two on the Oscars--two of the best picture nominees, Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood, have themes that are of interest for this blog.

So, I'm looking forward to the next two weeks.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

I've basically been skimming the blogospheric discussion of Brian Tamanaha's post on whether nonelite law schools should invest in interdiscplinary studies.  However, this post of Larry Solum's on "multidisciplinarity" turns the discussion on its head and is a must-read.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Michael O'Hear is wondering about lateral hiring of law school faculty. He senses an upswing in lateral hiring and wonders whether it is driven by the demand side or the supply side.

• On the demand side: "lateral hiring seems more likely to provide an immediate reputational bump than entry-level hiring."

• On the supply side ...

"Perhaps the greater connectedness of the academy in the Internet age has spawned a generation of junior faculty members who feel less attached to their home institutions than previous generations and who are more motivated to make moves that will enhance opportunities or status within the national academic community. Likewise, for junior faculty members who are not entirely satisfied with their current situations (for geographical reasons or otherwise), the Internet provides opportunities to build a reputation relatively quickly, and also facilitates the sort of networking that may pave the way for lateral moves."

Notice the implicit assumption: that the driving force behind lateral hiring is scholarship. Of course, this is widely understood, but making that assumption explicit highlights the spread of scholarly ambition beyond elite law schools. While lower-ranked law schools may have their own unique missions -- and thus may be worthy receptacles of institutional  investment by faculty members -- they also serve, in some instances, as "farm teams" for higher-ranked schools. Oddly, the quickest path to increased reputational capital for lower-ranked law schools probably does not come from hiring laterals, but from producing laterals for elite law schools.

All of this causes me to wonder: Is there any development in legal education of the past generation that has had a more important influence on the teaching of law than the spread of scholarly ambition beyond elite law schools?

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Is Daniel Lyons, a.k.a. Fake Steve Jobs, pulling our legs? Take a look at his posts from Saturday about a supposed exchange with Apple's lawyers:

4:28 am  Apple's lawyers allegedly contacted Lyons, offering money in exchange for his agreement to stop impersonating the "Dear Leader on the Web."

7:20 am "Just got an angry letter from their legal douchebags ..." complaining about the first post

10:59 am "Another update. Now they are really pissed."

12:44 pm "God bless you for your support."

5:34 pm FSJ is feeling better after talking to his lawyer.

Do you buy it? I don't. But if it were true, it would be a wonderful case study of bad lawyering.

Update: The last update from FSJ? He writes that Apple's lawyer took the red-eye and met him for breakfast. FSJ turned down $500,000. If you were still hanging on the edge of your seat, FSJ lets you down easy with the last paragraph:

After he was gone I called Tony Clifton and told him what happened and he's like, Well, my friend, you really screwed the pooch on this one. A half million? And you turned it down? Well, good for you, you dumb prick. It's like I always say -- some people deserve to be poor. Merry Christmas, moron.

Tony Clifton? FSJ is brilliant.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

I think even the most pro-plaintiff of us (that would be me) will start screaming for tort reform when law students start suing us over grades.  The National Law Journal obviously knows our deepest fears, and a recent article uses this attention-grabbing headline:  Don't Like Your Grade?  Sue Your Law School.  However, most of the examples given in the article are not very frivolous, and most would not be characterized as lawsuits over the substance of a grade.  The nightmare scenario for me is when students file lawsuits because "she gave me 15 points out of 20 on this essay question, but it's really worth 18 points."  These examples are very different.  I've listed the examples in order of strength of allegations, in my opinion:

