LSATs are lower than in previous years. There’s been an arms race with LSATs and GPAs [among top law schools], but I think the shrunken pool has forced admissions officers to think about what we really need in our class, and it’s not just the LSAT. I think we are choosing substance over LSATs.
– Sarah Zearfoss, dean of admissions at the University of Michigan Law School, explaining to The Careerist that with fewer applications, Michigan is starting to consider substance (implying that she doesn’t think the LSAT is substantive).
We resume our examination of professorial pay at the nation’s top public law schools (which generally have to make salary data public due to their status as state institutions). We’ve previously visited the East Coast, represented by UVA Law, and the West Coast, represented by Boalt Hall (Berkeley).
Now it’s time to head into the heartland. Let’s collect and analyze some compensation information for law professors at another elite institution, the University of Michigan Law School (#9 in the latest U.S. News rankings, and #12 in the recently released Above the Law rankings).
These salary numbers are strong. And remember that dollars go farther in Ann Arbor than they do on the coasts….
* Eugene Volokh analyzes the free-speech issues raised by the prosecution of Anya Bargh, the UConn law student accused of sending anti-Semitic and racist emails. [Volokh Conspiracy]
* Lawyerist thinks you suck, not the gunners. Discuss. [Lawyerist]
* Law and the Multiverse now has CLE courses about comic books. Maintaining this license just got that much easier. [Law and the Multiverse]
* Some new developments in the Ed O’Bannon case against the NCAA. Basically, discovery has not been kind to the NCAA. [Bloomberg]
* All the editors-in-chief at Michigan Law are women. Now, if another 90 or so journals follow suit, Staci’s article will seem outdated. [Michigan Law]
* Ruh-roh. Did David Boies blow the lid off campaign spending limits last cycle? [Huffington Post]
* No, Mike Bloomberg was not denied a slice of pizza yesterday. [Gawker]
* WARNING: If you understand math, the latest from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly will annoy the hell out of you. [PrawfsBlawg]
* Man injured in a drunken fight sues the bar that he says should have cut him off. [Overlawyered]
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….
We know that our readers simply cannot get enough of these employment rankings, so we decided to bring you some more. This time, we’ll be taking a look at the law schools that people dream of attending: the 14 most elite schools in the nation, more commonly known among the legal community as the T14. Everyone knows that graduates of these fine institutions are able to get jobs — in fact, many of these schools are able to boast “employed at graduation” rates of over 90 percent.
But some graduates from these hallowed halls experience the same problems as those of their brethren from the lower echelons of law schools. Not everyone has the luxury of being able to find full-time, long-term employment as lawyers, not even graduates from the best-ranked law schools in country.
Wouldn’t you like to see which top law school has the highest percentage of underemployed graduates? Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled T14ers….
In case you haven’t noticed by now, law students tend to be an overly dramatic bunch. If something inconveniences them, their lives have been ruined. If they don’t immediately get their way, they’ll storm off to Change.org and write a petition about it. And if something bad happens to them and they’ve got access to a school-wide listserv, then my God, abandon all hope ye who open that email.
Around these parts, we’re prone to calling these people “Millennials” — the special little snowflakes who’ve been raised to believe that they can do no wrong. That’s why we love it so when one of them gets smacked down by one of their more cynical peers.
Earlier this week, an enraged student from a T14 law school sent out a fiery email to the entire school because oh nooooes, someone had stolen her lunch, which is obviously the worst thing that’s ever happened in this chick’s life. But we’re kind of happy that this most awful event occurred, because the reply email is absolutely fabulous….
* It looks like it’s time for yet another rousing game of Biglaw musical chairs. This time, 11 of Bingham McCutchen’s securities enforcement partners are hightailing it over to Sidley Austin en masse. [DealBook / New York Times]
* This week in on-shore outsourcing: there may be a job waiting for you at Kaye Scholer’s new operations center (so new we bet you didn’t know about it), so hurry up and apply, because the interviews are soon. [Tallahassee Democrat]
* “We’re trained in the law and persuasion, not firearms.” But maybe you should be? After the targeted killing of attorneys in Texas, prosecutors are now on high alert. [New York Times]
* When looking at the current law school model, Paul Caron of TaxProf Blog urges law deans to take advice from Jimmy McMillan because “law school tuition is simply too damn high.” [Businessweek]
* Change our admissions practices amid the worst legal economy we’ve seen in decades? “Ain’t nobody got time for that,” scoffed Sarah Zearfoss, director of admissions at Michigan Law. [AnnArbor.com]
* Drexel Law will accept applications for its two-year law degree program in May 2014. The higher-ups at the ABA are scheduled to laugh their asses off on or about the same date. [Philadelphia Inquirer]
* “[F]or James Eagan Holmes, justice is death.” In a move that shocked absolutely no one, the prosecution in the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre case is seeking the death penalty. [CNN]
Much credit has been given to the American Bar Association of late for its efforts to rein in law schools and their wily ways as far as employment statistics are concerned. Once upon a time, it was just fine for law schools to publish completely nonsensical data and herald it to the world as if it were true. Prospective (and extremely gullible) applicants were made to believe that it was possible for 98 percent of a class to be employed nine months after graduation during the height of the recession, and they applied in droves.
