You Can Now Call Me "Counselor"

I just found out, as of this morning, I am officially licensed to practice law in the Commonwealth of Virginia. A super-huge congratulations to my peers who also passed the Virginia Bar Exam.

In addition, we will be sworn in to practice before the Virginia Supreme Court in Richmond on November 3rd.

Now if I can just finish up that dissertation...

The Irresponsibility of Law Schools = Fraud in the Inducement?

Brian Tamanaha:

The chart on the top shows the number of applicants law schools admitted (who actually enrolled) from 2001 through 2009. The chart on the bottom shows total law related employment--attorney and non-attorney--from 2001 through 2009. [Note that the charts are not on the same scale; and the labor chart is not limited to lawyers.]

While legal employment has fallen dramatically since 2007 (with a further decline in 2010), law schools, after remaining flat in 2008, increased by 5% the number of students admitted (and enrolled) in 2009. This increase was greater than the percentage increase in applications to law school. (The 2010 admissions numbers are not yet available.)

Law schools thus responded to the worst recession in the legal market in at least two decades by letting in more law students.

Law schools are enticing this increasing numbers of students into the legal world (and financial servitude) in large part by misrepresenting employment expectations. Things have gotten so bad, the ABA is now being called on to force law schools to be fully transparent in their employment statistics in order to maintain their ABA accreditation. I think this is a much needed step.

Do U.S. law schools need to be more transparent with their employment data?

Yes. At least that seems to be the growing consensus among everyone in the world — outside of law school deans — who routinely trot out a litany of reasons why providing such data would be burdensome, inconvenient, impossible, etc.

The rationale behind the sentiment: that schools are loathe to accurately reflect their job-placement rates, and that applicants are being sold false bills of goods...

At this point, schools have to disclose to the ABA what percentage of their graduates are employed nine months after graduation. But they don’t have to disclose whether students have part-time jobs, full-time jobs, jobs paid for by their law school or jobs that don’t require a J.D.

The Truth in Law School Education resolution could come sooner, said David Wolfe, the chairman of the ABA’s Young Lawyers Division. If it passed, schools would be required to disclose employment and cost information in order to keep their ABA accreditation. That information would be sent to applicants along with their letters of acceptance.

“It’s still in the works, but it will link the requirement to disclose employment and cost information with accreditation,” he said. “You would get that information with your letter of acceptance to a law school. We want people to go to law school with their eyes open.”...

“There’s a total lack of awareness out there. They hear these astronomical salaries which reflect just the top 3 percent of students who go to the top 10 law firms.”

I would also like to see them provide more accurate pictures of salary distributions. If one student comes out making $160,000 per year and two come out making $40,000 per year, schools can show their average income as being $80,000 per year. The two students making $40,000 per year who borrowed $100,000 to go to law school are going to feel duped and find themselves in a financial disaster.

What distinguishes current law school marketing from fraud in the inducement? It might not meet up to all the legal requirements for fraud, but conceptually it seems to come awfully close.

(HT Empirical Legal Studies)

Get Free Study Guide Ebooks from Kaplan Through August 30th

A nice tip for students from Lifehacker:

Got plans to study for the ACT, SAT, GRE, GMAT, MCAT, or any other of the rather large number of standardized tests that people generally brush up on? Test prep company Kaplan is handing out free ebooks through August 30th to anyone with an iPad, iPhone, or iPod touch. Just point your mobile browser to http://kaplanpublishing.com/iTunes on your iOS device and cherry pick whatever you need. [Free Kaplan Ebooks]

I just downloaded a couple dozen books including outlines for most of the classes I took in law school. Check it out.

Outsourcing to India Draws Western Lawyers

The New York Times:

India’s legal outsourcing industry has grown in recent years from an experimental endeavor to a small but mainstream part of the global business of law. Cash-conscious Wall Street banks, mining giants, insurance firms and industrial conglomerates are hiring lawyers in India for document review, due diligence, contract management and more.

Now, to win new clients and take on more sophisticated work, legal outsourcing firms in India are actively recruiting experienced lawyers from the West. And U.S. and British lawyers — who might once have turned up their noses at the idea of moving to India or harbored an outright hostility to outsourcing legal work in principle — are re-evaluating the sector.

The number of legal outsourcing companies in India has mushroomed from 40 in 2005 to more than 140 at the end of 2009, according to Valuenotes, a consulting firm in Pune, India. Revenue at India’s legal outsourcing firms is expected to grow to $440 million this year, up 38 percent from 2008, and should surpass $1 billion by 2014, Valuenotes estimates.

