Camille Andrews threatens to sue anyone who says anything mean about her

Rutgers-Camden is playing the role of Secretariat at the Belmont in this year's Most Preposterous Law School derby:

When New Jersey Rep. Rob Andrews used campaign funds to pay for a family trip to Scotland, an unusual compliance officer signed off: his wife.

Camille Andrews, a lawyer and associate dean at the Rutgers-Camden law school, also oversees legal questions about Andrews' political spending.

So when the Democratic congressman decided in 2011 that the couple and their two daughters should fly to Edinburgh and stay in a five-star hotel for a wedding, he relied on her judgment that they could use campaign accounts to cover the $30,115 tab, according to statements in a recently unveiled ethics investigation.

You may remember Dean Andrews and Rutgers-Camden from such emails and press releases as  "many [of our 2011 graduates] accepted positions with firms paying in excess of $130,000,"  ["many" in this context turned out to be a term of art meaning "one"] and "we understated our graduates' debt levels by a factor of three while claiming to be one of the biggest bargains in legal education."

Now Andrews has dusted off her Con Law casebook, and skimmed New York Times v. Sullivan, so she could bluster to the Philadelphia Inquirer that she's not kidding around about protecting her professional reputation, such as it is:

The wedding was for a onetime political operative Rob Andrews said he hoped to recruit to help in campaigns, so he has argued that the expenses were tied to his political work.

Details of Camille Andrews' role emerged in a 244-page report from the Office of Congressional Ethics, a nonpartisan board that reviews ethics complaints and sends potential violations to the House ethics committee.

 Testimony in the report, released Aug. 31, offers a revealing glimpse of the 22-year congressman, highlighting his hopes to expand his influence in the House and his reliance on a small circle of advisers, including his wife.

The trip to Edinburgh, a bustling city that blends ancient spires and an imposing castle with modern shopping and restaurants, drew the most attention from the ethics board.

Andrews, 55, decides which events to attend, he told Office of Congressional Ethics investigators. His wife determines whether campaign funds can pay for them.

That pattern held for the Scotland trip. Andrews told investigators he was "perfectly comfortable and confident" in his wife's judgment.

"Camille serves as our compliance officer. . . . She is one of the three best lawyers I know - maybe five," he said in a 57-minute interview with the board March 6.

"I made an evaluation and decision that I thought it was an appropriate expenditure," Camille Andrews said in her meeting with the board.

She was referring to the $16,575 in flights to Scotland paid for by the congressman's leadership fund.
The rest came from Andrews' campaign account, which is used for a range of expenses as varied as $2.50 for cafeteria coffee to $1,123 in Tiffany's purchases. Rob Andrews told investigators that the Tiffany's items were not personal purchases and were likely gifts for a campaign donor or volunteer.

Other members of Congress have used spouses as compliance officers, said Craig Holman, government affairs lobbyist for Public Citizen.

"It is a conflict of interest, and it lacks all credibility," he said . . .

Camille Andrews wrote that her husband's responses to questions about this article "reflect my position."

"I am not a public figure," she wrote. "I will respond to any reports or comments that disparage me or portray me deliberately in a false professional light by pursuing appropriate legal recourse."

 I wonder what Camille Andrews teaches at Rutgers-Camden? Hmmm . . . let's see . . . ah yes.

There are days when the jokes just write themselves.

How reliable are law school employment numbers?

This weekend DJM broke down the official NALP statistics for the class of 2011, emphasizing how dire they are on their face (less than three out of five 2011 graduates were reported by law schools as holding full-time jobs requiring bar admission nine months after graduation).

These statistics are important, because they're all we have to work with when analyzing employment and salary outcomes, but one thing that those of us who pay attention to this stuff need to remind ourselves and others of is that all these numbers need to be taken with a pillar of salt.  As bad as the story they tell appears to be, these statistics still almost certainly give a far too positive picture of the actual employment situation for recent law school grads.

Here's why:

Versus how many graduates?

