A TTT week

Two discouraging events this week. First, Inside the Law School Scam author Paul Campos called it a day with Goodbye is too good a word. I didn't get the Dylan reference, but lyrics and a recording were immediately forthcoming from others. What makes it sad is the reason he abruptly ended his blog: they got to him.

I've never written anything about the professional and personal price I ended up paying for starting to investigate, more than a year before I began this blog, the structure of contemporary American legal education. Perhaps I'll tell that story someday. For now I'll merely note that if people enjoying the extraordinary protections afforded by tenure aren't willing to confront institutional corruption, then academic tenure is an indefensible privilege.

I've had mixed feelings about Campos. I used to consider him an opportunist preaching from his sybaritic law professor gig, but his impact cannot be overstated. Now he'll never have a chance to cover the first modern law school failure, nor the first successful lawsuit against a school, nor, lord willing, the government turning off the loan spigot. At least not as the author of ITLSS.

Pointing out the elephant in the room is bad for business. Let's hope Campos doesn't delete the blog; a foreign entrepreneur will recycle it (see, e.g. ShillingMeSoftly).

In other news, Rutgers is preparing to close merge its two distinct law schools; Nando has a good write-up. Briefly, the stated dual intent is to become a more regionally-prominent school and to achieve the economy of scale and curriculum possible from combining resources.

Imagine if law schools were run like a business. Hell, they are a business, which is why Farmer describes Rutgers as a "brand." Its business plan is to consolidate two middling, horribly-sited law schools into one large school, change the signs, and call it done. This might be an efficient approach if there were opportunities for its graduates.

The legal market is obsessed with presTTTige. It's a fact of life and the most honorable intentions won't change it. Even as much of the academy gamed U.S. News in recent decades, Rutgers-Newark succored its moonbat faculty, opened an Animal Rights Law Clinic, and clung to Newark like its life depended on it. Meanwhile, Rutgers-Camden merited four (that I found) ITLSS posts in 2012 alone, culminating in this. Reorganizations are best left to Dilbert strips. It's a little late to be worrying about establishing a brand. Probably about thirty years late.

At the end of the day, the reason the Rutgers announcement is sad is because it portends business as usual in the legal academy, where reality doesn't intrude until the loan payments start. The market has changed dramatically but the institutions not a wit. Two schools pumping out unneeded graduates at taxpayer expense will become one school pumping out unneeded graduates at taxpayer expense. The school needs to shrink into one, selective campus in New Brunswick. If bigger were better, and a well-known brand a sustainable competitive advantage, then Cooley would truly be the second best school in the country.

RuTTTgers-Newark dean trolls scambloggers

The New York Times must feel badly about continually bashing law schools, for it allowed a local sewer to infest its op-ed page, yesterday. Rutgers-Newark Dean John Farmer published To Practice Law, Apprentice First. Though chock full of ivory tower disconnect, at least he didn't try to sell law school as a sound investment like most of his peers.

Let me get this out of the way: As a New Jersey taxpayer, I believe both Rutgers-Newark and Rutgers-Camden should close and the public resources currently expended be diverted to more productive use. I would have had a less visceral reaction if this op-ed issued from Hofstra, but I'm sure less geographically-challenged writers will remain more objective. Actually, I look forward to Campos ripping Farmer a new asshole from Colorado. This link has everything you need to know about lawyer supply and demand in the NJ legal market. Class dismissed.

Farmer has had a charmed life, unlike most Rutgers-Newark alumni. His bio is here. To his credit, he has considerable experience in private practice, so he is not just talking from you-know-where. I also know him as one of the "go-to" guys when the fit hits the shan. On the other hand, he is dean of a perpetual also-ran in the nation's biggest legal market and should tend to his own house rather than venture out to pontificate. After all, rankings come out next month.

The op-ed isn't that long; please read it. Farmer ties the legal market's woes to big firms overpaying for newbie lawyers. Briefly, because Cravath pays $160K, Dorita can't afford to fight her eviction. Further, because Cravath's clients aren't willing to pay to train new lawyers, Cravath hires fewer of them (and the remainder compete with Rutgers-Newark grads).

Farmer's prescription is the lawyer's version of a medical residency. I could write an essay on the difference between law and medicine, starting with one being an actual, well-respected profession and the other being a presTTTigious "profession" and textbook case of regulatory capture. Side note: medical students now face the "jaws of death." Oh, and the public pays to train new doctors, presumably because the investment is worth it. Can you say the same about lawyers? And keep a straight face?