“This is not a blip, this is a big historical movement,” said David B. Wilkins, director of Harvard Law School’s program on the legal profession. “There is an increasing pressure by clients to reduce costs and increase efficiency,” he added, and with companies already familiar with outsourcing tasks like information technology work to India, legal services is a natural next step.

So far, the number of Western lawyers moving to outsourcing companies could be called more of a trickle then a flood. But that may change, as more business flows out of traditional law firms and into India. Compensation for top managers at legal outsourcing firms is competitive with salaries at midsize law firms outside of major U.S. metro areas, executives in the industry say. Living costs are much lower in India, and often, there is the added allure of stock in the outsourcing company.

Right now, Pangea3 is “getting more résumés from United States lawyers than we know what to do with,” said Greg McPolin, managing director of the company’s litigation services group, who divides his time between India and New York. ...

Many legal outsourcing firms have offices around the world to interact with clients, but keep the majority of their employees in India; some also have a stable of lawyers in the Philippines. Thanks to India’s low wages and costs and a big pool of young, English-speaking lawyers, outsourcing firms charge between one-third and one-tenth what a Western law firm bills per hour. ... Even white-shoe law firms like Clifford Chance are embracing the concept. ...

Many corporations agree that outsourcing legal work, in some form or another, is here to stay.

“We will continue to go to big firms for the lawyers they have who are experts in subject matter, world-class thought leaders and the best litigators and regulatory lawyers around the world — and we will pay a lot of money for those lawyers,” said Janine Dascenzo, associate general counsel at G.E.

What G.E. does not need, though, is the “army of associates around them,” Ms. Dascenzo said. “You don’t need a $500-an-hour associate to do things like document review and basic due diligence,” she said.

More on this here.

The legal industry is certainly in the midst of some large changes in the way it has traditionally functioned.  This being just one of many changes that are occurring as client’s willingness and ability to pay has weakened in the face of the recent economic climate.  These changes are forcing law firms to become more efficient and cost-effective. 

Long-term, this should lower the cost of legal services and promote greater competition among law firms.  Overall this is likely to be a good thing for consumers of legal services and for the economy as a whole.  Short-term, it is likely to make the market for legal jobs even more intense and painful – particularly for recent law school grads.

I wonder if some aspiring entrepreneur will take advantage of this situation and set-up outsourced legal services to make it easier for solo practitioners to get into business (although this is going to be much easier for experienced attorneys than those freshly out of law school).  You might run into some ethical issues involving client confidentiality, but with some care and ingenuity, those issues could probably be overcome.  With the increasing number of young, bright law graduates with non-ideal employment prospects, this might help create a climate allowing smaller, low-cost law firms to start chipping away at some business of the big law firms.  In time, who knows?  Maybe this kind of law firm model could do to law what the mini-mills did for steel?

(HT Paul Caron)

The ABA Fiddles While Law Students Burn?

Brian Tamahan, a law professor at Washington University, writing to his fellow law professors on the failure of the law school business model:

It’s grim reading. The observations are raw, bitter, and filled with despair. It is easier to avert our eyes and carry on with our pursuits. But please, take a few moments and force yourself to look at Third Tier Reality, Esq. Never, Exposing the Law School Scam, Jobless Juris Doctor, Temporary Attorney: The Sweatshop Edition, and linked sites. Read the posts and the comments. These sites are proliferating, with thousands of hits.

Look past the occasional vulgarity and disgusting pictures. Don’t dismiss the posters as whiners. To a person they accept responsibility for their poor decisions. But they make a strong case that something is deeply wrong with law schools.

Their complaint is that non-elite law schools are selling a fraudulent bill of goods. Law schools advertise deceptively high rates of employment and misleading income figures. Many graduates can’t get jobs. Many graduates end up as temp attorneys working for $15 to $20 dollars an hour on two week gigs, with no benefits. The luckier graduates land jobs in government or small firms for maybe $45,000, with limited prospects for improvement. A handful of lottery winners score big firm jobs.

And for the opportunity to enter a saturated legal market with long odds against them, the tens of thousands newly minted lawyers who graduate each year from non-elite schools will have paid around $150,000 in tuition and living expenses, and given up three years of income. Many leave law school with well over $100,000 in non-dischargeable debt, obligated to pay $1,000 a month for thirty years.

This dismal situation was not created by the current recession—which merely spread the pain up the chain into the lower reaches of elite schools. This has been going on for years.

