If I had a dollar for every time I've heard somebody inside a law school complain about the school's career services office I could buy a brand new case book (that's a whole other topic). Apparently over the last few years just about every CSO out there was staffed by incompetent do-nothings. That, at any rate, has become a popular explanation within law schools for why it's gotten so hard for our graduates to get actual law jobs.
Now it's quite possible that lots of CSOs have been staffed by incompetent do-nothings, but the cold truth of the matter is that a CSO staffed by cardboard cutouts will do just fine when employers are hiring, while when they're not it hardly matters if a CSO is stacked to the rafters with ever-so competent and hardworking people, because career service people can't help students and graduates get jobs that don't exist.
It's also true that a good career services office can occasionally dig up job opportunities here and there for particular students and grads those people might not have been aware of otherwise, but let's face it: in the information age, the marginal value that CSOs add must be declining -- which of course hasn't stopped law schools from pouring ever-more resources into these offices, partially because schools have to spend all that tuition money on something, and because all of us are prone to magical thinking (if we just find the right person to run the CSO it can be 1987 or at least 2006 again).
The problem, as cannot be repeated enough, is that there are at least twice as many law grads as there are law jobs. I just went through all the job listings that CU's CSO is currently categorizing as "entry level" positions, potentially available to graduates from the school's last two classes. For anybody working at a law school who happens to be reading this, I highly recommend undertaking a similar exercise. Imagine that you graduated ten or twenty-two months ago, and you don't have a law job at all, or you're in a temp position that's about to end. At all but about four law schools, anywhere from a large minority to a large majority of recent grads are in this position. Your graduates need legal jobs: where can they find them?
The listings I reviewed included a total of 73 positions. The first problem that should be obvious to any prospective job hunter is that three-quarters of these jobs are outside not just the state, but the entire Rocky Mountain region. One of the biggest problems in the legal employment market is that you can't just go anywhere to work as a lawyer -- you have to be licensed to practice in a jurisdiction. Most CU graduates are licensed in Colorado, which makes sense: about 40% of our students are from the state, many more came intending to work here, and, most important of all, law school hiring tends to be intensely regional.
At more than 90% of law schools, even in flush times the chances of getting a legal job plummet for graduates who try to practice outside the region in which a school places most of its grads. That's where the school's hiring network of alums is located; that's where graduates have personal and professional connections that can help them get a job; and at the very least that's where the people making hiring decisions have actually heard of your school. This is why it's a particularly perverse reaction, especially at a school like CU, for law faculty and administration to complain that our graduates are un- and under-employed because they aren't willing to leave the area. After all, people came to school here precisely to get a job in the area, and moreover that's where the vast majority of jobs our graduates can get actually are (If you want a mordant laugh, check out this infamous piece of advice from an Emory professor, who chose the occasion of the school's 2011 commencement to advise unemployed Emory grads to look for jobs in, say, Nebraska. The problem with this advice -- leaving aside the awkward detail that there aren't any law jobs in Nebraska -- is that there are no Emory law alumni in Nebraska, which is one big reason nobody in Nebraska has ever heard of Emory, the others being its 1500 miles away and doesn't have a football team).
Thus it's a major practical problem that the 73 jobs uncovered by the CU OCS include 19 in California and 14 in the Washington DC area, but only 18 in Colorado (along with, speaking regionally in the broadest sense, one in Arizona, one in Nebraska, and zero in New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming). In other words, most of our graduates are not eligible to apply for most of these jobs, since they require that applicants be barred in the jurisdictions in which the jobs are located (This doesn't even consider the further difficulty that, given the overall state of the legal markets in California and DC, the notion that CU law graduates could compete successfully for jobs in these locations would be improbable even if this fundamental barrier to entry didn't exist).
But beyond this, our recent graduates aren't minimally qualified for most of the listed Colorado jobs either, since ten of the 18 positions require at least two years of practice experience, i.e., a standard that no one who has graduated after 2009 could possibly meet. And, as every recent law school graduate knows, "at least two years of practice experience" ends up meaning, in practice, "at least five and probably seven or more years of practice experience, since there are plenty of people with that much experience who are now desperate to work for 30% less than what a few years ago they would have considered an entry-level salary."
