Yale Daily News Puts Legal Elitism in Black and White

So today the Yale Daily News gives us a long-winded, comprehensive look at "elite" law students, where they come from, how they adjust to life at grand ol' Yale, what happens while there, etc. For anyone who still harbors any silly thoughts of meritocracy, this article should help you see that the upper Ivy League is basically run on a a series of elitist tautologies.

But in the midst of an article trying to make the Yale student body and its aspiring lawyers feel even better about itself, we get a flat-out admission regarding legal hiring:

Rivera interviewed roughly 40 professionals involved in law firm recruitment and hiring, and found that these people give particular preference to candidates from Harvard, Yale or Stanford law schools when reviewing job applications.

Although many recruiters actually believed that graduates of non-elite law schools were more prepared for the practical aspects of being a lawyer, they still preferred to hire from super-elite schools because of the prestige associated with them.

Yes, right there, in the Yale Daily News is an admission that many recruiters believe other "non-elite" law schools prepare their students better for practice.

And yet, (1) Yale is still the best law school in the country, says US News and World Reports and (2) Yale law graduates still get jobs much easier than others.

They're not even trying to hide how screwed up this system is anymore. It's right there in black-and-white, despite the various arguments thrown out by shameless elitists. (Side question: Did the Yale Daily News even realize they were admitting Yale must not be an excellent law school if others prepare their students better? Think about it.) Normal rules of capitalism simply do not operate at the large firm level; or, if they do, the value of a degree that says "Yale" is worth infinitely more than a degree that says "St. Johns" or "Ohio State."

Could you imagine any other trademark having this effect? You're a completely mediocre guy, but you buy a HONDA and all of a sudden your earning power triples what it would if you bought a TOYOTA. It'd be a commercial basically. You buy the product, life changes. Women want to sleep with you, men want to be you, and live in perpetual bliss while the schmucks who buy the cheaper Toyota actually have to work for a living.

This is, of course, absurd, but it's exactly like what happens in legal hiring all the time. The same kid goes to the local state school for dirt cheap and even if he makes law review and wins a gazillion awards and ranks top 5%, he'll be a longshot for BigLaw, whereas if he went to NYU or Virginia and hit the median or higher, he'd have a much easier shot.

Unfortunately for the makers of every other product in the country, their customers aren't as prestige-drunk as large law firms. Yet those in charge of legal hiring are apparently convinced that clients would balk at paying non-elite graduates high billing rates, even if the non-elite associates are more competent lawyers than their Yale peers. One has to wonder if the lawyers can't justify their own best-interest hiring practices (like paying slightly less for equal or better quality from lesser-known schools) to their clients how they can win borderline cases, but I digress...

At least this isn't lost on some Yale students.

While his classmates are well-qualified for these jobs, [one student] said, the law firms’ selective bias overlooks other candidates — such as his friends at the University of Iowa Law School — who may be just as qualified.
...
[Aanother student] said that the recruiting system reinforces the system of class privilege, in which richer students are more likely to attend good high schools, get into elite colleges and professional schools, and then score jobs at top-ranked firms.

Although she is only in her first year at Yale Law, Luna said she already has a summer job at one of the top firms in Seattle — a job she feels she may not have gotten if she attended a different law school.
...
But this is not always the case, said Hedy Aponte, director of attorney recruiting and development at the prestigious Kirkland & Ellis firm’s Washington D.C. Office. Aponte said her firm sometimes chooses recruitment targets based on geographic proximity to the firm rather than elite status.
...

Kirkland & Ellis focuses on schools ranging from Yale to University of Virginia to George Washington University, she added.

When asked to provide data on how many Kirkland & Ellis lawyers were hired from Harvard, Yale and Stanford, Aponte declined.

Whoa, Hedy! Talk about diversity! George Washington? Virginia? Gosh darned, that's egalitarianism at its finest. What, no Emory or Georgetown graduates?

By the way, Yale Daily News, if these people decline to give you the data, you might want to run a Google search. Kirkland and Ellis puts all of its attorneys information online and it's searchable by law school. I get that our ideals of journalism have sunk, but real journalists would at least check publicly available information.

I actually ran the Kirkland data back when I did part 2 of my rankings project (still going on, since I know people are wondering about it).

