Thoughts on law, business, technology, and economics.

Tuesday’s Boston Globe carried this front page story about the new University of Massachusetts School of Law.

Before we dig into it, a bit of background:  for the past several years, the Massachusetts Legislature  and Board of Higher Education have waged a tumultuous battle over whether the Commonwealth’s public university system should create a public law school by absorbing the private, unaccredited Southern New England School of Law and merging it into the University of Massachusetts’ nearby satellite campus in the town of Dartmouth.  The plan’s proponents noted that 44 states already had a public law school.  They promised to keep costs low enough so that the school would be reasonably affordable to its students.  They reassured all that the school would be self-sustaining economically and would add no cost burdens to an already-strapped state budget.  After several defeats, these proponents resurrected the plan (again) in 2009 and (this time) won approval for the new institution, to be called the University of Massachusetts School of Law. (Sadly, my proposal to dub it “Dartmouth Law School,” gained no traction.)  The school, still unaccredited, began accepting students this spring for fall admission.

The author of the Globe article, Tracy Jan, compared data between the old private school and the new public one, and, citing a rise in applications for admission (from 201 to 462 ) and in average LSAT score for inbound students (from 141 to 146), pronounced the UMass Law off to a “strong start. ”  Yay.

Jan continued on, noting that the school’s relative affordability makes it ideal for students who wish to pursue legal careers in public service fields.  Those fields traditionally do not pay well enough to accomodate the massive loan debt many law students graduate with.  Therefore, the thinking goes, lower tuition equals lower postgraduate debt equals more freedom to pursue lower-paying work. Jan then lauds (anectdotally) the breadth of this fall’s incoming class, which we are told includes students “as old as 59″ as well as: “an MIT alumnus and son of Italian immigrants who is leaving the high-tech industry to pursue a law career to protect the rights of new immigrants,” ”a victim-witness advocate in the Bristol district attorney’s office,” and “an occupational safety professional who wants to ensure that workplace health and safety standards are enforced.”

To quote cranky 18th century British philosopher, Jeremy Bentham, this article is ”nonsense on stilts.”  

We love lawyers.  We work with lawyers.  Many of us are lawyers.  We’re passionate about the future of the legal profession and we live that future every day.

Jan’s entire argument is only focused on the front door:  a law school is fulfilling its purpose if its admissions policy and cost structure allow it to let in more students and different types of students than you might find at other law schools.  To the extent that any school does these two things, she feels it can be deemed “off to a strong start.” 

This is not the purpose of law school–or any graduate school for that matter–any more than the loading dock is the purpose of the factory.  The simple core purpose of any graduate school in any field is to (a) educate its students in such a manner that (b) prepares those students for successful careers in that field.   And here, UMass Law is destined to be a failure before it even begins.  Here’s why…

(a) Educating its students – The school is still unaccredited and cannot coherently claim that it will offer anything approaching an acceptible legal education until it becomes so.  It plans to seek that accreditation, which it describes as a “long-term goal,” over the next few years.  In the twenty-eight years that it existed as the Southern New England School of Law, it twice applied to the ABA for accreditation and was denied both times.  So what will be different this time?  Hmm.  Let’s see…I guess that as a first rehabilitative step towards accreditation, the fact that the “new” school made the “old” school’s professors re-apply for their jobs, and then re-hired all but one of them, is not likely a good sign of sweeping change.  According to the ABA’s former Accreditation Committee chair and that Committee’s lead consultant, it will likely take $90M-$102M to upgrade the school to the point where accreditation is feasible.  This means that UMass-Law will either have to break its promise to become accredited or its promise to not burden Massachusetts taxpayers. Or, theoretically, it will break both promises.

Whatever.  Let’s assume that somehow the school finds the money under a rock and pulls this off.  It still fails epically at…

(b) Preparing those students for successful careers in their chosen field.  Put simply, there are no careers to be successful at.  Okay…that’s a slight exaggeration.  But only a slight one.  To say that there is presently a glut of law school graduates and a dearth of jobs for them would be a massive understatment.  Over the past 2-3 years, the legal industry has been shedding jobs at an unprecedented rate, and 2010 is shaping up at the worst year yet.  The National Association of Law Placement estimated that 2011 will be even worse, calling the market for future law school graduates “very compromised.”

Longer term, things are even more uncertain.  Most commentators forecast that technological and financial trends will force a contraction and overall re-shaping of how legal services are provisioned.  In his book, The End of Lawyers(?), Richard Susskind forecasts several general trends that will lower traditional attorney demand: in-sourcing, de-lawyering, relocating, off-shoring, outsourcing, subcontracting, co-sourcing, leasing, home-sourcing, open-sourcing , computerizing, no-sourcing.

[Check out Susskind's book for a deeper look at these trends.  Basically, they translate in aggregate to this:  the market for legal services will increasingly have less appetite for highly paid attorneys performing rote and repetitive tasks for which viable alternatives exist.  Attorney work will necessarily devolve to a more strategic core that focuses on consultative, high-end while process work is offloaded, automated, or eliminated. This will shrink the demand for the bottom end of the attorney market while transforming the industry.] 

So, as UMass-Law graduates begin to enter the job market in a few years, they will be fighting over fewer jobs with the graduates of the Commonwealth’s eight private law schools (Boston College, Boston University, Harvard, Massachusetts College of Law [unaccredited], New England School of Law, Northeastern, Suffolk, Western New England School of Law), as well as with the backlog of recent graduates who are still looking for legal work.  And those other graduates will likely be viewed by employers as more qualified.  UMass Law’s recent jump in median LSAT to 146 places it in the 29th percentile of all test takers.  The scores for the schools that UMass Law graduates will most directly compete with?  New England School of Law is at 152 (56th); Suffolk is at 157 (71st);  Northeastern at 161 (86th).  When you factor in that Massachusetts is already third among U.S. states in lawyers per-capita, it becomes very difficult to see where UMass Law graduates will find work. 

If you view, as the Globe article does, that schools exist to admit students broadly and not charge them too much, then you may well view the existence of UMass Law positively.  If, however, you think that maybe, just maybe, people go to graduate schools so that they might one day have jobs, that you’ll view this as the mistake that it really is.  And you might wonder why we weren’t launching a Computer Science school or an Institute for Clean Energy Technology.  You know, areas where the demand for graduates might meet the supply of graduates in the coming decades.

Don’t-take-credit-for-the-weather….One final note: the fact that the applications are rising  and that the school is therefore able to be slightly more selective should not be interpreted as signs of success.  Despite the headlines about law firms layoffs and serial deferrals of start dates for incoming first year associates, all of the Commonwealth’s private law schools reported increases in applications this year as well.  Nationwide, almost 20% more people took the LSAT last year than the year before.  This is what happens in a recession: people unable to find jobs retreat into school in the hopes that their prospects will be better in a few years.