This means most of our recent grads will find in this list a grand total of eight jobs that they are, in the most liberal sense of the phrase, actually qualified to apply for. These jobs consist of:
(1) An assistant city attorney position in a medium-sized town that lists experience as a prosecutor as "desirable." (translation: essential)
(2) A job assisting a sole practitioner with general civil litigation. (probably an eat what you kill arrangement)
(3) A job with an immigration law firm (candidates must be bilingual in English and Spanish).
(4) A job with an insurance defense firm, that requires either a year's practice experience or a clerkship (this would seem to disqualify 2011 graduates).
(5) A job with a firm specializing in family law that doesn't require but clearly prefers previous experience practicing family law. (see job #1 supra).
(6) Three jobs for "tax resolution" positions. (None of these jobs actually require a JD, and they look suspiciously seasonal.)
That's it. In just the last couple of years, CU and the University of Denver have graduated a combined total of several hundred current members of the Colorado bar who at this moment don't have real law jobs (again, a real law job = full-time long-term employment requiring a law degree). This figure doesn't even take into account all the recent grads from genuinely national schools who have gotten Lathamed, or just struck out at OCI, and who have wandered into our fair state, looking like updated refugees from the Joad family, assuming the Joads had picked up some Oakley sunglasses on the road west. Nor does it include all the licensed Colorado attorneys with five and ten and twenty years experience who have gotten bounced from their positions in the last few months and are looking for work, or who hate their current jobs so much they're willing to take a pay cut at a new one. Etc.
Add all that up and the number of licensed Colorado attorneys (or aspiring attorneys) currently looking for legal work surely runs well into four figures, while the CSO can't find 20 lawyer jobs in the whole state.
This is a reminder that at all but a handful of law schools, many if not most of the people in every graduating class leave law school without jobs, and will have to try to enter a market in which there are very few entry points for people in their position. It's also a reminder of how it's mostly irrelevant to most law schools and most law graduates whether or not big law hiring bounces back to the level it was at five years ago. If less than ten percent of your graduates get jobs with big firms -- which has always been the situation at more than 80% of law schools without regard to the business cycle -- then the real question is always going to be what happens to that vast majority of your class that doesn't get a job through OCI.
And the answer to that question has become: They'll enter an employment market where they will need a lot of luck to get any kind of real legal job at all, let alone one that will allow them to actually pay back the six figures-plus of educational debt the typical graduate now incurs for the privilege of obtaining a law degree.
Monday, March 19, 2012
Saturday, March 17, 2012
Law School Transparency's push for adoption of a revised Standard 509
The ABA's Council of the Section of Legal Education is meeting today in an open session at the Westin Beach Resort and Spa in Fort Lauderdale. The key item on the agenda is a revision of Standard 509 -- the ABA's consumer information standard.
Law School Transparency has submitted a memo regarding the proposed revision, which apparently the Council will consider. The memo is mostly devoted to advocating for various technical changes in the proposal, but ends with a general statement that, at this point, I hope few people in legal academia would be willing to disagree with (at least openly):
Speaking of which, the current chairman of the Council, New England School of Law Dean John O'Brien, received a salary of $737,482, plus $44,238 in other compensation in 2010, per IRS tax form 990. I doubt Dean O'Brien shares LST's views on the extent to which this system is broken, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the opinions of persons such as himself are not going to decide these matters for much longer.
Law School Transparency has submitted a memo regarding the proposed revision, which apparently the Council will consider. The memo is mostly devoted to advocating for various technical changes in the proposal, but ends with a general statement that, at this point, I hope few people in legal academia would be willing to disagree with (at least openly):
(5) Regulatory Barriers to More Efficient Law SchoolsThe last sentence in the quote alludes to the fact that, behind the scenes, a couple of U.S. Senate committees remain keenly interested in what the ABA is or isn't doing to reform a broken system. The Council has been made well aware of this fact -- a fact which has quite direct relevance to the Council's sudden new-found interest in improved law school transparency.
It has become apparent that legal education has gotten away from legal educators. There are almost 200 schools vying to be Harvard-like think tanks. The vast majority of these schools set tuition prices in a distorted market, with rates loosely based on a school’s U.S. News ranking and geographic location. This pricing model, which relies on student loans and dwindling credibility, will not survive. The Council should acknowledge this reality and ensure that the ABA standards do not stand in the way of schools needing to substantially change how they deliver a quality legal education.
At some point, as more and more graduates question their own ability to practice law upon graduation and more clients refuse to pay for their services, we must do more than idly theorize on changes to the current model. We believe the Council’s first step should be to conduct an inquiry into how the accreditation standards (a) functionally prevent low-cost alternatives and (b) could be adapted to allow other models to emerge. For too long, cost considerations have been absent from reform discussions. The Council should seize the chance to better legal education for the sake of the profession and society at-large.
