A Ramble from the Other Side of the Paper Curtain

I don't know if anyone still has this internet way station on their information superhighway maps, but I'm now multiple years into practice, civil litigation, by no means either doing great or doing poorly. But I'm not here to give some grand update about my life, convey pithy witticisms about practice, or evaluate my old entries for hindsight veracity in light of years of further experience.  I'm not even going to comment on the collapses in admissions standards or bar examination scores or what our national political scene says about the role and perception of the judiciary and law.

No, I'm just poking my head in on this old dusty, long-neglected space to smile and gloat.

You can't really gloat in litigation, not only because it lacks civility, dignity, and grace, but because everyone around for more than a day and worth a darn to clients or business wins some and loses some.  Lawyers on the other side almost always have decent positions or reasons for acting as they do, and that good faith should be respected, no matter how cynical we may be about the process, the industry, or even the clients those lawyers (well, all lawyers) represent.  Only once in my young-ish career have I seen a case worthy of gloating in the event of victory and that was where the other side had already crossed the Rubicon and pissed in it on the way over.  You just don't do it unless someone really begs you.

Indiana Tech is different.

Earlier this week, Indiana Tech announced that it plans to wrap up operations.  Upon seeing the news, it reminded me that one of my top ten achievements, easily, in all of the legal field - law school, practice, you name it - is writing a post on this blog reviewing Indiana Tech's feasibility study long before Indiana Tech opened its doors or enrolled a single student.  My only "client" was my anonymous ass's ego, and my only aim the truth.  Nonetheless, it's an XBox achievement for me, with likely far more public benefit towards the ends of social justice than anything I have ever done representing real clients.

And so while dignity and comity are virtues worthy of pursuit among licensed professionals sworn to uphold respect for the courts, the democratic rule of law, and the Constitution, I'm going to take just a brief, fleeting moment, step onto the porch where the internet kids are smoking dope, and let rip an uncouth string of happy vitriol.......

I nailed it.  I fucking nailed it.  It feels swell, and I will be squeezing the models and bottles extra tight this evening. 

I and others who wrote on the issue were 100% correct.  You - Indiana Tech, Art Snyder, the Board, the administrators, everyone who put their names on that inane, witless feasibility study and everyone who said one dumb word about this school being an idea worthy of birth instead of a dirty rubber discarded - you were wrong.

I knew you were wrong.  I have known you were wrong for five years now.  I suspect you knew it as well; you should have.  We - me, Matt Leichter, Paul Ogden, Campos, Above the Law, Lord knows how many others - told you that you were wrong.  In your hubris, you decided to ignore a fairly broad consensus among quite a few people not affiliated with the enterprise.

You embarked on a course that was so utterly foolish it deserves a Darwin Award for bad business ideas.  You blew $20 million, it seems.  $20 million, flushed on what essentially became a vanity project destined to be a trivial footnote in Indiana legal history.  Your university could have invested in cancer research or given juicy loans to Tech grads to start small businesses in Fort Wayne or literally dumped the money out of an airplane.

You didn't buy favorable stocks on the morning of the crash.  You didn't buy a exurb Florida house in 2005.  This wasn't some black swan event that came with no earnest harbinger to fool reasonable minds acting rationally like the sudden shifts of fortune in a 19th century novel.

You didn't get caught up in a Dickens plot.  You boarded the Pequod while Ahab was going nuts.

You opened a law school from scratch at a no name school a full two years after Peak Legal Education had become remarkably clear.  After Alaska (a full state of 700k with no law school) conducted a feasibility study concluding that a law school wasn't cost-effective despite the inevitable monopoly.  After the U. of Delaware put its plans for a law school on hold due to the downshift in the legal education market.

Nonetheless, you insisted that you would draw a hundred students a year - cut from whole cloth, it seems - to attend a non-tier law school in northeast Indiana.

Who the hell expected any different result?  What other possible results were there?  Announce it was a bad idea and humbly close after the first enrollment figures came in to save money?  Hang on another year or two in the hopes of an easier bar exam or that dre' cummings drops an album to support the place?  

It's one thing when someone who doesn't know any better blows money on a stupid sportscar or an investment that doesn't pay off or even shows up to court and raises debunked sovereign citizen arguments.