• "A group of students filed a $120 million class action against the American Justice School of Law in Paducah, Ky., on Nov. 17, citing allegations that include tax fraud, false representation to the American Bar Association, racketeering, scheming to defraud students and obstruction of justice. Rust v. American Justice School of Law, No. 5:07CV-191-R (W.D. Ky.)."
• "Also last month, Lisa Dawn Rittenhouse filed a lawsuit against Southern Illinois University School of Law in Carbondale after she was told not to return for her second year because her first-year grade-point average was 1.948, just below the minimum 1.95 needed to continue.  Rittenhouse, who is white and has learning disabilities, claims that she was discriminated against while minority students without handicaps who had lower averages were allowed to return. Rittenhouse v. Southern Illinois University School of Law, No. 07-CV-00763-MJR-PMP (S.D. Ill.)."
• "Late last month, Adam Key, a second-year law student, sued Regent University School of Law, a private Christian school in Virginia Beach, Va., claiming violations of his right to free speech and religion after getting expelled for posting a critique in an online university forum. Key v. Regent University, No. 4:07-CV-04060 (S.D. Texas)."
• "On Nov. 14, John Valente, a second-year student at University of Dayton School of Law in Ohio, filed a complaint against his school, citing negligence in dealing with exam software. Valente v. University of Dayton Law School of Law, No. 07-9593 (Montgomery Co., Ohio, Ct. C.P.)."  Valente "alleges that some students used a loophole that allowed them to transfer answers to the test, thereby negatively affecting his grade and preventing him for competing for a position on the University of Dayton Law Review. "
• "On Oct. 10, Clayton Hallford, a former first-year student at Florida A&M University College of Law in Orlando, filed a lawsuit claiming that one of his professors used questions from a commercial test guide in an exam, putting him and others without the guide at a disadvantage. Hallford also challenges the grading policy used, citing those issues as reasons behind his academic dismissal. Hallford v. Florida A&M College of Law, No. 2007-CA-01307 (Orange Co., Fla., Cir. Ct.). "

The last two are the only complaints that seem to strike at the heart of the grading process, and the one regarding exam software is still more procedural than substantive.  However, I can't imagine that either of these two claims will be successful.  In fact, I've witnessed a situation exactly like the last example (a professor used the exact same essay test as in the past year, and one study group had a second-year mentor who had used the hypos (from memory) as study materials).  I don't believe there was a lawsuit over that one, but there were definitely complaints!

A law student who resorts to litigation must be using this tactic as a last resort (like the woman who is being expelled).  Such litigation tends to brand the law student in the marketplace and rarely achieves any kind of success.  In such a clubby profession as law, former plaintiffs are well-known and not universally respected.  I was in law school at Texas during the time when various groups were trying to recruit white males who had been rejected by UT to be plaintiffs in what became the Hopwood case.  Needless to say, recruiting took a long time.

Hat tip:  Tracy McGaugh.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

The Dean had a very nice surprise for me yesterday, as he bestowed an endowed professorship. I don't know much about Glen L. Farr, but he was a labor man for the Union Pacific Railroad, and he loved to play golf. Old school. I like that.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (6) | TrackBack (1)

As I stare at my 100+ Business Associations exams, I ask myself why I have yet to give a multiple choice exam.  Since I have been in academia, my exams have been a combination of short and long essay questions.  At a meeting over the weekend when I asked a couple of law professors what type of exams they gave, I was surprised to learn that almost everyone gave or had given a multiple choice exam in some form.  That is, some people gave half or some portion of their exam as multiple choice, while others gave an entire multiple choice exam.   Of course everyone agrees that creating multiple choice exams takes significantly more time than creating an essay exam, and hence the ease of grading that such exams provide requires input of time on the front-end.  However, the brief survey over the weekend, did have me wondering if more people have begun to gravitate toward multiple choice exams in lieu of the essay.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (7) | TrackBack (1)

The WSJ Law Blog asks if any readers have ever been "seconded" -- loaned by their law firm to a client for an extended period of time.  I have to confess that in the Fall of 1995, as a third-year associate, I was seconded to a major client of my law firm, a large oil & gas company.  As the Law Blog suggests, the client at the time was under a hiring freeze, so the legal department creatively had its outside law firm send me over to help out with the workload.  I never saw the economics of this -- paying my full rate for 8 hours a day didn't seem to be a cheap way to get labor, but no one asked me. 

The Law Blog also suggests that being seconded is (1) a good gig and (2) a good way to segue out of your law firm to a client.  At least in my case, I don't think either were true.  First, even though I had a new 8-5 job, it didn't seem to replace my regular job.  Most days I found myself leaving the client's offices at 5:30 and walking back to my other office to start my second shift.  Just because I was housed a few blocks away didn't stop partners from calling me and giving me assignments.  Therefore, my work day (and work week) was not shortened during my secondment.  Second, the reason that I was there was that the client had a hiring freeze.  So, hinting about a permanent job would have seemed a little silly, even if I had wanted one.  In fact, while I was there, management had an all-company meeting (without me) in which budget cuts were announced in all "cost centers," such as legal.  That afternoon, I saw a senior in-house attorney reading the classified section of the Texas Lawyer at his assistant's desk. 