All too true...

Elie Mystal joins Tamahana in asking where are law profs in all of this?

Rarely, if ever, does the media turn its gaze towards law professors and their culpability in the epic scam of taking money from kids who don’t know any better and will never be able to pay off their debts. Most law professors don’t set tuition rates. They don’t determine the scope of loan forgiveness programs. They don’t mislead the world via U.S. News in order to pad employment stats... [M]ost of them aren’t even directly engaged in recruiting the next class of minnows that will keep the scam alive. All they do is teach, research, and take as much money as the market will offer.

But Washington University law professor Brian Tamanaha thinks that his professorial colleagues need to step up to the plate and start taking some responsibility for what is happening to law students — especially law students at low-ranked law schools. He says that professors can no longer turn a blind eye to the sadness of their students….

You’d think that legal scholars would at least want to be educated as to what the system is doing to the consumers of legal education.

We probably shouldn’t hold our breath waiting for law professors to suggest a course of action that will lead to a reduction in their salaries.

But if this system is going to change, pressure will have to come from all sides. With the ABA fiddling while law students burn, it is incumbent upon everybody else to demand that legal education become something other than a potentially ruinous financial decision.

Glenn Reynolds, another law prof at the University of Tennessee, writes in response to Tanamaha's article:

Not all law schools are that expensive, but even state schools are pricey now, and for out-of-staters may cost as much as private schools. If I were looking at law school today I absolutely wouldn’t go into debt except for an absolute top school — like Yale, Stanford, Harvard. And even then I’d be wary. The debt is too enormous, and the prospects too uncertain — not only because of the economy, but because of the uncertain future even of big law firms.

As a recent law grad currently preparing for the bar, I completely agree with Tamanaha, Mystal, and Reynolds on all counts. I've been disturbed ever since I started law school on the sad state of employment prospects for a majority of law grads relative to the astronomical tuition charged by most law schools. And that was before it became the worst time in history to graduate from law school.

I suppose I'm one of the lucky ones. I still have a year or so left to finish up my PhD and plan to pursue a career in economics, not following the traditional legal route. My future isn't as intricately bound up in the legal job market as many of my peers.

But for the sake of those who are considering going to law school, I make this request to the ABA and law professors around the country: Please help these students to become better informed and hold law schools to a greater standard of transparency. To far too great an extent, law schools are profiting off of the financial ruin of thousands of students each year. It's time for this to stop.

Another Day of Bar Review

Less that two weeks and it will all be over…

Studying for the Bar

Sorry for the lack of posts over the last few weeks. I'm currently in the midst of studying for the Virginia Bar Exam, which I take down in Roanoke, VA on July 27th and 28th. The review process is grueling and I've been in lock-down mode since it started about a month ago. I am finally getting caught up with my outlining and adjusting to the workload a little better. Hope to get back to more regular posting soon...

'Right Now Is The Worst Time in History to be Graduating From Law School'

Uh-oh. Looks like my timing's a bit off:

Wall Street Journal Law Blog, Were the ‘Good Old Days’ of BigLaw Better?, by Ashby Jones:

If anyone out there had any question that now — right now — is just the worst time in history to be graduating from law school, take a look at this article written by Mayer Brown lawyer Robert Helman in Chicago Magazine.

Now, you already knew that graduating from law school now was bad for this reason: it’s harder than ever to get jobs. But it’s also bad for this reason: even if you get a job, your life is bad, at least as compared to what it would have been had you started practice 45 years ago.

Helman’s been practicing law for a long, long time — he served as Mayer Brown’s chairman for 15 years — and his reflections on how things used to be are interesting.

The Pot Calling the Kettle Black?

A professor at Seattle University School of Law criticizes trade schools for charging students high tuition and encouraging students to take out huge loans they will have trouble repaying. Sounds like a lot of law schools, don't you think? Elie Mystal agrees:

How can you fix your mouth to criticize “trade schools” for setting up their students for financial ruin when you teach at Seattle School of Law? Seattle is ranked 77th by U.S. News, but the school charges $35K - plus for tuition. The cost per year exceeds $50,000 when you include books, board and other living expenses. But the school only sports a 67.9% “employed upon graduation” statistic.

So I wonder why Professor Pardo exempts Seattle from the list of schools who graduate more and more students who “can’t find meaningful employment.”

A good question. I also wonder how many other law schools deserve to be in this category?

Job Offers for Graduating Law Students Lowest in 17 Years

Another reason not to go to law school:

Third-year law students have been lamenting the unfortunate timing of their entry into the job market. Now they have some cold, hard numbers to quantify their woes.