In November, we asked that Jeffrey Lewis, dean emeritus and professor of law at Saint Louis University School of Law, create a special subcommittee to review regulatory barriers preventing law schools from adapting low-cost models. To date, plans for such a committee have not been announced. It is critical that the Council ask Dean Lewis to create this committee today, and that the Council urges the new committee to act quickly and thoroughly. If the answers do not come quickly from legal educators, the result will be that educators end up forfeiting their right to control the changes. And if the answers have to come from elsewhere, unbreaking the broken law school model will be as painful as it is necessary.
Speaking of which, the current chairman of the Council, New England School of Law Dean John O'Brien, received a salary of $737,482, plus $44,238 in other compensation in 2010, per IRS tax form 990. I doubt Dean O'Brien shares LST's views on the extent to which this system is broken, but it's becoming increasingly clear that the opinions of persons such as himself are not going to decide these matters for much longer.
Friday, March 16, 2012
Say anything
I didn't want to pay more attention to the controversy regarding the gap between Columbia's and NYU's NALP reports regarding the number of their grads who got big law firm jobs in 2010 and the NLJ250 statistics (for one thing big law placement is relatively minor side show in the multi-tiered disaster that is the current employment market for ABA law school grads), but a new story in Fortune throws further light on the extent to which anyone should believe anything law school administrators say regarding their schools' employment stats. Here's the dean of CLS:
Stats? Stats:
Percentage of Columbia law graduates getting jobs with NLJ250 firms by year:
2006: 69.9
2007: 74.8
2008: 70.5
2009: 54.4
2010: 55.2
2011: 51.7
This chart shows a comparable collapse in big law hiring at most elite law schools for the class of 2009, which continued and deepened for the classes of 2010 and 2011. On some level it's basically nuts to assert that the elite bar is hiring fewer people but Columbia isn't affected. It's almost an oxymoron, practically equivalent to saying "the people who hire our graduates aren't hiring as many of our graduates but our graduates are not affected."
Again, I really don't know what to say. Possible explanations:
(1) Schizer was misquoted. If so, he ought to speak up now or forever hold his peace.
(2) Schizer said this and believes it's true. If so, he's deeply delusional, at a level I wouldn't have thought possible even for elite law school deans, who often show signs of being less than securely tethered to reality on a whole range of subjects.
(3) Schizer said this, knows it isn't true, and is lying because he believes it's in his own and his institution's interest for him to lie.
(4) Schizer said this, doesn't know whether it's true or not, and doesn't care, because bullshitting is what deans do in the same way other people brush their teeth at bedtime.
My guess -- and that's really all it is -- is that (4) is the most plausible explanation. Legal academics in general and legal academic administrators in particular are people who get used to just saying stuff without bothering too much about whether they actually know what they're talking about, because bullshitting is a hard habit to break.
Protip for future reference: Journalists for the national media aren't law students. You're not a fearsome authority figure to them. In fact, what you are is a schmuck. They won't tell you so in so many words, but if you lie to them or act like you know what you're talking about when you don't, they'll write stories that make it clear to their readers that that's what you are.
Among top tier law schools -- where debt can be steep -- employment data can be hard to parse as well. Columbia University's law school, which kept its No. 4 national ranking this year, says that it did not exaggerate its employment numbers because two dozen law firms did not report their hiring, and employed graduates who had not been admitted to the bar were not included in the overall total.Really, at some point what is there left to say? Note that Dean Schizer wasn't making an off the cuff remark to cowed law students at "town hall" meeting, or posting anonymous snark on the internet, or mumbling something to a Jobs Creator at the bar after his fourth G&T at yet another unbearably tedious fundraising event. Instead, he said this, while on the record, to a journalist for one of the nation's leading financial publications.
"It's true that the elite bar is hiring fewer people," says David Schizer, dean of Columbia's law school. "But is Columbia affected? No."
Stats? Stats:
Percentage of Columbia law graduates getting jobs with NLJ250 firms by year:
2006: 69.9
2007: 74.8
2008: 70.5
2009: 54.4
2010: 55.2
2011: 51.7
This chart shows a comparable collapse in big law hiring at most elite law schools for the class of 2009, which continued and deepened for the classes of 2010 and 2011. On some level it's basically nuts to assert that the elite bar is hiring fewer people but Columbia isn't affected. It's almost an oxymoron, practically equivalent to saying "the people who hire our graduates aren't hiring as many of our graduates but our graduates are not affected."
