The Legal Whiteboard

The Legal Whiteboard ceased publication effective April 30, 2017.  It was a wonderful ride for the editors.  Thank you for your readership. For an explanation of why LWB ceased publication, see this farewell post.

Going forward, Bill Henderson's online writing will be published at Legal Evolution and Law.com.   Jerry Organ will periodically publish his legal education research at TaxProf.  Jeff Lipshaw will almost certainly continue to migrate throughout the blogosphere as a guest blogger. 

May 3, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is my last Farewell Series Post -- a deep dive into the legal labor market from July 2015.  I'll be producing more of this type of analysis as part of my ongoing research at Legal Evolution. 

What is more important for lawyers: where you go to law school or what you learned? (Part I)

The Economist reports a very interesting analysis from Payscale.  The questions being asked are pretty simple: If you want to generate earnings that justify the time and cost of an undergraduate education, what should you study and where should you enroll?

Lots of people have strong opinions on this set of questions, but Payscale has the data to answer them empirically. It turns out that at the undergraduates level, course of study is much more important than the prestige of the college or university you attend.  The hard evidence is shown below.

For those working in law or thinking about attending law school, a natural question to ask is whether the legal industry is closer to the blue dot (art & humanities) or red dot pattern (engineering/CS/math).  A second, related question whether the future of law is more blue or more red.

This a two-part blog post.  Part I tries to answer the first question, starting with a careful analysis of the undergraduate chart, which provides a valuable frame of reference that can be discussed more dispassionately (at least among lawyers and law students) than an analysis that questions the value of law school prestige and hierarchy.  

Part II, which I will post on Wednesday, explores the second, future-oriented question.  I will tip my hand now and say that the future of law will be less blue (arts & humanity) and more red (math/CS/engineering).  Within the legal industry, there will be winners and losers; but from the perspective of broader society, this change is a very good thing. 

Undergraduate ROI

In the Payscale chart above, the y-axis (vertical) is 20-year annualized returns from college fees paid.  The x-axis is selectivity, running from under 10 percent to near open admissions.  

The Payscale chart is a very good example of how data visualization can be used to communicate both core facts and useful nuance.  Here, the lede is unmistakable:  the red dots (engineering/CS/math) are overwhelming higher on the ROI scale than the blue dots (arts & humanities).  Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but they don't occur very often. (Observe how rarely a blue dot is above the red fit-line.) This suggests it would be very foolish to get a blue degree and expect a red paycheck unless you have very good information (or skills or talent) that others lack.

The chart conveys another important piece of information -- the red fit-line is flat.  This means that for engineering/CS/math majors, prestige has not been very relevant to their eventual earnings.  I'll add a nuance here that some empirically savvy readers are bound to point out:  It is possible (indeed likely) that fees are higher at more selective schools. So if MIT costs twice as much as a public polytech, and both yield 12% over 20 years, one might wish they had gone to MIT.   Still, the flat trendline is surprising.  As a general matter, lower ranked schools are not dramatically cheaper than higher ranked schools, and many public schools are highly selective.  The flat red trendline suggests that there are (or were, remember these are historical data) many bargains out there.  If one is trying to maximize financial returns, the goal is to find a school that will, in the future, be well above the red fit-line (and avoid those below).  

The flat red fit-line is also surprising because college selectivity is almost certainly highly correlated with ACT or SAT scores, which our society often views as measures of general intelligence. Yet, there we have it -- a flat trendline. Four years of education seem to be more relevant than a standardized test score taken during high school.  That is heartening at many levels.

A third interesting trend -- the blue fit-line is sloped downward.  This suggests that in the arts & humanities, selectivity/prestige does have a financial payoff.  I don't think this will surprise many readers, albeit the prestige payoff is not very large. To use a simple metaphor, if you attend a more selective college or university to get your arts or humanity degree, you are likely to have a better house in the arts & humanities neighborhood.  But on average, you won't be able to afford the same neighborhood as the engineers, computer scientists, and math majors.

What about Law?

Moving on to law, if we want to examine the relationship between earnings and law school attended, the best available evidence is probably the After the JD Study (AJD), which is large, representative sample of law graduates who took and passed the bar in 2000.  

Data from AJD Wave 3 suggests that the financial returns are relatively strong for all law school graduates -- ten years out and graduates of Tier 4 schools have median earnings of $100,000 per year. As shown in chart below, this is akin to shifting the blue dots up into the red territory.  

The downward sloping fit-line remains, but that doesn't seem to matter very much to happiness. Other AJD data shows that regardless of tier of graduating school, AJD respondents show relatively high and uniform satisfaction with (a) the decision to become a lawyer, and (b) the value of the law degree as an investment. By 2010, 48% of respondents had no debt; only 5.1% had more than $100K in educational debt remaining. 

This is all good news.  But is it reasonable to extrapolate forward and assume the past is a fairly accurate barometer of the present and the future? 

One way to address that question is to ascertain what has changed since 2000.  As noted earlier, the AJD sample was composed of law graduates who passed the bar in the year 2000. Figures published by NALP and the ABA show that the percentage of full-time bar passage required jobs has dropped significantly over the last 13+ years -- from 77.3% for the class of 2000 to 57% for the class of 2013. That is a huge delta.

One of the reasons why law school applicants have plummeted is that the career path from JD graduates has become murky.  And that is a good place to start Part II. 

April 30, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)

In October and November 2013, I had a series of three blog posts about changing demographics among law students.  The first looked at changes in applicants from the top 240 feeder schools.  The second documented a greater decrease in applicants with high LSATs than applicants with low LSATs and a resulting increase in the percentage of matriculants with LSATs of <150.  The third, set forth below, was published on November 24, 2013, and tried to explore possible reasons for the change in the proportional distribution of law students from different LSAT categories. 

The questions explored here still linger.  In the current admissions cycle -- for the fall 2017 class -- the most recent Current Volume Summary shows that while applicants overall are roughly flat compared to 2016, the percentage of applicants with LSATs of 165 or higher is down nearly 10% compared to 2016.  The AALS has launched a survey project -- Before the JD -- to try to gather information to help answer some of these questions.  I am privileged to serve on the Advisory Board working on the Before the JD survey project. 

Why the Difference in Response to Market Signals?

In Part One, I analyzed how analysis of changes in applicants from LSAC’s Top 240 Feeder Schools demonstrates that graduates of more elite colleges and universities have abandoned legal education at a rate greater than graduates of less elite colleges and universities.

In Part Two, I analyzed how the pool of applicants to law school has shifted with a greater decrease among applicants with high LSATs than among applicants with low LSATs resulting in a corresponding increase in the number and percentage of matriculants with LSATs of <150.

What might explain why applicants to law school are down more significantly among graduates of more elite colleges and universities than among graduates of less elite colleges and universities? What might explain why applicants to law school are down more significantly among those with LSATs of 165+ than among those with LSATs of <150? Is there some relationship between these data points?

There likely is some relationship between these data points. Many of the more elite schools in the LSAC’s list of the Top 240 Feeder Schools have historically been schools whose graduates on average have higher LSAT scores compared with graduates from less elite schools. The LSAC’s 1995 publication, Legal Education at the Close of the Twentieth Century: Descriptions and Analyses of Students, Financing, and Professional Expectations and Attitudes, authored by Linda F. Wightman, discusses the characteristics of the population of students who entered law school in the fall of 1991. Roughly 31% of the students scoring in the top quarter in terms of LSAT came from very highly selective undergraduate schools, roughly 31% from highly selective undergraduate schools, and only 17% from the least selective undergraduate schools. Id. at page 38, Table 20. Thus, it is very likely that these two data points are related – that the greater decline among applicants from more elite colleges and universities is correlated directly with the greater decline among applicants with LSAT scores of 165+.