In the survey, Harvard had 74 partners (12.7%) and 65 (9.3%) associates, the most from any school in either category. Stanford and Yale are actually way down the list; instead, Chicago, Northwestern, NYU, Columbia, Georgetown, Michigan, and the University of Illinois rounded out the top eight. With DePaul, GWU, and Fordham above Yale, it's probably safe to assume it has more to do with their offices in Chicago, NYC, and Washington D.C. than anything. But ultimately, despite Hedy's assertions to the contrary, Kirkland is still elitist (1.7% of your hiring pool came from DePaul. Yippee).

This would be one of those spots where I think the article was very under-researched. Harvard, Yale, and Stanford aren't the end-all of prestige hiring or elitism. But that's really getting beside the point. The point is that it's an exclusive club, and no matter your merits, you're probably not getting in unless you have the right stamp, even if you have objectively offer a superior quality of underlying product at a lower price.

The branding of the Ivy League with regards to prestige is, perhaps, the greatest marketing and advertising success in global economic history. One can only wonder if and when the ultimate consumers (i.e. clients of large firms) will fully catch on.

Texas Flushing Money Down the Toilet While Slashing State-Funded Services

From the Dallas Business Journal:

Legislators have earmarked more than $3 million to $5 million for the UNT downtown Dallas law school, but the funds have yet to reach final approval and anything could happen, Jackson said.
...
University officials could start construction immediately after final approval is given and the facility could open up to students by August 2013.

There's plenty of law schools in Texas, but apparently the Texas legislature is still okay with wasting the state's money building another one.

Granted, in a state of 25 million, this only represents about $0.20 per person. But hey, that's $5 million that could go into road construction, or cancer research, or training people for jobs that 21st century America actually needs instead of building a school that cannot, in any way, compete with SMU and the University of Texas for Dallas' legal affections and will most likely wind up transferring wealth to educators by dumping debt onto 20-somethings who haven't gotten the memo that the legal field is dangerously over-saturated.

But hey, who am I to judge since Texas is in such great financial shape? Oh, wait. Maybe it's just me, but if your state is slashing education and pension funding, the last thing you should be doing is setting aside money (so much as a dime) for a frivolous law school.

No one's ever accused the post-secondary education complex of not having clout. But the incongruity of building another law school while slashing the elementary and secondary education budget would be quite droll if it weren't so damn ridiculous, socially-damaging, and ultimately sad.

Capitalism at its Finest: Pre-Law School Socratic Training

Normally, blogger filters out comments that blatantly advertise some crappy product. But yesterday, one slipped through and I awoke to find a comment advertising for this god-awful product. Usually, I'd have a concern about promoting the product, but this one is so bad I can't see any sane person being interested. So I will commence with the lambasting.

The idea is this: the only way to prepare for law school is by taking classes. So, if you enroll in our program, you can take four weeks of classes with actual professors working with the Socratic method. From the "About the Program" page:

The program exposes students to

• the Socratic method of teaching,
• reading cases as a foundation for their law school education, and
• the new, foreign language of law with which all first year law students struggle at the outset of their legal education.

...

We aim to keep the required time students need to prepare minimal while still providing solid exposure to the language of the law and using cases as a basis for learning in law school.

The LSE program simulates law school as accurately as possible. The program does not provide an introduction to the content of law school – the substantive law – instead it aims to teach students how to learn in (and enjoy) law school once they start.

First, how do you give students the flavor of law school is their preparation time is "minimal?" The real joy in law school is when you have 50 pages on civil procedure to read and no real time to actually read some of the driest stuff on the planet.

Second, if you have a Bachelor's degree, you should be able to read an opinion and figure out what happened. With Google, you can look up any pesky Latin terms the court uses. Honestly, if you can't read and understand a case without someone holding your hand, a crash course program isn't going to help you any.

But at least the students will get to feel the advertised terror of the Socratic method, of being in a room with 60+ other people who all stare at you while some smarmy asshole in a toupee throws out absurd hypotheticals while you hem and haw and think of the best way to show him you actually did the reading so he'll put a check mark next to your name, right?

Uh...no.

Once enrolled, students need only a microphone and a headset or speakers (web-cam participation for students is optional), a web browser installed on their computer, and a decent internet connection.