The median number of offers by U.S. law firms for 2010 summer associate positions was seven, according to statistics released Tuesday by the National Association for Law Placement. That was down from 10 offers in 2008 and 15 offers in 2007.

In fact, the offer rate was the lowest NALP has reported since the organization began gathering offer statistics some 17 years ago.

Update: The NALP didn't start collecting statistics until 17 years ago. These stats are the lowest ever recorded by the organization.

(HT Economix)

Over 46% of Law School Class of 2013 Will Graduate With $120k+ of Debt?

Up from 29% in 2009.  Combine that with expected salary statistics and this is a recipe for a lifelong financial disaster for most of these students.  (Student loans are non-secured, non-dischargeable debt.) 

Here is a recent look at the salaries law grads can expect:

Of the 22,305 law school graduates in NALP's sample (over half of all 2008 graduates), a remarkable 23% (5,130  '08 grads) reported an entry-level salary of $160,000.  In contrast, 42% of entry level lawyers reported salaries in the $40,000 to $65,000 range.  Once again, the central tendencies are a poor guide to the distribution as a whole: whereas the mean salary is a $92,000, the median salary was $72,000.   Further, the two modes ($50,000 and $160,000) are separated by $110,000.

Put another way, if you decide to become a lawyer you are nearly twice as likely to make less than $65,000 as you are to make $160,000+. 

While I would not argue that law schools should have a legal duty to warn students about this potential disaster, I think there is a very strong argument they have a moral duty to do so.  It disturbs me that so few in legal academia seem to be making this effort.

Think long and hard if you’re considering going to law school and even harder before taking on too much in student loans.

Related:  Here are five myths regarding the practice of law many students entering law school tend to believe.

1. Becoming a lawyer is a guaranteed path to financial success.
2. As a lawyer, I can eradicate injustice and affect societal change.
3. I will make a great lawyer because I am good at arguing.
4. Litigators lead a thrilling, high-powered and glamorous life.
5. The work of a lawyer is intellectually challenging.

Also, the New York Times had a recent article on the diminishing value of a law degree.  Sarah Waldeck responds by saying there are only three reasons you should consider going to law school:

1. you have always dreamed of being a lawyer; or
2. you are accepted by a very prestigious institution; or
3. you are offered a full scholarship.

If none of these thee apply to you, I’d have to agree with Sarah.  Don’t go.

(HT TaxProf Blog)

Debt: The Silent Killer

A sobering tale by Elie Mystal:

I graduated law school in 2003, owing Harvard University just under $150,000. At the time, I had no idea what starting my professional career $150K in the hole would do to my life. I figured I’d work hard, make money, and I’d pay my loans out of my general non-disposable income funds — kind of like my cable bill.

Seven years, two careers, numerous deferments and defaults, and one global economic meltdown later, I still owe a ton of money. Now, however, I pay it to various debt collection agencies and lawyers. When prospective landlords run a pro forma credit check on my application, they come back looking at me like I’ve been convicted of multiple war crimes. Every raise I’ll ever get will be eaten up by the collection agencies until sweet death allows me one everlasting and satisfying default. And, oh yeah, I don’t even want to practice law anymore — I quit my Biglaw job because, despite the debt, I really wanted to have a job that I enjoyed. So I essentially purchased a $150,000 disposable good. My time working in Biglaw was kind of like a very expensive vacation that I debt financed.

I mention all this because I am the cautionary tale prospective law students never want to think about. I mention all this because it is noble to crush false hope. I mention all this because there are way too many people poised to follow in my financially ruinous steps.

Unfortunately, Elie is not alone.  According to the ABA Journal, nearly one-third of law students owe more than $120,00 in student loans by the time they graduate… and that number is continuing to climb.  Not all of these students will be making a lifelong career in BigLaw which means many of them, like Elie, are most likely heading into financial disaster.

Consider this, if 29% of law students graduate with $120,000+ in debt and enter into a profession with median starting salaries of $72,000 (as of 2008), that means a whole lot of people are heading into a whole lot of trouble.  (A lot of people take on the debt not knowing where they will end up in the salary distribution.)  And that’s not even factoring in the terrible shape the legal sector is in now thanks to current economic conditions.  What I find particularly troubling is that so few within the legal profession or legal academy seem to be taking steps to warn prospective law students about the financial realities they are likely to face.

