Washington University in St. Louis School of Law

Law School Tries To Pressure Students Into Snap Decision With ‘Buy Now’ Sales Tactic

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Won’t be long before law schools are getting this guy to sell you legal education.

It really bothers me when law schools resort to “used car salesmen” tactics to try to induce law students to sign up for school. Say what you will about the value of legal education, but it’s not like buying a Sham-Wow. Students can’t be influenced by “special, limited time” offers when trying to decide if and where to invest three years of their time. If nothing else, you’re entering into the lottery to win a legal career, not an iPad Mini.

Law schools that try to exploit “impulse buy” reactions to fill their seats should be ashamed of themselves. They are taking advantage of kids — twenty-somethings who don’t have lawyers or accountants or appraisers representing their interests. Law schools are at a huge informational advantage concerning the true value of their services, value that they try to hide at every turn from independent third parties. Law students are trying to cobble together what they can based on word of mouth, Google, and some published rankings. Turning the screws on these prospective students with offers that “expire in 24 hours” is a good business strategy if you are trying to sell them a toaster, but it’s a disgraceful thing to do for a place that claims to be an “institution of higher learning.”

I can only hope that anybody who received this “hard-sell” email from this law school did the smart thing and just walked away…

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This Video Is What Happens When Criminal Procedure Meets an Acid Flashback

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The task of keeping cranky, nervous, and potentially mutinous law grads on task and learning requires a lecturer being memorable enough to hold the audience’s attention. There are many paths to being memorable.

This video “trailer” for a film by one BARBRI professor takes a very particular route to memorability, and that route is a balls-to-the-wall crazy collection of hallucinogenic images.

As far as I can tell through the psychedelic fog of the production embedded below, a piece of African art in his living room convinced the instructor to kill a bunch of people and then take off his shirt in front of the jury. African art… why does it always have to be a black guy’s fault?

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Five Defenses Used By Law Schools for Poor Graduate Employment Outcomes

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Hello again from the 2013 annual education conference of the Association for Legal Career Professionals (aka NALP). People here are very friendly — although, as noted earlier, the law firm folks tend to be more welcoming to us than the law school crew.

That’s to be expected, given our sometimes critical coverage of law schools. We seek to promote consumer awareness when it comes to legal education, but some schools — especially those schools with weaker job outcomes for their graduates — perceive this as an attack.

Yesterday I attended a NALP panel discussion about law school transparency. In the course of discussing what we talk about when we talk about transparency, the panelists provided five defenses that law schools can use when faced with criticism over unemployed or underemployed graduates….

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The Decision: Tempted By The ‘T14′

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Today, April 15, is Tax Day. But it’s an important day for another reason as well: it happens to be the day that some law schools want to hear back from applicants — and collect their deposit checks, of course.

Let’s close out our series of posts soliciting advice on picking a law school with three fact patterns. All of them involve at least two members of the so-called “T14,” the nation’s 14 leading law schools according to the U.S. News rankings….

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The Most Important Part of Law School: Social Life Rankings!

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Wooooo, law school!

It’s about that time: law school tuition deposits are due in a few weeks, and the class of 2016 will soon be bilked out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in exchange for questionable promises of an improving entry-level job market. So obviously this is a great time for rolling out the latest set of dubious law school rankings.

You’ve seen the prized U.S. News rankings. You’ve seen the somewhat-ridiculous Princeton Review rankings. You’ve even seen the “What is this? I don’t even…” Cooley Law School rankings. But today, for your viewing pleasure, we present you with the GraduatePrograms.com rankings, because that’s apparently a thing now.

While GradPrograms ranked the top 25 student-rated law schools, as well as the best law schools for financial aid, we’ve decided to focus on one of the most important parts of the law school experience: your social life. Now let’s be perfectly clear, if these were colleges, they’d be called “party schools.” But because they’re law schools, there needs to be an air of highbrow prestige — hence these “social life” rankings.

Let’s find where you can go to law school and still party your face off….