We can't have digital law schools, but digital pseudo-law school preparation courses? Party on, Wayne! And look, kids, you don't even have to SEE the person who's doing the Socratic method on you! No eye contact; victory for social anxieties, eh?

Conceding that the Socratic method is hard to deal with for some, this product just ain't going to help you. The fact that the professor is staring at you is part of the game. So is the fact that you're often not prepared because you really didn't have to read everything two or three times. Neither of those are going to be present when you can sit at home in your pajamas and listen in. And not every does the Socratic method similarly, so knowing the style of one doesn't necessarily help you with others.

So the program is of dubious quality and I haven't even tried it. But what's the cost of this thing?

$395.

No, I didn't make that up. They're charging $395 for six sessions of this shit. (But they offer limited scholarships!)

My guess is that it's really that expensive because they're supposedly hiring law professors, although they don't actually name them and the link says they're soliciting for more. A search around their website finds only one cited - a "Professor Johnson" - and there's no school listed.

Similarly, the Founders names are absent.

The founders of the Law School Experience are all former law students – now current or former attorneys and professors. We all enjoyed law school greatly – the people we met, the academic challenges – but we were not ready. No one really is.

And yet they give us no names. This should be a red flag.

Another red flag? They seem to have given themselves a Yelp review. And they're spamming websites like this one.

In the end these people are leaches feeding off of the law school marketing machine and its recurrent theme of law school prompting fear, which prompts aggressive spending on preparation materials. These people are a lower-rent version of what Bar-Bri and Kaplan do.

Look, if you want to go to law school, law schools are fairly open about letting students sit in on classes. Email the admissions department and see if you can see a 1L class, like Civil Procedure or Torts. That will give you a real idea of what to expect - and a real idea of what is expected of students. Given the really high number of attorneys in this country, it's not insurmountable.

And for the record, I have yet to be in a class where what you do in the Socratic method has a significant negative effect on anyone's grade. Aside from drafting classes, 99% of law school grades are determined finals week in my experience. This is especially true for the 1L year when the professors know very few students. If you do especially well on the Socratic stuff, you might get a bump on your grade, but that's about it. Read the syllabus. For most classes, even if you show up unprepared and nervously mumble your way through Socratic dialogue, you grade will still come down to finals.

It can be nerve-racking, but from my experience, how well you do on it really isn't that important unless you're one of those tools who really wants to impress your classmates, who probably going to think you're a big-league douche, anyway.

If, after my consumer review, you STILL think this product is a good idea, let me make you an offer:

I will do what this company does for $13.50 an hour.

I'm not kidding. Send me an email, I'll give you three or four 1L cases, you'll send me money over paypal, and then we can talk over the phone as if we were in a law school classroom. I'll give a five-minute lecture, make an awkward joke about alimony payments, and then I will spend 45 minutes being a complete dick to you.

Act now, kids, my summer is filling up fast with your peers who will all get A's.

I believe some law schools have "boot camps" to help with the anxiety of 1L. But paying $395 to sit in some online cesspool while some third-tier professor looking for a paycheck talks to you about a random case is not worth it.

And you have to wonder about the group of law graduates setting up this site. If they all could make $100k+ a year, why are they adding this worthless product and its scam-like website to the marketplace?

Let that one digest.

Elie Mystal Gives Terrible Advice

It's easy to pile on Elie Mystal, who must give nightmares for Harvard Law School's marketing department by being a public intellectual lightweight. But gosh darn it, it's kind of fun.

So today Elie - in contrast to his self-proclaimed skepticism about law school - has decided to tell a disgruntled 1L who wrote in that he should stay at his "elite" law school. What a shocker, eh?

Here's the kid's basic info:

• At an unidentified "top 10" school
• At the bottom of his class despite "working really hard"
• Lost motivation and is pessimistic about his future in the law
• No great pre-law work experience
• Liberal arts major
• "Significant financial help" from parents.

Now here are Elie's reasons for staying in law school:

(a) He picked the right parents.
(b) He got into the right school.
(c) He doesn’t have any other burning passion in his life.
(d) The worst part of law school is over.

Why wouldn’t this guy finish law school? Here is a situation where there is almost no downside. Assuming he’s going to be in a position to graduate debt-free or nearly debt-free, with a degree from an elite institution, what’s the harm? He can do anything he wants after it’s over. No, idiot law school marketers, not because you can do anything with a law degree. But because you can do anything with financially supportive parents.

