Interesting post this week by Kevin O’Keefe at Real Lawyers Have Blogs.  Kevin posits that Flipboard, the fast-spreading social magazine publishing platform, should probably be the way that legal content creators syndicate their stuff out to their audiences.  His well-reasoned logic goes like this:

1. Flipboard has a clean, beautiful interface that its readers love.

2. Flipboard is already on 4.5 million iPads and just released an iPhone version

3. If a legal content provider wants to create its own publishing app, it will compete against Flipboard on points  #1 and #2.  And when it comes to an iPad user’s apportioning of screen space for icons, Flipboard is probably going to win.  Because that’s the reality of mobile apps (even mobile legal apps): you aren’t just competing for market share against your competitors; you’re competing for screen share against the hundreds of thousand of other apps that could be occupying your icon’s space.

As Brightleaf CEO Dan Gaffney has written in these pages, lawyers themselves increasingly need to use new technologies to connect with prospective and existing clients.  As they do, they’ll face a similar dilemna…should they try to distribute that content to clients and prospects using their homegrown websites and e-mail marketing systems?  Or should they try to leverage mobile apps that flexibly syndicate that content?

We have strong thoughts in this area.  Drop us a note if you have any questions or want to chat further.

A startup lawyer may be outside counsel for a company.  But that company tends not to have much legal work.  It will only do the legal work that it absolutely needs to.  It might not survive to create more legal work.  And its financial constraints mean it needs to pay as little money as possible for the scant legal services it does commission.

On the other side, the lawyer might be doing work for the venture capital or angel investor. The work is more regular, but the investor will almost always cap the costs its lawyer may assess. Plus, most investors have a roster of firms they can send work to if one objects to that cap.

Brightleaf does a lot of deep financial modeling at our client firms.  Much of that analysis shows that from a profitability perspective, lawyers doing VC deals actually lose money on those deals. This comes as no surprise to those lawyers, who routinely write off dozens of hours because they’ve blown past their cap.

So if it’s hard to profit from individual EC/VC matters and if EC clients evaporate quickly, and if you need to juggle a lot of these clients to keep revenues rolling in, why are so many quality lawyers in this space?

The reason is that they all want to win the “Lottery”.  Several startup lawyers we work with refer to startup clients as lottery tickets. They each hope that the startup becomes the next Zynga, or Facebook. They hope that one of their lottery tickets will need to go public someday, generating millions of dollars of billable work for their firm…if not for themselves.

So, if startups really are lottery tickets, it seems a good strategy for VC & EC lawyer would be to get as many “lottery tickets” as they can, thereby increasing their odds that one or more of their companies will make the big dance.

Easier said than done…for several reasons.  There’s fierce competition for these clients.  They don’t always seek out legal help when they should.  Their founders tend to be very smart, but very unsophisticated about selecting outside counsel. But the biggest problem for EC/VC lawyers is simply that it takes tremendous time and effort not only to hunt for startup business clients but also to provide (likely unprofitable) services to those clients.

It might sound overly simplified, but as competition increases, EC/VC lawyers who plan on thriving, or even surviving,  in this practice area for years to come are going to have to do two things.  First, they have to find ways to more easily gather these lottery tickets.  Second, they have to find ways to lower the time and cost of servicing these clients while providing even higher service levels to them.  The pressure to do so is likely to mount.  As margins continue to be squeezed at law firms, their CFOs will increasingly measure individual matter types from a profitability perspective…the way every other industry on the planet measures profitability by product line.  As CFOs visualize profitability by matter type, they start to squeeze or remove unprofitable practices. This puts the EC/VC practices right in the fiscal crosshairs.

How will EC/VC practices solve this dilemma?  How do they grow in this market over the long haul? How do they lower servicing times and costs while increasing service levels so they can win more business?  How do they out-compete new model firms and Rocket Lawyer style providers that crowd the sidelines of their fields?  How do they justify themselves in a climate that focuses more and more on profit?