My last post examined the number of entry-level lawyering jobs available during each year of the last decade. How many graduates of ABA law schools competed for those jobs? And how many law students lost out in the job lottery? Answering those questions takes two steps, because NALP does not gather job information about every graduate of an accredited law school. Before 2010, some schools did not report data to NALP. And, both before and after that date, participating schools fail to obtain information about some graduates.

How many jobs?

I posted earlier this week about the Bureau of Labor Statistics' sobering job projections for lawyers. You can find those posts here and here. Let's look now at the employment situation from the other side: The jobs actually found by graduating JDs in recent years.

NALP gathers information each year about the jobs law graduates take. The statistics are woefully inadequate with respect to salaries, but they offer a fairly good snapshot of jobs actually taken. LawProf has been over much of this ground before, but I thought it was worth revisiting in light of the BLS projections and other pessimistic news about the labor market. During the last 10 years, here are the number of law graduates from NALP-member schools who found jobs requiring bar admission by nine months after graduation:

Paying your dues

One indication of the extent to which the legal elites are either oblivious to the economic circumstances of a large percentage of lawyers, or, more invidiously, are exploiting those circumstances to reduce potential competition, is how much it continues to cost to become and remain a member of a state bar, and how difficult it is to get any kind of waiver for these costs.

Here's a letter I got recently from a New York lawyer.  (When reading this, keep in mind that New York's top court decided recently to impose a mandatory pro bono requirement on people seeking admission to the New York bar).

Prof. Campos,

Today, I had an amusing experience with our state bar.  I work in New York City on a variety of weird jobs that I find as a new solo wandering blindly, representing lots of misdemeanor defendants.  This week, I got a job drafting entertainment contracts and demand letters for an adult film director as a sort of makeshift "in-house" counsel (don't ask).  The regular assignments from this new business relationship, even though outside of my regular field of practice, will allow me to stop being enrolled in Medicaid for the first time since I started law school.

So, as someone who lives with in-laws and still qualifies for Medicaid, I called the New York State Bar Association to apply for tuition assistance.  After filling out a detailed form and answering many questions during a phone call that made me feel humiliated, the state bar only gave me $50 off of the $300-$500 it will cost for me to complete this year's CLE requirements. I will have to spend the same amount of money next year, as I will not qualify for the online video stuff at the cheap rates until after two years.

So, the bar forces us to pay $750 a year just to stay in good standing and charges another $300-$500 a year for classes taught by lawyers picking money for speaking fees and the products they sell (computer programs, legal forms, strategy books, blah blah).  The state bar pretends to offer help to new lawyers in six-figure debt, but this is just a scam as well.

This issue may seem somewhat small or inconsequential when compared to the rest of the law school scam, but I find it representative of the larger problem of an out-of-touch generation adding more financial burden to those who cannot bear it.  Interestingly, my husband thinks that this is all by design to keep competition, especially from solo practitioners, to a minimum by pricing them out. 

Bottom line: in New York State, I qualify for Medicaid, but I do not qualify for even one free CLE seminar. 

I wonder what Chief Judge (and career government bureaucrat) Jonathan Lippman, author of the mandatory pro bono requirement, would think about the last line of that letter?   According to Lippman, J., "if you want the privilege and honor of practicing law in New York, you're going to have to demonstrate that you're committed to our values."  And what again are those exactly, your Honor?

Jobs update:   Nationally, the legal sector lost 1,400 jobs between July and August.
 

More bad news from the BLS

Updated Below

I posted earlier this week about the Bureau of Labor Statistics projections for attorney job openings. To recap briefly, the BLS projects only 218,800 openings between 2010 and 2020--or 21,880 openings per year. Accredited law schools are currently producing about 45,000 JDs per year, more than twice the number of available jobs. Even if schools cut enrollment by 20%, a relatively dramatic move, we will finish the decade with more than 200,000 JDs who can't find jobs as lawyers.

But that's just the beginning of the bad news. Those 218,800 projected jobs are not all full-time, secure jobs with good salaries and benefits. The BLS counts all positions--part-time, full-time, temporary, or permanent--as "jobs." (I confirmed that fact directly with a helpful BLS staff member.) Notably for the legal profession, the projected openings include individuals who will open solo practices.