The people who caused this $20 million dollar monstrosity are something else.

These were experienced so-called educators, white collar stewards of a non-profit institution.  Their choice to pursue this path was reckless and wanton, showing the maturity of a contemptuous, megalomaniacal six-year-old demanding a bucket-full of ice cream despite his lactose intolerance.

Surely, there are a few people deep in the ranks who deserve sympathy, the truly naive who moved with a family member or just needed a low-level admin job or something.  But virtually everyone who willfully involved themselves with this entity at a direct level should have known exactly what they were getting into.  You want to throw sophisticated consumer and caveat emptor at law applicants, fine; if the "truth" about law school was available to applicants in 2007, it was screaming in the ears of those starting an unknown law school in the rust belt in 2011.

For them, I have no sympathy and only scorn.  They took a cynical, callous, irresponsible fantasy approach to their stations, buoyed their will with an obviously and blatantly dubious feasibility study that was probably offensive on its face to honest social scientists, and then spent four to five years doubling-down on their moron's wager even as every piece of evidence reinforced how wrong they are.  If I acted this way with a client matter, I would uninsurable after the malpractice suit and probably would face disciplinary action.

Like a gambler pressing forward with a mismatched 2 and 7 on hand, they deserved to lose everything when everyone at the table called their bluff.  I sincerely hope that anyone who was even remotely involved in the decision to open or maintain a law school at Indiana Tech is scrutinized and proportionately held accountable for this nonsense. I am in no way exaggerating when I say I have seen better decisions made at 3 am by people with a high enough blood-alcohol content to be legally declared dead.  That's how stupid and avoidable all of this was.

That's why I smiled when I saw the news.  The world, on at least this small level, finished a narrative with a just and fitting result.  In a world and industry where the vagaries sometimes seem inexplicable and unfair, it feels really good to see the dominoes fall as they should and see it from the get-go, a distant cousin corollary to revenge being best served cold.

I suppose, on the bright side, it only took five years and $20 million dollars to give me this mildly orgasmic feeling, so I suppose I can at least thank Indiana Tech for somehow creating the most expensively odd and long-winded prostitution-like experience imaginable, and all without dropping a dime from my own pocket.

So....so long, Indiana Tech Law School, farewell, and thanks for the laugh. 

A Closing Argument of Sorts

This will probably be my last entry at this particular blog address. This is something I've been mulling over for the last few months, and I think the time's right to put it out to the internet pasture for a number of reasons, only a few of which I'll get into here.

When I started this blog, my goal was, as the title suggests, to be a small, positive force in changing legal education to match the ideals that almost everyone seems to agree it should have.

As it turns out, few people give a shit about doing that. Those who believe the system is rotten have little to no faith that it can be salvaged. Those who refuse to believe the system is rotten continue to blame students for their apparent sloth, misunderstanding, etc. Those open to reforming the system from within have little use for voices from the pseudonymous crowd, who is like little more than dirty, dried flecks of chewing gum on the bottom of academia's $500 shoes.

Personally, I've grown far more pessimistic about reform's prospects over the last year, and I've grown far more cynical about the legal profession as a whole. There are some things that, frankly, should be as plain as the sun is the sky: the fact that we're graduating 30-40% too many entrants into an allegedly-regulated profession; the fact that accredited law schools engaged in misleading advertising; the fact that the ease of federal loans and the strict limitations on federal bankruptcy have created a severe distortion between students and student loan lenders; etc.

And yet people - otherwise intelligent people - oppose these basic truths and fight them with every logical fallacy in the politics-for-dopes playbook. Take, for example, Scott Greenfield's recent post on today's law students viewing law school as a consumer product. Scott runs a solid blog with generally-good commentary, and by all accounts he's a great attorney. Yet, on this issue, flaws that should be ironed out the sophomore year in college appear: the straw man ("$160k job and a Ferrari"), the factless distortion (scambloggers "are usually unemployed"), the false dichotomy (in this case, between consumer good and education), the inconsistent rhetoric (if education, and the people who run it, is fundamentally different now, how can he credibly claim it meets the same normative values that it did 30 years ago?), etc.