Again, I really don't know what to say. Possible explanations:
(1) Schizer was misquoted. If so, he ought to speak up now or forever hold his peace.
(2) Schizer said this and believes it's true. If so, he's deeply delusional, at a level I wouldn't have thought possible even for elite law school deans, who often show signs of being less than securely tethered to reality on a whole range of subjects.
(3) Schizer said this, knows it isn't true, and is lying because he believes it's in his own and his institution's interest for him to lie.
(4) Schizer said this, doesn't know whether it's true or not, and doesn't care, because bullshitting is what deans do in the same way other people brush their teeth at bedtime.
My guess -- and that's really all it is -- is that (4) is the most plausible explanation. Legal academics in general and legal academic administrators in particular are people who get used to just saying stuff without bothering too much about whether they actually know what they're talking about, because bullshitting is a hard habit to break.
Protip for future reference: Journalists for the national media aren't law students. You're not a fearsome authority figure to them. In fact, what you are is a schmuck. They won't tell you so in so many words, but if you lie to them or act like you know what you're talking about when you don't, they'll write stories that make it clear to their readers that that's what you are.
They write letters
I learned that George Washington had posted its 2011 employment stats from a 3L, portions of whose letter I'm posting here with permission:
Right now, firms aren't hiring much and government, in many places, isn't hiring period. This was driven home to me yet again yesterday during a conversation with an unemployed 2011 grad of a school solidly within the top 20 (grades in the top 40%; tons of extra-curriculars; winning personality blah blah blah). He pointed out that when calculating acceptable outcomes for graduates of expensive elite and sub-elite schools -- the HELP list -- I may have been a little too hasty to treat federal judicial clerkships as unambiguously "good" outcomes. He keeps in close touch with most of the federal clerks in his class and tells me that many of them have not been able to find any post-clerkship employment yet. In particular he referenced a friend who has top 15% grades from this top fifteenish school, is Hispanic, female, conventionally attractive (unfortunately this as everyone knows is a factor in hiring), liked by everyone, and working for a judge who normally only hires from HYS, but who still can't get a job. He spoke to a lawyer at the big firm in the building where he offices (he is self-employed and is receiving a small "fellowship" stipend from his alma mater) about this clerk -- networking! -- and the lawyer said this sounded like an ideal candidate and she would speak to the hiring partner immediately. She did but . . . the firm isn't hiring at all right now (this is a several-hundred attorney shop).
Yes anecdotes are not data but the data are terrible enough.
Stupid or evil? In this business both charity and experience continue to suggest the former remains the more likely explanation, at least for now.
The most terrifying figure I'm seeing from this -- although they didn't break down percentages for 2011 -- is that in 2008, 66% of our grads went to firms. In 2011, 40% did. That's an enormous drop.
GW, by virtue of being high-quality and located in DC, had the opportunity to assuage this somewhat by shifting to government. But even then, the hiring freeze has clearly taken a toll. We jumped from 13% to 21% in government in 2010 -- and then back to 17% in 2011.
The jobs simply aren't there. I'm thrilled that we just released these numbers in the interest of transparency, but the real lesson I learned from the numbers is that the industry is bleeding jobs and our career services office simply can't keep up (if trying to distort market reality is even their responsibility in the first place). It is, in your own words, the classic "trap" situation.
Personally, I'm doing ok. I had done my research and knew exactly why I wanted to go to law school, and I've loved it. Then, I didn't go to the best school I got into, I went to the best school that gave me the most money. Because of my scholarship (thankfully endowed, not cross-subsidized), I'm nowhere near the full debt load of my peers. But my debtload is still a lot higher than I had budgeted coming into law school. I'm in the top 15% of my class, but in spite of many callbacks and dozens of other interviews I had no offers as a 2L. Iended up working, for free (see: budget crisis), for the federal government during the summer and school year. I impressed my office but even after 8 months they had no funding to guarantee me a paid position. I'd be starving right now and unable to even pay the bar exam fees if my well-salaried romantic partner wasn't currently subsidizing my existence.