All of this is not to say that I didn't learn valuable things during my two months there.  I got to know my client without the buffer of senior partners between us.  I learned a lot about how this specific business worked and about how generally legal departments are viewed within a company.  Although I was relieved when it was over, I appreciated the experience.  Although, unlike the Law Blog's prediction, it made me realize that the grass was not really greener on the other side of that particular fence.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

While Brian Tamanaha bemoans the surplus number of JDs out there, SUNY Binghamton is planning to start a law school.  I understand why California wanted to start a second state-supported law school in the southern part of the state (though I'm surprised it didn't do so at UCSD).  And I know that New York, with only two state supported law schools, has fewer than Florida and Texas.  And I even know we're in an era of law school growth.  So yes, yes, there's all that.

But I don't get why the state should invest in Binghamton.  Don't the law schools in Syracuse and Buffalo have that part of the state covered?  To say nothing of Albany?  And as for the downstate market, there's ten-odd law schools in the NYC area that would both get better students and be easier to recruit at (Pace, Hofstra, St John's, NYLS, NYU, CUNY, Columbia, Fordham, Cardozo, and Touro would be the ones in New York state that come to mind - but there's others in New Jersey and CT).  SUNY is chronically underfunded; does New York need another fourth tier law school?  And I know Binghamton claims to be the flagship institution and all that, but if you started the thing at Stony Brook, at least you could leverage the law and courts strength there.

But best of luck to you, Binghamton Law School.  May you reverse the many strikes against you with something truly creative, something that will make you the unlaw school.  Maybe you will hire a faculty composed entirely of Ph.D-no-J.D.'s, maybe you'll have students who go on "rounds" in traffic court, or maybe you'll institute a laser-like focus on networking and job acquisition from orientation day 1.  Maybe.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

Describing how legal reasoning is distinctive is no easy task, but my former colleague from Wisconsin, Beth Mertz, does a wonderful job of it in this passage of her new book (read slowly to get every drop):

Where a textualist ideology regards the text as fixed, the U.S. case law tradition depends on a conception of texts as subject to changing interpretation, as fundamentally reconstitutable through the process of recontextualization in subsequent cases.  This is not to say that cases are not also given authoritative, determinist readings.  But the cultural constitution of cases as precedent has a double-edged quality; subsequent interpretation at once creates the authoritative meaning of a precedential case, and yet is constrained by the framing discourse of the language used in that precedential case.  What a case means emerges only as it is interpreted as precedent in subsequent cases.  At the same time, because subsequent discourse is constrained and framed by the terms of argument set up in precedential cases, any subsequent authoritative interpretation relies in a fundamental way on the authority of the prior text.  In terms of meaning and authority, these legal texts are mutually constitutive.

Thus, it is the very capability of a text to be reconstituted when it is recontextualized as precedent that makes it powerful in the textual tradition; case texts are “fixed” and “refixed” in the continual process of ongoing legal opinion writing and reading. A clear explanation of this process turns out to be oddly elusive.  As noted, Edward Levi provides a description in his astute analysis of this sort of legal discourse: “The kind of reasoning involved in the legal process is one in which the classification changes as the classification is made”; it is at once “certain” and “uncertain.” James Boyd White similarly defines legal reasoning as “and organized and systematic process of conversation by which our words get and change their meaning.” An often invoked adage emerging from the ideology of law school teaching is that there are no right answers to questions asked about case law in class.  This is somewhat puzzling, for observation of law school classroom exchanges makes clear at one level there are, if not right, then certainly wrong answers.  But the “no right answers” ideology is a response to the essentially contestable character of case law texts; meanings may be refixed, new interpretations may be forged, and attorney adversaries in practice will argue vastly different interpretations of the same cases in efforts to harness powerful case law precedent for their purposes.  Students may give wrong answers when they fail to observe the canons for reading legal texts, or fail to discern the limits to contestability.  But to accept the notion that a legal text is sufficiently fixed that it contains right answers is precisely to miss a key canon for reading legal texts.

