News Roundup: Saturation in Iowa, Crappy Advice from New Jersey, and a Dose of What the Hell from Indiana

1. Message Saturation

From the Des Moines Register, Rekha Basu asks if we need an "explosion" of law students when tuition escalates and job prospects diminish. It's elementary stuff for regular readers of the blog, but the key point here is just how standard these types of articles are becoming. By the end of the year, I imagine it'll be common knowledge for anyone who tries to keep up with news. I'd also like to point out this part of her editorial:

[O]nly 14 percent of college students are majoring in science, technology, engineering and math, according to President Barack Obama, speaking in Durham, N.C., last week. He said while demand for most jobs exceeds supply four to one, the opposite is true for science and high-tech jobs, where skilled workers are in short supply. And those are the jobs of the future.

Although I'm slightly skeptical that this sound advice (I've heard the engineering field is now requiring a master's degree to thin out the pool), herein lies, perhaps, the biggest problem of the law school industry. It's a common refrain amongst petty and jaded people that lawyers aren't smart enough to be scientists, engineers, medical technicians, etc. This is entirely false. Almost anyone who scored a 160 on the LSAT or higher has the mental aptitude that allows for success in so-called "high tech jobs."

In theory, the market should have directed labor where the society's needs were. If the society needs scientists and engineers, those starting salaries would be higher, tuition at the schools would be higher, etc. The market would signal to young people to study those fields.

Conversely, if there's limited or no demand new entrants in a field, the market should signal to prospective students to avoid it, either through low salaries or lowering tuition prices, etc. But even though law became oversaturated long ago, this didn't happen. The institutions (law schools, ABA, US News, etc.) kept reporting rigged statistics to induce talented people (and their higher LSAT scores) to come to law school instead of exploring other career options.

Because here's the truth: very, very few people genuinely love the law or find legal work particularly exciting or life-affirming. No preschooler, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, says "lawyer." Many say relatively non-prestigious careers, like teacher or firefighter or park ranger or construction worker. The shift for my generation was long and slow, but systematically the "bright" people ruled out being a teacher or a firefighter or a park ranger or a construction worker, most often because of the salary and prestige associated with the relative positions. Law only remained an option because people though it was a profession for the affluent and intelligent.

People are, on the whole, rational actors. Most in my generation were presented with blatantly false information from the educational institutions that claimed we would be be able to make some type of living on a liberal arts degree. And in the event that we couldn't, we were virtually assured that by getting a law degree or a master's or an MBA we would make a good living. The institutions willfully engaged in these type of distortions and as a result kept intelligent and hard-working people away from fields like technology where the real demand might be/might have been!

The problem is exacerbated by the duration of education. Law grads are already invested 7 years. When the screwed ones want to "correct" the saturation, they have to take community college classes and then try to get in a master's program, a process that adds another 3+ years. Ten years down the drain, a waste that could have been mitigated if only the schools were required to publish accurate, audited information about their offered investments.

Guaranteed loans haven't helped the situation, of course, but the truth is that our higher educational institutions have completely screwed up the labor market by pushing people towards more profitable options (liberal arts, law, generic business) than more costly - but socially-beneficial - ones (sciences, technology, medical). Everyone suffers as a result of this massive labor misallocation, so I'm truly baffled when people side with the universities when someone has the audacity to use the court system to fix the problem.

2. Hey, Unemployable, Apply for a Clerkship! Speed date!

I started out thinking this article about law students "find[ing] ways to beat out the economy" would be worth it, but after a nice discussion about how saturated the market is, the article boils down to the following:

• Law grads need to be creative
• Law grads need to network (including "speed dating" local attorneys!)
• Look at soloing
• Apply for a clerkship
  

Wow. That'll sure fix the problem, won't it? There's not enough legal work to go around for all the barred lawyers, but hey, you should spend thousands setting up a practice! There's a finite number of clerkships that have never been in want of applicants, but hey, you should apply!

3. Indiana Saturation + 1

Finally, note that in Indiana, public defender gigs for recent graduates dropped slightly when the state reinstated the license of a convicted tax fraud. A former Teamsters attorney, Eric Evans lost his law license a decade ago. I would've thought he would have found something else to do, but apparently he plugged away, did a lot of community service, and now has a law license in an oversaturated market after receiving many letters of support from local judges, politicians, etc.

[One] testified that he wished Evans had been reinstated sooner, because he is "an excellent" attorney and there is a shortage of attorneys, especially local public defenders, in Blackford County. [He] called the crime "an act of omission" and added that Evans probably felt trapped at the time.

The people in Blackford County are either lazy, naive, or lying. All it would take is a drive to Valparaiso or Dayton or Cincinnati or Indianapolis - or even a simple craigslist advertisement - and their shortage would be over in a matter of weeks.