Massive debt isn’t fun.  Law school isn’t fun.  And from what I hear from many practicing attorneys, working at a large law firm isn’t much fun either. 

As I’ve said numerous times before, pick a decent-paying undergraduate major if you want to maximize your chances for a good financial return on your education.  Taking on a small amount of debt used to enable your education toward a well-paying job and career satisfaction may not be a bad financial decision.  But taking on six-figure debt with uncertain income prospects afterward can quickly turn into financial suicide.

See my previous post:  Debt Is Slavery

Tough Market for Law School Grads

Law Students Across the Country Try to Adapt in a Struggling Economy:

For the first time in decades, the promise of a profitable law career for top students is uncertain, as law schools report significantly reduced hiring rates. ...

Law schools across the country are seeing a reduction in the number of firms participating in the recruitment process. Harvard reported a 20% reduction in the number of employers participating in recruitment, according to assistant dean for career services Mark Weber, while NYU, Georgetown and Northwestern reported on their Web sites that on-campus interviews are down by a third to a half when compared with recent years. Texas experienced a 45% decrease in on-campus interviews....

During normal times, law school is unlikely to be a good financial bet – particularly if you attend a non-elite school.  Deciding to go in today’s economic climate increasingly appears to be more like committing financial suicide. 

(HT Paul Caron)

'Stare Decisis' - Great for Law, Bad For Teaching Methods

Stare Decisis - "Maintain what has been decided and do not alter that which has been established"

Why do so many law professors continue to use the Socratic method?

[T]he tradition-based argument for the Socratic method fails even on its own terms. It ignores the fact that virtually every academic discipline other than law has a long tradition of not using the Socratic method. That includes professors who teach courses on legal issues in political science, economics, history, and philosophy departments. Similarly, the Socratic method isn’t generally used by law professors in other countries, including other Anglophone common law jurisdictions such as Britain, Canada, and Australia. There is no reason to believe that either non-law classes in the US or legal education abroad suffers because they don’t inflict SM on their students. Nor is there any significant movement to adopt the Socratic method in any of these other academic departments and foreign law faculties. Relative to the traditions of most of the academic world, the widespread use of the Socratic method in American legal academia is an outlier.

Orin Kerr thinks this overestimates the use of the Socratic Method by law school profs. Ilya Somin responds.

As a current law student and a past and future educator, I completely agree with Somin. I have had a class or two in law school that was not so different from Professor Kingsfield's class in the video above. And most several others that were more than shadows of this. Now that I'm in my third year, I've finally gotten used to it (maybe that's part of the point?), but it has not been an enjoyable road getting here.

Problems I see with the Socratic Method:

• Much of class time is wasted hearing students who have been called on trying to guess what the professor wants them to say. Other students often completely zone out while this is going on. Those who do pay attention can have trouble figuring out what, out of what the student who is on call is saying, the professor actually wants them to learn. Quite often, the professor never clarifies.
• It causes students to spend their scarce time over-preparing for class and under-preparing for the exam. (In law school, 100% of your grade is based on the final. Another anomaly in law school that I think is counter-productive to learning.) For students unprepared for this, it can severely impact their first-year grades which can set the course for their entire legal career.
  
• It needlessly stresses out and sometimes humiliates students. This is particularly true for 1Ls. Law school can be bad enough without this.
  
• It is a highly inefficient method for teaching students to be prepared to answer a judge in court. I have gone through at least one class having never been called on and several having only been called on once in a semester. That's hardly what I call rigorous training at answering spontaneous questions from an authority figure.

I will admit that there have been a few times the getting questioned about a topic by my prof has helped steer my thinking to the point of discovery. But for the few times this has happened in my legal education, it is far too high a cost for too little educational benefit.

Law is the fourth discipline I've studied. (In addition to engineering, business, and economics.) Out of all them, law is the only field that uses the Socratic method. I have yet to figure out why.

Our professors know far more than we do about the law. Why don't more of them spend more class time actually teaching us instead of torturing us trying to elicit thoughts from students who had never seen the material prior to five minutes the night before the class? This would give us much more knowledge of the law and better prepare us for the Bar. It might even make us better lawyers too.

Other quirks in law school that make absolutely no educational sense to me:

• 100% of your grade depends on the final exam. This is not an effective way to provide meaningful feedback to students to facilitate their learning.
  
• A large chunk of your future career is determined by your first-year grades. (To be fair, this is probably less a feature of law schools, than of law firms and other organizations hiring law students.) This is a level of path dependency that I find disconcerting and makes law school a bad financial bet for all but the top students.
  
