Brooklyn Law School

The More Law Schools Change, The More Law Faculty Will Start Pitching A Fit

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Law dean v. Law faculty. In this analogy, the students are the dirt.

Thing is, I like law professors. I like professors. I think it’s an achievement of civilization (and, you know, agriculture) to have a class of people whose only job is to think and teach.

Law professors have a great life. They’re paid generously, they work occasionally, and they’re fired rarely. No, I don’t hate law faculty, I want to be on faculty. Even at a relatively poorly ranked school (not Cooley, a man’s gotta have a code). The life of a professor involves writing, interacting with young people, and occasionally crushing the dreams of people too stupid to parrot back to you exactly what you want to hear. What’s not to like?

Of course, if we want serious change in legal education, we’re going to have to take a flamethrower to the lives of law faculty. And they’re not going to give it up quietly. When an ambitious law dean takes on the law faculty for the benefit of students, that will be a great war.

But for now, we just have the less interesting skirmishes that happen when law deans take on faculty without benefiting students in any meaningful way…

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Third-Party Litigation Financing: The Latest Chimerical Lifeline For The Legal Profession

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The legal industry has taken its lumps. At the top, growth is modest at best. At the bottom, law school applications have dropped off dramatically. There are scary book titles like Steven Harper’s The Lawyer Bubble: A Profession in Crisis (affiliate link) to spook the industry even more.

But some are pushing back against the gloom and doom and projecting a bright future ahead. The new hope for Professor Bradley T. Borden is third-party litigation financing (“TPLF”), dropping millions into lawsuits in exchange for a hefty cut at the end so they can party like a champ(erty).

Litigation finance is drawing considerable talent and will certainly change the way law firms and clients do business. But it’s no pathway to rekindle the pre-recession boom.

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Non-Sequiturs: 05.08.13

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* Professor Alfred Brophy wonders if The Great Gatsby (affiliate link) provides an early preview of product placement. In any event, I’m willing to bet the new movie will provide a stellar latter day view of product placement. [The Faculty Lounge]

* Brooklyn Law School will begin offering a two-year JD program. This makes too much sense. [Brooklyn Law School]

* Former Dora the Explorer star rebuffed in effort to unwind settlement, in part over claims that she overpaid for her lawyer. He charged $755/hour plus a 37.5% “success fee.” [UPDATE: According to her former lawyer, the hourly rate was replaced by the contingency fee arrangement.] This is the sort of thing that happens if a monkey is your most trusted confidant. [Hollywood Reporter]

* Oreck files for bankruptcy. Not Orrick, Oreck. They make vacuum cleaners that suck. Figuratively. [USA Today]

* Urinating on police stations? Detroit sounds like such a charming place. [Legal Juice]

* If you don’t mind spoilers, here are the answers to all your Iron Man 3 legal queries. Not answered: why was the post-credits scene so lame? [Law and the Multiverse]

* While created for short-sighted criminal defendants, this applies equally to the hubris of civil defendants who are just SURE they’re going to win. [What the Public Defender?]

* Caroline Kennedy just paid up her lapsed bar admission. Just in time for a Senate confirmation hearing… you know if she were to get nominated for something. [WiseLawNY]

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Morning Docket: 04.25.13

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Party on, Justice Breyer.

* On this episode of Supreme Court Retirement Watch, we learn that for whatever reason, Justice Breyer is “having the time of his life,” and so once again, all eyes are upon Justice Ginsburg. Maybe in 2015, folks. [The Hill]

* How unusual that a federal judge would see a confirmation in less than three months. If only Chuck Grassley owed favors to all of the nominees. Congratulations to Jane Kelly, now of the Eighth Circuit. [Legal Times]

* Thanks to an unprecedented ruling from Judge Dolly Gee, mentally disabled immigrants facing deportation will receive government-paid legal representation. New law school clinics, assemble! [New York Times]

* “Among the things the ABA is working on, this may be the most important.” Too bad the Task Force on the Future of Education seems to suffer from too many cooks in kitchen. [National Law Journal]

* Another one bites the dust: Team Strauss/Anziska’s lawsuit against Brooklyn Law School over its allegedly phony employment statistics has been dismissed. Sad trombone. [WSJ Law Blog (sub. req.)]

* Justin Teixeira, one of the Berkeley law students accused in the Las Vegas bird beheading, waived an evidentiary hearing so the media couldn’t squawk about video images they’d see. [Washington Post]

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The Law Schools With the Highest Unemployment Rates

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Over the past few weeks, we’ve brought you a few sets of rankings based on the class of 2011 employment statistics that were used in compiling the 2014 U.S. News law school rankings. These data points — in particular the one concerning full-time, long-term employment where bar passage was required — were the downfall of many a law school. If administrators weren’t looking out for their graduates before, now they’ll be forced to, unless they want to suffer even more in future rankings.

As for the 2015 U.S. News rankings, most law schools already have an idea of the fates they’ll be subjected to when Bob Morse gets his hands on the jobs data for the class of 2012. The fact that only 56 percent of the most recent graduating class were employed as lawyers nine months after graduation is already set in stone, so they’ll have to aim higher when it comes to the class of 2013.