Human psychology being what it is, those who purchase a product defend it, and the successful defend whatever they attribute their success to. Many in the boomer crowd would rather believe that the younger generation is lazy, stupid, careless, greedy, etc. than believe for one second that there's so much as a fingernail scratch on the immaculate, motherly system that birthed and breast-fed them. Curiously, many of these same people can readily recognize the flaws of other social systems, but when you mention higher education, they give you an earful about "the privilege of having an education" and "renowned research institutions" and all sorts of other shit that no one should, objectively, care about.

The idea that they would rather assume young people are lazy, stupid, careless, greedy, etc. strikes me as shockingly cynical and inherently narcissistic.

The critical thinking skills that should be taught in the freshman year of any self-respecting liberal arts education - and as a last resort, the first year of law school - go out the window.

It only goes to show how thoroughly screwed up the system is. This is supposed to be a profession where things like truth and justice are valued. And yet the system that breeds new entrants is muddied with concealment and arbitrariness and somehow that is not only acceptable, but justified when it disadvantages smart, hard-working people with disabling debt.

I've heard of multiple interviewers that tell interviewees that the interviewees' resumes are far more impressive than the interviewer's was when he or she first got hired. There are magna cum laude graduates working in retail and as support staff. There are second-tier law review editors forced to take temporary positions that lead to doc review. Likely a minority of new graduates in 2010 will be practicing law in a mere decade, and this is with tuition resembling a suburban mortgage payment.

It's a mad world, and not one that lacks proud, thumb-in-the-chest apologists. I've tried to reach them and rebut them all in the hopes of a positive restructuring. In retrospect, this might have been a poor move. The title is certainly something I'm no longer a fan of, and frankly, I'm not even sure I care about reform actually succeeding. There's part of me that believes the only thing that will change this part of the world is economic implosion, although I still think eliminating the ABA's monopoly on legal education would be a respectable start to lowering student debts and allowing for broader labor mobility.

Personally, going to law school was a horrible life decision. I have achieved respectable honors at every educational level, and gotten excellent performance reviews at every job I've ever worked. I went to a name-brand (read: top 30ish) undergraduate school and a law school that I thought would set my career on a decent path.

All I've ever asked for a decent middle-class lifestyle where I can pursue my few hobbies, have a family, etc. I know many individuals who gained that with two-year degrees without that much of a problem, and I'd be fine with that, a decent, $40k salary. I figured law school would at least secure that if I put the work in. On my most pessimistic, bottom-floor projections, I figured if I worked hard and did "well" in law school, I'd land a job with a $50,000 salary, which would be sufficient to pay off my loans long-term, live comfortably, have a family, save for retirement. I've done slightly better than I expected and I will be thrilled to have full-time work making $35k or greater within six months. With my "stats," the brochure projected I'd have no problem securing full-time work north of $65k, with a fair crack at a $100k+.

But apparently, to some people, the malfunction was my own. And my peers who finished with experience and solid academics, who would be thrilled to land $45k jobs working for the public defender or a legal aid, well, they're malfunctioned to.

The big question, thus, is this: To them, is there any scenario in which law school resembles a consumer scam?

Surely, the answer is "yes" to anyone capable of examining human nature, isn't it? Even the most out-of-touch bastard would have to concede that, right? And yet, apparently, a system where the students pay $200k in debt for a rather arbitrary crack at a any permanent work when jobs were advertised to them in the triple digits is on the "not fraud" side.

Thankfully, that view is receding into the minority. Today, Kurzon Strauss announced it was filing lawsuits against fifteen (15!) more schools: Cal-Western, Southwestern, San Francisco, Florida Coastal, Chicago-Kent, DePaul, John Marshall, Baltimore, Albany, Brooklyn, Hofstra, Pace, St. Johns, Villanova, and Widener. Can we call these the second-tier sued?

The thing is, there are so many more that are indistinguishable. Where are the two (three, for that matter) Loyolas? What about Golden Gate, Touro, Barry, Ave Maria, Florida International, St. Thomas (both, for that matter), John Marshall (Atlanta), St. Mary's, Phoenix, Elon, etc. etc. etc.? And is the ABA and/or US News going to be joined?

Is it a good time to mention that the aforementioned Scott Greenfield went to NYLS ("first-tier sued") when it was far cheaper and far more beneficial to one's life prospects? That today's Scott Greenfields may very well get sucked into permanent doc review through no choice of their own?

