Indiana University Maurer School of Law

Non-Sequiturs: 06.04.13

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* If you checked out our story about the 3L seemingly taking over the admissions department at Indiana University, head on over again because there’s an update. [Above the Law]

* Two former professors have sued the Phoenix School of Law for valuing profits over students and faculty. If you can’t trust your local diploma mill, who can you trust? [Connecticut Law Tribune]

* On June 11, Atlas Obscura is hosting an interesting event called “Go Directly to Jail: Trespassing and the Law.” Ironically, the event requires advanced tickets. [Atlas Obscura]

* Top myths about law school and the legal profession… from the desk of the dean of Thomas M. Cooley Law School. “Thomas M. Cooley is the second-best law school in the country” is strangely not one of the myths they address. [Cooley Law School Blog]

* Legal blogging worlds collide when Law and the Multiverse guest posts on Volokh Conspiracy. [Volokh Conspiracy]

* And while we’re on the subject of Law and the Multiverse, they update their spoiler heavy piece from a few weeks ago about the criminal liability of the Mandarin in Iron Man 3. [Law and the Multiverse]

* Not much fallout yet, but Chris Christie just set the time for the special election to fill NJ Senator Frank Lautenberg’s seat. As far as I can tell, the date selected fulfills NEITHER of the statutes governing the issue, the relevant portions of which are provided after the jump…

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3L Becomes Interim Director of Admissions — Or Not?

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[Please note the UPDATE at the end of this post.]

Late Friday afternoon, we got multiple tips that a major law school had axed its admissions director and turned over the whole department to a 3L.

Why would the school fire a long-time admissions director while still chasing down prospective students? Why did the school tap a student to run the program? Does this represent a philosophical shift to bring the admissions process closer to the live student experience? Is this a completely Mickey Mouse operation?

But after some poking around, the whole thing got crazier. The school claimed it hadn’t made any personnel changes, but tipsters kept forwarding us emails sent from the school to prospective students that identified the 3L as the “Interim Director of Admissions.”

Now we had something. Either a law school cover-up (or screw-up), or a rogue 3L with delusions of grandeur (if you define “grandeur” as “director of admissions at a law school”)…

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Quote of the Day: The Law School Dream Is Dead

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We are going through a revolution in law with a time bomb on our admissions books. Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school escalator is broken.

– William D. Henderson, a professor of law at Indiana University (Maurer), commenting on the rigor mortis that’s quickly spreading now that everyone’s fantasies of fame and fortune in the once storied legal profession have died.

(Enough doom and gloom. What are law schools planning to do about it?)

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The Downhill Road from 1L to 3L

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A 3L in a ‘law-and-blank’ class yesterday.

“One of the well-known facts about law school is it never took three years to do what we are doing; it took maybe two years at most, maybe a year-and-a-half,” Larry Kramer, the former dean of Stanford Law, said in a 2010 speech. The continuing existence of the third year of law school is generally held to be one of the basic structural defects in our current legal education model, alongside the contracted job market and soaring tuition. There have been efforts to address the problem, the latest being NYU’s announced overhaul of its third year curriculum.

Yet these attempts to redefine what the 3L year means appear to many like half-measures at best, “lipstick on a pig” at worst. As we noted back in November, Professor Bill Henderson of Indiana/Maurer has made a sweeping proposal that calls for a special new program for 3Ls by a coalition of willing law schools. The 3Ls would embark on a skills-based, teamwork-heavy course of study in partnership with law firms who agree to employ the students, albeit at a reduced rate. Also, there is a proposal currently before the New York Bar that would allow students to take the bar exam after two years. These students would not obtain a J.D. unless they return for their third year, but would be eligible for a bar card.

In assessing the NYU proposal (basically an increase in study abroad and specialty courses), Professor Kenneth Anderson argues that law schools have allowed educational incentives (i.e., learning to how to be a lawyer) and credentialing incentives (i.e., becoming an attractive job candidate) to drift apart: “The problem lies in how very, very unattractive we’ve institutionally made [students’] incentives – and the price tag attached to what is essentially a bet rather than investment. It’s a bet with many more bad payoffs than good ones.”

All the discussion and debate about the three-year law school model focuses, understandably, on the utility of that third year. We thought it would be interesting to have a look at our survey data to get a sense of how the experience of law students changes over time. The ATL Insider Survey asks law students and alumni to rate their schools in academic instruction, career counseling, financial aid advising, practical/clinical training, and social life. We wondered how, if at all, these perceptions differ between 1Ls and 3Ls….

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The Best and the Brightest: Some Reflections on Entry-Level Law Firm Hiring

By Bruce MacEwen

Ed. note: This is the first in a new series, “Across the Desk,” from Bruce MacEwen and Janet Stanton of Adam Smith Esq. and JDMatch. “Across the Desk” will take a thoughtful look at recruiting, career paths, professional development, human capital and related issues. Some of these pieces will have previously appeared, in slightly different form, on AdamSmithEsq.com.

As noted in the American Lawyer recently, the lateral recruiting boom of recent years continues unabated. As the Am Law article points out, “At the same time [as they’re focused on hiring lateral partners], firms appear to be homing in on their poor performers. Nine out of 10 survey respondents said their firm has ‘unprofitable’ partners, and seven out of 10 said their firms have partners at risk of being deequitized or ‘put on performance plans.’ As one survey respondent put it: ‘There are too many partners without sufficient billable work.’”