This is retardation at work. Let's take these in order.

(a) "Rich parents" are not a valid reason to continue in law school. Elie claims that the kid is graduating "debt-free" if mom and dad pay for the whole thing. Furthermore, he claims that this guy can go to law school for "free."

That's an outright lie. Just because he's burning mom and dad's money instead of the federal government's doesn't mean that it's now "free." If anything, I'd feel guiltier about hoodwinking my parents into paying 50k a year instead of getting the government-banking complex to pay 50k a year. Furthermore, our concepts of "debt" and "free" should be broader than whether some 3rd-tier financial institution sends you a bill after graduation. The kid is sacrificing two more years of his life, plus taking the limitations of having a J.D. on his resume. Lost opportunities are a major downside, especially for someone in their early-to-mid 20s.

And if "you can do anything with financially supportive parents," that actually counsels against staying in law school doesn't it? Or it's a neutral at best? Your parents can help you start a business, travel the world, pursue other passions. There's plenty of investment alternatives here, so even with rich parents, you have to defeat the alternatives and prove law is a strong enough investment to keep that capital invested in it.

(b) There's no such thing as the "right school" for someone who finishes at the bottom of the class. Elie the elitist called it a "top 10" school, so I'm guessing it's somewhere like Penn or Northwestern or NYU and not Harvard or Yale. Given the continuing BigLaw and government cut-backs, I would not gamble on being a bottom-quartile graduate at Northwestern or Penn. Georgetown has already been caught fudging its graduate employment numbers, and Duke had to set up a program to ensure all its graduates landed jobs.

Never mind that to be an attorney, one actually has to pass the bar exam. Depending on what "bottom of the class" means to this kid, he might find the bar exam a very difficult challenge. For example, according to Law School Numbers, at NYU 6% of bar takers don't pass on the first try. For Michigan, 8% of in-state bar exam takers did not pass in 2007. For Cal-Berkeley, 6-16% fail the"notoriously hard" California bar exam the first time around.

I can guarantee you some of this kid's classmates didn't work that hard at all. If he put in a top effort and wound up near the bottom, he's probably going to have a difficult time with the bar. At which point in time, his "top school" doesn't matter at all. Investing all that time only to find the bar exam an insurmountable hurdle (like >2% of the class often does, even from "elite" schools) is a major downside; you cannot ignore this possibility.

So the bottom line is that even at a top school, this kid needs to have the right attitude to be paying the not-so-free full sticker price.

(c) The question is not whether he has some other burning passion, it's whether he actually has a burning passion for the law. This person seems very pessimistic and burnt out. He has no motivation by his own words. If he has no motivation at the end of 1L (before spring exams, when he might have a chance to redeem his fall performance), how is he going to feel answering interrogatories at 9 pm? How is he going to do well in the next two years? How is he going to have to drive to do top work for his clients and/or his firm? How is he going to be gung-ho about finding work opportunities in his 2L and 3L years?

This student seems to have gone to law school because he had nothing better to do. That's not a good reason to stay in law school when he has no strong desire to actually practice law.

(d) The worst part of law school is not necessarily over. People like to talk up 1L year like it's some sort of boot camp, but at least in my experience, parts of 2L are worse depending on your array of classes. And at least during 1L year, any thoughts of unemployment and debt repayment are far in the distance. Try talking to a generic 3L right now and the fog of unemployment and taking the bar exam plagues them worse than even 1L exams. 1L is time-consuming and stressful, but it's a time-limited stress; once mid-May hits there's no more 1L Socratic method or harsh-curve exams. That doesn't work with debt default.

All in all, this person needs to think long and hard about the law, and if they have no honest drive to be a lawyer, they need to get out after this semester. The connections are, for the most part, already made. With "financially supportive" parents, the life reorganization won't be that bad, and new experiences can quickly wipe away the tarnish of a bad year in law school.

The loss of time and money is a major harm, Elie. To spend significant amounts of both, the student should have a positive, compelling reason for staying in law school. This student does not.

Would you personally spend $100,000 and two years of your life on something you had no enthusiasm for that had no guarantee of paying any kind of a reward down the road? Of course not, and if this didn't involve an "elite" law school, I can't believe even Elie Mystal would be so dumb as to suggest otherwise.