• Law professors are incredibly slow (slower than professors or any other discipline I've studied) in returning law school grades. Is this an intentional feature of the legal education system to ensure that students who preform poorly in their first semester don't find out until it's too late to drop classes in their second semester and get a refund? This puts many students into such high levels of debt they feel they must finish law school so they can make enough to pay off their loans, even though by that time they've figured out they'd rather do anything something else. No wonder so many law students are unhappy.

As I've said before, I absolutely love the law. I just wish there was a better, more effective, more enjoyable way to learn it.

Learning the Law Through Stories

Foundation Press has just published their 30th Law Stories book.  The idea behind these books is to learn the stories behind the cases you study in law school.  It is a good approach.  As I mentioned a few days ago, I rented Scottsboro: An American Tragedy after studying Powell v. Alabama in my Criminal Procedure class.  I also finished reading Gideon's Trumpet which gives the background story behind Gideon v. Wainright, the landmark Supreme Court case which established the right of all indigent criminal defendants to have an attorney appointed to them if they could not afford one on their own.  (The development of this case stemmed from the holdings in Powell.)  Learning the context of the cases and the stories behind the people involved serve two useful functions:

1) Providing historical context for the cases involved and how they relate to previous rulings makes understanding their importance much easier than studying the cases in isolation to their broader context.

2) Hearing more about the human elements of the cases -- learning what happened before and after the cases were decided -- appeals to our natural inclination towards storytelling.  This makes the cases become more alive and meaningful.  It makes the connection between impersonal law and personal lives, making the law much more memorable.

I first heard about the Law Stories series while taking Antitrust.  I purchased Antitrust Stories and got one of the best grades I've received in law school in that class.  (Interning at the Federal Trade Commission at the time didn't hurt either.)  I regret not having read through this series in my other classes.  (I currently have Criminal Procedure Stories and Tax Stories checked out from our library and have been reading about a few cases from them.)  To be fair, a large reason I have not been able to read more of these books while taking the related classes is because the sheer volume of reading in law school is so intense.  With a few exceptions (such as the Scottsboro movie and reading Gideon's Trumpet), whenever I find myself with a rare moment of spare time, the last thing I want to look at is something related to law.

If I ever teach law in some capacity, I definitely plan on using these books as part of my teaching arsenal.  I agree with Paul Caron -- studying fewer cases more in-depth would be a better way to learn the law.  Instead of trying to force students drink from a fire-hose, why not make sure they are drinking deeply instead?

I know far too many lawyers, including Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and several friends who graduated from Harvard Law, who say they didn't learn much law in law school.  Maybe this approach could help change that?

Here is a list with links to the 30 books currently in the series.  Also, a paper by Paul Caron (author of Tax Stories, the first book in this series) extolling the virtues of learning law through stories.

Read my previous post on the series.

My one request is that they please come out with these books in a Kindle format.  My back is killing me from all the law books I have to carry and my bookshelf is getting full...

Google the Laws that Govern Us

Now the common man can search the common law via Google Scholar:

Starting today, we're enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the "Legal opinions and journals" radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of "separate but equal" facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

We think this addition to Google Scholar will empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all. To understand how an opinion has influenced other decisions, you can explore citing and related cases using the Cited by and Related articles links on search result pages. As you read an opinion, you can follow citations to the opinions to which it refers. You can also see how individual cases have been quoted or discussed in other opinions and in articles from law journals. Browse these by clicking on the "How Cited" link next to the case title. See, for example, the frequent citations for Roe v. Wade, for Miranda v. Arizona (the source of the famous Miranda warning) or for Terry v. Ohio (a case which helped to establish acceptable grounds for an investigative stop by a police officer).

Ever since I started law school, I thought Google would be a powerful competitor to LexisNexis and Westlaw and was hoping they'd come up with a service like this that was free to the public. While Google is still lacking many of the features of these two search engines, this is still Google's first foray into a legal search engine and one that is destined to improve and be far easier to use than the competition. Not only that, but it won't cost you hundreds to thousands of dollars to do basic legal research. If I were Westlaw and LexisNexis, I would not be too pleased with this announcement.

To see an example of how it works, here is a search for Powell v. Alabama (the case I mentioned in my post on the 'Scottsboro Boys') and a list of how this case has been cited. Pretty cool stuff... and you can't beat the price.

Eugene Volokh seems to like it too.

It even works decently well on my iPhone. Now if only Google would develop an app for that...

More on this here.

