Biglaw, Education / Schools

16 Colleges Decide To Share A Law Firm To Cut Costs, But Will Other Schools Follow?

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The law school tuition bubble gets the most attention because this is a legal audience and there are also real access to justice issues involved in pricing students out of pursuing public interest and other lower paying roles. But we’ve all gone to college too and the undergraduate tuition bubble is just as real and carries devastating impacts of its own into the world by putting a generation of Americans on the stoop of credit ruin before they even start their first job.

As Paul Campos has pointed out, one of the primary factors driving of tuition increases is administrative bloat. Public institutions may see some drop in government support and many schools may splurge on luxury facilities, but the growth in the non-faculty staff has had the biggest impact in rising tuition since the 1960s.

So go ahead and blame your associate dean of intramural sports. And his or her assistant. And the assistant’s secretary. And the secretary’s intern.

While there are a number of dubious administrative posts in academia, at least a share of this spike in headcount is an organic results of higher administrative challenges. For example, more legal headaches from litigation risks to new construction deals to dealing with Trump’s immigration shenanigans — remember it was the impact on university students that formed the basis of the Washington AG’s challenge to the Muslim Ban — and in-house legal budgets have gone up as a result.

The 16-member Associated Colleges of the South is looking outside the box to put some brakes on rising legal costs by signing one firm to handle the legal work of all its independent member institutions. Congratulations to Steptoe & Johnson PLLC (the West Virginia Steptoe & Johnson, not the D.C.-Steptoe & Johnson that tried to ruin a fried chicken restaurant). Per Inside Higher Ed:

Steptoe will offer both preventative educational advice designed to help keep the 16 colleges out of legal trouble, by better navigating the increasingly complex regulatory environment they face, and project-based legal services at a sharply reduced rate on issues such as federal regulatory compliance, academic freedom, domestic and international admissions, and nonprofit governance.

That sounds like a great idea on paper. Can the group get institutional buy-in? Many schools have tight relationships with their existing outside counsel — some of whom may be perennial donors and boosters — and it may be hard to make a clean break. But to the extent the schools can get on board, the common legal challenges they face could yield benefits when the firm doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel after helping a sister institution with an identical problem a few months earlier. The arrangement also contemplates Steptoe being able to share legal insights gained from one matter with other institutions as the group’s head R. Owen Williams put it:

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“As soon as any one of our colleges encounters some sort of quagmire or quicksand,” Williams says, “we’re going to be able to save them and then pass the message to the others — ‘here’s the quicksand,’ creating a feedback loop of sorts.”

Hopefully every school is cool with laying everything out there for their fellow ACS members. This is a proposal that’s only as strong as the support it gets from the schools. As Williams put it to Inside Higher Ed when discussing how this unconventional arrangement came to be:

“The point we tried to make with our members is that we have more in common with each other than not, and we need to recognize that we’re competing against others,” Williams says, citing honors colleges at public universities and online providers as examples. “We have to get people over this sense of competitiveness.”

Whether Williams successfully squelched that sense of competitiveness remains to be seen. Let’s check in on the tuition ACS member schools are charging in a couple of years to see how it all worked out.

16 Colleges, 1 Law Firm [Inside Higher Ed]

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HeadshotJoe Patrice is an editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news.

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