Instead, paid work is going to one who clearly screwed up earlier in his career. Meanwhile, lawyers who have completely-clean records cannot find work as their student loans escalate.

I'm all for rehabilitation, but shouldn't this guy have found an alternative career in the last decade? And shouldn't the state Supreme Court ideally be an active watchguard of the profession? And if there are numerous lawyers in good standing, especially recent bar admissions, who are struggling for work, shouldn't it avoid reinstating convicts?

Just my two cents.

A Rant on Thomas Cooley's Advertising and Budget

I've previously mocked Thomas Cooley's absurd marketing techniques, but I didn't realize the true depths of the demonic awfulness in their hokey solicitations until today.

Sometimes, those who comment and write on these issues luck into finding a graph, a picture, or a table that speaks for itself. This is one of those times.

From Guidestar.org, the following represents the amount of money this set of relatively-comparable schools (private, non-profit, unaffiliated, ABA-accredited) spent on advertising and promotion in 2009 (Form 990, Part IX, Line 12):

Thomas Cooley: 2,167,925
New England: 669,677
Ave Maria: 323,259
William Mitchell: 263,907
Vermont.: 158,475
John Marshall (Chi.): 124,000
New York L.S.: 122,470
South Texas: 89,567
(note: Thomas Jefferson and Brooklyn's numbers were unfortunately not available).

$2 million. If you went to Thomas Cooley that year, you, individually, paid almost $600 so that the school could con someone else into going there. You could have enjoyed a shopping spree, eaten fifteen to twenty top Lansing dining experiences, bought a night with an std-free escort, etc.

Instead, you paid for advertisements so the worst law school in America - North America, in fact - can try to convince people that Cooley is a worthwhile use of six figures and three years.

In 2009, Ave Maria packed up its entire school and moved to a completely different region of the country. It spent a mere 15% of what Cooley did.

Granted, much of Cooley's number might come from its absurd stadium naming-rights deal, but that didn't take place until early 2010 and it still begs the question why a quality professional school would ever need to buy naming rights to a minor league baseball stadium. And they do have the highest enrollment in the country, which may justify some additional promotional costs.

But $2 million? When John Marshall barely spends six figures?

Think of all the superior ways that money could have been used. Cooley could have made a donation to the Lansing public school system, bought an elementary school or something. It could have founded programs for troubled youth, disease research centers, good ol' legal aid foundations: the sky's the limit for the truly munificent.

Nope. A baseball stadium name. And $2.1 million spent on advertising.

And it's not like they're getting a quality product for the money, either. This is some pretty watered-down stuff. God-awful would be one description for their advertising. Hysterical would be another.

Take, for example, Cooley's laughable NFL comparison:

Yes, you read that correctly: Cooley is trying to convince doe-eyed 149ers that because NFL quarterbacks come from places like Miami-Ohio, using prestige in the law school business is as silly as a Matt Millen draft.

I actually like the analogy, but not for the reason Cooley wishes. It's a beautiful illustration of cherry-picking with anecdotal evidence, a really common logical flaw in law school advertising (if not the world at large).

Here's the reality for football players: a high school quarterback who wants to get to the NFL has the best chance to get there if he goes to USC, Texas, Florida, etc. Likewise, A college graduate who wants to work at Cravath has the best chance to get there if he goes to Harvard or Yale.

Ultimately, the concern isn't with the few Cooley graduates who make BigLaw or the few NFL players who hail from Miami-Ohio. It's about the odds of a a random person at Cooley, or at Miami-Ohio or similar football school, to make that end destination. The population isn't the end population (BigLaw or NFL), but the starting one (all people at Cooley or a lousy football school).

To illustrate the analogy, let's say Cooley is the 200th best law school in the country (this is generous, as it excludes some non-ABA accredited schools that may be finer institutions). Last year, Jeff Sagarin's rankings listed Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, and the Citadel as the 199-201st best college football teams in the country.

So how many Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, and the Citadel graduates are in the NFL right now? 1 for Fordham, 3 for Bethune-Cookman, and 1 for the Citadel.

Those teams have roughly the same number of overall players and alumni as schools like Texas (41 active pros), LSU (40), and Miami (40). See a difference in the odds? A random player at the "more prestigious" colleges was 24 times more likely to make the NFL.

This is why top high school talent continues to go to Texas, LSU, Miami, etc. and not Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, or the Citadel. The same principle is why budding lawyers would never, ever dream of going to Cooley when Columbia is an option.

Kids, the analogy works, from the school's own fire-breathing mouth: if you go to Cooley, your odds of making the big leagues are the about as good as a random football player from Fordham, Bethune-Cookman, or the Citadel making the NFL.

The differences? Most of those schools offer scholarships to their football players. At Cooley, you have the privilege of paying $200k for a glorified lottery ticket from a school that's basically conceding that everyone thinks it's a piece of crap. And there are opportunities for the low-level college football players to show off their skills. No such thing exists in law.