Going to Law School Is Like Starting to Smoke?

Words of wisdom?

At this point, going to law school is like starting to smoke. It’s expensive, it’s probably going to kill you, and it’s a stupid life decision. But some people just don’t care.

At the very least, prospective law students should be forced to study for and take the LSAT outside. Mothers with small children should sneer and hold their nose when they pass these kids on the street.

(HT Paul Caron)

‘Mamas Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Lawyers’

Is law school a good investment?

Not according to a new research paper entitled, “Mamas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be…Lawyers.”

The paper tries to measure the return on investment in a law school education, using three prototypical students (the “Also Ran,” the “Solid Performer” and the “Hot Prospect”; more details here). The results are somewhat disheartening, especially considering the surging interest in law school during this tough job market.

Read the paper here. [PDF]

While I would probably take some different approaches if I were to do this type of analysis, I applaud Schlunk's (the author) analysis including tax effects (looking at after-tax rather than pre-tax income for determining opportunity cost), and differentiating between different types of students. I think he overestimates the probabilities of students landing jobs with BigLaw, though. Even at the very top schools, only 60 to 70 percent of graduates go on to work for BigLaw. (Far below the 90% Schlunk assumes -- and many of these do not stay in BigLaw for more than a few years.) The percentage quickly drops after getting outside the top 14 or so law schools. (For example, GMU only had 12% of their grads go to NLJ 250 law firms in 2005.)

Below is a graph of the distribution of starting salaries for the class of 2008. It is a bimodal distribution with only a minority of the salaries reaching levels that would make the expected law school payoff financially worthwhile. I suspect very few students enter law school expecting to start below the median salary depicted here... but 50% of them do.



To quote myself from an earlier post, here is how I would approach analyzing the expected value of attending law school:

To get a much better feel for how well law school really pays off, I'd love to put together an agent-based model or program a Monte Carlo Simulation to account for undergraduate major, law school ranking (top 14 vs. lower ranked schools), law school grades, tuition rates, etc. Either technique should yield a distribution of likely outcomes that would be much more informative than looking at averages. Another important piece of information to take into effect is expected number of hours worked. Is a legal job that pays $100,00/year but requires 60-70 hours of work per week really better compensated than an engineering job that pays $75,000/year but only requires 40-50 hours per week?

My expectation is that law school is only worthwhile if you have below average expected earnings with your undergraduate degree, go to a top-14 law school, and/or are in the top 10-20% of your class.

There is enough interest in Schlunk's paper, I wonder what the chances would be of getting this type of analysis published in a law review somewhere?

It might be strange coming from a guy who has an MBA and is now working on his JD and PhD, but if you're looking to maximize your finances, focus on choosing a lucrative undergraduate major such as engineering or economics and consider bypassing professional/graduate school altogether.

Personally, I have no regrets about coming back to school for my PhD, but from a wealth maximization standpoint, it will likely prove to be counterproductive in the long run. (The good news is that I realized that before coming in.) There are many reasons to pursue higher education besides financial. But if you're considering it for the money, there are probably better avenues you could take.

(HT Jeremy Horpedahl)

The State of Legal Education? 'Absolutely Wretched'?

At least that's what one professor thinks:

A report out of Colorado on Wednesday provides even further evidence to support what we all know to be true: it’s a terrifically bad time to be in law school.

According to this story in Colorado Law Week, only about 35 percent of the University of Colorado School of Law’s class of 2009 had jobs at graduation, down from 55 percent the year before...

Oh how we wish this trend were limited to Denver, or Colorado, or even the western half of the U.S. But it’s not. It’s a trend that’s playing out again and again at just about every law school in the country.

[M]ight the law schools themselves be to blame, at least in part?

Yes, says Rick Bales, a law professor at the University of Northern Kentucky. Writing over at Prawfsblog, Bales says law schools have been “absolutely wretched” at responding to the shifting marketplace...

Ask any law firm hiring partner whether law schools are doing a good job of educating lawyers and you are likely to get an earful. Neither law firm clients nor cash-strapped government employers are willing or able to subsidize lawyer training the way they were in the past. Legal employers want to hire graduates who can take a deposition or draft a merger agreement now. But law schools are not delivering. The law schools that figure out how to do so – while still teaching the doctrine necessary for bar passage and the critical-thinking skills necessary for solving complex legal problems – will find themselves at a substantial competitive advantage over other law schools.