Here’s what we see…They focus on using technology to make their practice much more efficient, significantly improving their margins and making unprofitable work profitable. They are employing technology to better market their services to new startups, connecting with those startups on their own turf. They leverage mobile devices to shorten the acquisition cycle of these new clients.

As the world of law firms continue to specialize, those practices that best leverage technology to differentiate themselves and connect with new clients and efficiently receive and complete work from all clients will ultimately have the biggest pile of lottery tickets. And having the biggest pile of tickets will always place them in the front of the line to collect their winnings.

You may also be hearing your own free-range lawyers bark the word “app” more and more as the look up from their thingamajiggies. If so, you’ve likely noticed that their usage of “app” feels a bit uneven for a profession that’s so consistently persnickety about its definitions. (And I’m not just saying that because I have a document on my desk whose first 28 pages are reserved for defining the terms it uses in its remaining 76 pages).

We’re awash each day in emails that tout “Five Must-Have Lawyer Apps.” We’re pelted by blog posts with (slightly hacky) titles like “App to the Future: How to Make Your Small Firm More Efficient.” After reading just a few of these, it becomes pretty obvious that there’s very little consensus about what an app actually is and even less understanding about why apps excite people or inspire devotion in users.

So, with our characteristic lexicographical lawyerliness, let’s see if we can help find the common ground. At our first stop, Merriam-Webster, we find “app” defined this way:

Source: Merriam-Webster Online
App: noun \ˈap\
Definition: An application.

Okay…THAT cleared thing up considerably. Thank you, Merriam. Thank you, Webster. I don’t know which one of you came up with that etymological nugget of uselessness. I just hope you didn’t strain yourselves too much in the process. Moving on…

The Oxford Dictionary. We know, we know…hardly a bastion of cutting-edge techspeak. But, THE authority on precise, detailed meaning. Let’s see what they’ve got for us

Source: The Oxford Dictionary (online)
app (app); noun
Pronunciation:/ap/
a self-contained program or piece of software designed to fulfill a particular purpose; an application, especially as downloaded by a user to a mobile device.

Hm. Marginally better, I suppose. At least Oxford had the manners to define what an “application” before telling us that an app was one. But, what’s with the indecisive “especially” hedge they toss in at the end of the sentence?  Are they telling us that an app is just an application? Or…a mobile downloaded one?  Or  is it an applicatio…that’s also kind of sort of maybe a little bit particularly especially the kind of application that get downloaded mobile-y. Is that one definition or two?  Or one-and-a-half?

Feels like about one-and-a-half. I guess that to Oxford, a good example of an app would be the Microsoft Project installation on my PC at work.  But an especially good example of one would the “Grover and the Monster at the End of This Book” story-widget that causes my two-year-old son to keep swiping my iPhone. 

Shocking Spoiler Alert: Turns out Grover IS the titular monster at the end of the book.  And his panic attacks,  mounting as each page turn brings him closer to book’s end, are for naught.  There’s probably some sort of deeper lesson there about how we are each in the end our own anxieties. If so, it was lost on me.  I’d just like to get my phone back.  And I’d like to get a clearer definition of  what these app things are.

Right. Well. If Oxford couldn’t help, let’s head southwest to Cambridge and see what the rivals have for us…

Source: Cambridge Dictionary Online
app /æp/ noun [C]
Definition: (Information Technology). Abbreviation for application or application program: a computer program that is designed for a particular purpose. See also killer app…

Okay. Other than the revelation that these things–whatever they are–can apparently kill (do NOT tell Grover…he just can’t handle this sort of news), Cambridge seem to be going with the staid, vanilla…”an app is just an application…” approach. While that’s not particularly illunimating, at least they’re not caught in the dissembling it’s-sort-of-one-or-two-things middle.  Oh…wait…there’s more…

Definition: (Communications). Abbreviation for application or application program: a small computer program that you can download onto a mobile phone.