I want to offer three possible explanations for this differential response to market signals among different populations of prospective law students. The first two focus on the possibility that market signals are communicated differently to different populations. The third focuses on how different populations of prospective law students simply might respond to the same market signals in markedly different ways.

Different Pre-Law Advising Resources May Mean Market Signals Penetrate Some Populations of Prospective Law Students More Deeply Than Other Populations of Prospective Law Students. Focusing first on the nature of the feeder schools, one possibility is that access to pre-law advising resources differs across these different categories of feeder schools resulting in different messages being communicated to applicants from less elite colleges and universities than to applicants from more elite colleges and universities regarding the cost of legal education and the diminished employment prospects for law school graduates in recent years. Perhaps there are more robust pre-law advising programs among the elite colleges and universities than among the less elite colleges and universities, with pre-law advisors who really have their finger on the pulse of what is happening in legal education and the legal employment market. Perhaps these more robust pre-law advising programs are engaging in programming and advising that communicates more effectively to prospective law students the significant costs of legal education and the ways in which the challenging employment reality for law graduates in recent years makes the significant cost problematic. As a result, perhaps larger percentages of prospective law students at more elite colleges and universities are getting more information about the increasing costs and diminished employment prospects for law graduates and are deciding to wait to apply to law school or are deciding to pursue a different career completely.

Alternatively, pre-law advisors may have different responses to market signals in thinking about their role in advising students. Perhaps pre-law advisors at more elite colleges and universities are more directive about discouraging students from considering law school while pre-law advisors at less elite colleges and universities are more inclined simply to support student interest in pursuing law school.

There clearly are disparate allocations of resources to pre-law advising across various colleges and universities, different levels of engagement among pre-law advisors and different perspectives on how directive one should be in advising students considering law school. That said, I am not sure these differences necessarily can be delineated in relation to the extent to which a college or university is considered an elite college or university or a less elite college or university. Moreover, with so much information now available on the internet, it is not clear that pre-law advisors are the primary source of information for prospective law students.

These hypotheses would benefit from being explored empirically. What are the relative pre-law advising resources at the schools down more than 30% in applicants between 2010 and 2012 relative to the pre-law advising resources at the schools down less than 10%? Are pre-law advisors at the colleges and universities down more than 30% in applicants between 2010 and 2012 more inclined to affirmatively discourage students from considering law school than pre-law advisors at  colleges and universities down less than 10%? Were prospective students at these two categories of schools really receiving different messages about the employment situation for law graduates and the cost of law school?

Different Social Network Signals and Influences --- Another possibility might involve social network signals and influences. Significant empirical data indicates that on average different socio-economic populations attend different types of colleges and universities. Among those entering law school in fall 1991 from very highly selective undergraduate schools, nearly three times as many were from families from upper socio-economic status as from lower-middle socio-economic status. Legal Education at the Close of the Twentieth Century: Descriptions and Analyses of Students, Financing, and Professional Expectations and Attitudes, at page 38, Table 20. By contrast, among those entering law school in fall 1991 from the least selective undergraduate schools, nearly twice as many were from lower-middle socio-economic status as from upper socio-economic status. Id. Similarly, there is fairly significant empirical data indicating that different socio-economic populations generally attend different tiers of law schools with more of the socio-economically elite at higher-ranked law schools and fewer of the socio-economically elite at lower-ranked low schools. Id. at pages 30-31, Table 15 and Figure 7; Richard H. Sander and Jane R. Bambauer, The Secret of My Success: How Status, Eliteness and School Performance Shape Legal Careers, 9 J. Empirical Legal Stud. 893, Table 2 (2012)(analysis of the After the JD dataset looking at a representative sample of law school graduates who took the bar in 2000).

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April 28, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)

First, I want to thank Bill for welcoming me to The Legal Whiteboard several years ago.  It was an honor to be welcomed as a contributor and it has been a privilege to have a blog outlet readily available for some of my observations on data relating to various aspects of legal education.

With the recent news that the Whittier College Board of Trustees has decided to close its law school, it seems appropriate to revisit a post from October 20, 2014, in which I compared applicant and enrollment trends in dental schools between 1975 and 1990 with applicant and enrollment trends in law schools between 2004 and 2014.  The post noted that six dental schools closed between the late 1980s and early 1990s and suggested that we should expect some comparable contraction in the number of law schools.  So far we have had the merger of Hamline and William Mitchell into Mitchell|Hamline, the announced closure of Indiana Tech and of Whittier, and federal loan constraints that might mean the imminent closure of Charlotte.  At a roughly comparable point in time for dental schools in the late 1980s, only two of the six schools to close had actually announced the decision to close.  The other four closed over the next few years.  My guess is that in the coming years, we will learn about additional closures as law schools and their host universities adjust to a changing economic environment.

For four consecutive years we have seen a decline in the number of applicants to law school and a corresponding decline in the number of matriculating first-year students.  Over the last year or two, some have suggested that as a result of this “market adjustment” some law schools would end up closing.  Most recently, the former AALS President, Michael Olivas, in response to the financial challenges facing the Thomas Jefferson Law School, was quoted as stating that he expects several law schools to close. 

To date, however, no law schools have closed (although the Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School recently announced the closure of its Ann Arbor branch).  

Have law schools found ways to cut costs and manage expenses in the face of declining revenues such that all will remain financially viable and remain in operation?  Is it realistic to think that no law schools will close?

Although there may be a number of people in the legal academy who continue to believe that somehow legal education is “exceptional” – that market forces may impose financial challenges for law schools in the near term, but will not result in the closing of any law schools -- this strikes me as an unduly optimistic assessment of the situation. 

To understand why, I think those in legal education can learn from the experience of those in dental education in the 1980s.

The Dental School Experience from 1975-1990

In the 1980s, dental school deans, along with provosts and presidents at their host universities, had to deal with the challenge of a significant decline in applicants to dental school. 

At least partially in response to federal funding to support dental education, first-year enrollment at the country’s dental schools grew throughout the 1970s to a peak in 1979 of roughly 6,300 across roughly 60 dental schools.  Even at that point, however, for a number of reasons -- improved dental health from fluoridation, reductions in federal funding, high tuition costs and debt loads -- the number of applicants had already started to decline from the mid-1970s peak of over 15,000. 

By the mid-1980s, applicants had fallen to 6,300 and matriculants had fallen to 5,000.  As of 1985, no dental schools had closed.  But by the late 1980s and early 1990s there were fewer than 5000 applicants and barely 4000 first-year students – applicants had declined by more than two-thirds and first-year enrollment had declined by more than one-third from their earlier peaks. (Source – American Dental Association – Trends in Dental Education – U.S. Dental School Applicant and First-Year Enrollment Trends 1955-2009 (copy on file with author).)

How did dental schools and their associated universities respond to this changing market?  Between 1986 and 1993, six private universities closed their dental schools: Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1986); Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia (1988); Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (1990); Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, New Jersey (1990); Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri (1991); and Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois (1993). (Source: Dental Education at the Crossroads:  Challenges and Change, Table 1.1 (Institute of Medicine 1995)).  According to a New York Times article from October 29, 1987, “Georgetown, formerly the nation's largest private dental school, decided to close after a Price Waterhouse study found that the school would have a $3.6 million deficit by 1992.” (Source: Tamar Lewin, Plagued by Falling Enrollment, Dental Schools Close or Cut Back, New York Times, Oct. 29, 1987).