I will say coming out of engineering school, I felt well trained to hit the ground running when I started working for industry. I felt well prepared by my MBA program to immediately apply it to project management and leading teams. My PhD program has definitely helped me become a better teacher and researcher. What about law school? I feel much more prepared this year than before for legal work, but it is no where near the level of preparation I fell like I received in my other programs. I've lost track of how many of my lawyer friends complain that they don't use anything they learned in law school for their jobs. Do law schools serve primarily as a vehicle for rent seeking and barrier to entry to the legal profession than as a substantive educational experience? What does the preponderance of the evidence imply?

What puzzles me is why legal education is the way it is? I love many of my professors and most of my classmates. Most of them are highly intelligent, highly motivated people. There seems to be something systematic in the structure of legal education that creates many inefficiencies that no one seems to be rectifying. Do ABA regulations keep entrepreneurs form discovering ways to remedy these issues? Are law schools too concerned about US News rankings to take risks with innovating their programs? Are law schools so concerned about ranking their students for prospective employers that they make things needlessly obscure and difficult to force differentiation between students? Is there too much demand for legal education that suppliers feel little incentive to innovate?

Here's another interesting puzzle no one has been able to explain to me yet (without talking about some form of rent seeking): Why is there a third year of law school? Why not just make it two?

Technological Changes In Legal Education

It may be two years too late for me, but it looks like there are some significant changes becoming available in technology that have the potential to greatly enhance legal education. Currently, I see this emerging primarily on two platforms: 1) eBooks, and 2) the iPhone.

1) e-Books:

I discovered a few days ago that Thompson-West is now selling Bankruptcy in a Nutshell for the Amazon Kindle and got excited as this implies that they will soon offer the rest of their Nutshell series on eBooks as well. Looks like this prediction was on the money as Thompson-West just announced they will immediately begin selling many more law books on the Kindle. Other publishers are bound to follow suit -- both on the Kindle platform and other eBook readers in the future.

Eugene Volokh just finished up an excellent series of posts on the future of books related to law. One of the most intriguing things Volokh mentions is his expectation that legal textbooks will increasingly veer towards self-publishing rather than books from textbook publishers. I think he's right and it makes me wonder if we won't see the same thing happen in other disciplines?

As eBook technology and business models continue to develop, the publishing industry is going to face the reality that the cost of printing and distributing books is rapidly approaching zero -- as are inventory costs. What this means is that anyone with a computer will soon be able to self-publish. Combine that with instant access through wireless eReaders and it creates a perfect storm for dramatic change in the book industry. There are already efforts to develop open-source textbooks. As this self-publishing textbooks becomes easier and more students have a platform to read them from, I expect the open-source movement will gain much more momentum. Between this, MIT's OpenCourseWare, and iTunes U, the cost of quality education is also quickly trending towards zero. While university degrees will still cost considerable money in the near future, I expect these changes combined with rising college expenses to put increasing pressure for alternative forms of education to emerge.

2) iPhone:

A few weeks ago, I mentioned Law in a Flash study aids for the iPhone. Since then, I've purchased these flash cards for my Criminal Procedure and Federal Income Tax classes and am very pleased with them so far. Having them on the iPhone makes for a great way to review topics when I'm riding the subway or find myself with some unexpected spare time. Their constant availability also means I never forget to bring them with me when I head out the door. These flash cards are on sale for 25% off during October. I plan to get the Professional Responsibility and Corporations sets as well.

In addition to the flash cards, I also recently purchased an app that contains the entire 2009 Internal Revenue Code [iTunes link] for my Federal Income Tax class. This $14 app that fits in my pocket has replaced a 4-pound, $42 book.

As an MP3 player, the iPhone can also be used to listen to legal audiobooks. Currently, iTunes U does not have any legal content, but hopefully this will eventually change. If/when it does, the iPhone will prove to be an excellent educational resource capable of playing both audio and video lectures.

Summary:

Just in the last two years since I started law school, technology has significantly changed in ways that have great potential to change legal education. Already, there are a plethora of books and apps available for eBook readers and iPhones that can aid legal learning and greatly reduce the weight of what law students have to carry. In the future, these technologies should also help drive down prices, allow for periodic updates to books already purchased, and continue to evolve into even more sophisticated learning aids. Perhaps an Apple tablet or similar technology will combine all of these capabilities into one device?

I am thrilled by the continued innovation of learning technologies and expect some form of tablet computer/eBook reader to rival the impact personal computers have had on learning. I for one long for the day when a 10.2 ounce Kindle can replace 20+ pounds of legal textbooks. What's exciting is that these days are essentially upon us.