Wait a minute: How can the BLS estimate how many desperate lawyers will hang out their own shingles? If new solos count as people who have filled "job openings," then won't the number of "openings" rise to match the number of law graduates?

No--and the answer demonstrates an important point about the BLS projections. Economists don't project job openings based on what people want to do in the workplace; that type of wishful thinking belongs to 0Ls. The BLS uses macroeconomic models, together with appropriate inputs, to project how many job openings the economy will support in each occupation.

Applying those models, the BLS projects that the economy will support about 218,800 lawyer job openings during this decade. That number includes the low-paid public defenders and public interest lawyers. It includes the contract and part-time attorneys. It includes the in-house lawyers. It includes the attorneys who work for small firms, earning much less than median salaries. It also includes all of the new solo practitioners who will earn enough to tough things out in practice. Those are the 218,800 who will have lawyer jobs.

The other 200,000 or so JDs will have to find something else to do. The economy won't support more lawyers simply because lots of people want to go to law school--or because there are professors eager to teach them. There is a limit to how much consumers, businesses, and government will spend on legal services. Lawyers can urge businesses to purchase more legal advice; law professors can advise individuals to get legal help. Those exhortations are natural expressions of our economic self interest: Every producer thinks that consumers would be better off with more of the producer's product.

But it's hard to talk back to the U.S. economy. Consumers, businesses, and government want lots of things other than legal services: health care, food, homes, cars, manufacturing equipment, schools, prisons, fire departments, airlines, national defense--the list is enormous. Lawyers play a valuable role in our economy, but we're not invaluable.

The BLS projections won't be exactly right. The economy may support somewhat more than 218,800 lawyers this decade. On the other hand, it may support less; BLS projections can err in either direction. The depth of the recent recession, the slow growth in overall employment, the accelerating impact of technology, and continued unrest in the world economy suggest to me that BLS's current projections may be overly optimistic.

There's another, even more worrisome, reason why the BLS projections may overestimate the number of lawyer openings this decade. The projections include both new jobs and openings due to workforce departures. In making the latter estimates, the BLS relies upon historical data. If baby boomers work more years than their parents and older siblings did, there won't be as many job openings as BLS estimates. Ditto if more parents decide that they need two incomes to support a family, rather than choosing to have one parent withdraw from the workforce for a few years. Both of those trends seem likely to me; if either occurs to any noticeable extent, the BLS estimates of lawyer job openings will be too high. There may be more openings for babysitters (to care for those two-career children) or drivers (to ferry those aging boomers to work), but there won't be as many lawyer jobs.

But even if we put those gloomy predictions aside and assume that the BLS has correctly targeted the number of lawyer jobs, law schools are producing far too many lawyers. It is sheer arrogance to suggest that we can force the economy to create more lawyer jobs simply because our graduates are bright and eager. And it is dangerously deceptive to keep encouraging large numbers of students to go to law school because "the economy will turn around" or "there will be more jobs when you graduate."  The BLS has already assumed that the economy will turn around:  A fully turned, full-employment economy will produce 218,800 openings for lawyers this decade--leaving more than 200,000 new lawyers holding JD-sized debts and BA-sized jobs.

Update: A few comments have asked how the BLS counts temporary jobs. E.g., if 50 document reviewers work for one month on Project A, then move on to Project B, does that count as 50 openings or 100? The answer is that it depends on what the document reviewers were doing before they started Project A. If the document reviewers were already doing lawyer work of some kind, then this hypothetical includes zero new openings.

I could have made this more clear in the original post, so let me explain a little further. When the BLS projects the number of "job openings" that will occur in an occupation over the next decade, it is estimating the number of new entrants that the occupation can absorb. It is not trying to predict how many new jobs will be advertised or how many lawyers will move from one law job to another; it is only looking at how many slots will be available for new people to take.

Suppose, for example, that Microsoft increases the size of its in-house department by adding a new lawyer to its team. Microsoft consults a headhunter and hires a senior associate from Big, Big & Law firm. Big, Big & Law replaces that associate with a third-year attorney from Small law firm. Small then hires a new graduate from State U Law. Three jobs were advertised here, and three people started new work, but this is only one "job opening" in BLS terms: only one new worker moved into the lawyer occupation category.