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Quote of the Day: Law Schools Would Probably Care, But Only If People Stopped Throwing Money at Them

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Linda Doyle

[A] brick-and-mortar LL.M. would be far more beneficial than an online LL.M. at this point.

– Linda Doyle, a hiring partner at McDermott Will & Emery, commenting on the utility of pursuing an online LL.M. degree. Washington University recently made headline news for its introduction of an online LL.M. degree.

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Quote of the Day: The Broken Economics of Legal Education

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Brian Tamanaha

The average debt of law graduates tops $100,000, and most new lawyers do not earn salaries sufficient to make the monthly payments on this debt. More than one-third of law graduates in recent years have failed to obtain lawyer jobs. Thousands of new law graduates will enter a government-sponsored debt relief program, and many will never fully pay off their law school debt.

– Washington University Law professor Brian Tamanaha, author of Failing Law Schools (affiliate link), painting a rosy picture of what life is like for recent law school graduates.

(What can be done to remedy this situation? Additional insights from Professor Tamanaha, after the jump.)

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Morning Docket: 05.09.12

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* Dewey get the chance to reap revenge against all of the partners who defected? Only in bankruptcy clawback suits. Many are keeping an eye on the Coudert and Thelen Chapter 11 cases to see if they’ll have to pay up. [Thomson Reuters News & Insight]

* “People have bigger concerns on their mind than whether Elizabeth Warren is 1/32 Cherokee.” Well, Scott Brown isn’t most people. He wants all of her job records from her career as a law professor. [Washington Wire / Wall Street Journal]

* “We are not anti-gay, we are pro-marriage.” I don’t think “pro-marriage” means what you think it means. Last night, North Carolina voters passed a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage in the state. [CNN]

* Mike McQueary is filing a whistleblower lawsuit against Penn State. Hate to say it, but that’s definitely not the first time Penn State’s seen a lawsuit over something being blown in the locker room. [Centre Daily Times]

* Washington University in St. Louis Law is launching an online LL.M. program for foreign lawyers for the low, low price of $48K. The exchange rate surely can’t be good enough for that to be worth it. [New York Times]

* Joran van der Sloot will likely be extradited to the United States from Peru this summer. His lawyer, Maximo Altez, isn’t a fan, because he thinks that we’ll charge his client with murder. America, f**k yeah! [ABC News]

* Oh, of course a member of the Village People’s claim just had to be the test case for 35-year copyright transfer termination. Well, kudos to you, Mr. Motorcycle Cop. You’re a real “Macho Man.” [Bloomberg]

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Early Reactions to the U.S. News Rankings: Deans and the Excuses They Make

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Let's see them talk their way out of this.

The U.S. News law school rankings are out, which means it’s open season on law school deans. Nothing puts a law school dean’s job in jeopardy like a fall in the law school rankings. Nothing. The law school deans can lie, dissemble, raise tuition to backbreaking levels, and still keep their jobs. But when law schools drop spots in the U.S. News rankings, law school deans start updating their résumés.

If you want proof, just look at how deans from schools that dropped are falling all over themselves to explain their results. The deans will say anything; their explanations don’t even have to make sense.

While deans from schools that dropped are trying to save themselves, deans from schools that went up in the rankings are crowing from the rooftops.

Let’s start with a school that we left out of our Most Honest Law School bracket that is now a rankings darling…

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Was Judge Posner a Dodo in His Ostrich Opinion?

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Of course not! But the headline got your attention, didn’t it? The notion of Judge Richard Posner as being anything other than a genius will certainly make people sit up and take notice. There’s a reason why there’s a Facebook group called Richard Posner for Philosopher King (of which I am a proud member).

It should be noted, however, that Judge Posner’s opinion in Gonzalez-Servin v. Ford Motor Co. was not 100 percent perfect. It initially contained some infelicitous wording — which has since been fixed.

Let’s look at the language that was perhaps imprecise….

UPDATE (4 PM): Additional comment from Judge Posner, added after the jump.

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