Now I’m really confused. Merriam-Webster says an app is just an application. Oxford says it’s just an application, but maybe a skootch more a mobile device downloaded one. Cambridge says it’s an application if you’re talking about IT and a mobile download if you’re talking about communications. But none of them even begin to explain with any kind of precision why apps excite people.

Any one else want to weigh in?…?…?

Source: PC Magazine
Definition of: app
(APPlication) The term has been used as shorthand for “application” in the IT community for decades. However, it became newly popular for mobile applications in smartphones and tablets.

Not particularly precise, I suppose. But explaining that the definition of “app” has transitioned (or is transitioning) from one user group to another.  Maybe it just needs a little time to unpack its bags.  Maybe it’s too soon for a hard-edged dictionary definition of “app.” Maybe, with the passage of time and a little more syncretic term-settling, we’ll have a better and more universally acknowledged handle on what these things are.

No.  That’s not it.  You can tell, just by the way our lawyers and their free-range ilk say the word, that their experience of it is different.  It isn’t just an application.  And, with apologies to an aforementioned and overwrought Muppet, it isn’t just a mobile widget.

Maybe, instead of trying to define the “what,” it would be more helpful to focus on the “how.”  And that’s what Bill French of iPadCTO.com did a year ago today.  In his November 8, 2010 blog, French took the approach of describing how we interact with apps instead of defining what apps technically are. The result was much more useful.   As you will see from his definition, it’s the right-sizing of the app, the fit it makes between form and context, the seamlessness of its user interaction, that really defines it:

“Apps have become a meaningful abbreviation to technology that just works. Apps provide a common and easily understood idea that has been widely accepted as a solution – indeed a means to get stuff done quickly and effectively. Humans across the globe see apps as the pathway to achieving objectives, whether simple tasks or complex processes, and they’ve begun to vote on this model [literally] with gestures of resounding approval… Apps are quickly becoming the life-link between users and businesses – they represent the brand equity of that relationship and users can assess the benefits of an app at relatively low costs…”

The App-centric Enterprise and Why The Web May Soon Be Obsolete
Bill French, iPadCTO.com
November 8, 2010

Fast-forward to one day late in my Mom’s career.  (No…not the day she told an already mega-famous Jim Carrey, “They tell me you’re a comedian.  Good for you.  You’re such a polite young man; just stick with it and things will work out for your career.”  While true, that’s a story for another blog on another day).  I’m talking about the day she arrived in her office to find an alien device blinking soullessly on her beloved antique desk.  After regarding this intruder for a few minutes, she called Technical Services to determine its provenance and whether it posed any threat to her well-being.  She was informed, “Oh…didn’t you see the memo?  That’s your new computer.  We’re all going to be using them to keep track of our time from now on.”

I will leave aside any ironic comments about timekeeping being the first use law firms made of the greatest time-saving device ever invented.

Ever polite, Mom listened carefully to the voice from Technical Services as it extolled the virtues of the unwelcome newcomer.  Then she said, “Well…that’s lovely.  Thank you.  Now please come and take it away. I can’t see my rolltop desk because of it…And it’s blinking at me.”

Nothing against my Mom.  Got herself from a modest background through Vassar College and Yale Law School on scholarships.  Clerked at the Supreme Judicial Court in Massachusetts.  Started at Ropes & Gray at a time when there was precious little support or opportunity for female attorneys.  Had five kids in six years, leaving the firm for a while in the middle of this run (but helping organize the Peace Corps during her “time off”). Then returned to work.  Then had a sixth kid. Then shortly thereafter, becoming the firm’s second female partner ever.  All the while doing a great job raising my five siblings, and a marginally okay job raising me.  So, y’know, hardly a woman afraid of challenge or change.  Just one who didn’t want a 20th-century device on her 19th-century desktop.