So many questions, but alas I must leave them for now. A year of growth and learning has made this blog stale. The title was chosen with the best of intentions but doesn't fit the message as nice as I would have liked. A reflection of its creator, the format has too often become long-winded (see this entry for Christ's sake). The blog-roll has become lengthy with blogs I don't even read.

As I might have to do with my job (if nothing else is weird about the legal job market, it's the ambiguity and arbitrariness), it's best if I start over. Thankfully, the internet gives me that prerogative so denied by our bankruptcy code.

It's been a good year. More people read my entries here than probably read the average journal article. I got my email address sued. I thrashed Indiana Tech to bits (god, that was a fun entry, albeit depressing since I imagine they'll open a law school anyway). I got hits from every law school from Albany to Yale.

I've learned a lot, too. Sometime soon, time permitting, I'll be back at the dance in new clothes. In the meantime, kids, have a good one, stay away from law school, and watch the headlines to see if - yuppee - you're a class action member. Don't laugh, Harvard kids. The way things are going, it's only time.

Silly Irrational Rich People

In today's episode of "non-profit" capitalism, I have a strong negative reaction to this article.

Hofstra University School of Law will be renamed in honor of a graduate who has agreed to donate $20 million to the Long Island school, the school announced yesterday.

It will become the Maurice A. Deane School of Law at Hofstra University in recognition of a wealthy retired pharmaceutical executive who enrolled in the school at age 50 and was the valedictorian in the class of 1981, receiving awards for both constitutional law and evidence.
...
The school said that for 30 years Mr. Deane, now in his mid-80s, has been an adviser and benefactor of the university and its law school. He served on the university's board of trustees from 1982 to 2007 and was the board's chair from 1989 to 1991. In 2008, he was named chair emeritus.
...
Mr. Deane passed the bar in 1982. Though he did not practice after graduation, he thinks his legal education "really served him well," Ms. Demleitner said.

Mr. Deane is "exceptionally fond of the law school," she said, adding that a condition of the donation was that it exclusively benefit the law school.

And the answer is "yes," you can be technically magnanimous and a complete turd at the same time.

I'm sure some of this money will trickle into scholarships and reduce someone's tuition. But if a game is rigged, it's hardly moral to bankroll the organizers. I'd almost rather the wealthy spend their money on hookers and blow, or buy some crappy artwork or something. At least then they're not supporting a fundamentally broken system that's a detriment to a field they never had any serious involvement with or dependence on.

Univ. of Illinois May Have Reported False Information

From Law.com:

The University of Illinois has launched an investigation into the accuracy of information about the median grade point average and LSAT scores disseminated by the College of Law about its incoming class.

According to a statement released by the university on Sept. 11, ethics officials on Aug. 26 received "credible information" that the law school might have reported inaccurate data regarding the class of 2014 on its Web site and in promotional materials.

Not much comment required here, but:

1. If the allegations prove true, U.S. News should immediately drop Illinois to the third tier to retain any credibility. The absurdity, theoretical and otherwise, of the U.S. News Rankings is, and always will be, a flawed driving force behind these shenanigans. Unless U.S. News actually has some type of penalty for blunt lying, the rankings' sponsor would only prove again how worthless they are.

2. If the allegations prove true, the ABA should immediately pronounce a rule allowing it to audit these institutions at will, if it doesn't already have one. Actually, the ABA should do it anyway.

3. If the University of Illinois - a school whose reputation would keep it in the top 35 regardless of a 2-3 point drop in LSAT score - has to fudge its numbers, how can anyone's numbers be taken at face value without scrutiny?

4. Undergrad stats are stupendously easy to keep track of for an admissions office. The students all wrote them on their applications, and I imagine most schools use a sort of spreadsheet/database-style calculator to ring these numbers up. If schools can't even get those numbers right, how in the firecrackin' hell are they getting the post-graduate numbers even close? A common defense to the post-graduate numbers is that they're accurate when taken with the disclaimers. Can we eve say that? Really?

See additional coverage here.

