‘Clever Plans to Reform Legal Education Won’t Make Legal Services Any Cheaper’ up on Am Law Daily

It’s a revised version of my post from a couple weeks ago, “WSJ Op-Ed Reaches Acceptable Conclusion on False Premises.” Link is here: “Clever Plans to Reform Legal Education Won’t Make Legal Services Any Cheaper“ Hopefully this will inspire better proposals from reformers.

The Nearsightedness of Career Services

William A. Chamberlain, “Law Schools are Adapting to the Shifting Job Market,” in the National Law Journal I think the best response to Northwestern dean Bill Chamberlain’s piece is some good old press beating. “In 2011, law schools came under fire for charging excessive tuition, strapping graduates with unmanageable debt and for allegedly publishing incomplete [...]

FixUC Stumbles onto Human Capital Contracts

Nanette Asimov, “Plan Would Eliminate Tuition to UC’s Benefit,” in SFGate.com Leanne Maxwell, “UC Considers Students’ ‘Delayed Tuition’ Proposal,” in sfist.com News outlets are reporting on a proposal (PDF) produced by a student organization, FixUC, which operates out of University of California-Riverside. More importantly, the university is actually considering it. The proposal is essentially the [...]

December LSATs Drop to 11-Year Low, Applicants Down

Those who gander at the LSAT data will find the LSAC put up the December numbers recently. I can’t remember if anyone else has reported this, so I’ll touch on it myself. Big drop in December LSAT-takers, and since the number of eligible test-takers (college juniors and up) has grown since then, it’s that many [...]

WSJ Op-Ed Reaches Acceptable Conclusion on False Premises

Distantly following the op-ed published by Clifford Winston and Robert W. Crandall that called for deregulating legal services entirely, the Wall Street Journal has now published an op-ed by a law professor and a lawyer, John O. McGinnis (Northwestern) and Russell D. Mangas (Kirkland & Ellis, Chicago), advocating allowing undergrads to sit for bar exams. [...]

NPR Asks If Law Schools ‘Cook Their Employment Numbers’

Larry Abramson, “Do Law Schools Cook Their Employment Numbers?” National Public Radio Much of the piece is a rehash of law schools luring students in with juked employment numbers. To that extent, it tells us nothing new. Moreover, the problem I’m having with these types of pieces that characterize the problem as graduates vs. law [...]

No More Adventures in Perverse Incentives Please

Ari L. Kaplan, “Applying the alternative fee model to law school tuition,” in the National Law Journal The tagline to Kaplan’s editorial reads, “The time has come to talk more openly about the cost of legal education.” I guess no one’s had that idea before. He continues: “I don’t mean cheaper, I mean different. My [...]

Not Your Parents’ (or Grandparents’) Profession

In a post a few weeks ago, I teased the BEA for a clear typo on its Web site. For my previous Am Law Daily post, which was based on that, I called the BEA to find out what was what. Turns out my guess of 1,277,000 persons engaged in industry was close (coincidentally), it [...]

Media Outlets Way Too Credulous of LMU’s Duncan School of Law

Google Alerts headaches bookend my view of 2011: in January, a week’s worth of warnings of hyperinflation brought about by law school debt and in December, a near dearth of news on Lincoln Memorial University’s Duncan School of Law’s (LMU) denial of provisional ABA accreditation and subsequent antitrust lawsuit against the ABA last month. May [...]

‘New BEA Data Showing Legal Sector Grew 2.3 Percent in 2010 No Reason to Celebrate’ up on Am Law Daily

New post on the Am Law Daily: “New BEA Data Showing Legal Sector Grew 2.3 Percent in 2010 No Reason to Celebrate“ Somewhat improved over the original post, as always.