This mini-parable of the blinking-computer-on-the old-oaken-rolltop-desk always reminds me that no matter how accomplished or intellectually curious a person may be, once they get used to doing things a certain way, it becomes difficult to get them to change that way.  Actually, it turns out that the more accomplished a person is, the more pronounced their resistance to change may be.  ”I have been successful when I do X, therefore X is the way to be successful.”  This is hardly surprising.  Evolutionary biologists correlate the degree to which a species has adapted to its environment with the likelihood that species will “win” by out-competing neighbors for resources within that environment.  Whether you’re a finch in the Galapagos or an fifth-year at Goodwin, the more fundamentally you adjust to the rules your survival depends on, the more likely you are to survive.  Seems logical enough, right?  Finches and fifth-years who morph to fit in live to have baby finches and become sixth-years. 

Precisely because of their high level of adaptation to their environments, however, evolutionary “winners” find themselves especially susceptible to environmental change.  If a finch’s beak is perfectly adapted to crushing seeds, they’re in trouble when drought or disease or new competition remove their one food source.  When you succeed because you are so tied into doing things one way that works in your world, you tend to miss out on changes to that world…even fundamental changes that threaten survival.  There’s even a technical term used across a range of disciplines–hysteresis–that describes the state where the rate of change in some organism or entity lags behind the rate of change in the environmental factors that act upon that organism or entity.  

Lawyers tend not to be as up-to-date on their hysteresis analysis as they perhaps should be. But after a few years and with the benefit of perspective and the clarity of hindsight, even these firms come to see how short-sighted their “X is the way to be successful” refrains really were. If you were around when lawyers resisting the adoption of email, then you know what I mean. It wasn’t all that long ago that I was told by (former) outside counsel that they were afraid that email would lead to clients sending new matters to them at 4PM on a Friday afternoon. It’s hard today to imagine practicing without it.  (It’s also hard today to imagine wanting to prevent clients from sending new matters to you).

Which perhaps is why we were struck by yesterday’s almost-true news that the world’s last typewriter factory had closed its doors for good.  (We say “almost true” because it appears that Chinese and Indonesian factories still make a vestigially small number of typewriters.  But not, it seems, for long. 

Dinosaurs have been gone from this world for a very long time.  But they ruled it for a much, much longer period–sitting atop the food chain for a period of time about  100 million years longer than the period from their extinction until now.

The same concept holds for typewriters.  They seem like such distant anachronisms now, but they were the predominant means of law firm document production for–what?–seventy or eighty years?  And have now been gone  for maybe twenty? For decades, law firms couldn’t have imagined getting work done without typewriters.  Now they can’t imagine getting work done with them.

So, to honor the almost-dead typewriter, do this…Look around your desk–rolltop or otherwise.  Take a peek around your office.  Walk the halls a bit.  Look for all the pieces of technology you use everyday.  Now try to pick out the ones mostly likely to make you look back on in a few years, unable to remember how you ever got anything done with it around.  Fax machine?  Desk phone?  Desktop computer?  Laser printer?  The evolutionary clock is ticking on all of them. 

Except the coffeemaker.  If Darwin wants our coffeemaker, he can try to come down here and pry it from the hands of our Director of Product Design.

[Why are you still here?  You shouldn’t be here.  Go here instead.  C’mon…go…]

—————————————— 

Good.  They’re gone.  Let’s talk about Pulp Fiction until they get back.

You remember 1994’s Pulp Fiction,right?  By Quentin Tarantino? When it hit movieplex screens Pulp Fictionchanged how popular movies tell their stories.  Since the early Greek tragedians, popular storytelling in visual media was always structurally the same: events occured chronologically across a three or five act story arc while tensions built and then ultimately resolved.  You might get an occasional flashback (Godfather II), or an out-of-sequence coda (the burning Rosebud in Citizen Kane) or an onstage recitation of pivotal off-stage occurrences (“Sorry Hamlet…Rosencrantz and Guildenstern ain’t coming down for breakfast no more.  Time to move to plan B”).  Basically though, on stage or screen, plots and themes and characters always just progressed sequentially and in rigid lockstep with each other.  Beginning.  Middle.  End.  Always.  Why such predictability?  That’s basically the way we humans operate.  A formula for doing something just builds by inertia, accreting over the years and hardening to the point where it seldom gets challenged, even after it has long grown stale.

