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A Milestone for Legal Education

December 15th, 2016 / By

For the first time ever, women constitute a majority of JD students at ABA-accredited law schools. 50.32% of JD students studying for fall exams are women.*

It’s a milestone to celebrate–but also one to view with caution.

As Kyle McEntee and I reported last month, female law students remain clustered at the least prestigious law schools. You can find a graphic representation of these data, along with a podcast in which Kyle and I discuss the numbers, here.

After crunching the latest disclosures, there remains a strong (and statistically significant) correlation between a law school’s US News rank and its percentage of female students: On average, the better ranked schools enroll a significantly smaller percentage of women students. The correlation remains when we look at schools’ placement outcomes. Men are significantly more likely than women to attend schools that place a large percentage of their graduates in full-time, long-term jobs requiring a law license. Women are more likely to attend schools with weak employment outcomes.

When we looked at last year’s data, we found a correlation of .381 between a school’s US News rank and the percentage of women it enrolled. This year, the correlation is almost as high, at .357. The story is similar for the relationship between percentage of female students and good job outcomes. Last year’s data showed a correlation of -.520, while the updated data yield an association of -.508. All of these relationships are statistically significant: the odds of them occurring by chance are less than one in a thousand.

Women now outnumber men in law schools, but our pipeline is still broken. Let’s do more to recognize and correct gender bias in the profession. You can start with Law School Transparency’s podcast series on Women In the Law.

* Source: The ABA’s annual data release. These totals include students from Penn State’s two campuses, which seem to have been omitted from the “All Schools” spreadsheet on the ABA site. 55,059 of this year’s students are men, while 55,766 are women.

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Accreditation

July 31st, 2016 / By

Earlier this summer, a federal panel recommended suspending the ABA’s power to accredit new law schools for one year. The transcript for that meeting has now been published, so we can examine in detail what happened. It’s clear that the panel intended its action to “send a signal” to the ABA Council that accredits law schools. All of us in legal education need to hear that signal: It affects the standards we adopt for accrediting law schools, as well as the eligibility of our students to take the bar exam.

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The View from Minnesota: A Profession on Edge

July 25th, 2016 / By

Wood R. Foster, Jr., a Minneapolis lawyer and former president of the Minnesota State Bar Association, has written a striking review of recent changes in the legal profession. Foster spent his career as a commercial litigator with Siegel Brill, a small Minneapolis firm. Relatively few lawyers from that background have written about changes in the legal profession, and Foster does so eloquently.

Foster covers the growing surplus of lawyers, which he dates to 2000; fracturing of the profession; stalled diversity efforts; the high cost of legal education; BigLaw and its equally big shadow; and the impact of technology.

With some irony, Foster quotes a column that he wrote in 2000 after holding a series of focus groups with lawyers. “I have found,” he wrote then, “that lawyers are generally reluctant to visualize the profession’s future.” The future, however, arrived anyway. Today, he reflects, “a good argument can be made that the legal profession has changed more in the last 15 years than it did in the 150 years from 1849 to 1999.”

Foster’s views echo those I hear from many practitioners in their 60s and 70s. While academics continue to debate the existence of change, these lawyers have lived it. Their vantage point makes them particularly sympathetic to the newest generation of lawyers. “There really can be no doubt,” Foster concludes, “that it has been a rough ride for lawyers graduating from law school since 2000. . . . [The facts] add up to an unflattering picture of why so many young lawyers are finding it so hard to get the kind of start in their chosen profession that older lawyers like me were able to take for granted during the last half of the twentieth century.”

Give Foster a read. His featured series of articles absorbs much of this issue of Minnesota’s Bench and Bar journal.

 

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A Conversation with Dave Hoffman

June 27th, 2016 / By

Dave Hoffman has posted a thoughtful piece about the future of legal education, in which he wonders whether legal educators, law graduates, potential students, and others can have a conversation about legal education rather than a rancorous debate. I think many conversations are already occurring offline, but I’d like to create such a discussion here by exploring a few of Dave’s thoughts in what I hope is a conversational manner.

Accreditation

Dave suggests radically decreasing the regulations that law schools face through the accreditation process, with the hope that this would “enable students to cheaply access the right to take the bar.” I’m with him on some of his principles, which I hope will make our conversation productive, but disagree with his conclusion.

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The Seventeen Percent

June 23rd, 2016 / By

In a recent column, Professor Stephen Davidoff Solomon observes that the legal job market “is a world of haves and have-nots.” With BigLaw firms raising entry-level salaries from $160,000 to $180,000, he concludes, “[t]op law graduates are doing better than ever.” Conversely, “it is clear that it is harder out there for the lower-tier law schools and their graduates.”

I agree with Professor Solomon about the divided nature of our profession; that reality has haunted American lawyers for decades. Solomon, however, significantly overstates the percentage of law graduates who fall within his world of “haves” (those whose salaries recently climbed from $160,000 to $180,000).

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Did Firms Raise Salaries High Enough?