Elizabeth Mertz, The Language of Law School 63 (2007)

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

The Recorder reports that McDermott, Will & Emery has announced that it will create a new track of attorneys within its ranks who will make 25% less, work 30-40 hours a week and make about 75% of the regular associate salary (first years = $160,000, so at least $120k).  This group of attorneys will be created to perform tasks that clients are balking at paying high billing rates for, such as document production.  Although other firms have responded to this budget pressure by hiring contract attorneys or even outsourcing these tasks to India, MWE believes that it's best for quality control and budget to keep this in-house.  These jobs will not be a stepping-stone to the partnership track but a separate track altogether.

This all makes a great amount of sense to me.  Unfortunately, the comments to the Law Blog suggest that readers believe that the applicants who will fill these jobs will be subpar to MWE associates generally.  I disagree.  I believe that there is a high demand for these jobs.  I can think of many attorneys with stellar resumes who would like a high-paying option besides big firm associate on the partnership track.  I would think that being offered $120k plus for 30-40 hours a week would be very attractive to many attorneys (not to mention most people in this country, not to mention the world!).  I predict that these ranks will be filled by candidates with resumes that would have landed them MWE jobs anyway -- and I bet some of there own associates consider the move.  In addition, I would also predict that many candidates would be parents who are more than willing to trade 25% of their salary for that much or more of their work time.

The Recorder article poses the question of whether this move should concern p-track associates.  The one downside I see is the question of what happens when work slows down, as it does with economic cycles.  When p-track associates are scrambling for work to keep their billables up and the usual day-to-day work is being done by the cheaper attorneys, associates might have trouble making their hours, bonuses, quotas, etc.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)

Apparently students at the University of Maryland College Park who miss class do not have to worry about finding someone to take notes for them.  Instead, they can rely on "Terp Notes".  According to the website of Bookholders.com, the company that sells Terp Notes, Terp Notes are "professional typed notes for daily class lectures.  The notes are taken by hand-selected students enrolled in your class providing easy to read material that you need.  Not only do you receive lecture information but an interpretation by a student to understand the material better."   According to one newspaper, student note takers are paid from $8 to $20 per class for their notes.  The Bookholders.com website includes prices for the notes, samples notes, and classes for which notes are available.  The prices range from $2.49 for one day of notes to $26.95 for a full semester.  Interestingly, class notes from previous semesters are less expensive than notes currently being taken.  While the quality of notes appear to vary, based on the sample notes I saw, the class notes are not just pages of rambling classroom discussion, but rather are presented in an outline format.  The notes have been available for several years.  Yet their existence continues to cause concerns, particularly among professors who apparently not only worry about copyright concerns, but also worry about students' relying on such notes as authoritative.  While I can appreciate the concerns these notes generate, they seem like an inevitable extension of commercial outlines and other research tools on which students rely.  And of course I wonder if a market for these kinds of notes will develop at the law school level.

To be sure, Bookholders.com seems to be aware of the potential for legal liability in any school setting.  However, Bookholders.com thus far has managed to avoid legal issues, and includes a disclaimer on its notes that reads: "these notes do not represent the professor's lectures verbatim."  Apparently Bookholders.com also keeps the list of note takers confidential so that professors will not know whose earning money while they take notes in class.

Copyright concerns aside, perhaps law school students are more risk averse than undergrads and hence are not willing to rely on a stranger's perspective of classroom discussion.  Of course, one could argue that something like Terp Notes is preferable to more traditional commercial outlines because at least the notes seeks to capture the perspective of a particular professor.  Then too, aside from the profit piece, such notes seem almost indistinguishable from borrowing class notes from a friend, on the one hand, or outlines and other class materials passed down from year to year, on the other.  Moreover, it is possible that the profit piece incentivizes the note taker to take better notes.  And yet it is equally possible that the profit motive corrupts these more informal ways of sharing class information because the original note taker is motivated by more than just the educational experience.   And I can imagine that law students would feel comfortable relying on these informal ways because the notes have somehow been verified--that is, dubbed the "law review" outline or taken by the "A+" student.  This suggests that maybe such a note service could not take off in the law school setting. 

And yet, given the anxiety many law school students feel and the amount of money students pay for various study aids, it is hard to imagine them not taking advantage of any tool that they perceive as potentially bolstering their performance.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

We all know about calls to ban laptops from the classroom. As readers of Conglomerate know, I have some sympathy for this position.