Some of the primary factors contributing to the closing of dental schools were described as follows:

Financial issues were repeatedly described as critical. Dental education was cited as an expensive enterprise that is or may become a drain on university resources. On average, current-year expenditures for the average dental school are about $1 million more than current revenues. … The declining size and quality of the applicant pool during the 1980s played a role in some closures by threatening the tuition base and prestige on which private schools rely. Faculty and alumni resistance to change may feed impatience among university administrators. In some institutions, the comparative isolation of dental schools within the university has provided them with few allies or at least informed colleagues and has left them ill-prepared to counter proposals for "downsizing." (Source: Dental Education at the Crossroads:  Challenges and Change, at 202-203 (Institute of Medicine 1995)). 

The Law School Experience from 2004-2014

In terms of applicants and enrollment over the last decade, the trends law schools have experienced look remarkably comparable to the experience of dental schools in the 1970s and 1980s.  According to the LSAC Volume Summary, applicants to law schools peaked in 2004 with 100,600 applicants (and roughly 48,200 first-year students).  By 2010, applicants had fallen to roughly 87,600, but first-year enrollment peaked at 52,500.  Over the last four years, applicants have fallen steadily to roughly 54,700 for fall 2014, with a projected 37,000 first-years matriculating this fall, the smallest number since 1973-74, when there were 40 fewer law schools and over one thousand fewer law professors.  (Source - ABA Statistics)(For the analysis supporting this projection of 37,000 first-years, see my blog post on The Legal Whiteboard from March 18, 2014.)  

The two charts below compare the dental school experience from 1975 to 1990 with the law school experience in the last decade.  One chart compares dental school applicants with law school applicants and one chart compares dental school first-years with law school first-years.  (Note that for purposes of easy comparison, the law school numbers are presented as one-tenth of the actual numbers.)

(Sources – American Dental Association – Trends in Dental Education – U.S. Dental School Applicant and First-Year Enrollment Trends 1955-2009 (copy on file with author) and the LSAC’s Volume Summary  (with my own estimates for 2014 based on the LSAC’s Current Volume Summary)).

The Law School Experience 2014-2019

Notably, these charts do not bode well for law schools.  The law school experience tracks pretty closely the dental school experience over the first ten years reflected in the charts.  For law schools, 2014 looks a lot like 1985 did for dental schools.

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April 27, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The post below was originally written on June 17, 2014 by LWB's thoughtful and witty editor Jeff Lipshaw.  Jeff and I met roughly 12 years ago when he entered the teaching market.  Before signing up for the hazing of becoming a junior professor, Jeff had been a partner at a major law firm and the GC of two publicly traded companies.  Somehow he found the humor it in all, writing one of the great unconventional law review articles of all time, Memo to Lawyers: How Not to 'Retire and Teach'.

Jeff has been successful not only in law, but also in life.  He is pictured at right with his spouse Alene on the occasion of their 30th anniversary.  If you are going to blog, why not do it with people you like? That was the formula here.

Via Facebook, I saw that my friend Joan Heminway had some interesting things to say about the private-public distinction in securities law over at our sister blog, Business Law Prof.  I heartily recommend it.

But with my usual instinct for avoiding the import of a serious presentation and jumping immediately to the trivial and irrelevant, it dawned on me I had never known that the Crowdfund Act of 2012 was really the CROWDFUND Act of 2012.  

My cartooning skills are not up to what they were in my productive peak thirty-five to forty years ago during my brief stints at the Michigan Daily and the Stanford Law Journal,** but I was inspired to grab my crutches, hop up to the second floor,* get a sharp pencil and some paper and sketch this:

* I suffered a complete rupture of my achilles tendon pretending I was a lot younger than I am and find that I now have a lot of time on my hands.

** This was the student newspaper, not the law review, something I noted on my resume for many years.

April 27, 2017 in Blog posts worth reading | Permalink | Comments (1)

As I worked through the LWB archive, this 2013 post really stood out.  Take the four minutes to watch this video, which basically says everyone wants meaning in their lives yet many factors thwart an open acknowledgement of this need.  I use this clip every year in my Deliberative Leadership class (syllabus).  The class is designed to enable 2Ls and 3Ls to reconnect and reflect on why they came to law school or, alternatively, their highest hopes.  This reflection occurs slowly over 12 weeks, yet the transformation among the students in mood, confidence, and comfort with self is palpable. By Week 13, they have come to like and respect each other in ways they never expected.  This class is entirely traceable to me finding this Viktor Frankl video clip and believing it might be true.

Below is 1972 video of Viktor Frankl, a renowned psychologist and author best known for his book, Man's Search for Meaning.   Frankl's greatest accomplishment was becoming an unflinching realist and idealist -- a person who simultaneously sees what is and what could be.   To my mind, it would be impossible to get both concepts into proper focus without reading Frankl's book, which I found to be one of the most emotionally jarring and difficult, yet necessary and valuable, experiences of my life. If you are wondering how this could be, read the book.

In the rare footage below, Frankel explains how we harm the world by not hoping for and expecting the very best in others.  

I think the point Frankl makes here has special significance for educators.

April 26, 2017 in Blog posts worth reading | Permalink | Comments (0)

The biggest break I ever got in my academic career occurred nearly ten years ago when I attended the Council meeting for the Section on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar at the August 2007 ABA Annual Meeting.  I was one of the people who sat along the wall and listened to the proceedings.  There was zero audience participation, though we were allowed to drink their coffee.  I was an untenured professor trying to understand how these complex institutions worked.  

I vividly remember Jim Leipold entering the room and handing out a graphic to everyone (including the wall folks) showing the distribution of entry-level salaries for the class of 2006 -- the now famous bi-modal distribution. Jim used the graphic as the centerpiece of his NALP report to the Council.  Totally shocked by what I was looking at, I remember thinking, "Can I write about this chart?" I subsequently asked Jim for permission. The first bi-modal post was titled "Distribution of 2006 Starting Salaries: Best Graphic Chart of the Year."  See ELS Blog, Sept 4, 2007.  I have a hard time arguing with the maxim, "the most important thing in life is showing up"  (permanent H/T to NALP and Jim Leipold). 

Below is a detailed analysis of the bi-modal distribution from July 15, 2012 -- five years after the original graphic was published.  The right mode was in the process of melting. Suffice it to say, a decade has changed nearly everything in legal education because so much has changed in the entry-level market.  There remains a lot of work to be done on understanding the legal labor market, if for no other reasons than to enable law schools to make better decisions on strategy and operations.  For the record, I believe the demand for legal education is shifting rather than shrinking. 

A Picture of the Melting Right Mode

I created the graphic below to depict the shrinking right mode of the bi-modal distribution since its 2007 high water mark (measured in February 2008). 

[Note: The difference between the mean and adjusted mean in the 2011 distribution is due to the fact that law grads who fail to report their salaries tend to have have less lucrative employment; so NALP makes a prudent statistical correction --basically a weighted average based on practice settings.]

From a labor market perspective, the class of 2007 entry level salary distribution was extraordinary and anomalous.  Why?  Because we can safely assume that legal ability, however it might be defined, is normally distributed, not bi-modal.  So when such a distribution appears in a real labor market, something is significantly out of kilter. 