As a 3L, with the prospects of an offer from the government at nil, I did a massive direct write campaign to more than a hundred law firms,and called in every even tenuous connection I had. Miraculously, after many more interviews and callbacks, I got one single offer, in my desired practice area, from a firm. I'm incredibly thankful, but it was one of the most stressful experiences I've eve been through. Many of my friends at the top of my class are in a worse position; the bottom half is struggling even more. And we're still a top 20 school in a great location. My friends at top-30 but rural schools can't find anything. And once you fall below that, it's a bloodbath.
Lawyers basically do two things: work for law firms, and work for the government. (Yes this is an oversimplification. Sometimes they manage the St. Louis Cardinals or run the Pittsburgh Steelers. It's a versatile degree!). 70% of GW's most recent class are supposedly in such positions, but when you start digging into the numbers a lot of rats scurry out of the dark (15% of this group have jobs with firms of 10 or fewer attorneys or are going solo, both of which are categories that include a lot of essentially imaginary employment, while "government" work has the charming characteristic of sometimes turning out to be completely unpaid, due to its exemption from many of the requirements of FLSA.)I'm a hard-working middle-class kid with parents who were hit hard by the economic crash. In an absolute emergency they might be able to bail me out, but it'd be tight. That's the main reason I didn't go to T-14 schools, even though I got in. The cost was prohibitive to a middle-class kid. Back during application season as a 0L, I visited one T-14, and literally started crying because I felt like I fit in perfectly but knew there was no way I or my family could afford the $180K price tag. The other students there either were having their parents pay the price tag in cash, or were utterly naive about how much money the education actually cost, and what the opportunities would be coming out. (To quote one: "Yeah, I figure the debt is the equivalent of buying a house. But any lawyer from this school should be able to afford two houses.")
I know I've gotten lucky. But many of my friends demographically identical to me have not been so fortunate. Something is fundamentally wrong with this system when even the smart, savvy, hard-working, middle-class kids who want to live the American Dream are priced out, from the beginning, of going to good schools. And even when they do go to those schools, they've been fed lies about jobs which don't exist. That's not the America I was raised to believe in.
Right now, firms aren't hiring much and government, in many places, isn't hiring period. This was driven home to me yet again yesterday during a conversation with an unemployed 2011 grad of a school solidly within the top 20 (grades in the top 40%; tons of extra-curriculars; winning personality blah blah blah). He pointed out that when calculating acceptable outcomes for graduates of expensive elite and sub-elite schools -- the HELP list -- I may have been a little too hasty to treat federal judicial clerkships as unambiguously "good" outcomes. He keeps in close touch with most of the federal clerks in his class and tells me that many of them have not been able to find any post-clerkship employment yet. In particular he referenced a friend who has top 15% grades from this top fifteenish school, is Hispanic, female, conventionally attractive (unfortunately this as everyone knows is a factor in hiring), liked by everyone, and working for a judge who normally only hires from HYS, but who still can't get a job. He spoke to a lawyer at the big firm in the building where he offices (he is self-employed and is receiving a small "fellowship" stipend from his alma mater) about this clerk -- networking! -- and the lawyer said this sounded like an ideal candidate and she would speak to the hiring partner immediately. She did but . . . the firm isn't hiring at all right now (this is a several-hundred attorney shop).
Yes anecdotes are not data but the data are terrible enough.
Speaking of which, I got an email this week from a stressed and depressed 1L at a "top tier" school where perhaps 40% of the grads are getting real legal jobs, liberally defined. The student has middle of the class grades, is debt-financing law school, logs onto the internet occasionally, and therefore realizes that Houston we have a problem (a remarkable number of 1Ls remain innocent of this knowledge). The student spoke about his/her concerns to one of his/her professors who assured the student "that there is no need to worry, because [ ] is a top tier law school. She/he also said that being an average B student is ok since we're all excellent, and that there will be jobs for us. (Somehow, this was not very comforting)."
Stupid or evil? In this business both charity and experience continue to suggest the former remains the more likely explanation, at least for now.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
A couple of Class of 2011 placement charts
These are the first two Class of 2011 placement numbers I've seen law schools put up (there are probably others; I haven't done a search):
WUSTL
George Washington
Comments:
The most striking thing about the GWU numbers is the change over the course of the last four graduating classes.
Total number of graduates getting BigLaw jobs (250+ lawyer firms):
2008: 240
2009: 227
2010: 134
2011: 95
*A side note: GWU is yet another school at which the number of its grads listed as having jobs with firms of 250+ lawyers correlates almost exactly with the number of its grads listed by the NLJ as having jobs with NLJ250 firms (the figures are 95 and 92 respectively for the class of 2011).