These days, now that word has gotten out that employment in the entry-level legal sector has run dry, law school applications are on pace to hit a 30-year low. You’d think that given the gravity of the situation — not to mention the ebb and flow of class action lawsuits having to do with job statistics — law schools do their best to comply with the ABA’s standards, but apparently even that’s too hard to do.
Perhaps the ABA’s reporting requirements are too tough in that they require not one, but Dear Lord, two charts to be published, along with consumer information that’s “complete, accurate, and not misleading.” That’s a pretty high bar to reach, amirite? Considering the state of the job market, providing accurate employment information about law schools must be really embarrassing rough for administrators to have to endure.
In fact, some law schools in the T14 can’t even bring themselves to adhere to these stringent requirements….
Understand, I would force people to use this calculator from a desire to do good.
The University of Michigan Law School has created something beautiful. It’s a tool forged by the explosive union of “facts” and “math.” It’s a vision of a future where law students actually know what they’re getting into before they go to law school. It’s not perfect, but I feel as if I’ve just looked up at the first light on the fifth day, and seen something brilliant.
As we mentioned this morning, Michigan Law has a new tool that points students towards “11,000 possible [debt] repayment paths.” And most of them are God-awful.
Because Michigan Law is just trying to tell you the truth….
Law school is a ‘debt wizard’ — it’ll make your money disappear like magic!
* In the nick of time, lawyers for the Obama administration filed a brief with the Supreme Court urging the justices to strike down California’s ban on gay marriage. Let’s hope their views have evolved. [BuzzFeed]
* As the lawyers and administrative staff who just got laid off at Patton Boggs can attest to, it sucks to be on the wrong side of “rightsizing.” We’ll have more on this developing story later today. [Reuters]
* Lanny Breuer is leaving the DOJ today, and he’s doing it with a bit of “swagger.” He’s shrugging off rumors that he’ll retreat to Covington, insisting he’ll interview at many firms. [DealBook / New York Times]
* It’s time for the changing of the guard over at Milbank Tweed. Mel Immergut, the longest serving chair of any Am Law 100 firm in New York, is passing the reins to Scott Edelman. [New York Law Journal]
* Michigan Law has a new “Debt Wizard” program that’s extremely useful in that it will allow you to see what you’re getting yourself into. Or, in my case, how poor I’ll be for the rest of my life. Yay! [National Law Journal]
* All he wanted to do was “make the world a better place,” but that didn’t work out so well. In a plea deal, Bradley Manning pleaded guilty to 10 of the charges against him in his WikiLeaks case. [Los Angeles Times]
* Of all of the words that are used to describe Cory Booker, one of them is now “matchmaker.” The Newark mayor assisted a young Seyfarth Shaw associate with his engagement proposal earlier this week. [TIME]
Watch to find out what some of our subscribers received in their May box!
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We currently have a number of active openings for associate roles at US and UK firms in HK / China, Singapore and two new in-house openings. As always, please feel free to reach out to us at asia@kinneyrecruiting.com in order to get details of current openings in Asia, as well as to discuss the Asia markets in general and what we expect for openings later this year. Our Evan Jowers and Robert Kinney will be in Beijing the week of March 25 and Evan Jowers will be in Hong Kong the week of April 1, if you would like to meet them in person.
The US associate openings we have in law firms are in the usual areas of M&A, cap markets, FCPA / white collar litigation, finance, and project finance. The most urgent of our top tier (top 15 US or magic circle) law firm openings in Asia (among many other firm openings that we have in Asia) are as follows:
• 2nd to 5th year mandarin fluent M&A associates needed in Beijing and Hong Kong at several firms;
• Korean fluent 2nd to 4th year cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 5th year Japanese fluent M&A associates needed in Tokyo;
• 4th to 6th year mandarin fluent cap markets associate needed in Hong Kong;
• 2nd to 4th year M&A / cap markets mix associate needed in Singapore.
The last time I flapped my wings your way, I tried to make at least enough noise about your mobile phone to make you more than a little bit uncomfortable. I hope I did. If enough of us become anxious enough about the known and unknown unknowns and knowns in our mobile phones, then we can start making wise decisions about how to manage that information and its resultant investigations.
Today, I’d like to put a finer point on the last installment’s topic by asking a question that seemed to catch most attendees off-guard at a conference panel that I moderated last week: is there discoverable personal information in a mobile app? Our panelists’ answer was a uniform “yes” with one stating that, if he had to choose only one type of data that he could discover from a mobile phone, he’d choose app data. Why? Because there’s simply so much of it and because almost all of it is objective – not just user-created like an email – but machine-tracked like GPS, usage duration, log in and log out times, browsed web addresses, browsed actual addresses. Also, most of us seem to have the idea that data doesn’t actually “stick” to our mobile devices the way it “sticks” to our hard drives. Maybe there’s a disconnect based on the fact that our phones are mobile so we assume the data is mobile to?
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