Why did the entry level market become bi-modal? As the legal economy boomed from the mid-90s through the mid-00s, many large law firms (NLJ 250, AmLaw 200) were trying to make the jump from regional dominant brands to national law firms.  For decades, going back to the early to mid-20th century, these firms followed a simple formula: hire the best and brightest from the nation's elite law schools. As they continued to enjoy growth, they reflexively followed that same formula.  Yet, by 2000s, the demand for elite law graduates finally outstripped supply. 

This micro-level logic ("let's not tinker with our business model") produced a macro-level bidding war.  This is how the right mode came to be.  Yet, because it was a macro-level phenomenon, clients, led by industry groups such as the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), reacted by saying, "Don't put any junior level lawyers on my matters --they are overpriced."  Outsourcing and e-discovery vendors have also eaten into the work that used to go to entry level lawyers.  So the volume of BigLaw hiring has collapsed, hence the melting of the right mode. For a more detailed overview, see NALP, Salary Distribution Curve.

Long Term Structural Change in Big Law

That said, it is not just the entry level market that is under stress -- the fundamental economics of Big Law are also changing.  Consider the chart below (from Henderson, Rise and Fall, Am Law June 2012), which shows that revenues per lawyer at AmLaw 100 firms has gone flat and moved sideways since 2007, breaking a pattern of steady growth that dates back to the pre-Am Law 100 days.

Stagnant revenue is a source of enormous worry for law firm managers.  Without higher profits to distribute--and growing the top line is the usual profitability fomula--their biggest producers might leave, causing a run on the bank ala Dewey, Howrey, Wolf Block, etc.  So the dominant strategy now has nothing to do with entry level hiring.  Rather, the goal is to keep and acquire lateral partners with portable books of business.  After all, clients aren't protesting the value of most senior level lawyers. And seniors lawyers are plentiful, thanks to the excellent health of baby boom lawyers and the poor health of their retirement accounts. 

This strategy may work fine for this fiscal year, but over the middle to long term, BigLaw is going to get older and dumber.  Further, this dynamic produces substantial ripple effects on legal education -- albeit ripple effects that feel like tremors.

Endgame

The long term solution -- for both law firms and law schools -- is for the price of entry level talent to come down to the point where young lawyers are more cost-effective to train.  And that price point is not $160,000.  This inflated pay scale (which has supported ever higher tuitions at law schools) only persists because large firms are deathly afraid of adjusting their salary scales and being labeled second rate.  So the solution is keep the entry pay high but hire very few law school graduates.  This is not a farsighted or innovative business strategy.

It's been 100 years since law firms engaged in sophisticated business thinking. And that last great idea was the Cravath System, which was method of workplace organization that performed expert client work while simultaneously developing more and better human capital.  See Henderson, Three Generations of Lawyers: Generalista, Specialists, Project Managers.   According to the Cravath Swaine & Moore firm history, published in 1948, the whole point of the Cravath System was to make "a better lawyer faster." 

I think the next great model for a legal service organization (law firm may not be the right term) likewise will be based on the idea that there is a large return to be had by investing in young lawyers. As my friend Paul Lippe likes to say, "When it appears, it will look obvious."

April 25, 2017 in Blog posts worth reading | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have great enjoyed my LWB affiliation with Jerry Organ as I greatly admire his character and intellect.  Below is Jerry's first post on the Legal Whiteboard (from Aug. 8, 2012).  Jerry is informing readers about very negative trend lines in enrollment patterns.  In hindsight we know that the enrollment trough was still, at best, a few years away.

An UPDATE written by Jerry a few days later revealed his characteristic doggedness to always be thorough, accurate, and balanced.

A recent posting by Paul McGreal at The Faculty Lounge and an article in the National Law Journal by Matt Leichter (discussed in July here on the Legal Whiteboard) raise issues about the enrollment challenges law schools began facing last year, are facing now, and likely will face next year.  This post summarizes the comparative data for the 2010 and 2011 entering classes covering the 197 schools ranked by USNews.

PROFILES IN DECLINE -- Between 2010 and 2011, 111 law schools had a decline in their LSAT/GPA profile, 59 had an increase in profile, and 27 had a mixed profile.  (A decline means across six possible data points, 75th, median, and 25th for LSAT and GPA, more scores went down then up; an increase means more scores went up than down; a mixed profile means the same number of scores went up as went down.  For example, if a school had an LSAT/GPA profile in 2010 of 160/156/153 and 3.82/3.65/3.45 and an LSAT/GPA profile in 2011 of 160/156/152 and 3.83/3.64/3.43, this would be a decline in profile – down on three parameters and up on one parameter.)   The average 75th LSAT has dropped from 160.2 to 159.9, while the average 25 LSAT has dropped from 155.2 to 154.3.  The median scores for the 75 and 25 fell from 160 and 155 for LSAT to 159 and 153.

ENROLLMENT IN DECLINE – Between 2010 and 2011, 141 law schools had a decline in enrollment (of which 63 had a decline of 10% or more), 30 had an increase in enrollment (of which 6 had an increase of 10% or more), and 26 had flat enrollment (within +/- 1% of 2010 enrollment).  This means over 70% of schools had a decline in enrollment and that nearly one-third had a decline in enrollment of 10% or more.  The decline in enrollment totaled roughly 4000 students or roughly 8 percent.

ENROLLMENT AND PROFILES IN DECLINE – Most significantly, 75 schools (roughly 38%) saw declines in enrollment and in their LSAT/GPA profiles, of which 37 schools saw declines in enrollment of greater than 10% and saw declines in their LSAT/GPA profiles.  These 37 schools are highlighted here -- (original chart has been deleted and replaced by an updated chart reflecting 39 schools as described in post on August 16).  Four of the schools are ranked in the top-50, while the other 33 schools are relatively evenly divided between the second-50, the third-45 and the alphabetical schools.  There is some geographic concentration, with five Ohio schools (plus Northern Kentucky), three Illinois schools and four of the six Missouri and Kansas schools on the list.  Notably, 16 of the 37 are state law schools, several of which are relatively low-tuition schools that should conceivably fare better in the current climate in which prospective students are increasingly concerned about the cost of legal education.

FORECAST FOR 2012-- Given that LSAC has estimated a decline of roughly 14.4% in the number of applicants for fall 2012, from 78500 to roughly 67000, and given that the decline has been greatest among those with higher LSAT scores, one should anticipate further declines in enrollment and further erosion of entering class LSAT/GPA profiles for fall 2012.  The admit rate will be the highest it has been this millennium, probably exceeding 75% and possibly exceeding 80% (after increasing from 55% to 71% between 2004 and 2011).

IMPACT FELT ACROSS THE RANKINGS CONTINUUM, BUT WORSE FOR LOWER-RANKED SCHOOLS -- While the decline in enrollment and in profiles was experienced across the board, it was more pronounced among lower ranked schools. 

-Among the top 100 schools, 55 schools (over one-half) had a decline in profile, while 67 (two-thirds) had a decline in enrollment, with 27 experiencing a decline in enrollment of 10% or more.  Notably, 35 schools saw a decline in enrollment and in profile (over one-third) of which 15 schools saw declines in enrollment of 10% or more and a decline in profile.  Overall enrollment was down roughly 6%.

-Across the bottom 97 schools then, 56 saw a decline in profile while 74 (more than three-quarters) saw a decline in enrollment, of which 36 (nearly 40%) saw a decline in enrollment of 10% or more.  Notably 40 schools saw a decline in enrollment and a decline in profile, of which 22 saw a decline in enrollment of 10% or more and a decline in profile.  Overall, enrollment was down nearly 10%.