Total salaries reported by GWU to NALP:
2008: 359
2009: 325
2010: 188
2011: 170
The percentage of known graduate salaries has declined from 67.9% to 32.8% over the past four years.
GWU also lists 37 2011 graduates as employed in "academia," but only one person in a law-school funded job.
The WUSTL stats are to put it charitably skeletal, but this number jumps out: Percentage of the class with a full-time "long-term" job requiring a JD nine months after graduation: 59.3%
"Long-term" is in quotation marks because both of these schools are counting judicial clerkships as "long-term" employment. They can do this while staying ("arguably" as a lawyer might say) within the NALP definitions because NALP defines "short-term" employment as any definite period of employment of less than one year. Technically most judicial clerkships last one year, although I note that in its aggregated national statistics NALP treats judicial clerkships as short-term employment. Given that a large proportion of the judicial clerkships taken by graduates of sub-elite schools are state and local rather than federal (slightly less than half at GWU in 2011; comparable number at WUSTL unknown), many of these jobs are very much short-term in both form and substance, as they are essentially a one-year reprieve from post-graduate unemployment.
In other words one doesn't have to look very critically at even these sparse statistics to conclude that less than half the most recent graduating class at the nation's 23rd-ranked law school had a real legal job nine months after graduation, even liberally defined.
WUSTL
George Washington
Comments:
The most striking thing about the GWU numbers is the change over the course of the last four graduating classes.
Total number of graduates getting BigLaw jobs (250+ lawyer firms):
2008: 240
2009: 227
2010: 134
2011: 95
*A side note: GWU is yet another school at which the number of its grads listed as having jobs with firms of 250+ lawyers correlates almost exactly with the number of its grads listed by the NLJ as having jobs with NLJ250 firms (the figures are 95 and 92 respectively for the class of 2011).
Total salaries reported by GWU to NALP:
2008: 359
2009: 325
2010: 188
2011: 170
The percentage of known graduate salaries has declined from 67.9% to 32.8% over the past four years.
GWU also lists 37 2011 graduates as employed in "academia," but only one person in a law-school funded job.
The WUSTL stats are to put it charitably skeletal, but this number jumps out: Percentage of the class with a full-time "long-term" job requiring a JD nine months after graduation: 59.3%
"Long-term" is in quotation marks because both of these schools are counting judicial clerkships as "long-term" employment. They can do this while staying ("arguably" as a lawyer might say) within the NALP definitions because NALP defines "short-term" employment as any definite period of employment of less than one year. Technically most judicial clerkships last one year, although I note that in its aggregated national statistics NALP treats judicial clerkships as short-term employment. Given that a large proportion of the judicial clerkships taken by graduates of sub-elite schools are state and local rather than federal (slightly less than half at GWU in 2011; comparable number at WUSTL unknown), many of these jobs are very much short-term in both form and substance, as they are essentially a one-year reprieve from post-graduate unemployment.
In other words one doesn't have to look very critically at even these sparse statistics to conclude that less than half the most recent graduating class at the nation's 23rd-ranked law school had a real legal job nine months after graduation, even liberally defined.
Yet more law school numbers
Nearly a week after this blog noted that Columbia and NYU had recently published employment data indicating that 555 of their 2010 graduates had jobs with firms of more than 250 lawyers, while the National Law Journal had only been able to confirm that 448 graduates in those classes had such jobs, both schools have issued responses to this observation.
The responses are quite different in tone, and to some extent in substance. Columbia, to its credit, did not use the occasion to express outrage over the fact that anyone would dare to ask questions regarding discrepancies in the reporting of employment outcomes for law school graduates. The substance of the school's response is brief:
The letter goes on to say that earlier this year NYU determined that in regard to the class of 2011 -- keep in mind my questions were regarding the class of 2010 -- non-disclosing firms hired 58 NYU grads, and that the school asked the NLJ why these grads weren't listed as working for NLJ250 firms. This would seem to contradict the statement earlier in the same paragraph that "we have strong, longstanding relationships with these [non-disclosing] firms, and if they did not provide the data, we similarly did not disclose it." Apparently NYU did disclose this data to the NLJ in regard to the class of 2011, despite its impliedly confidential working relationship with the non-responding firms.