Now, wouldn’t you think it would make sense — if firms are worried about underperformers — to pay some attention to associates as well as partners? After all, some of those associates should, speaking theoretically at least, be your future partners.

Yet there’s unrebutted evidence that firms look at the wrong criteria when hiring associates….

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Behold! ATL Launches Definitive Law School Research Resource

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As Staci observed earlier this week, if law students took data into account, we’d be living in a different world. Today, in the interest of moving a bit closer to that sunnier, happier planet, we launch the latest component of our Career Center: The ATL Law School Directory.

There’s been no small amount of discussion around here regarding the disconnect between the career and salary expectations of incoming law students and the majority of their post-graduation realities. Yet we are continually reminded that most 0L “research” consists of blind adherence to a single, arguably dubious data point, and nothing else.

However, there is reason to believe that some would-be law students are doing their due diligence and turning into won’t-be law students, but still, there continue to be of a hell of a lot of applicants at all levels, from “prestige whores” to “low hanging fruit.” Clearly, while we’ve no agenda aimed at discouraging folks from applying to law school per se, we do oppose uninformed and under-researched decisions to do so. The Law School Directory is an indispensable resource for aspiring law students willing to do their homework. (Which, based on some strong anecdotal evidence, we understand is a characteristic of successful actual law students.)

The ATL Law School Directory is to 0L-relevant data and information what the Ronco Veg-O-Matic is to vegetables (It Slices! It Dices!). You can sort law schools by a wide array of analyzing variables: employment outcomes, admissions criteria, top law firm employers, and much more, including the the results of our ongoing ATL Insider Survey, where current students and alumni rate the major aspects of the law school experience, from academics to social life.

So which are the best schools for Biglaw placement? Public interest placement? Clinical training? The Directory has the answers. After the jump, check out a sampling of our ratings tables, including the list of schools which are tops at losing track of their own alumni….

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Quote of the Day: Mo’ Money, Less of Everything Else?

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[T]he only thing holding many large firms together now is money. No shared history. No shared values. Money by itself is weak glue.

– William Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University, speaking to Dan Slater of the Daily Beast about how a storied firm like Dewey & LeBoeuf can fall so fast and so hard.

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Open Thread: 2012 U.S. News Law School Rankings (16 – 30)

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And now things get interesting. As we continue to run through the U.S. News 2012 law school rankings, we get to a crucial set of schools. The schools in this batch are certainly top tier, but they’re not “top 14″; for the most part, though, they charge like top 14 schools (especially the private ones).

So this is the batch of schools where we usually hear questions like: Should I go to this school at full price, or a much lower-ranked school for free? And our answer is usually, “How much lower-ranked are we talking about?”

The bottom line is that when people get into schools like Duke, or Penn, they are going to end up going to that school. But when people get into some of the schools on this list, they do seriously consider other options. Should I retake the LSAT, score better and apply again? How much financial aid am I getting? What’s the job market like in the [secondary market] this school is located in, just in case I get stuck there? Is it worth it to go into this much debt for a degree from that school?

These factors should come into play no matter which law school you get accepted to, but at this point on the U.S. News list, cost factors take on increased importance…

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Does Hiring Smart People Hurt Law Firms?

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He probably would have made a great modern law professor, but Aristotle would be a crappy practicing attorney.

Here’s an argument you don’t hear everyday: law firms who hire the smartest people are hurting their business.

That’s the gist of the argument by Bill Henderson, a professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law who studies the legal profession (and whom we’ve quoted often in these pages). At least if we define “smart” as people who did very well on the LSAT and go to the “best” (as in highest-ranked) law schools. Henderson says that there are a lot of different skills that go into being a profitable lawyer, and being a slightly better standardized test taker than somebody else is not the most important of those skills.

Hey, you know what Aristotle says: “I know enough to know that being able to quote myself makes me an over-educated douche who can barely balance my abacus.”…

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Drinking Advice from Indiana Law

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Do you know how to drink responsibly? I hope so. By the time you get to law school, I really hope that you at least know how to avoid criminal behavior when drunk. Law school administrators do too. At the Indiana University Mauer School of Law, the Dean of Students decided to send 1Ls preparing for a bar crawl a little reminder. Here’s how one 1L described the email:

I am a 1L at Indiana University Maurer School of Law and I feel like we have an unusual predicament. Tonight, (4/2), the 1Ls organized a bar crawl with shirts for members of the class to go out and have a good time at the time we felt was our last opportunity before the big exam grind. The administration has apparently heard about our bar crawl, and is not too pleased. We got an email today (1 hour before the bar crawl) from the Dean of Student Affairs

We’re talking about a bar crawl in Bloomington, Indiana. I know that there isn’t a lot to do in the Midwest — aside from getting outrageously drunk and maybe tipping a cow — but we are talking about adults here. IU thinks they are qualified to get themselves into six figures of debt, surely they can be trusted to go out for a night on the town without hurting themselves.

The advice from the Dean of Students reminds me of what your mother would say before you go out to the state fair …

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