[Posted by Jerry Organ]

April 23, 2017 in Blog posts worth reading | Permalink | Comments (0)

Originally published on the LWB on April 28, 2012

A just released study by the Yale Law Women documents that class participation at Yale Law tends to be disproportionately male (H/T to Jeff and Lior Strahilevitz at Prawfblawg).  Although the report offers prescriptive advice for Yale faculty and students on how to close the gap, it does not offer an empirically grounded explanation for why the gap exists in the first place.  Coincidentally, I recently read another empirical study that appears to offer an answer. 

In an article in the 2012 volume of Adminstrative Science Quarterly, Yale School of Management professor Victoria Brescoll provides compelling evidence that different power rules apply to women than men.  Brescoll's article, "Who Takes the Floor and Why: Gender, Power, and Volubility in Organizations," found that when women possess the same objective measures of power as men, they are reluctant to use that power to speak up (i.e., be voluble) in organizational settings. 

Why are powerful women less likely to speak up? Because of fear of backlash.  Further, the fear is justified.  Specifically, holding the objective measures of power constant, Brescoll found that when women were more voluble in meetings, they tended to be viewed as less likeable and deserving--and here is the kicker, less likeable and deserving at roughly the same levels by both male and female peers.  In contrast, when powerful men were more voluble, their peers--both males and females--viewed them as more likeable and more deserving.

Wow.  This is quite a problem.  Brescoll observes that "the presciptions for powerful men's and women's behavior may be much more comprehensive than originally hypothesized (i.e., power men should display their power, while powerful women should not)."  This differential in power rules is not something amenable to a quick, simple fix.  Its root cause appears to be buried deep in both the male and female subconscious. It's hard to fix what we don't understand.

Over at Work Matters (H/T), Bob Sutton posted the perfect cartoon to summarize the Brescoll study:

It is worth noting the Yale Law Women describe social norms at Yale that essentially mirror Brescoll's results.  On page 24 of the report, a YLS professor is quoted, "I think there’s an in-group dynamic where when women are gunners, they get punished more than men for doing it. Their classmates’ reactions are harsher.”   The report continues, "This observation finds widespread support in the student survey among both men and women. Multiple students mentioned that there are norms about participation and women are either more likely to abide by the norms or are more likely to receive criticism for breaking them."  The Brescoll study lends substantial support to this explanation.  Again, not an easy problem to solve.

Some readers might be interested in a more in-depth description of Brescoll's research design.  So here it goes.  Brescoll results are based on the findings of three interconnected empirical studies.  She starts with the established empirical fact that powerful people tend to assert their power through commanding more time--i.e., being voluble--in organizational settings.  As a historical matter, most power has been held by men.  Now that women have obtained some measure of social/organizational power, we want to know whether women, holding objective measures of power constant, are equally voluble.

• Study 1.  Is volubility a function of power alone, with equal volubility among males and females with comparable power?  According to Study 1, which studied patterns of floor time among male and female U.S. Senators (2005 session, controlled by Repulicans and 2007 session, controlled by Democrats), the answer is no.  The connection between more power and more volubility was observed only among male Senators.  In contrast, more power was not associated with more floor tiime taken by female Senators.

• Study 2.  Following up on Study 1, Study 2 essentially asks, "why are equally powerful females more reticent than their male counterparts?" Using a controlled experiment format with male and female participants with workplace experience (average age 38, most with at least "some college" education), participants were asked to simulate an organizational meetings in which important decisions needed to be made.  Holding levels of power constant, female participants were much less likely to speak-up.  The primary explanatory variable was fear of  social backlash. 

• Study 3.  The question that flows from Study 2 is essentially, "Is the female fear of backlash justfied?"   Study 3 used a similar controlled experiment design to ascertain how male and females reacted to powerful CEOs.  The only two variables were volubility in meetings and gender of the CEO.   Remarkably, for both male and female study participants, male CEOs who dominated a meetings were viewed as competent and deserving.  In contrast, for female CEOs, the opposite was true--more volubility led study participants to view powerful female CEOs as less competent and less deserving.

Very important research.

April 22, 2017 in Blog posts worth reading | Permalink | Comments (0)

On April 30th, The Legal Whiteboard will cease publication.  During our 5+ years of operations, we generated some very good content, focusing on facts, trends and ideas affecting the legal industry. We made the ABA LawBlawg 100 in 2012 (year 1) and 2016 (year 5).  In particular, some of the most widely read posts were written by Jerry Organ, who focused on legal education.  Jerry painstakingly built numerous datasets to answer important questions related to conditional scholarships, the transfer market, and bar passage. It was a privilege to be associated with this work. I am personally grateful to Blog Emperor Paul Caron for providing us this platform and graciously agreeing to continue to archive our content on the Law Professor Blog Network.

I was the primary editor who launched The Legal Whiteboard. It was also my decision to shut it down.  The reason is not lack of interest in the blogging medium — in fact, the opposite is true.   For the last several years, mediums that started as blogs have been siphoning off readership – and thus power and influence -- from traditional media.  Online publication also facilitates connections with people outside one’s academic silo.  For over a decade now, my online writing has connected me with numerous professionals in law firms, legal departments, bar associations, and legal start-ups. In most cases, I am trading information with my readers, collecting local experience in exchange for macro-level observations. These connections produced countless friendships, enriched my teaching and research, and changed how I viewed the world. 

There is a tension between what counts as serious work inside the academy (e.g., placement and citations in prestigious journals; mentions in the New York Times, etc.) and how serious people in and outside of the academy are accessing information to help them do their work. This is an observation, not a complaint.  Professional and social norms evolve slowly, often to the point of feeling static.  But they do evolve, and generally in the right direction.

I am shutting down The Legal Whiteboard so I can make a more ambitious investment in online publishing.  For the next year or so, and perhaps longer if the experiment works, virtually all of my professional efforts outside of teaching will be focused on building an online publication for my core research on the legal industry.  The publication will be called Legal Evolution.

At this point in my career, I am very interested in doing applied research – i.e., research targeted at solving practical, real world problems. Examples of applied research include rural sociology (agricultural production), industrial/organizational psychology (worker productivity), public health (health outcomes). Online publication drops the cost of doing this type of work while increasing its potential impact – that is a powerful reason to give it a try.

Legal Evolution will be focused on the practical problem of lagging legal productivity in a world of rapidly increasing complexity.   Lagging productivity among lawyers is a serious industry-level issue because it means that solving legal problems is becoming, in a relative sense, more expensive over time.  In the individual client market, more citizens are going without access to legal services.  In the corporate market, heavy reliance on fee discounts is straining client-lawyer relations, as they have yet to see that the only long-term solution is to improve productivity through better systems and more sophisticated sourcing. The second-order effects of lagging legal productivity are now impacting legal education through stagnant entry-level salaries and historically low enrollment levels. I don't think the law professoriate fully appreciates this linkage. 

We lawyers and law professors lack the skills and expertise to solve the legal productivity problem by ourselves.  Whatever form the solutions take, we can be 100% certain that the inputs will be multidisciplinary.  Lawyers and law professors who collaborate with professionals from other disciplines will move a lot faster than those trying to stay at the top of the food chain. The ultimate goal of Legal Evolution is to accelerate this transition by curating examples of what is working in the field, including contextual knowledge to help readers make better decisions within their own organizations. 

