In Morning Docket yesterday, we mentioned that Standard & Poor’s has joined the chorus of people who are noticing that stand-alone law schools are shaky investments. When the S&P notices, you can bet that law school administrators feel some heat.
The national trends of declining law school applications and shrinking law school class sizes have now affected S&P’s outlook rating for one stand-alone law school. It’s not a huge shift, but given the trend lines, we have to wonder if we will eventually see some diploma mills actually close down…
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 traditionally made up what used to be the alphabetically listed third tier. It was only very recently that the law schools that once constituted the “third tier” received the gift that keeps on giving (no, not herpes): numerical rankings.
Today, we’ll be talking about the schools that used to comprise the fourth tier, but now have a new name. These days, this segment of the U.S. News list is referred to as the “second tier,” and although they’re all ranked, those rankings aren’t published (presumably because no one wants to brag about going to the worst law school in the nation — as if being tied for 144th place is better).
Let’s use this post to discuss these schools, collectively or individually, and to compare and contrast….
You’d think that the “longest serving law school dean in America” would have had plenty of time to share all of the bad or misleading information with prospective students that he wanted to.
But apparently Rudy Hasl, the dean of Thomas Jefferson School of Law who is retiring at the end of the academic year, had a few more drops of confusion to share.
Hasl suggested that the media is underestimating the value of a law degree by focusing on pesky statistics like whether or not people are employed nine months after graduation.
Hey, don’t blame us. We didn’t make this list of the worst law schools in the country.
In the Above the Law Career Center, we just give law schools letter grades, based on user surveys completed by ATL readers. But the Daily Caller has compiled a list of the ten worst ABA-accredited law schools. Mwahaha.
One really strong point about this list is that it’s more outcome-oriented than other rankings. It’s not looking at LSAT scores and GPAs; it’s looking at bar passage rates, cost, and employment data.
So, send your angry emails to the Daily Caller, or your own administrators, if you are unlucky enough to be going to one of these schools…
* Thomas Jefferson School of Law dean Rudy Hasl responded to those serious allegations of employment stat falsification by calling them a “crock of crap.” OK then! [ABA Journal]
* All the Republicans claiming their flagrantly sexist, diabolically anachronistic comments were simply “misinterpreted” need to stop misinterpreting the word “misinterpret.” [The Fix / Washington Post]
* BC Law appointed a professor specifically to help students deal with the “real world.” Not sure whether this is exciting or unbearably depressing. [WSJ Law Blog]
* This new fashion blog is so offensive and it violates your privacy and it’s bad for America and I’m totally going to start reading it. [Not-So Private Parts / Forbes]
* This man’s lawsuit claims Justin Bieber stole his credit card and used it to buy a penis enlargement, among several other weird purchases. No, ATLCommentBot, I am not the plaintiff in this case. Sorry to disappoint. [Consumerist]
* A Seton Hall University Law School student saved an elderly woman’s life in dramatic fashion. Well done, sir. [Jersey Journal]
Back in March, we reported that Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s motion to dismiss Anna Alaburda’s class action lawsuit over the school’s allegedly misleading employment statistics was “not well-taken,” and the case moved on to the discovery phase. We had previously wondered if Thomas Jefferson could actually lose the case, but given the wave of dismissals in the other law school lawsuits, that glimmer of hope soon faded. But then again, none of those cases ever made it to discovery.
Today, we’ve got news that will make all other schools pray that existing and potential cases against them never make it as far as that of Alaburda v. TJSL, the very first law school lawsuit filed. Everything — and we do mean everything — changes when you get to discovery.
For example, you may find out that your law school was allegedly engaged in a deliberate scheme to inflate its own employment statistics….
I want you to digest that headline for a moment. This weekend, a rising 2L is going to share his “system” for succeeding in law school, a system he honed — for a whole year — at Thomas Jefferson School of Law. The kid is trying to charge people money to attend his seminar.
Oh, but he was really good at law school. He was able to transfer out of TJLS to George Washington University Law School. He starts there in this fall. Success!
Actually, let me give you the full, prestigious biography he posted to Top Law Schools. We’ve also got video footage of the guy, providing “The 21st Century Approach” to succeeding in law school.
One problem I’ve noticed with law schools: they always seem to be speaking to the dumbest audience possible. They’re certainly not addressing the smartest guys in the room. They’re not even trying to speak to average, reasonable people. Instead, law schools seem to be talking at the very slowest people who might qualify for their programs, to people who have an irrational fear not just of “math,” but of “numbers” themselves.
Unfortunately for American law schools, most people are not as dumb as the law schools would like them to be. And when law schools engage in this Bobby Jindal style of patronizing double speak, neutral observers are forced to conclude that the law school is just communicating with its student body in the guttural words and expressive gestures the school figures they can understand. With each increasingly pathetic response to a problem, the so-called “value” of the school’s law degree goes lower and lower.