But just because U.S. News hasn’t evaluated the most recent set of employment statistics doesn’t mean that we can’t. Today, the National Law Journal released a study on the latest employment outcomes from all 202 ABA-accredited law schools, ranging from the schools that sent the highest percentages of their class into Biglaw’s gaping maw to the schools with the highest percentage of Article III groupies.

The NLJ also has information on the law schools with the highest unemployment rates, and because we know that our readers are big fans of schadenfreude, we’re going to delve into that data. So which law schools had the highest percentage of graduates willing to review documents for food? Let’s find out….

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Open Thread: 2014 U.S. News Law School Rankings (76 – 98)

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Welcome back to our series of open threads on the latest batch of U.S. News law school rankings. Last time, readers weighed in on the law schools that made up the top half of the traditional second tier. And when we say the “traditional second tier,” we’re harkening back to a time when not all law schools with numerical rankings were classified as “first tier” educational institutions — a time when not all law deans could defend their law school’s rank by telling students and alumni that the school was still in the “first tier.” It’s not an elitist thing, we promise. It’s just much, much easier this way.

That being said, today we’ll take a look at the schools ranked #76 through #98 (where there’s a four-way tie). What does it take to be recognized as a Top 100 law school by U.S. News these days? Apparently your graduates need to be employed….

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Some Students Want Their Deans Fired After Poor Showing In The U.S. News Rankings (And One Head That’s Already Rolled)

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One reason law schools care about the U.S. News law school rankings so much is because prospective law students care about the U.S. News law school rankings. The other reason is that people get fired when their schools drop too long and too far in the rankings.

Every year, deans and assistant deans find themselves “pushed out” of a job thanks to the U.S. News rankings. Law schools and university presidents rarely say outright that changes are being made in response to the magazine, but let’s just say that Kenneth Randall, dean of the rising Alabama Law School, is probably very safe in his job for another year.

This year, the rankings seem to have already claimed their first assistant dean casualty. But what’s fun this time around is that students at two law schools have started petitions demanding that their deans get canned for poor performance in U.S. News.

It’s entirely possible that U.S. News is getting more powerful in a market of declining law school applications….

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House Rules: How Did I Get Here?

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Talking Heads was a teensy bit before my time, but some of you know the above lyric. I came into my own with music right around “Burning Down the House.” It wasn’t until my early 20’s that I started to appreciate the world of music instead of my world of music. Living in New York City at the time of Dinkins showed me just enough rough trade to appreciate what New York was like in the 70s. Today, clubs like CBGBs and Wetlands are but mere memories for those of us with enough memory remaining. If you want a taste of “old” New York, I recommend watching “Dog Day Afternoon,” or even “Do the Right Thing.”

These days it’s almost embarrassing to walk through Times Square with its Disney-fied atmosphere. I am all for safety when walking the streets of Manhattan, but velvet ropes outside of my old dive bars in now gentrified neighborhoods make me long for the days when the City had some edge. Some of you may not believe this, but Bryant Park was once avoided like the plague after a certain hour. There used to be a bar guide put out by some enterprising young men, and my then-girlfriend — now wife of 20 years — once highlighted the names of the watering holes we had visited. When we realized we had been in fully 70% of the bars in the book, we knew it might be time for a change.

The 70% part is absolutely true, but the real reason we left Manhattan was that she got into school in Boston and my acting career was at a standstill…

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Responding to the New U.S. News Rankings: The Parade of Butthurt Deans Begins Now

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I’m not going to lie, these are quickly becoming my favorite columns to write every year.

For approximately 364 days a year, law school deans are free to tell us how great their schools are without being forced to provide any data to support their claims of being the best law school for whatever. But one day, each law school must confront the stark reality of their U.S. News law school ranking. They can disparage the rankings, get angry at the rankings, or boast about the rankings (if they’re lucky). But deans ignore the rankings at their own peril.

And so some deans are forced to address their schools’ poor rankings. They are free to spin things however they want, but for one day, they’re not operating in a vacuum. There is an objective fact that is just a little bit beyond their powers of self-reporting manipulation.

It’s a fun day….

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Who Are the Happiest Law Students in New York City?

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Apologies to the Saul Steinberg Foundation.

New York City is the logical starting point for this occasional series highlighting law schools in specific locales. New Yorkers’ self-regard is bloated enough to believe they are at the Center of the Universe and that everything that happens there is naturally interesting to everyone, everywhere. The ATL Insider Survey asks, among other things, current law students to rate how their schools are doing in terms of academics, career counseling, financial aid advising, practical/clinical training, and social life.

After the jump, check out how the students at Columbia, NYU, NYLS, Hofstra, Fordham, St. John’s, CUNY, Seton Hall, Rutgers-Newark, and Brooklyn rate their institutions. Somehow we don’t have sufficient survey responses from Pace or Touro….

UPDATE (5:45 p.m.): Apologies to Cardozo Law School. You were mistakenly left out of the initial version of this post and we have revised it to include you.

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