Applied research needs to be driven by theory.  Legal Evolution’s editorial strategy will be grounded in the research of the late sociologist Everett Rogers, whose seminal book, Diffusions of Innovations, is one of the most cited books in all of the social sciences.  The first edition of Rogers' book was published in 1962.  In turn, he spent much of his 40+ year career updating subsequent editions with ever richer examples that (a) supported a general theory of innovation diffusion, and (b) demonstrated how knowledge of diffusion theory could be used to accelerate the adoption of innovation, often for important, socially beneficial ends.  

In my own career, shutting down The Legal Whiteboard feels like the end of era, albeit it is necessary to make room for something new.   In the fall of 2008, as I assembled my tenure file at Indiana Law, I remember creating a final attachment ("Attachment 7") that summarized my “internet writings.”  It was a list 216 blog posts I had published between April 2006 (when I joined the Empirical Legal Studies Blog) and Labor Day 2008. For visual effect, I created a hyperlink for all 216 posts. I can remember one of my advisors telling me that I didn’t need the summary and besides, it wouldn’t count toward tenure.  I replied, “I know I don’t need it.  I know it won’t count.  But I am putting it in because I think this work is valuable.  At some point in the future, it ought to count.”

I wrote that nearly 10 years ago. I have learned a lot since then.  With some luck, maybe I can nudge legal academic norms in a positive direction. 

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be reposting some of our favorite LWB stuff.  After April 30^th, I hope to see you on the other side.  Many thanks for your readership.

April 17, 2017 in Blog posts worth reading, Current events, Innovations in law, Scholarship on legal education, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (2)

I apologize for this in advance, but as much as everybody, from the late-night monologues to the left-hand editorial column of the Wall Street Journal, is getting a nice piece of United Airlines right now (I like the clip from Airplane! used as a training film), I'd like to slip in a plug.  

Oscar Munoz, United's CEO, has now done what he should have done straight, which is grovel publicly, but not until a full day after issuing what the Journal (see above) called a candidate for the Euphemism Hall of Fame ("re-accommodating," a word I believe is only properly used when the Ritz-Carlton puts you in Suite 304 rather than Suite 302).  

It happens that, just yesterday, I was a guest professor in our business school's capstone class for the accounting degree, there to participate in a discussion about how chief lawyer officers and chief financial officers do and ought to interact, particularly in the management suite of a public corporation.  One of the topics for the CFO-hopefuls was "how do you know if you are getting good legal advice?"  

As if on cue, the Wall Street Journal reported this morning as follows:

Mr. Munoz "bent over too far to support his employees," said a person close to the discussions this week among United executives. "I think he got bad advice. He probably listened to lawyers too much."

Oy. Whether the reported statement is true (and we could unpack those seven words for some time), the situation and the sentiment are at the heart of Beyond Legal Reasoning: A Critique of Pure Lawyering.  

April 12, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)

I was fortunate to be able to talk about Beyond Legal Reasoning: A Critique of Pure Lawyering at the Harvard Law School's Center on the Legal Profession.  By the magic of YouTube...

April 5, 2017 | Permalink | Comments (0)

When I initially learned that Harvard Law would start accepting the GRE as an alternative to the LSAT, I viewed it through the prism of the US News & World Report ranking and concluded that it was a very good thing for Harvard and all of legal education. Aggressive rankings management has led to tremendous over-reliance on the LSAT. By using on the GRE, I reasoned, Harvard would have sufficient test score information to assess a candidate's intellectual capacity while also obtaining the freedom to use other admissions methods to explore the larger and more diverse universe of candidates who are destined to become great leaders and lawyers.  

My thinking is crudely sketched out in the diagram below.

Yet, in making admission decisions, did Harvard Law really feel constrained by US News?  Was the move toward the GRE motivated by something else? I failed to ask myself these questions. My thinking was too small.

If Harvard Law was trying to get around U.S. News rankings formula, the USN chief strategy officer, Bob Morse, saw it coming.  Harvard got a lot of favorable attention on March 8 when it announced its new GRE policy.  A few days later, when US News released its 2018 law school rankings, something that got zero attention was a very significant change in the USN rankings methodology. Here is the description of the selectivity factor that was previously limited to the LSAT:

March 31, 2017 in Current events, Data on legal education, Innovations in legal education | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Holloran Center for Ethical Leadership in the Professions at the University of St. Thomas School of Law (Minnesota) is pleased to announce the availability of a new, searchable, web-based clearinghouse of information regarding law school learning outcomes – the Learning Outcomes Database: https://www.stthomas.edu/hollorancenter/resourcesforlegaleducators/learningoutcomesdatabase/  

The Holloran Center has compiled all law school learning outcomes that have been published and are accessible on law school websites and is making them all available in one location.

The Learning Outcomes Database is organized in three categories structured around the language of ABA Standard 302. To the extent that law schools have identified learning outcomes more robust than the minimum required by Standard 302, each category lists the full array of learning outcomes with an identification of the law schools that have adopted such learning outcomes along with a delineation of where, within each law school’s learning outcomes, one can find the specific language associated with a specific learning outcome.

The database of learning outcomes also is searchable by law school.

The Holloran Center plans on doing quarterly updates.  The Center will “sweep” law school websites looking for more law schools with learning outcomes and checking to see whether law schools change their learning outcomes.  The Center anticipates updating the Learning Outcomes Database in May, August, November, and February.  To the extent that law schools change their learning outcomes, the Center will be maintaining an archive that will allow those interested to see how law school learning outcomes evolve over time.

March 29, 2017 in Current events, Data on legal education, Innovations in legal education, Scholarship on legal education | Permalink | Comments (0)

This blog posting updates my blog postings of December 2014 and December 2015 regarding what we know about the transfer market. With the release of the 2016 Standard 509 Reports, we know have three years of more detailed transfer data from which to glean insights about the transfer market among law schools.

NUMBERS AND PERCENTAGES OF TRANSFERS – 2011-2016

The number of transfers dropped to 1749 in 2016, down from 1,979 in 2015, and from 2,187 in 2014 and 2,501 in 2013. The percentage of the previous fall’s entering class that engaged in the transfer market also dropped to 4.6%, the lowest it has been since 2011. In other words, there is no reason to believe the transfer market is “growing” as a general matter. It has been consistently in the 4.6% to 5.6% range for the last six years.

SOME LAW SCHOOLS CONTINUE TO DOMINATE THE TRANSFER MARKET

The following two charts list the top 15 law schools participating in the transfer market in descending order in Summer 2014 (fall 2013 entering class), Summer 2015 (fall 2014 entering class), and Summer 2016 (fall 2015 entering class). One chart is based on “numbers” of transfers and the other chart is based on the number of transfer students as a percentage of the prior year’s first year class.

Note that in these two charts, the “repeat players” are bolded – those schools in the top 15 for all three years are in black, those schools in the top 15 for two of the three years are in blue.   Ten of the top 15 have been on the list all three years. The top six for 2016 have had pretty consistent transfers numbers for each of the last three years.

Largest Law Schools by Number of Transfers from 2013-2015

Largest Law Schools by Transfers as a Percentage of Previous First Year Class - 2014-2016

Interestingly, the number of law schools welcoming transfers representing more than 20% of their first-year class has fallen from nine in 2013 (not shown), to six in 2014, then to only three in 2015 and 2016.

Nonetheless, as shown in the following chart, we are continuing to see a modest increase in concentration in the transfer market between 2011 and 2016 as the ten law schools with the most students transferring in captured an increasing share of the transfer market, from 23.5% in 2011 to 33.3% in 2016. 