June 21st, 2016 / By

Originally published on Above The Law.

nationwide pay raise biglaw associate base salary starting salary increase money bonusDeborah Merritt, a law professor at the Ohio State University, published an informative analysis on her blog yesterday about the new market rate salary for large law firms, which has been extensively covered here on ATL.

To her and virtually every other observer, the increase to $180,000 signals that many large firms are prospering. In part the increase reflects a small but steady increase in associate productivity since 2008, reaching roughly the levels from the last market rate increase in 2007. The following chart is from the 2016 Report on the State of the Legal Market, issued by Georgetown Law’s Center for the Study of the Legal Profession:

2015 Associate Productivity Chart

Associates are continuously more productive by this measure than any other category of worker, although at lower billable rates than partners. Interestingly, the gap in productivity between associates and other groups is significantly greater post-recession.
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$180,000

June 20th, 2016 / By

BigLaw firms gave 2016 graduates a sweet gift earlier this month: new associates at many of those firms will earn $180,000 (rather than $160,000) when they start work in the fall. That’s the first salary increase in BigLaw since 2007.

What should we make of this increase? It shows, certainly, that many BigLaw firms continue to prosper. But we already knew that from the firms’ reports of profits per partner. We also knew that associates are the most productive workers at those firms. This raise reflects rather belated recognition of that fact.

One could argue, in fact, that BigLaw partners are still undervaluing their associates. As Bruce MacEwen notes, the increase doesn’t match inflation since the last increase in BigLaw salaries. $180,000 in 2016 has less buying power than $160,000 did in 2007.

But those kids are going to be alright. I want to focus here on a shadow side of the BigLaw salary increase, one that the press and blogs haven’t discussed. BigLaw firms are paying more money–but to many fewer associates. This trend, which concentrates higher salaries in a smaller number of workers, has important implications for the legal job market.

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Caveat Venditor: Throwback To The Days Of Junk Employment Statistics

June 16th, 2016 / By

Originally published on Above the Law

Closeup of a pile of caution tapeWelcome to the second installment of Caveat Venditor, a series that assesses claims made by law schools to separate truth from fiction. This week we look at Brooklyn Law School’s employment rate of 92.2% posted on its “By The Numbers” infographic.

I noticed this claim on Brooklyn’s website after investigating the concern of a prelaw advisor. At the quadrennial Pre-Law Advisor National Council conference, this prelaw advisor asked what to do when a law school does not meet the accreditation requirements by not publishing the required disclosures. Indeed, Brooklyn was publishing an old report nearly six months after the ABA required them to publish its new one. Brooklyn remedied this problem on Monday, citing an “oversight due to transitions in several administrative departments in the last year.” According to a spokesperson from the law school, the ABA did not follow up with the law school to make sure it published the materials on time or at all.
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Plaintiff’s Personal Injury (NYC): A Radically Changed Business [Small Firm]

June 5th, 2016 / By

When most people are injured in car wrecks or at work, they can’t afford to pay a lawyer an hourly fee out of pocket to win their case against a large corporation or their insurance company. That’s why attorneys for the plaintiffs in these lawsuits use a contingency fee, which pays the lawyer about a third of the total settlement or verdict — but only if the plaintiff wins. That amount covers the work done by the lawyers, and compensates them for the risk of no payout.

In this episode, Dan Minc, a 1977 graduate of Seton Hall School of Law, discusses how he managed to rise up to his firm’s managing partner after starting there as a first-year lawyer. He also talks about how he builds his book of business and what he assesses when determining whether to take a client. After all, he’s only paid if his client wins.

This episode is hosted by Derek Tokaz, an academic writing teacher at American University. It is sponsored by ShouldIBeALawyer.com and Top-Law-Schools.com.

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Doctors, Lawyers & Software Developers

May 27th, 2016 / By

I wrote earlier this week about employment trends for doctors and lawyers. There is a third occupation that now vies with these professions for the affections of talented college graduates: software developer. Examining this occupation explains where some might-have-been lawyers are headed.

What Is a Software Developer?

Software developers, who are also called software engineers, are not programmers. They have a deep understanding of code, and know how to program, but that is not their primary focus. Instead, developers design the programs that give us so much delight–and occasional frustration. The developers also test programs to try to forestall that frustration and, when glitches happen, work with the programmers to fix the errant program.

Once you understand the nature of software development, you can see it’s attractions for students who might also consider law school. Software developers use their intellects, solve puzzles, and help people. They know more math than the typical lawyer, but their work focuses on logic and strategy rather than equations.

Add in these facts: It’s pretty cool to develop “apps,” many software companies are hip places to work, and you could become famous (and very rich) creating the next big program.

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About Law School Cafe

Cafe Manager & Co-Moderator
Deborah J. Merritt

Cafe Designer & Co-Moderator
Kyle McEntee

ABA Journal Blawg 100 HonoreeLaw School Cafe is a resource for anyone interested in changes in legal education and the legal profession.

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