I'm getting lazy, so let me respond to Farmer with some bullet points.

• The reason the middle-class can't afford lawyers is because it has no money. Fix that and some other intractable problems will fix themselves. Education debt, anyone? How about reducing housing prices in the NYC area? A more progressive tax structure coupled with federal, state, and local government pruning?
• Good lawyers are expensive because they are worth it; you get what you pay for. This is the case with everything in life. Farmer implicitly recognizes that low-end legal work can and should be done cheaply, meaning the value isn't there. Big firms realized this years ago, at which point they began hiring staff attorneys; shipping work to India and flyover country; and, employing automation. The problem remains that the academy wants seven years of higher education, a bar exam, bar dues, and CLEs for the chance to do scut work. Farmer's answer to this is to add two years low-paid residency under questionable supervision.
• One way to reduce the cost of legal education, but not legal services, is to make law an undergraduate degree, either four or five years. THEN, you require one or two years working for an admitted lawyer. This is how accountants regulate themselves and we don't hear about a glut of CPAs, though a lot of this is self-selection. Again, it won't reduce prices because the cost of training does not affect the perceived value of the service rendered. This is why my accountant charges a high hourly rate for estate accounting and estate tax preparation and the lawyer who does my estate planning works for a flat fee somewhat higher than LegalZoom's.
• Did I forget to mention the middle-class has no money?

Anyhow, nice try, Dean Farmer. You clearly understand both structural changes facing the legal industry and macroeconomics. If I may quote Upton Sinclair, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Be on Tee Vee

From a JDU post:

---

Volunteer needed for CBS Evening News segment

I'm working with a producer at the CBS Evening News to put together a segment on the employment and debt crisis among recent law school grads. We need someone who:

1. Is a recent law school grad
2. Has a large amount of law school debt (at least six figures)
3. Is either unemployed or seriously underemployed
4. Is struggling economically as a result
5. Is articulate, and comfortable with the idea of being on camera

Ideally, this person will have gone to law school for reasons that would resonate sympathetically with a general audience, i.e., not because he or she was confident a law degree was going to make them rich. Also, this person should have relied on misleading employment statistics when deciding to go to law school and to incur large amounts of debt in order to do so. Having a family (spouse, and or child/children) is also a plus. It would be helpful if the person was either fairly close to the New York City area, or in the Denver metro area.

If you would like to participate, please email me ASAP at paul.campos@colorado.edu. Thanks in advance.

Served

I actually spend time trying to devise cutesy titles for my posTTTs. It comes from a desire for something attention grabbing and years of submitting headlines to Fark, mostly unsuccessfully.

Headlines are an art. I know a former NY Daily News headline writer and they come to him naturally. His terse e-mail responses often require a second (or third) look lest they sail over my head.

Sometimes an article's headline is so good that it needs no embellishment; it's perfect as is. Paul Campos, a professor of law at the University of Colorado, handed me the title for this post. His article, Served How law schools completely misrepresent their job numbers, is one more nail in the law school carTTTel's coffin.

"Served," "owned," and "pwned" all mean the same thing to me: To be obliterated in a contest, usually publically. It's a succinct description of the fate awaiting lemmings heading off to law school. Campos probably used "served" because of its legal connotation. I prefer pwned, myself.

Follwing the incendiary subtitle, Campos trods familiar ground, noting that schools claim almost all their graduates get jobs as lawyers and that US Snooze has revised its employment rate calculations to make them "somewhat less inaccurate."

He hits his stride when he begins analyzing National Association for Law Placement (NALP) data. NALP reports that 63% of graduates of ABA schools have full-time legal positions within 9 months of graduating. Campos points out that NALP does not distinguish between permanent and temporary jobs. While the latter are typically low-status, low-paid clerical and document review, he also includes state trial-level clerkships as temporary positions.

Based on a T50 he analyzed, the true 9-month employment rate is 45%; lower-ranked schools fare worse.

In other news that will surprise only Ric Romero, he notes that employment figures are self-reported and that neither the schools nor NALP audit them. Unemployed and underemployed graduates tend not to report back to the school. Campos further "found several instances of people describing themselves as employed permanently or full-time, when in fact they had temporary or part-time jobs (I found no instances of inaccuracies running in the other direction)." Even T14s game their ranking by hiring alumni temporarily.

So, life after T50 is mostly for losers? What happens to the winners? They "often accept jobs that make them miserable, featuring insane hours and unfulfilling work, but which these graduates conclude they must take in order to pay their often astronomical educational debt."

Served. Indeed.