Update on Rakofsky Story

This is from three days ago, but I think most commenters missed it and I didn't see it until late last night, but the Washington Post did a follow-up on the Joseph Rakofsky story (the recent Touro grad who decided to defend one charged with homicide in a different state). The Post found the defendant's grandmother, and her explanation of how he wound up to be her grandson's attorney is - well - completely unsurprising:

Watson, 71, said she told Rakofsky that she wasn’t interested in hiring him even for the murder case because the family couldn’t afford the $25,000 to $30,000 normally charged in such cases.

But Rakofsky, 33, called her, Watson said. And again. She said he told her that he had worked on criminal cases before. And he told her that he would charge $10,000. Watson decided to “give him a chance,” she said, impressed with his tenacity and his willingness to work on her grandson’s case, especially for such a low fee.

Note there's multiple dynamics at work here. Race-to-the-bottom fees? Check. High-pressure sales tactics? Check. Exaggerated representations to clients to get them to hire a desperate soul? Check.

And remember all that verbiage deans spit out about how more lawyers equals lower fees for poor people? Isn't that exactly what happened here? Isn't this the ABA's wet-dream: a family priced out of the homicide defense market can now buy the product because Touro - God bless them - keeps spitting out attorneys so desperate for work they'll do it for 50-75% off. Poor people can finally afford representation - hallelujah!

But, like settling for a cut-rate prostitute, it had its consequences. Of course, the fact that I just compared cut-rate attorneys to $25 prostitutes should signal that something's wrong, even if it's mildly funny-'cause-its-true.

Web sites and bar licenses don’t provide enough information, said Saul Singer, senior legal ethics counsel for the D.C. Bar. Potential clients need to get references and check out a lawyer’s reputation, Singer said.

Yeah, that sort-of kills the whole idea of this being a well-regulated "profession," doesn't it?

And to complete the hucksterism:

During a two-hour phone conversation, Watson said, Rakofsky declined to refund her money.

I don't know if I can say this enough, but a 15k attorney surplus each year leads to more Lionel Hutzes on the market, so this should not be seen as a one-time story. Because many students are swamped with debt and pigeonholed as lawyers, they will not easily exit the market. Many 2009 and 2010 graduates of varying quality are still looking for jobs. The desperation level will rise along with the ethical tensions as young lawyers try to price themselves competitively.

For better or worse, this is the system our elites have created. The true tragedy here is that their response is not to fix the system, but to circle the wagons and place the blame entirely on the Rakofsky's of the world. As I've said before Rakofsky is an idiot worthy of blame. But he's got a big-time accomplice in a system that fails at multiple points.

"Great World University" Binghampton Contiues Its Streak of Idiocy

As law school plans are being sensibly scrapped elsewhere, Binghampton University has decided to continue its pursuit of building a law school.

If ignorance is bliss, these guys must live on a natural orgasm-on-crack-level high.

"A law school at Binghamton would be very good academically and affordable, which are two great strengths," said John Appelbaum, pre-law adviser at BU. "I do think there is a need for a legal education that comes at reasonable price — that would be a public law school."

You mean like SUNY-Buffalo, which charges about 55-60k in tuition for in-state residents for a degree that may increase earning power only minimally and decrease other opportunities? You mean that kind of "reasonable" price?

And I'm sure Pace and Touro are "very good academically," too. It doesn't stop them from being completely unnecessary places and inefficient wastes.

"I think Binghamton has taken a number of steps over the past couple of decades not only toward becoming a great regional school but a great world university," said John McNulty, a political science professor at BU. "Providing law degrees is important for this expansion."

Yes, because that's exactly what schools like Princeton and M.I.T. needed to become "great world universit[ies]." And when I think of Binghampton, I think of a "great world university" like Yale, Cambridge, or the University of Tokyo.

[Prof. Jonathan] Krasno said he believes that the state could use more affordable graduate school choices.

"Almost every state has public law schools. I think New York state is way below the national average," he said.

New York state currently has two public law schools: University at Buffalo Law School and CUNY Law School.

That's the standard? Whether you're not as saturated with public law schools as other places? How did these people make it through grad school?