This Problem is Your Problem is Our Problem

In 2005-2007, I imagine a lot of people had a caveat emptor that's-what-you-get attitude towards people who failed in their housing ventures. I imagine that upon hearing about someone overpaying for a "flipping" property and then failing to sell it, failing to make the monthly mortgage payments, etc., that there was a lot of shadenfreude, remarks about irrational greed ("You paid $300k for a house in the ghetto?"), and such. TV shows used to show the foibles - and often failures - of those trying to flip properties to take advantage of irrational home prices. Real estate exuberance, it seemed, was a public spectacle, like a boxing match. You could participate or not, but there wasn't a sense of connection between person x's failure and the failure of the economic system.

I bring this to mind after reviewing the comments on articles like this and this. It seems there are a lot of idiots in this country who view the fraudulent nature of higher education - law school in particular - as an individual problem, one we should welcome if our attitudes towards greedy lawyers is one of antipathy, one in which we should find head-slapping entertainment if our political views prefer robust, responsible individualism and abhor people exercising their legal rights or exposing flawed systems.

Regardless of where your politics swing, the problem of young people being sucked into the educational-student loan vortex is absolutely a nationwide problem, bigger than abortion, bigger than gun control, bigger than 95% of the issues that the vacuous ruffle their feathers over. It will likely come to rival the mortgage meltdown in impact on the economy. And one of the biggest culprits is higher's education's absolute rejection of transparency, refusal - in spite of its philosophical mission statements - to present an objectively-honest self portrait, and its warm embrace of shyster marketing techniques.

According to the Census Bureau, almost 70% of our high school graduates enroll in post-secondary education. Many more attend school later on in life. In any given year, there's about 3 million who graduate high school, so in excess of 2 million enter into post-secondary education. Around 20 million are in post-secondary education at any given time, with 4-year colleges taking double the number of students at 2-year schools.

The average annual tuition at a 4-year school (public and private both) is around 21,000. Three years ago, the average debt for undergraduates was in excess of $27,000 and around 2/3 of those at 4-year schools took out undergraduate loans.

Using some very crude math and ignoring attrition, we're talking about almost a million every single year taking on almost $30,000 in non-dischargable debt. And for what purpose? The vast majority wind up moving back home. Millions wind up working in jobs that require the skill-set of a 16-year-old.

While the $30,000 figure may seem modest: 1) it's increasing every year; 2) it's above what the federal government advises for a rational student loan debt load, given the employment prospects; 3) 80+% of the time it's a wasted expenditure.

And make no mistake: many of the people borrowing these loans are among the more sophisticated people in the society. The ones that "should" go to college, but have the audacity to come from lower- and middle-class backgrounds. Each one of those one million has to service that $30,000 debt (which becomes $40,000 over a 10-year repayment) instead of buying a car, spending money on entertainment, investing, or otherwise contributing to the economy. Instead, the debt is used to support the bloated and cost-inefficient university system now.

Even at such "minimal" debt levels, the student has a $350 a month handcuff placed on them. And if the student doesn't take the debt, someone else often winds up paying the deficiency. If mom and dad pay for your education, kids, it wasn't free. Absurdly high tuition is a serious economic problem precisely because it diverts resources away from productive uses of capital and towards non-productive ones (debt service and "research" by 3rd-tier anthropologists).

In ten years, there will be millions upon millions of our most education citizens who will be unable to purchase homes or new automobiles precisely because of the debilitating effect of student loans that were thrown on, in part, by a perpetuation of fraud. How can you not see the long-term systemic effect of this?

For law school students, the picture is about five times more dire. Most have undergraduate debt, and then are forced to expend between of $100,000 to 200,000 more to gain a law degree. If $350 a month is nothing to sneeze at, what is $1000 a month like? Because of the fraud of law school admissions departments, these students grossly overpaid for tuition. There are maybe 10% of law students who will achieve salaries capable of paying off these debt levels with ease. For the remainder - approximately 35,000 per year - the high debt will crush their finances and prevent them from having meaningful participation in the economic society.

Say what you will about law students, but 1) most are among the top 10% of the society in terms of intelligence and work ethic; and 2) most never would have gone to law school if they knew the reality of post-graduate employment. Do you think anyone really wants to desperately be a lawyer? Maybe like 15%, tops, have a Perry Mason boner.

