[blindlaw] N.Y. Times Article about Law Schools

[Ross Doerr]

This article appeared in Today's New York Times. Speaking as a graduate of
law school from 1988, I am disappointed that it took this long for the
discussins we had over 20 years ago to be accepted  on now. States complain
about lawyers not going into public interest law where we are needed, while
law schools and those same states do not budge on what can only be described
as draconian school debt repayments.
Even us poor, lowly public interest law types need to earn a living.
 The foregoing is only my opinion.
***
>From today's NY Times
July is the cruelest month for recent law school graduates. State bar exams
next week are make-or-break affairs, determining how many will be allowed to
practice law. Those exams once set a graduate on the path to a lifelong
career. Not anymore. A huge number of new graduates, if lucky enough to find
work, will not be employed in legal jobs that require passing the bar. 
Only 55 percent of 43,735 graduates in 2011 had a law-related job nine
months after graduation, said William Henderson of the Indiana University
Maurer School of Law, who analyzed recent data from the American Bar
Association. Twenty-eight percent were unemployed or underemployed. And at
the 20 law schools with the highest employment, 83 percent of graduates were
working as lawyers. At the bottom 20, it was a dismal 31 percent. 

These numbers are far worse than jobs data going back a generation and
should be a deep embarrassment to law schools, which have been churning out
more graduates than the economy can employ, indulging themselves in copious
revenues that higher tuitions and bigger classes bring in. A growing list of
deans acknowledge that legal education is facing an existential crisis, but
the transformation to a more sustainable model will be difficult and messy. 

The number of law office jobs began to decline in 2004, well before the
recession. And demand for new lawyers isn't expected to grow much even when
the economy recovers. Outsourcing of legal work to places like India and
greater efficiencies made possible by smarter software to search documents
for evidence, for example, are allowing firms to cut the positions of
multitudes of low-end lawyers. In 2009, twice as many people passed bar
exams as there were legal openings - a level of oversupply that may hold up
for years. There is, of course, tremendous need for lawyers to serve the
poor and middle class, but scant dollars to pay them. 

Law schools have hustled to compensate for these shifts by trying to make it
look as if their graduates are more marketable, even hiring them as research
assistants to offer temporary employment. But those strategies won't fix
legal education, particularly when students are starting to see that a
high-priced degree, financed by mountains of loans, may never pay off. The
number of people taking law school admissions tests fell 24 percent in the
last two years, to the lowest level in a decade. Law schools will be crushed
if they don't remake themselves, said Frank Wu, dean of Hastings College of
the Law at the University of California in San Francisco. "This is Detroit
in the 1970s: change or die." 

Hastings, for example, is reducing the number of its J.D. students by 20
percent in the next three years. It trimmed staff jobs to cut costs, and it
increased the teaching load of each faculty member by 20 percent to reduce
the need for adjunct professors, among other reasons. But Mr. Wu says the
school has no plans to cut the size of its full-time faculty or its
compensation or tuition - and tuition is an unavoidable problem. 

Brian Tamanaha reports in "Failing Law Schools" that in-state annual tuition
at public law schools rose to an average of $18,472 in 2009 from $2,006 in
1985, and tuition at private law schools increased to $35,743 from $7,526. 

A lot of money went to raising faculty salaries. With salary and summer pay,
the average now is likely close to $170,000 - and some law professors make
$350,000 or more. 

As tuition has soared, so has student debt. Nearly 9 out of 10 graduates
have sizable debt, with $98,500 the average for the class of 2010,
or about $1,200 a month in loan payments over 10 years. Most schools and
many students have banked on students' being able to pay back enormous loans
with ample salaries, but that flawed model is irretrievably broken. 

It will be hard for any school to alter its cost structure without making
substantial changes to its faculty and pay, though some schools are
earnestly considering two-year J.D. programs and beginning to experiment
with more virtual learning in selected courses. Course-sharing among law
schools in lecture courses is another cost-saving option. 

But in some ways the crisis of law schools goes well beyond the
unsustainable economics. Their missions have become muddled, with a widening
gap between their lofty claims about the profession's civic responsibility
and their failure to train lawyers for public service or provide them with
sufficient preparation for practical work. 

Some schools are trying to break out of this dead end. Boston's Suffolk
University Law School is planning to focus on the justice gap by preparing
more students to serve the middle class and poor. At Washington and Lee
School of Law in Virginia, the third year is now devoted to practical
training. Others have increased courses in negotiation, counseling and other
skills. The A.B.A., which accredits law schools, could help by allowing much
more experimentation and differentiation among schools - and by being much
more skeptical of diploma mills. 

This crisis makes it easy to forget that the law attracts pragmatic types,
able to handle changed circumstances. And in fact, huge law firms, hot areas
of practice and outsized salaries at top firms are fairly recent
developments. Law schools need to be pragmatic, too, finding ways to ensure
that graduates can afford to take jobs where the salary is less important
than the impact. 

A version of this editorial appeared in print on July 15, 2012, on page SR10
of the New York edition with the headline: An Existential Crisis For Law
Schools..