But just for fun, let's pretend that we embraced laptops in the classroom. I don't mean that we simply tolerated them or acted like we were all high-minded by giving students the option to shop during class. I also don't mean that we finally acknowledged the true value of laptops as efficient note-taking, concept-organizing devices. I mean, what would happen if we started thinking of laptops as an opportunity to improve the classroom experience rather than an inevitable scourge?

What would we do if we thought like that?

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (20) | TrackBack (0)

According to the Princeton Review (Best 170 Law Schools and Best 290 Business Schools), BYU has the most competitive law school and business school students in the US. "Most competitive" in this survey is not a measure of the selectivity of admissions. According to a local story about the rankings, the ranking for law schools was based on four questions: "the average hour of sleep a student gets each night, the hours a student studies outside class, the hours a student believes classmates study outside class and the degree of competitiveness among students at the school."

Hmm. That doesn't seem like a good thing, but BYU is spinning it. According to BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins, "This goes hand in hand with the rankings we've seen recently where they've done so well. It speaks to the rigor of both programs."

My guess is that it has more to do with the percentage of the students who are married and have children. Having been here only a couple of months, I don't have a deep knowledge of the norms of the students, but I have the impression that BYU's law students are much more occupied with family and Church than my students elsewhere.

By the way, if you are interested in my anecdote, one of the seven law schools I have been associated with (as a student, tenured professor, or visitor) stands apart from all of the rest for competition in the classroom: Vanderbilt. Hands down the most competitive law school I have seen up close.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (6) | TrackBack (0)

If contained in a screenplay, recent events at Ave Maria School of Law would seem a bit over the top.After all, who sends security guards to watch law professors at work? Get more than your fill from Fumare and AveWatch, as well as Steve Bainbridge.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

OK, so I'm out of pocket for one week staring at the best baby in the world, and Gordon calls for the abolition of legal writing programs.  Well, I guess I could dust off my legal writing director hat and come out punching except that I did the same thing at an Association of Legal Writing Directors conference in 2001 at the University of Minnesota called Erasing Lines.  The conference had many speakers, including law school deans, with many viewpoints, but one general topic that was discussed was the breaking down of barriers (structural and political) between legal writing and "other" classes (whether you call them doctrinal classes, textbook classes, etc.)  A rough analogy can be made to the "writing across the curriculum" movement that sought to make writing a component of various subject matter courses.  My contrarian remarks, which are more or less captured in an essay available on Westlaw (1 J. Ass'n Legal Writing Directors 80 (2002) is that if proponents are truly committed to "erasing lines" then the one of the next logical steps is the abolition of legal writing programs.  A true evolution would be to a faculty of tenure-track professors, some of whom have a methodology course they teach on rhetoric and persuasion in their bundle of tricks.

My rationale was different than Gordon's, although I am sympathetic to his questioning the assumption that law schools have any comparative advantage in providing skills training in relation to actual law firms.  Gordon realizes that attempting to recreate the skills atmosphere requires a great investment of law school resources, resources that might otherwise be used to create small classes and give all teachers training in teaching methodology.  This law school that Gordon would create would provide ample opportunity for every law professor to incorporate writing into each class.  Therefore, my addendum to Gordon's proposal would be that the end result would be not to abolish the value inherent in legal writing programs but to integrate that learning into the overall curriculum. 

When I spoke at the conference in 2001, I did not comprehend and could not predict the rapid growth of a different kind of skills training in law schools that began with law professors who used these skills for their own scholarship and is now spreading to the law school curriculum:  quantitative methods.  I think the future of skills teaching in that area (and the stark contrast with which these courses and their teachers are treated in comparison to legal writing courses and instructors) deserves a separate post.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (9) | TrackBack (0)

My modest proposal for law school reform prompted an email discussion among my former colleagues at Wisconsin. I was particularly interested in Steve Hurley's contribution, which I reprint below with permission:

We began to modify curriculum in response to criticism from the marketplace: that we were not adequately preparing lawyers for its needs. When that criticism is offered, it ought be listened to. What Smith suggests is that the core curriculum can be covered in two years [it can]; and poses the question of whether the "skills" curriculum is best taught by a school or in the marketplace. He thinks the latter; especially when considering the cost. Long ago, we substituted schools for apprenticeships as the premise for the practice of law. Few would argue that that was bad. But, is not the teaching of "skills" the academic institutionalization of an apprenticeship? If so, is it the exclusive way that a lawyer ought be prepared? Did we throw away too much of apprenticeship when we saw that schools could better teach the core curriculum? We can offer an approach to skills which the marketplace can't; but, so too can the marketplace offer an equally valid approach which we cannot. Thus, for example, we coordinate, just as Smith suggests, with prosecution and defense offices to offer our students a place in the market in which to learn trial and criminal practice skills. In doing this, don't we recognize the validity, at least in part, of Smith's suggestion? And ought we not explore further ways in which to do this?