In any event, California has five public law schools. Virginia, Florida, Texas, and Ohio have four. Illinois, Pennsylvania, and Michigan have three. After that, everyone is at 2 or less, so I don't think New York is below the national average. Even if they were, their private schools make up for it. And for the record, many of those public schools (e.g., UC-Irvine, Texas Southern, Wayne State, Northern Illinois, Florida A&M) have no real reason for existence, and are hardly a list you'd want to be associated with.

But there's more garbage Kresno has to spout:

"This is investing in public education, which is an effective way to spend money," he said. "There is also economic development for the city, and it will bring in more students. But more than anything else, turning out lawyers with less of a debt load after three years of public law school, who tend to stay in the state, will be a very good thing."

If we could close down Touro or Pace or Albany and replace it with a public school, that would be true. But it's not, because those places aren't going to close. What will happen is that they'll continue to spit out debt-ridden students while Binghampton adds more debt-ridden students to the pile.

To go to a public school like Binghampton, one would still have to take out 55k+ for tuition (in-state) and would probably need to take out an additional 60k+ for living expenses. Students who go there sans scholarship will regularly carry debt loads north of 100k (excluding undergraduate debts) with little to no increase in earnings potential.

New York is the most saturated state in the union. Can the Binghampton idiots not read that? Somehow, New York doubles the saturation of California, Texas, and Minnesota. That's impressive.

There is no reason for this, and it will bring nothing of value to the Binghampton area compared to the damage of indebtedness and unemployed people who can't find work in their chosen profession, all depressed at burning three years out of their prime.

These people are as bad and delusional as 0Ls who still think they'll go to law school and wind up driving a Mercedes and arguing thrilling trials every day. Either that or they're just dishonest.

Widener Dean Not Working in Hypotheticals Anymore; NY Bar President Living in Reality As Well

First, I can't believe I hadn't yet posted on this, but Widener professor Lawrence Connell, who, as I noted previously, got into trouble for what seemed to be a routine law school hypothetical, has now actually brought a lawsuit against the dean for her statements in the post-incident administration hearings.

Lawrence Connell contends that dean Linda Ammons falsely characterized him as racist and sexist in administrative proceedings when she sought to oust him from his job of 26 years after he used a hypothetical involving her murder, reports the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The complaint was filed last week in Sussex County Superior Court, in Delaware. Connell, who is white, and his lawyer, Thomas Neuberger, contend that Ammons, who is black, targeted him because of his conservative beliefs, according to the Associated Press.

I'm frankly surprised that this came back up, because usually when people threaten lawsuits, they're just blowing smoke out their butt, but this is interesting to say the least.

For what it's worth, Dean Linda Ammons spent five years as a television personality and worked in public relations for four years. I wonder if it ever crossed her mind that bringing formal proceedings against a long-tenured professor was the best step for Widener's reputation.

Also, after law school, it appears she went directly into administrative service (and after six months jumped into the governor's service - anyone could do that, right?) and never really worked as a lawyer. Not that I think that's a requirement, but aside from her administrative position with the state public defender, I don't see anything that actually requires bar passage.

Definitely a story to watch. In one corner, a long-tenured male conservative. In the other corner, a black female ladder-climbing administrator transplant from Ohio. Race, gender, politics, career trajectories - this is so scripted it seems like a law school hypothetical for teaching kids about libel or academic freedom, or maybe a final exam question.

In happier news, I encourage readers to check out this report from the New York State Bar Association president. It basically points out four areas (firm structure, training, work-life balance, and legal technology) and how those areas will change and it's spot-on on pretty much everything. Aside from a few dumb ideas (e.g. requiring public service), there's some good stuff in there:

The Task Force recommends that the State Bar Association examine potential licensing reforms, such as . . . sequential licensing, which would permit limited practice for new attorneys pending further training and examination; [and] adjusting an applicant's score on the bar exam to reflect the successful completion of skills courses. . . .

As the economy recovers, it is apparent to many observers that the legal profession will not return to business as usual. Competition for legal work will be intense. Law firms that do not understand and address these changes will have difficulty competing in the emerging marketplace.

Yup. Hopefully other state bar associations continue to catch on to the "new normal" and they can spearhead the changes necessary to meet tomorrow's demands of this "profession" before it loses all marks of an actual profession.