Quick side thought:  If this could happen in a the theater and movie industries, which are ostensibly built on originality and individualism, how might the forces of inertia and accretion stifle innovation in an industry built on adherence to precedent, observance of community standard, and strict avoidance of risk?  Hmmm…let’s put that thought aside for a bit.  Maybe we’ll think of just such an industry.

Pulp Fiction abruptly changed this rigidity.  In the film, events occur in almost random order.  Plotlines just barely interrelate. Characters die in one scene, and then appear in later scenes that chronologically took place earlier.  Basically, it’s a complete re-shuffling of the traditional movie structure.  But it works really well because when Tarantino tosses out the accreted form (sequence…sequence…beginning, middle, end…), he focuses instead on the underlying purpose: storytelling.  Because of this focus on story over form, and because of Tarantino’s skillful technique, the center holds: characters develop; plot strings come full circle, tensions rise and resolve, all with great poignancy and salience.  As NYT reviewer Janet Maslin noted at the time, “far from confusing his audience, Mr. Tarantino eventually makes the film’s time scheme crystal clear, linking episodes with dialogue that may sound casual but sticks indelibly in memory.”

One indelibly recurring nugget of such dialogue conveys much character growth.  Throughout the movie, Samuel L. Jackson’s hitman character, Jules, recites, and alludes to off-camera recitations of, Ezekiel’s emotional prophecy against the Philistines (Ezekiel 25:17).

“The path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the iniquities of the selfish and the tyranny of evil men. Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will, shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers. And you will know my name is The Lord when I lay my vengeance upon you.”

As he profanely informs us towards the movie’s end (I won’t link to it, but if you search Youtube for some combination of the words Pulp-Fiction-Ending-Diner-Scene, you’ll find the scene pretty quickly), Jules is at something of an inflection point in his life when he drops his last Ezekiel 25:17 on us.  He’s been through a lot in the course of fulfilling his duties to his employer.  Now, he’s just going to walk the earth for a bit.  He doesn’t exactly know where he’ll end up or what he’ll do as he moves away from his previous role (a role he excelled at, by all accounts).  But he recognizes that he wants to guide others with what he has seen and learned. He’s trying real hard to be the shepherd.

And that’s really all I wanted to say about Pulp Fiction.  By rearranging the stale and accreted practices of his industry, Tarantino revitalized moviemaking, spawning scores of imitators and—for while anyway—making movies a bit less rigid and a bit more interesting.  He also makes us remember that it’s never really the existing structure that drives innovation, it’s the characters who emerge from that structure.

——————————————  

Oh.  You’re back.  See what we mean about Reliance on Counsel?  Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about writing succinctly and well about deep-rooted structural inefficiencies in the legal service delivery model. And then (wait for it….) actually suggesting solutions and offering to help.

Different, huh?  Better, right?  As we’ve noted before, too many legal blogs are thinly veiled attempts to get the reader to buy whatever legal service or technology the writer is peddling.

Baer isn’t selling anything. As Qwest General Counsel and Chief Administrative Officer he just quarterbacked the massive $20B M&A deal whereby his company got A’ed by and M’ed with CenturyTel without getting F’ed by the government. So, he’s sold enough for a few hundred lifetimes, thank you.

Because of the high-profile jobs he’s held, Rich has been in a unique position to observe how legal services can sometimes do disservice to the clients they’re supposed to serve.  Because of how well he did his last job, he probably has an audience that will listen to his suggestions about how these service providers need to adapt.  If he’s offering his help now in shepherding industry change, we should all be listening.

So, we encourage you to start reading and keep reading Reliance on Counsel.

Or we will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger.

In this video, Trinity’s Dan Ryan talks a bit about the firm and its philosophy.  It’s worth watching, especially if you’re in the market for some business lawyering.  Also, check out Dan’s writings at (Lexis-Nexis Top 25-rated) The Business Law Blog here.