Amen.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (3) | TrackBack (0)

Paul Caron and Bill Henderson solicited my input for their series "Advice for Erwin Chemerinsky." You can find all of the contributions at Paul's TaxProfBlog. If you are particularly interested in mine, it went up this morning. Note that I was responding to the challenge to offer the "single best idea for reforming legal education." Of course, I wanted to be provocative, so the hate mail from legal writing instructors and clinicians should be rolling in at any moment now ...

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (12) | TrackBack (0)

The Wall Street Journal has an article highlighting a troubling problem for law schools—the tightening legal job market.  Many law school students enter law school dazzled by the possibility of making a six figure salary at a large law firm, and hence take on law school debt with barely any qualms.  This may be particularly true for students desiring to practice corporate law because they want to work on large transactions at equally large firms.  And it is true that large law firm salaries have risen over the years—first years can make as much as $160,000 a year.  But it is also true that only students at top law schools and/or students at the top of their law school class manage to secure these law firm jobs.  For the rest of the students, the job market presents a different reality.

Indeed, the WSJ article suggest that many students in the middle or bottom of their class find it difficult to find employment; or at least find it difficult to secure the expected high-paying employment.  Instead, such students end up in small firms, as solo practitioners, in the government/private sector, or taking on contract work.  Jobs in these industries do not tend to come with dazzling salaries.  Moreover, the salaries at many of these jobs have not grown at the same rate as those at large law firms.  For example, apparently the average income for many solo practitioners has been flat since the mid-1908s, while the income for lawyers who enter the government or take on public interest jobs has not fared much better, rising 8.6% and 4% respectively between 1994 and 2006 while the median family income has risen at least 11% during that same period.  One of the reasons for this pattern is a supply and demand problem: while the number of lawyers continues to grow, the demand for lawyers has declined. Hence, according to data from the Commerce Department, since 1988 the legal sector has grown less than half as fast as the broader economy.   Thus, there appear to be too many lawyers and not enough jobs, particularly high-salary jobs, to go around.  And of course the salary issue is exacerbated by growing tuition rates at law schools.  The result is that many students take on tremendous debt; yet those students are under the impression that they will easily pay that debt with a high paying law firm job.

Ultimately, one key to this problem is disclosure.  No one is saying law school students deserve six figure salaries.  But prospective law students need to be given an accurate assessment of their job prospects so that they can understand the debt load they are taking on in relation to their realistic opportunities for employment once they graduate.  Schools also must do a better job of seeking out and helping students find alternatives to the large firm.  Some schools are better at this process than others.  However, the reality in many law schools is that it is almost too easy to learn about the relative ins and outs of large law firm jobs.  In contrast, too often learning about other law-related opportunities represents an opaque and up-hill struggle.  Hence, for many law students the job search represents a frustrating process.  And the frustrating nature of that process comes as a surprise for many students who entered law school thinking that there would be a fairly lucrative job waiting for them upon graduation.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (8) | TrackBack (0)

The W$J ranking of business schools earlier this week -- in which BYU ranked #1 among "regional business schools" as measured by recruiting interest -- prompted a discussion in the faculty lounge today: if we classified law schools in this way, which law schools would be in the "national" group? Also, are some law schools sub-regional, that is, local?

In the W$J ranking, schools were divided into National and Regional groups "according to the recruiters they share, which is based on where recruiters say they tend to recruit." In creating these groups, the W$J "conducted a multivariate analysis known as hierarchical clustering based on the schools that recruiters said they had had contact with since September 2005." My hunch is that this sort of analysis would yield less than 20 "national" law schools, though I don't know of anyone who has tried it.