Anyway none of this involves the class of 2010. Did the five firms that didn't report to the NLJ in 2011 that hired 49 NYU grads in 2010 also not report that year? This seems like a natural inference, but given that NYU doesn't say we can assume the school doesn't actually know. That question becomes more interesting if one examines the analogous data for NYU's class of 2008. NYU reports that 75% of its 458 employed graduates were working for law firms, and that 92.4% of those graduates were working for firms of more than 250 attorneys, i.e., NLJ250 firms. This comes out to a total of 317 graduates. How many NYU class of 2008 graduates did the NLJ report working for NLJ250 firms? 317.
This curious fact serves as a reminder that there was essentially no discrepancy between the law school-reported numbers and the NLJ numbers for any of the other top 11 law schools' classes of 2010, with the partial exception of Harvard. Did the five firms that hired 49 NYU grads in 2010 and didn't report their numbers in 2011 collectively hire no Yale, or Chicago, or Michigan, or Duke grads in 2010? Why do the factors referenced by Columbia and NYU -- non-reporting firms, listing of graduates as law clerks rather than attorneys, etc.-- seem to affect only their graduates, or at least affect their graduates in such great disproportion, when it comes to the NLJ numbers? (This isn't a rhetorical question by the way).
This would be a good time to emphasize yet again a point I have already made explicitly, and more than once, in regard to all these questions:
The responses are quite different in tone, and to some extent in substance. Columbia, to its credit, did not use the occasion to express outrage over the fact that anyone would dare to ask questions regarding discrepancies in the reporting of employment outcomes for law school graduates. The substance of the school's response is brief:
The NLJ did not discuss with us the difference between their numbers and ours for the Class of 2010, but we had detailed discussions with them about the Class of 2011 and discovered a number of reasons why their numbers are wrong. For example, 24 of the NLJ 250 firms did not respond to the NLJ’s survey. In addition, the NLJ did not count as “employed” some full-time, permanent, first year associates who were awaiting admission to the bar. The reason is that some firms use the term “law clerk” to describe them (in order to avoid an ethical issue about describing employees not yet admitted to the bar as “lawyers”).NYU's response is another matter. Readers can decide for themselves what both the tone and substance of that response reveals. Here I'll address a couple of the response's more curious details. NYU writes:
To gather its data, the NLJ contacts each of the NLJ 250 law firms. But not all release this information. NLJ editor-in-chief David Brown told NYU Law that in this year's survey, the results of which he just published, 71 of these 250 firms provided no school-specific 2011 hiring data. And, if a firm didn’t participate and a law school declined to say how many graduates it sent to that firm, the NLJ simply recorded that as a zero. “If we didn’t have information from the law firm or the law school, we didn’t publish information we didn’t have,” Brown said. Presto: a sizeable group of entry-level lawyers vanish into the ether.First, note that the number of non-disclosing NLJ250 firms seems to vary a lot depending on whether the source for this information is Columbia, which says 24 of the 250 firms didn't disclose in 2011, and NYU, which says NLJ's editor told them 71 didn't disclose. (The fact that a paragraph later the letter states that 21 firms that hired NYU graduates were missing from the list the NLJ shared with NYU makes one wonder if the "71" figure is a typo, although of course not all non-reporting firms necessarily hired an NYU graduate).
How did this disappearing act affect NYU’s numbers? It happens that quite a few of the firms that do not release data to the NLJ are major New York-based firms that typically hire a lot of NYU Law grads. We have strong, longstanding relationships with these firms, and if they did not provide the data, we similarly did not disclose it. During its data-gathering process this year, the NLJ sent us a list of NLJ 250 firms that had reported hiring NYU Law 2011 graduates, including the number at each firm. But 21 NLJ 250 firms that hired a total of 58 of our 2011 graduates were missing from the list, and, when asked, the NLJ told us that was because these firms did not provide information. For the 2010 data that Campos cites, five of these firms alone hired 49 NYU Law 2010 graduates, erasing almost the entire discrepancy Campos cites.
The letter goes on to say that earlier this year NYU determined that in regard to the class of 2011 -- keep in mind my questions were regarding the class of 2010 -- non-disclosing firms hired 58 NYU grads, and that the school asked the NLJ why these grads weren't listed as working for NLJ250 firms. This would seem to contradict the statement earlier in the same paragraph that "we have strong, longstanding relationships with these [non-disclosing] firms, and if they did not provide the data, we similarly did not disclose it." Apparently NYU did disclose this data to the NLJ in regard to the class of 2011, despite its impliedly confidential working relationship with the non-responding firms.
