Law Schools

Guess What This Law School Is Doing To Attract More Students?

Which law school has a new initiative to aggressively court the Alaskan market?

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If you don’t remember the old show Northern Exposure, a fresh-faced New York med school student had his education paid for by a wealthy Alaskan on the condition that the young doctor open a practice in the small, remote town of Cicely, Alaska, for a vague period of time. Cicely residents needed access to medical services, and the town’s prominent citizen went out and bought them some access.

But what about lawyers? Alaskans need legal services as well, right? And yet they are the only state without a law school to call its very own. While there may be more lawyers coming out of law school than there are available jobs, there is a distributional problem with tons of out-of-work associates in New York while rural communities, like most of Alaska, suffer a dearth of options.

Now there is a law school making an effort to build the Alaskan legal community. But will this bring more lawyers to the people of Alaska, or is there another shadowy beneficiary?

Sadly, nobody is offering to pay for your legal education to move to Cicely — since it’s not real anyway — but Seattle University School of Law has opened a new satellite campus in Anchorage, Alaska.

If the program gets final approval from the American Bar Association, students will be able to spend summers and their entire third year attending Seattle University law classes on the campus of Alaska Pacific University, starting in 2015. There’s no cap on the number of students who could participate, but organizers [] anticipate starting with 10-15 per year.

That may not sound like a lot, but it could be a great service to Alaskans seeking their law degree. From the perspective of someone who wanted to work in the New York market, attending law school in New York and interacting with New York practitioners throughout law school was a tremendous benefit. I can’t imagine how much it would suck to move thousands of miles away for three years and then return with no ties to the professional community where you planned to practice.

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The proposed satellite campus program would combine internships with law firms, nonprofits and state agencies with traditional classroom instruction. Local attorneys and judges will likely be tapped to help teach, said Nichols, who is from Fairbanks.

And this proposal supercharges that process of building connections with the local legal community. While the professors may not have the academic background available at a dedicated law school, when it comes to third year, do you really care about a seminar on Law and Ice Road Trucking, or some practical training from people who actually practice where you want to work? Sounds like an easy choice to me.

But will this program really deliver legal services to the average Alaskan? Or will it just fast-track graduates into in-house work for BP or Exxon? Not that energy concerns don’t need lawyers, but it’s hardly providing a service to the state of Alaska to help shuffle more people into the employment of big corporations.

It’s an intriguing program, and a smart move from a school seeking to become the top dog in a new market. Let’s see how this program plays out.

New Seattle University “satellite campus” will let Alaskans finish law school in Anchorage [Anchorage Daily News]

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