In looking for attempts to categorize law schools along these lines, I stumbled across an interesting new paper entitled Take Back the Night: Why an Association of Regional Law Schools Will Return Core Values to Legal Education and Provide an Alternative to Tiered Rankings by John Garon of Hamline University School of Law, in which he argues that our current system of legal education is broken because "students have too few price choices and far too much debt while the public has legal services that are too expensive to provide meaningful representation for a significant portion of the population." Part of his argument rests on the notion that law schools are insufficiently attentive to their regions, a development that was caused by various external pressures on law schools, including accreditation and rankings.

Garon proposes the creation of a National Association of Regional Law Schools, and the purpose of this association would be to "build consensus around a set of appropriate educational goals that will address the growing economic barriers to justice." He suggests the following principles:

• Diversity: Promote diversity to diversify and broaden the profession to the greatest extent permitted by law.

• Price Sensitivity: Control costs to financially enable graduates to better serve the profession.

• Student Learning: Focus on student learning and competency upon completion of law school, including a strong emphasis on experiential learning.

• Applicable Scholarship: Emphasize meaningful scholarship tied to the needs of the profession and society.

• Regional Engagement: Promote ties to regional institutions including state and regional bar associations and state supreme courts.

If you would have asked me in advance of reading the article, I would have said that we already have a collection of law schools that pursue (most of) these goals and that this real-world phenomenon was the basis for conventional references to "national" and "regional" law schools.

Garon has an interesting discussion of night law schools (thus the title of the article), and it is the disappearance of these schools that most concerns him:

The night schools accomplished certain aspects of legal education that we continue to struggle with today. Most notably, the night schools led the way in creating access to the profession for those of modest income and those from traditionally underserved communities. The part-time schedule allowed working adults to attend law school. Many were open to women, minorities, and different religions. Most had a more liberal academic admissions policy as well. All were much less expensive than their elite counterparts.

The night schools emphasized developing a faculty with strong practice experience, ties to the local profession, demonstrated commitment to legal service, and thoughtful writing highly relevant to the community. In effect, students were mentored into the profession by the same professionals they would see every day. To be successful, the schools heavily emphasized legal service in addition to student education and scholarship. The faculty members were selected from the bar associations and community organizations--judges and attorneys who were part of the community and working to make a difference. Though some were working for the income, the part-time faculty members at these schools were often like the adjunct faculty today, earning a token amount so that they could engage in the joy of teaching and mentoring.

The close tie to the practice has another strong benefit. Regional law schools have encouraged their students to pursue a broad range of professional opportunities after law school, often serving as the key institutions supporting public prosecutors' offices, public defenders' offices, public sector employment, and small law firms.

Garon's emphasis on access reminds me of a discussion with my former dean at Lewis & Clark (Jim Huffman) in which he described the benefits of the old "opportunity law schools." These law schools, of which L&C was one, operated on a community college model, with few admission standards. They provided, first and foremost, an opportunity to prove oneself capable of handling the study and practice of law. But they were also the genesis of the "look to your left and to your right" culture, which most (all?) modern law schools reject.

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

is not something I've done just yet.   To be clear, I left the law firm almost fifteen months ago, and the day I surrendered my Blackberry was also the day I thought I'd quit viewing my time in six-minute increments.  But old habits die hard, and there are still afternoons when I look up and, for a split-second, panic that I haven't kept a record of what I've been doing all day.  This past Spring I was grading papers at home one evening, and upon finishing the last one the first thought that popped into my head was "one hour forty minutes."  Yes, I had been subconsciously tracking my time, just as I did when I worked at home while at the firm.  And the strange thing is, my firm was fairly reasonable as far as billable hours went -- they certainly wanted me to keep my hours up, but I was never called into a partner's office after a slow month, nor did I think I would be fired if I didn't bill 2400 hours a year.

For a while, I thought I was the only professor suffering from "billable hour hangover," but I recently read Patrick Schiltz's article "Legal Ethics in Decline," where he describes, two years after leaving law practice, feeling himself "getting jumpy when colleagues or students stop by my office to talk, because I have been so conditioned to regard time spent talking with anyone except clients as wasted."   I don't know that I have it quite as bad as Schiltz did, but I know what he is talking about.

So, when does the little billable hour clock in our heads go away?

Permalink | Law Schools & Lawyering | Comments (4) |