Sorry, the TL;DR version of the previous paragraph is: one of our favorite law schools is up to it again….
Back in October, we informed our readers that law school litigators Jesse Strauss and David Anziska intended to file class action lawsuits against 15 additional schools, on top of the two they’d already filed against Cooley Law and New York Law School. In mid-December, we brought you an update on the status of those potential filings after Anziska told us that at least three named plaintiffs had been secured for 11 out of the 15 law schools on October’s target list. And now, about a month and a half later, have we got some news for you.
Anziska quipped in an interview with us last year that he hoped to turn 2012 into the year of “law school litigation.” Well, the class action crusader is off to a great start, because today, Team Strauss/Anziska partnered up with six other law firms and filed lawsuits against 12 law schools around the country. According to Anziska, “these lawsuits will define a generation.”
Which law firms have joined in their mighty quest, and which law schools have been sued? Find out all of this information, plus additional details that we learned during today’s media conference call, after the jump….
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever.” In contrast, Thomas Jefferson School of Law does not tremble before the toothless authority of the ABA. In fact, the school feels free to respond to utter institutional FAIL with peevish blame-shifting. Either TJSL has a serious problem with its admissions standards or it fails students once they arrive. Or some combo platter thereof. Does it matter? Let’s all stipulate that this is a “bad thing.” But what, if anything, should be done?
There are obviously a range of legal/societal stances toward the treatment of “bad things.” Bad things like cigarettes are legal but have mandatory warning labels. Bad things like the New York Lottery are just a Darwinian tax on the ignorant. Predatory subprime mortgage lenders are subject to a patchwork of federal and state laws. Ponzi schemers face criminal fraud charges. Where a law school charging $120,000 for a dubious product fits into the scheme of bad things is open to debate. So we reader-sourced the question. Last week, we conducted a research poll asking:
• Should the ABA impose national minimum LSAT and/or GPA standards for entry into accredited law schools?
• In what range should the LSAT & GPA cutoffs be?
• Should law schools lose their accreditation if their graduates’ bar passage rates fall below a certain threshold?
• Below what level should a school’s accreditation be in jeopardy?
After the jump, you tell us whether and where the lines should be drawn….
A college graduate without student loan debt is akin to reading a kind quote about Kim Kardashian in a tabloid—it’s rare.
In the past eight years, student loan debt has nearly tripled to a whopping $1.1 trillion, and in the past 10 years, the percentage of 25-year-olds with such debt has risen from 25% to 43%
It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that New York Fed economists warned last month that the burden of student debt could stilt consumer spending by twentysomethings, as well as further hamper the recovery of the housing market and economy.
To get a better idea of what massive student loan debt (we’re talking over $100,000 massive) looks like, we talked to an attorney who graduated with a large student loan debt. We also consulted LearnVest Planning Services CFP® Katie Brewer to see just how their repayment plans stack up.
S. Fischer, 36, Attorney Graduated: 2001
How Much I Borrowed: $100,000
What I Still Owe: $45,000
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Ed. note: The Asia Chronicles column is authored by Kinney Recruiting. Kinney has made more placements of U.S. associates, counsels and partners in Asia than any other recruiting firm in each of the past six years. You can reach them by email: asia@kinneyrecruiting.com.
Deal flow has clearly picked recently up for most US associates, counsels and partners in Hong Kong/China and Singapore. We are on the phone with a lot of these folks on a daily basis, many of whom we have known for years. Further, the head of our Asia team, Evan Jowers, and Kinney’s founder and president, Robert Kinney, frequently meet in person with leading US partners in Asia to assess their needs and keep on top of the inside scoop at as many firms as possible. The need for legal recruiting help in Asia from experienced recruiters appears to be live and well. In March, Evan and Robert were in Beijing at such meetings, in April, Evan was in Hong Kong, and for half of June Evan will be in Shanghai and Hong Kong. Thus its pretty easy for us to tell when there has been an across-the-market pick up in capital markets and corporate work.
On an average day in Asia when Evan and Robert visit firms, they typically have 5 to 9 meetings a day, mostly with US partners in the market. The reason they have these meetings is not simply because Kinney makes a lot of US attorney placements in Asia and that a particular firm may have openings; instead these are just visits with friends. After years of working together as business partners, the folks at Kinney are actually these peoples’ friends. The firms Kinney work closely with in Asia (which is just about every law firm – call us if you want to know the one firm in the world we will never place anyone with again, ever, and why) look forward to the visits, or at least act like they do. After seven years in the market, many of the client partners are former associate candidates. Also, these US partners see Kinney as a very good source of market information as well, because they know how deep their contacts are in the market and how frequently they are speaking to counterparts at peer firms.
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In Morning Docket yesterday, we mentioned that Standard & Poor’s has joined the chorus of people who are noticing that stand-alone law schools are shaky investments. When the S&P notices, you can bet that law school administrators feel some heat. 