The schools deliberately obfuscated the post-graduate employment situation for years. They induced - and still induce - people to pay high tuition amounts to support building projects, professor salaries, faculty retreats, swank soirées, and absurd marketing ventures. As a result of their huckster tactics, tens of thousands will see their discretionary income slashed to almost nothing.

As victimized consumers, graduates are using one of the few weapons in their arsenal that's useful against multimillion-dollar corporations. They're suing. This is one of the few ways to correct the Grand Systemic Flaw, and yet you fucking morons act like it's the students who have a problem. Fuck you; you're as blind as the mortgage lenders circa 2005. In your mania of "personal responsibility" and staring at the trees instead of the forest, you can't see the system imperiled right in front of you.

Education certainly has its normative values, and I'd be the last person to deny that there's a civic virtue in broad knowledge. But because of the high esteem education has, and its place in our democracy myth, the educational institutions have a responsibility not to abuse their station. Instead, they've pissed all over it in an orgy of unbridled greed, exorbitant consumption, and pretentious self-aggrandizement at the expense of tomorrow.

The "underwater" and fraudulently-incurred debts that will disable the next generation are not just the problems of the individual debt holders. They're our problem, all of us, and we should act now, not later. If you learned anything from the mortgage debacle, it should have been that individual problems can become systemic problems under the right conditions, when institutions have an incentive to act anti-socially, as schools have done.

My guess is that naive critics of lawsuits like these and those who robotically spout PERSONAL RESPONSIBILITY every chance they get are not quite "educated" enough to understand such complex problems. The present is the past is the future. My problem is your problem is our problem. C'est la vie.

Forget Nebraska, the Gold's in South Dakota

From the Wall-Street Journal:

There is at least one region of the country actively seeking more lawyers: rural South Dakota.

According to this piece in the Argus Leader, the State Bar of South Dakota is launching Project Rural Practice to try to lure more attorneys to the state’s less populated regions.

“A lot of our rural attorneys are nearing retirement and looking for someone to carry on the practice,” state bar president Pat Goetzinger told the Argus Leader.

Yee-haw.

Of course, the University of South Dakota still spits out eighty new lawyers every single year, and even though eighty plus people pass the bar every year, the state is only projected to have 53 openings per year 'til 2015.

And let's not forget that in South Dakota, wages are among the lowest in the country. It's fine, I suppose, if you went to a state school out there, but I wouldn't expect a William Mitchell, Hamline, or U. of Denver grad to service their private school debt on 29k a year.

And don't ignore that there are only two cities in the entire state above 30k in population. A town of 5,000 needs probably ten to fifteen attorneys, max. There might be a lot of older attorneys retiring in rural South Dakota, but my hunch is that many of them may supplement their income. You could probably fill all of rural South Dakota's needs with just the unemployed Cooley grads from 2010 alone.

Rural life actually appeals to a lot of people. It's safe, quiet, low-stress. In a rural county, you probably know the clerk and the judge personally and unless they hate you, your life should be easier. In many rural counties, they'll protect you and your clients from out-of-county forces if they can. Lot of perks, but I'm highly highly skeptical that the opportunity are really there, or that if they are, they're being sopped up immediately by the spillover from the (relatively) nearby law schools.

If there really are openings, there's no need to spend a dime. Just run a Symplicity advert for the twenty closest law schools. You'll have ten applications the next time you check your email, and at least five will be somewhat-impressive.

Ready for an Even Bigger Laugh?! Law Degrees Still Worth the Debt, Says Kiplingers

From Kiplingers' "5 Advanced Degrees Still Worth the Debt:"

Avg. annual tuition and fees, public in-state: $18,461

Avg. annual tuition and fees, private: $35,622

Avg. debt: $82,601

Avg. income (lawyer): $129,020

Monthly loan payment: $960 (10 years); $544 (30 years)

Hiring is down compared with prerecession levels, and competition for jobs will be fierce as law schools churn out more lawyers than the market can bear.

The biggest paydays now are at big private firms, where new lawyers earn a median annual salary of $160,000. Public-interest attorneys bring up the rear, with median starting salaries of $42,000.

There is so much wrong with this general entry, I wouldn't know where to start, save saying that the "competition is fierce" stuff is the only accurate portrayal.