Top Ten Law Schools as a Percentage of All Transfers

NATIONAL AND REGIONAL MARKETS

Starting in 2014, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar began collecting and requiring law schools with more than twelve transfers in to report not only the number of students who have transferred in, but also the law schools from which they came (indicating the number from each law school) along with the 75%, 50% and 25% first-year, law school GPAs of the students who transferred in. This allows us to look at where students are coming from and are going to and to look at the first-year GPA profile of students transferring in to different law schools. The following chart focuses on the ten law schools that have been among the top-15 in terms of transfers in for each of the last three years, presented in descending USNews ranking. It indicates the extent to which these law schools were attracting transfers from their geographic region and also identifies the law school(s) that provided the largest number of transfers to each listed law school in 2016 as well as the percentage of transfers that came from that school.

Percentage of Transfers from Within Geographic Region 2014-2016 and Top Feeder School(s) for 2016 at the Ten Law Schools Among the Top-15 for Transfers in 2014, 2015 and 2016

For these top 10 law schools for transfer students in 2016, five law schools (Berkeley, UCLA, Emory, George Washington and Arizona State) obtained most of their transfers (51% or more) from within the geographic region within which the law school is located during each of the last three years. On the other hand, five law schools (Harvard, Columbia, NYU, Georgetown and American) had fewer than 49% of their transfers from within the region in which they are located in each of the last three years. 

Moreover, two of the ten law schools had a significant percentage of their transfers from one particular feeder school.  For George Washington, roughly 48% of its transfers came from American University, while for Arizona State, 73% of its transfers came from Arizona Summit.

The chart below shows the tiers of law schools from which these 10 law schools in the transfer market received their transfer students.  Five of the ten law schools that consistently have high numbers of transfers are ranked in the top 15 in USNews, while nine of the ten are ranked in the top 25. Only five had 75% or more of their transfers from schools ranked between 1 and 99 in the USNews rankings – Harvard, Columbia, NYU, UCLA and George Washington.  Two additional schools, Berkeley and Georgetown, had at least 50% of their transfers from law schools ranked between 1 and 99.  The remaining two law schools ranked in the top 25 in USNews (Emory and Arizona State), along with American, had at least half of their transfer students from law schools ranked 100 or lower, with two of those law schools (Arizona State and American) having 85% or more of their transfers from law schools ranked 100 or lower. 

 Percentage of Transfers from Different Tiers of School(s) for 2014, 2015 and 2016 at the Ten Law Schools Among the Top-15 for Transfers in 2014, 2015 and 2016

(Bolded data indicates the modal response for each law school.)

If one focuses just on the reported GPAs from these ten schools, one quickly sees that the six law schools ranked in the USNews top-20 have a 50th GPA for transfers in 2016 that is a 3.6 or above (except for UCLA at 3.56), and a 25^th GPA of 3.52 and above (except for NYU at 3.41). Once you drop out of the top-20, however, the other four law schools have a 75^th GPA that drops below 3.5, a 50^th GPA that drops below 3.3, and a 25^th GPA that drops below 3.05 for three of the four law schools. Harvard clearly is accepting transfers who could have been admitted to Harvard in the first instance. While they make a less compelling case, Columbia, NYU, Berkeley, Georgetown and UCLA likely are accepting transfers whose entering credentials largely would have made them possible candidates for acceptance at those law schools. By contrast, Emory, George Washington, Arizona State and American are welcoming as transfers students whose entering credentials likely are sufficiently distinct from each of those law schools’ entering class credentials that the transfers they are admitting would not have been admitted as first-year students in the prior year.

First-Year Law School 75^th/50^th/25^th GPA of Transfers at the Ten Law Schools Among the Top-15 for Transfers in 2014, 2015 and 2016

STILL MANY UNKNOWNS

As I noted in each of the last two years, the more detailed transfer data that law schools are now required to publish should be very helpful to prospective law students and pre-law advisors, and to current law students who are considering transferring.  The more detailed data give them a better idea of what transfer opportunities might be available depending upon where they go to law school (or are presently enrolled as a first-year student).

Even with this more granular data now available, however, there still are a significant number of unknowns relating to transfer students, regarding gender and ethnicity of transfer students and regarding performance of transfers students at their new law school (both academically and in terms of bar passage and employment).

March 18, 2017 in Data on legal education, Scholarship on legal education | Permalink | Comments (1)

One of the first blog posts I had on The Legal Whiteboard focused on the location of employment for graduates in the Classes of 2010 and 2011.

I have now updated this data by looking at the regional employment outcomes for the two most recent classes for which results are available, the Classes of 2014 and 2015. These calculations are drawn from the Employment Summary reports for each law school, which indicate the top three states in which graduates were employed in descending order.

For both the Class of 2014 and the Class of 2015 – 152 law schools saw 67% or more of their employed graduates take jobs in the state in which the law school was located or an adjacent state or states. Of these 152, more than 75% (roughly 60% of all law schools) saw 67% or more of their employed graduates take jobs in the state in which the school was located. 

The numbers for the Classes of 2014 and 2015 (76% in region and 60% in state) are remarkably consistent with the numbers for the Classes of 2010 and 2011 (76% in region and 60% in state). This means there has been relative stability in the geographic markets in which graduates are employed for the vast majority of law schools over the last five to six years.

The vast majority of law schools are, in fact, regional law schools in terms of employment outcomes.

For the Class of 2014, 132 law schools saw an even higher percentage -- 75% or more of their employed graduates -- employed in the state in which the law school was located or adjacent states, with 85 of those having 75% or more just in the home state of the law school. For the Class of 2015, that increased to 134 law schools and 96 law schools, respectively.

In 2014, 47 law schools, and in 2015, 48 law schools, saw 90% or more of their employed graduates employed in the state in which the law school was located or adjacent states.

By contrast, for both the Class of 2014 and the Class of 2015, only 17 law schools had fewer than 50% of their employed graduates located in the state in which the law school is located or adjacent states, and 13 of these 17 law schools were ranked among the top 25 law schools in US News and World Report.

For those considering law school, geography should be an important consideration, given that the vast majority of law school graduates who find employment tend to take jobs in the state in which the law school is located or in an adjacent state.

Posted by Jerry Organ (I am grateful to Scott Norberg for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this post.)

March 5, 2017 in Data on legal education | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm delighted to be able to say that my book, Beyond Legal Reasoning: A Critique of Pure
Lawyering, is now available for pre-order in hardcopy or e-book through Routledge's website.  Here's the description:

The concept of learning to ‘think like a lawyer’ is one of the cornerstones of legal education in the United States and beyond. In this book, Jeffrey Lipshaw provides a critique of the traditional views of ‘thinking like a lawyer’ or ‘pure lawyering’ aimed at lawyers, law professors, and students who want to understand lawyering beyond the traditional warrior metaphor. Drawing on his extensive experience at the intersection of real world law and business issues, Professor Lipshaw presents a sophisticated philosophical argument that the "pure lawyering" of traditional legal education is agnostic to either truth or moral value of outcomes. He demonstrates pure lawyering’s potential both for illusions of certainty and cynical instrumentalism, and the consequences of both when lawyers are called on as dealmakers, policymakers, and counsellors.

This book offers an avenue for getting beyond (or unlearning) merely how to think like a lawyer. It combines legal theory, philosophy of knowledge, and doctrine with an appreciation of real-life judgment calls that multi-disciplinary lawyers are called upon to make. The book will be of great interest to scholars of legal education, legal language and reasoning as well as professors who teach both doctrine and thinking and writing skills in the first year law school curriculum; and for anyone who is interested in seeking a perspective on ‘thinking like a lawyer’ beyond the litigation arena.