The BLS, in other words, answers precisely the question that troubles many readers of this blog (and that should be troubling law school faculties): How many new lawyers can the U.S. economy absorb over the next decade? The answer is about 218,800--not 450,000 or even 420,000.

Slow learners

Here are quotes from a Detroit business magazine story ($$):

Some Michigan law schools will begin the 2012-13 academic year with a smaller class of incoming students.

Academic experts say a shrinking job market for entry-level attorneys is the biggest driver, but trends vary by school.

The University of Michigan Law School begins its fall semester this week with a class of 345 first-year students drawn from a pool of just over 5,000 applicants, compared with 359 enrolled from 5,422 applicants last fall, and 376 first-years from an applicant pool of 6,312 in 2010.

Wayne State University Law School began its fall semester in late August with 148 first-year students enrolled from 833 applicants, compared with 181 out of 1,123 applicants last year and 197 from 1,363 in 2010.

Dean Robert Ackerman at Wayne State said falling enrollment and applicant interest have plagued law schools nationwide and particularly in Michigan, where most of the school's applicant pool originates. He sees the trend as a mix of the recovery in Michigan's economy and the contracting market for law jobs.

According to a recent report from the National Association for Law Placement, the overall employment rate for class of 2011 law school graduates is 85.6 percent, the lowest it has been since 1994. The association measures employment as of nine months after completing law school.

"Two phenomena here are converging. One is the employment situation, and the harsh reporting on the national stage about legal education. That, I think, is tied to a structural change (in the profession), and not a cyclical trend," Ackerman said . . .

LSAC director of communications Wendy Margolis said the primary reason is believed to be a weakening private-sector job market for recent law school graduates.

"The tenor of the recent articles about this (trend) is really frustrating," said Sarah Zearfoss, senior assistant dean for admissions, financial aid and career planning at UM's law school.

"I feel our students are still very enthusiastic and happy to be here, but they have made the decision in the midst of criticism -- as if friends and academic advisers wonder if they are crazy by choosing to be lawyers."

I guess some people are just incorrigible.  Let’s look at the numbers:

Estimated debt-financed cost of a law degree for the UMLS class of 2015:  $248K non-resident/$237K resident.

Percentage of the class of 2011 that had a legal job nine months after graduation (defined as full-time long term employment requiring bar admission, not counting solos, but counting two people employed by the school):  75.5%

Percentage of the class of 2011 that was employed by UMLS in the fall of 2011 in short-term “fellowships” that paid $333 per week:  20% 

Percentage of the class of 2011 that had a job with a law firm of more than ten attorneys:  38%

That’s a high stakes gamble by any reasonable reckoning.  A quarter of the class of 2011 didn’t get a real legal job of any kind.  About half of the other three quarters didn’t get jobs that come within a mile of paying a salary that allows the average grad to service his or her debt in a timely manner.  (Yes, UMLS has a “good” LRAP program, in that people in low-paying private sector jobs are eligible for it. On the other hand the program, like other LRAP programs at most top schools, has bootstrapped itself to IBR/PSLF, so that UMLS grads have their IBR and PSLF payments made for them by the school up to a certain income level. Almost all LRAP programs no longer pay what graduates actually owe on their loans, although I believe HYS still do).

Is UMLS currently worth sticker if debt-financed? Traditional analyses of debt to income ratios would conclude that it isn’t for a large majority of the class.  Now you can make an argument that UMLS is still a reasonable choice even for many students who aren’t given huge breaks on sticker, but it’s a tough argument to make -- and you have to actually make it, as opposed to engaging in the typical legal academic hand-waving about how education is priceless, prosperity is just around the corner, you could always become president of the Pittsburgh Steelers with the help of your versatile degree etc. etc.

What’s truly absurd is whinging about how all these awful people are saying mean things to our bright-eyed and bushy-tailed 1Ls (“mean things” defined as “quoting actual cost of attendance, employment, and salary numbers.”), instead of just celebrating their choice to spend a quarter million dollars to become – whoops, make that try to become! – lawyers.