The New Normal; Can "Entreprenurial" Dayton Adjust?

Great article from Claire Zillman at AmericanLawyer.com:

After two years of turmoil, the nation's largest law firms are settling into a new normal.
...
"The loss of leverage is not a short-term reaction, it's a significant long-term change," says Bingham McCutchen chairman Jay Zimmerman. "We're hiring selectively and using paralegals and staff lawyers for more mundane tasks." He's not alone: A little more than half of our respondents (55 percent) said that their firm had used contract lawyers, up from 44 percent a year ago.

Moreover, few firm leaders worried that a smaller class size would leave them short-staffed in the event of a sudden uptick in work. With so many recent law school graduates looking for jobs, firms can staff up quickly if the need arises, says Perkins Coie managing partner Robert Giles.

However, the law schools continue admitting students by the thousands even when their most notable practitioners have full cognizance that there is a massive oversupply of labor, so much so that elite students no longer have leverage.

And yet law school administrators, charged with instilling ethics in the next generation of lawyers, continue to place a premium on advertising. For example, Dayton just hired SIU Law Professor Paul McGreal as its new dean. What drew him to Dayton?

"This is a law school that's been entrepreneurial in looking at curriculum and the recruitment of students."

"[E]ntrepreneurial in . . . the recruitment of students?" It's hard to tell what exactly Dayton is doing that is so "entrepreneurial" since it's attracting students with a median LSAT of 152. Perhaps it's in the slick marketing as evidenced in their 2010 Viewbook that drew McGreal's attention. Let's see some samples:


For those who cannot read the small type (or cannot avert their eyes from the egregiously-hilarious large type), on this second page Dayton boasts of having a 94% job placement rate for the class of 2008 within nine months of graduating and having 90% of graduates pass the bar on the first time.

This is curious, to me, because their 2005 numbers were only 85.4% employed and 81% bar passage. Given that the school obviously has no scruples with lying ("the world definitely needs more lawyers?" "Long hours in the law library" will make someone NOT want to call Dr. Kevorkian?), my healthy skepticism is running at full blast. Perhaps this link for the Class of 2007's data better explains why the school can claim 94%:

					Job Type
					Bar admission required or anticipated (e.g., attorney and corporate counsel positions, law clerks, judicial clerks)		83.0%
					J.D. preferred, law degree enhances position (e.g., corporate contracts administrator, alternative dispute resolution specialist, government regulatory analyst, FBI special agent)		11.0%
					Professional/other (jobs that require professional skills or training but for which a J.D. is neither preferred nor particularly applicable; e.g., accountant, teacher, business manager, nurse)		5.0%
					Nonprofessional/other (job that does not require any professional skills or training or is taken on a temporary basis and not viewed as part of a career path)		1.0%

Right. 2007 was before the "new normal" fully set in and 17% of your grads did not need a Juris Doctor. Tell me again why the world needs more lawyers, please. Tell me why I should invest 3 years in a field where the "new normal" means the labor supply is so grossly oversaturated that firms believe they can hire good talent quickly if they need to.


Ah, yes. Dayton, that city of my dreams. To think someone actually wrote these pages and didn't collapse, instantly dead of a laughter attack, is astounding.


I agree completely.

Dean McGreal, if the outright dishonesty at work here is what you call "entrepreneurial," I think you need to brush up on your ethics. This is a moral issue, and viewing prospective students the way large retailers view poor people with welfare checks is unethical behavior.

As the survey and article cited above point out, there is a "new normal" in the legal world. Telling your students or prospective students the old one will return is no more based in rationality than believing Santa Claus will show up with a bag o' jobs this Christmas. The world does not need more lawyers right now. It needs better lawyers, and even better models of doing things, but raw fourth-tier graduates are not likely to be the former or do the latter.

Law firms no longer hire in increasing class sizes and raise fees every year. As they are now run like businesses, they track every associate's financial contributions to the firm in ways not present under the old model. Your job as an educator should be helping whatever students you have navigate a world where they will not only be attorneys, but also salesmen and debt collectors. If you have a model that you think will train students to excel in this world, by all means, continue it. But under no circumstances is it ethical or moral of you to charge tuition as if the old model were still in place at large firms and 90% of your students had hopes at attorney work. They don't.

McGreal plans to assess . . . ways to keep tuition affordable. Fundraising will be a key aspect of his new job. "We have to think about ways we can address the increasing cost of law school," he said.

Considering that most law schools are highly profitable cash cows for their larger universities, how about you start by slashing tuition across the board and lowering salaries in line with the reality that there is an oversupply of attorneys able to teach at your law school?

Just a simple suggestion, but maybe it's not "entrepreneurial" enough for Dean McGreal.