Anyway none of this involves the class of 2010. Did the five firms that didn't report to the NLJ in 2011 that hired 49 NYU grads in 2010 also not report that year? This seems like a natural inference, but given that NYU doesn't say we can assume the school doesn't actually know. That question becomes more interesting if one examines the analogous data for NYU's class of 2008. NYU reports that 75% of its 458 employed graduates were working for law firms, and that 92.4% of those graduates were working for firms of more than 250 attorneys, i.e., NLJ250 firms. This comes out to a total of 317 graduates. How many NYU class of 2008 graduates did the NLJ report working for NLJ250 firms? 317.
This curious fact serves as a reminder that there was essentially no discrepancy between the law school-reported numbers and the NLJ numbers for any of the other top 11 law schools' classes of 2010, with the partial exception of Harvard. Did the five firms that hired 49 NYU grads in 2010 and didn't report their numbers in 2011 collectively hire no Yale, or Chicago, or Michigan, or Duke grads in 2010? Why do the factors referenced by Columbia and NYU -- non-reporting firms, listing of graduates as law clerks rather than attorneys, etc.-- seem to affect only their graduates, or at least affect their graduates in such great disproportion, when it comes to the NLJ numbers? (This isn't a rhetorical question by the way).
This would be a good time to emphasize yet again a point I have already made explicitly, and more than once, in regard to all these questions:
Some commenters responding to the original thread on this topic assumed I was accusing Columbia and NYU of intentionally cooking their numbers. I didn't and I'm not. What I'd like to know is why one out of every five BigLaw jobs that Columbia and NYU reported to NALP in 2010 has gone missing in the NLJ stats. There are lots of possible explanations for this that don't include outright fraud by the schools themselves (For instance one possibility is that unusually large percentages of Columbia and NYU grads are taking new non-partner track associate positions, which the NLJ doesn't count when surveying firms).I'm pleased to see that the two schools have now provided answers, the adequacy of which interested parties can judge for themselves. In any case, one would think we were well past the point where law schools had cause to feel put upon to be asked these kinds of questions, and to be expected to answer them.
Simply refusing to answer the question, however, isn't a very good way of getting people to give you the benefit of the doubt.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
20 more law schools to be sued; NYU pays $3.6 million for faculty condo
Press release reprinted below:
Law Offices of David Anziska (New York, New York), Strauss Law PLLC (New York, New York), Law Offices of Frank Raimond (New York, New York), The Clinton Law Firm (Chicago, Illinois), Concepcion Martinez & Bellido LLP (Miami, Florida), Finkelstein Thompson LLP (Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, California), Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff LLP (Sacramento, California), and Stone & Magnanini LLP (Short Hills, New Jersey and New York, New York) announced today that they are seeking to file class action lawsuits challenging the post-graduate employment rates reported by the following twenty schools:
1. New England School of Law (Massachusetts)
2. Western New England University School of Law (Massachusetts)
3: Roger Williams University School of Law (Rhode Island)
4. Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law (New York)
5. Pace University School of Law (New York)
6. St. John’s University School of Law (New York)
7. Syracuse University College of Law (New York)
9. American University Washington College of Law (District of Columbia)
10. Stetson University College of Law (Florida)
11. University of Miami School of Law (Florida)
12. University of St. Thomas School of Law (Florida)
13. Loyola University Chicago School of Law (Illinois)
14. Valparaiso University School of Law (Indiana)
15. St. Louis University School of Law (Missouri)
16. Chapman University School of Law (California)
17. Loyola Marymount University Law School (California)
18. Pepperdine University School of Law (California)
19. Whittier Law School (California)
20. Seattle University School of Law (Washington)
The average debt load for 2009 graduates of these twenty schools is nearly $115,000. “Seventy-five law school graduates have already shown that they are willing to hold their schools accountable for the misrepresentations they may have made” stated Plaintiffs’ counsel David Anziska. “That is a good start, but there are tens-of-thousands of young lawyers saddled with massive debt and few job prospects. I truly believe that at the end of this process nearly every law school in the country will be sued.” The Law Offices of David Anziska is advising graduates of the above schools that they may have certain legal rights and should contact David Anziska at david@anziskalaw.com or visit www.anziskalaw.com to learn more.
In completely unrelated news.
NYU Law '08
In completely unrelated news.
NYU Law '08
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)