Category Archives: Law School

Brian Tamanaha predicts, plausibly, that law schools will be subject to external scrutiny. It does sound as if they’ve earned it. I was not aware that the Law School Admissions Council has the ability to provide (or check) LSAT (and other?) data that has been being falsified by some schools. Getting the accurate data from the source seems like a no-brainer.

I would hope that a move to more verified reporting is an unalloyed good for UM, just as it most certainly would be for prospective law students everywhere. If, as seems to be the case, we’re reporting honestly, we can only gain from stamping out the trimmers.

Every semester I prepare a memo for my incoming students about how the class will work. Each memo is tailored to the class, although they all share some similarities. The one for incoming first years is of necessity the longest — I posted a copy of one on this blog a few years ago as A Note for my 1L Torts Class. It hasn’t changed that much since.

In editing the note for this year’s class, I spent maybe too long trying to decide if I should add something to make it clear that I do not want students blowing bubbles in class. (In fact, I don’t particularly want my students chewing gum, but I draw the line at big pink protuberances suddenly appearing in the front of their faces.) On the one hand, I really don’t like it, and think that bubble-gum-blowing is unprofessional and inappropriate for the classroom. On the other hand, I would like to think that everyone knows this, and worry that if I am stating an obvious thing like no-bubble-blowing-in-the-classroom it will justly offend people who don’t need to be told not to expectorate in class either. In the end, I chickened out.

And yes, yet again, we had a bubble-blower this week.

That’s it. Next year I’m putting it in the class policies.

Photo Copyright 2009 by maclauren70. Some rights reserved.

Survey data reporting which elective courses lawyers wish they had taken in law school, and which were most useful, via Prof. Orin Kerr of GW Law.

Most useful:

1. Evidence — 156 respondents (27%)
2. Administrative Law — 120 respondents (21%)
3. Corporations — 105 respondents (18%)

Most wished had taken:

Of the wish list courses with more than 35 votes (6%), four were in the area of civil litigation, including the top of this list, Complex Litigation (50), plus Pre–Trial Advocacy (46), Trial Advocacy (44), and Alternative Dispute Resolution (36). Second highest on the overall wish list was Administrative Law (48), with many of those supporters listing other practice areas as their principal focus. Others high on this list were Corporate Finance (41) and Law & Accounting (38, including support outside the core practice areas). Some, but not all, of the observations based on the wish list can be explained because many of these courses were not offered when some of the respondents attended GW.

I’m glad, but not surprised, to see that Administrative Law made the top 3 for “most useful”. I highly recommend it. It also ranks highly on the “wish I had taken” scale, which fits what I hear from alums who have come back to visit. I’m somewhat surprised federal courts (aka federal jurisdiction) wasn’t ranked higher, especially in a DC school.

The US News survey is somewhat biased against big schools. Here’s a much more rigorous and modest survey of law school outcomes that is up front about its bias in favor of big law schools, and which finds Miami at #26 in terms of number of partners at major US law firms.

Theodore P. Seto, Where Do Partners Come From? writes,

You are a hiring partner. You need to spend your recruiting dollars as efficiently as possible. Which law schools offer the largest pools of potential future partners for you and your firm to explore? You are applying to law school. Your long-term ambition is to become a partner in a national law firm in city X. Which schools may increase your chances of realizing that ambition?

To date, no published study has attempted to answer the question: Which law schools produce the largest numbers of partners at national law firms? This article is intended to fill that gap.

…

St. John’s, a school only slightly larger than the U.S. average, outperforms its U.S. News ranking by an astonishing 53 places; Miami by 51 places; Villanova by 49; DePaul 47; Catholic 43; Loyola Chicago 42.

What do these numbers mean?

First, they tell us that not all schools produce national law firm partners at rates consistent with their U.S. News rank, even controlling for size. Some produce more; some less. The data do not tell us why. It may be that, for whatever reason, students interested in becoming big-firm partners tend to be attracted to a particular school. Or perhaps the school’s admission practices favor such students. It may be that, because of the culture of the school, graduates who accept associate positions do so seriously, with the intention of really trying to make partner, not just to “get some experience” before moving on. It may even be that some schools actually provide superior preparation for big-firm practice – that some schools teach law and/or practice skills more effectively than others. Whatever the reason, 25 years of data is probably enough to capture real differences, even if we cannot explain them.

Second, not surprisingly, large schools generally produce more NLJ 100 partners than small schools. From an employer’s perspective, size is relevant in deciding where to interview.

Is this unfair to small schools? Prof. Seto argues that he is just applying a different perspective:

Many rankings – U.S. News, among others – compare schools predominantly on a “per capita” or “per student” basis. The premise is that schools whose average students (or professors) are better should be ranked higher. This may make sense if one’s goal is to establish a Platonic hierarchy. Theoretical rankings, however, are often of only indirect relevance to real-world decisions. Economies of scale exist in law firm hiring, as elsewhere. If employers cared solely about per capita outcomes, they would all interview at Yale. They don’t. For employers attempting to allocate scarce recruiting resources, aggregate numbers matter.

To what extent if any students should take account of these numbers in choosing a law school is, Prof. Seto says, less clear:

The single most important determinant of how schools perform on most outcome measures (bar passage, hiring, big-firm partnership, etc.) is the quality of the students they attract. In significant part, therefore, per capita outcome measures are merely proxies for student quality. Unfortunately, applicants commonly misread such measures as reflecting the value added by attending one school rather than another. … Unless a measure controls for student quality, however, it says nothing about the value likely to be added to a particular student by a particular school.
…

These aggregate data are not intended as, and should not be read as, measures of value added. They do, however, provide a plausible measure of feeder school status. A school that has placed large numbers of partners in the NLJ 100 over the past 25 years is likely to continue to attract NLJ 100 recruiters to its campus. Hiring committees at such firms, in turn, are likely to assume that hiring from that school is normal and will likely be productive. All else being equal, students who aspire to join such firms are more likely to have an opportunity to do so if they attend schools with established feeder relationships.

The bottom line is that prospective law students should not be picking their law schools by their ranking on this list, but it’s an interesting extra set of data that might help decide some otherwise close cases. (Another, less surprising, outcome of the study is that if you want to be a partner in a particular city, the local schools tend to have a big advantage.)