Supply:

1.  The number of JD’s awarded by schools is up 11.5% over the past ten years. 

2. The number of newly accredited law schools is up 9% over the same period. 

3. The number of LSAT takers is up 20%  since 2007.

Demand:

1. The number of law jobs available has fallen by 7.8% since 2007.

2. This represents a 50% steeper decline in jobs than that seen in the general economy.

3. This trend is expected to continue.

4.  In an effort to preserve their rankings and continue the flow of incoming students, schools report job placement and salary stats that they have to know are misleading, making the supply look richer than in actually is.

On this last point:  it has become increasingly clear that schools are fudging the post-graduate employment rates and salary figures that they send to U.S News and World Report and the National Association of Legal Placement.    When they report that “88% job placement,” what they really mean to say is “since those students who have jobs are way more likely to repond to our questionnaire than those who don’t have jobs, and since we include temporary and part-time jobs as ‘employment,’ and since we’ve created thousands of make-work fellowships to keep our employment numbers up, we’re guessing that the percentage of our recent grads who are fully employed might be closer to 40%…but we’re going to call it 88% because that keeps the applications flowing in.”  Also, when schools report a mean salary of $80,000 for first-year grads, they may technically be accurate, but only because the small percentage of grads who land high-paying BigLaw associateships  disproportionately elevate that mean.  The median salary–what the typical grad might reasonably expect to earn–is definitely much, much lower and so (surprise!) goes unreported by the schools.

The article concludes that there will have to be a contraction among the nation’s law schools in the future, with the better schools and the schools that are better equipped to handle new market realities surviving while the weaker schools fail.  The logic seems irrefutable.

Or, if you’re Massachusetts, you could choose this time to launch a brand new state law school.

“So what?” you say.  ”Partners these days are shearing off from large firms like ice sheets from Antarctic glaciers.”  What’s so different about this one?” 

Well, since you asked, two things, really:

The first is that when the United Kingdom’s Legal Service Act takes effect in January, 2011, Hudson plans to have his private equity clients buy ownership stakes in the firm and share in its profits.  Legal Week notes also the possibility that Hudson might also invest in his clients’ businesses, an idea that Hudson says he gleaned from Skadden’s practice of taking equity as compensation for the work it does for start-ups.  Interestingly, he spends almost as much space on his website detailing the sectors he has invested in as he does listing the clients he has worked for.

The second point of difference is that Hudson’s new firm plans to pursue aggressively a range of non-hourly billing models.  In an AmLaw blog interview, Hudson admits on this second point that “billing by the hour means that you may end up rewarding inefficiency.”   Now, this is a bit like saying that eating nothing but jellybeans may promote tooth decay.  Fundamentally, even if an hourly billing firm is extremely ethical, the less efficient it is, the longer it takes to complete a task, and the longer it takes, the more that firm charges for that task.  To clients, that pretty much sounds like the dictionary definition of “rewarding inefficiency.”     No matter.  We’ll forgive the understatement.

Speaking broadly about the raison d’etre for the new firm, Hudson says:

“This structure brings out the benefits of traditional advisory partnership while adding superior 21st century service and pricing. It is an idea whose time has come. The last two years have emphasised the need to re-think many of the ways people in the financial and legal world do business. From now on, clients will want to know that law firms genuinely understand their needs and want to develop a long term alignment of interests.”

“Alignment of interests” is something you hear frequently from law firms.  In this case, it sounds like Hudson means it.

Cool stuff.

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.

Even better, Entrepreneurship Talks will be hosted by Foley’s Gabor Garai and Brightleaf’s Dave Curran.  Gabor’s absolutely undoubtedly one of the best attorneys in Boston, and he speaks with clarity and insight about issues facing new businesses. Dave is a multi-talented business executive with deep and uniquely diverse experience in the business and law of growth-stage companies (and we’re not just saying that so he’ll be nice to us in the hallways).

It should be fascinating.  Be sure to sign up and listen in.