And from the reviews:

'Jeffrey Lipshaw combines acute legal and philosophical analysis with prodigious legal experience to explain to us both how lawyers do think and how they should think. He makes clear why lawyering needs a fundamental transformation, and starts us down the path to achieving it. Anyone perplexed or angered by the role of lawyers and lawyering in modern society should read this book.'

Professor Barry Schwartz, author of "Why We Work" and co-author of "Practical Wisdom".

'Jeffrey Lipshaw draws on long experience, first in corporate legal practice, then in teaching, to offer a unique and invaluable guide to legal reasoning: its use in practice and, more importantly, its limits. I would advise all law students who are considering a career in transactional law to read it right away.'

Professor Brian Bix, University of Minnesota, USA.

'Professor Jeffrey Lipshaw, who practiced law for more than 26 years, has written a great and timely book—calling to mind Karl Llewellyn’s efforts to champion "the grand tradition" of law as against "the formal style." Lipshaw leads the reader to recognize that if lawyering is to have any real value, it must shed its narrow self-image as weaponized reason, and achieve self-awareness to understand its language within broader moral, social, and philosophical contexts. It must in short understand itself as not merely a technical profession, but a liberal arts vocation.

This is a distinctive and learned book with a breezy earnest style all its own. Law students should read this after the 1L year, lawyers and academics at any time, and judges right away.'

University Distinguished Professor Pierre Schlag, University of Colorado, USA

December 8, 2016 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Slide deck courtesy of Dan Katz at Chicago-Kent. 

September 23, 2016 in Fun and Learning in the classroom, Innovations in legal education | Permalink | Comments (0)

The work of lawyers is increasingly the work of businesses rather than people.  This conclusion flows from recently released Economic Census data, which is the U.S. Government's "official five-year measure of American business and the economy."

For the two most recent years (2007 and 2012), the Economic Census data includes an analysis called Revenues/Receipts by Class of Customer for Selected Industries.  The chart below compares these two years for Offices of Lawyers (NAICS 541110).

From 2007 to 2012, the share of total law office receipts shifted by about 5% away from individuals toward businesses. Revenues for Offices of Lawyers grew during this period from $225 billion to $246 billion.  However, when we run the numbers, the total receipts for lawyers serving people declined from $65 billion to $59 billion.  That is a relatively large absolute decline in just five years.  It suggests an actual contraction in the amount of legal work for people. Yet during this same period, the nation grew from 288 million to 302 million people

These fairly stark results continue the trendlines of the Chicago Lawyers I and II studies.  Chicago Lawyer I showed that roughly half of lawyers in Chicago in 1975 were working for people and half were working for corporations. This was the basis for the Heinz-Laumann two-hemisphere theory.  When the study was replicated in 1995 (Chicago Lawyers II), the data showed twice as many organizational lawyers versus people lawyers, so hemi (as in half) no longer applied.  Further, among lawyers in solo and small firms -- the primary practice setting for people lawyers -- income had dropped significantly in inflation-adjusted dollars. In contrast, lawyers in large firms and in corporate legal departments experienced significant gains.

If during the 2007 to 2012 timeframe the proportion of people work dropped from 29.1% to 23.9%, what does that number look like today?  We will not know definitively until 2020 or 2021 when the Census Bureau releases the class of customer data from the 2017 Economic Census, yet a further decline certainly seems likely, particularly as services like LegalZoom and RocketLawyer continue to target the retail market.  Separate and apart from these new entrants, to what extent is the diminution in people lawyers driven by declining real incomes within the middle class?  

It is possible that the archetypical images of private practice lawyers are becoming more and more out-of-sync with what is happening in the actual market.  For those creating law school curricula or setting policy around access to justice, we are going to need new mental models of what it means to be a lawyer.

September 14, 2016 in Current events, Data on the profession, New and Noteworthy | Permalink | Comments (3)

For the last couple of years, Dan Katz has been telling me and anyone else who would listen that law will eventually be a subfield of finance. Following Dan's reasoning, this will occur because legal risk can be modeled and quantified like financial risk, thus enabling parties to allocate time, money, expertise based on probabilities. If the modeling is accurate within a fairly predictable range, it facilitates an investment strategy where the business side of legal risk is equally predictable. Add leverage and/or other people's money, and basically you have a hedge fund with legal claims as its primary asset class.

Based on a story in Sunday's Boston Globe, Katz may be on to something.  The story reports the launching of Legalist, which funds lawsuits based on the size and probability of recovery. This concept is not new, as companies like Burford Capital have moved into this market and are growing rapidly. 

Legalist is potentially different, however, because it pools together smaller and medium-sized legal claims that are likely to paid out.  Case evaluations are made using data algorithms that draw upon "a database of 15 million court cases from all over the United States." So, in theory, the company can generate a strong return by building a diversified portfolio of claims that are likely too small for the high-end litigation financiers like Burford. 

One of the co-founder of Legalist is Eva Shang (photo right), who is pursuing the idea thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Foundation.  This is the Peter Thiel organization that encourages undergraduates to drop out of college in favor of pursuing a promising start-up idea.  After forgoing her senior year at Harvard, Shang also earned a spot in Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley accelerator that has a strong record of picking and nurturing successful start-ups. The other co-founder is Christian Haigh, who is a master's degree student in computer science at Harvard.

The core idea here is that with the right quantity and quality of data, computers can be extremely useful in valuing legal claims on several dimensions: size of payout, likelihood of payout, total time to reach a resolution, etc.  Lawyers provide the same service, but with a sample size limited to their own experience.

The most intriguing part of the Boston Globe story is that Shang and Haigh originally thought that law firms would pay for their service in order to improve their own case assessments. But "about a month in, we realized that attorneys weren't all that interested in legal analytics."  The dialogue with lawyers, however, enabled them to learn about the field of litigation finance.

Based on these insights, the Legalist decided to pivot.  In the June 2016 press release from the Thiel Foundation, the company was described as "a legal analytics and alert platform that helps lawyers keep track of new developments in case law so that they can represent their clients more effectively." Today, Shang's LinkedIn page describes Legalist as an "Algorithmic litigation financing for small businesses with meritorious lawsuits" -- a description with a Y Combinator polish.

I have no idea whether Shang or Legalist will be successful.  However, the story provides another striking example of the reluctance or inability of lawyers--I don't know which--to consider data as a tool to better serve their clients and, perhaps as a result, to earn a higher income.  Conversations with lawyers on this topic often stall on what the data cannot effectively model and thus the mistakes that might result. The mindset seems to be, "find an example where it may not work and kill the concept." I really do believe that there are a handful of behavioral economics biases that apply with special vengeance to lawyers. 

Katz is likely right to think of law as a powerful use case for finance.  The goal is not about getting something right this time, but instead getting it right more often than not with a high degree of certainty.  In short, it's probability with reliable estimates of risk.  And for clients, that is valuable.  

If we pull on this string long enough, eventually it will be possible to quantify how, all else equal, particular law firms and lawyers affect the odds of winning a case.  When that happens, there will be strong incentives to deconstruct the skill sets and backgrounds of the most bankable lawyers.  Law will become less a credence good and accordingly the utility of longstanding signals of quality that law schools and law firms are built around will get tested by data and repriced.

I have no idea if this future will actual emerge.  Certainly a case could be made that were are better ways to resolve disputes than protracted litigation where armies of lawyers are hired to advance only one side of an argument. Regardless, I am confident that the practice of law is definitely going to change.

September 5, 2016 in Current events, Innovations in law, New and Noteworthy, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (1)