You Cannot Build a "New Kind" of Law School

Indiana Tech has put forth a lot of crappy reasons for opening a new fourth-tier law school, the most recent of which are outlined here and debunked - again - by Matt at LSTB here.

The one that's annoying the hell out of me today is this idea, often repeated by lower-tiered law schools, is this mantra that the schools will "distinguish" themselves by offering all sorts of novel bells and whistles. Here's Indiana Tech's version:

“We don’t need another law school,” Snyder said. “We need another kind of law school.”

The school, he said, will pair students with attorney mentors, place them in internships at local law firms, and draw on other local resources to ensure students are prepared to practice as attorneys immediately after graduation.

Once Snyder appoints a dean, which he hopes to do by September, he said he will have a better idea of how the school will distinguish itself.

Every single non-t14 first, second-, third- and fourth-tier institution in the country tries to tell itself and its consumers something similar.

Indiana Tech's prospective rival, Valparaiso, tries to set itself apart by requiring three years of legal research and writing, deliberately maintaining a smaller study body, offering clinics in sports law and other specialized fields with a variety of externships, etc.

What the law schools never admit is that no one who matters gives a shit, and nothing Indiana Tech can possibly do will "set itself apart." Because frankly, if there was a golden ticket to making one's graduates employable, every other third- and fourth-tier hole would be doing it as well; does Arthur Snyder, who decided to build a law school last year according to the article honestly think he can innovate a field with 200+ other participants, most of whom have been there for decades?

New businessman's arrogance. Thanks to some rather stringent ABA regulations, there's little any school can do to truly "set itself apart," and so regardless of what little gimmicks the school's push, the student's education and prospects virtually never change.

Reality of today: Employers hire on prestige, experience, and rank. The only real bypass is if you know someone on the inside. Indiana Tech can give its students all the mentors and legal writing classes and international law experience in the world. It won't mean a damn thing unless it can boost one of those categories (which relevant clinics can do, but again, almost every law school has clinics in areas like criminal law, domestic relations, etc.).

Thinking you can be a revolutionary while following 200 others marching with the empowered (i.e., ABA accreditation) is foolish. There simply is no such thing as "a different kind of law school" where current ABA accreditation is involved, no matter how hard the marketeers try to distinguish their beige Corolla from the off-white, light tan, latte, and sand-colored Corollas surrounding them.