You could theoretically be the second coming of Louis Brandeis, but if you go to Cooley, your odds of getting anywhere prestigious in the law are worse than the 65th percentile graduate at Cornell, even if you ace everything and edit enthralling editions of the law review single-handedly. Yes, this is a dumb system, but it's wrong for Cooley to portray it as otherwise and act like its stellar graduates may actually have a good chance.

Of course, anyone with moderate logical ability figures all this out rather quickly, which speaks to the utterly poor quality of the propaganda at issue. Only the least-sophisticated consumer could fall for this shit, meaning Cooley's LSAT median probably isn't going to rise any time soon.

As an aside, their own advertising shows a distinct lack of college football knowledge. Note in the following how Stanford is a more prestigious football program than Virginia Tech, Texas A&M, BYU, West Virginia, Clemson, Boston College, and Michigan State (heck, national title game aside, I don't even Oregon is top 20 yet).

One has to wonder if Cooley used the same formula as their proprietary law school rankings to rank college football programs.

In any event, that $2 million is clearly paying for the best Madison Avenue can offer. It makes one wonder why, instead of naming stadiums and putting out ridiculous Soviet-level propaganda, the administrators don't just hire their own graduates at 20k and have them do it. Surely, a group of Cooley grads could come up with something better than a horrendous NFL analogy that doesn't work in the school's favor for anyone with three brain cells.

Cooley is clearly in a league by itself. As bad as LaVerne or Thomas Jefferson or Florida Coastal may be, they've got nothing on the multi-campus money-sucker of Cooley. It is the 5th tier, the 6th, the 7th; no matter how many tiers of legal education hell one wishes to construct (or deduct...), Cooley is at the bottom of the barrel, the slumpbuster of law schools, the scenic vacation in northern New Jersey, the menu item no one but a drunk would order. As far as I can tell, it's worse than the for-profits, worse than the state-accredited schools, worse than the LLMs in International Donkey Saddle Arbitration.

$2 million isn't going to get it any respect, but rather make sure its place at the bottom of the toilet is firmly cemented. Is there any scenario where such a figure can even possibly be justified? In a world where LSAC and resources like US News are more than happy to advertise for free?

The cherry on top is that when I logged on right before posting this, there was a google ad for Cooley at the top of my page. I find this hilarious and fitting, and it only slightly diminishes when I think about the long-term consequences of having student loan with a low return-on-investment paying off this small part of a $2 million pool.

Law Grad Wants FTC to Investigate Law Schools

The only surprising thing about this article is that the ABA Journal actually ran it.

Joel Murray, a recent graduate of the University of California at Davis law school, posted a paper outlining his conclusions at the Social Science Research Network, the National Law Journal reports. "Many law schools are violating the FTC Act by reporting false and misleading employment statistics,” he writes. "The FTC should begin an investigation into U.S. law schools."

Apparently, Murray must not have "networked" enough at the 23rd-best law school in the country to get a job that would compensate him enough to not think of writing this article.

We also have quotes from professors Gerald Thain and Paul Campos, the latter noting that "schools are, essentially, lying to the federal government for the purposes of getting benefits."

Not that I have much faith in the FTC, but it's nice to see people showing some creativity in finding ways the law schools have done wrong. Some day I would like to compose a compendium of all the possible laws, rules, and common sense public policies violated by the law school system, but frankly that task seems more herculean by the week.

Bob Morse, Champion for Change

The most passive journalist on the planet is at it again today, where he discusses the latest ABA jobs data changes.

U.S. News had been among those urging the ABA to take action to improve the credibility of the important consumer information.

Yes, "urging." See, kids, this is how reform works. Figureheads like Bob Morse are a position to change the system immediately, and yet they do nothing. Then, when the people who actually care about reform show up and make a self-evident point, the coat-riders like Morse join the chorus. Then, when they write the history, they were a full-fledged member of the justified opposition, even though they refused to enact any reform steps for years.

But that's not all the magic from Bob's hand.

If the new ABA rules are implemented, U.S. News will use our own law school statistical surveys in fall 2011 to collect and eventually publish the entire new richer and more detailed set of employment and jobs data from each law school for 2010 J.D. graduates. When we gather this richer data set, we will be able to make a more exact determination of how our ranking methodology will change.

Think about this for a moment. The new ABA guidelines already make clear what information will be collected. Granted, Morse and Co. don't know what the response rates will be or how reliable the state-wide surveys will be, but you'd think they could be working with the methodology prior to getting the data itself. After all, statistical methodology should be theoretically-sound independent of the data.

Is Morse being ambiguous and as commitment-free as possible so he can make methadological adjustments to keep the T-14 the T-14, or the T-6 the T-6? I'll leave you to speculate, but it's hard for a cynic like me to not make that assumption given the nature of the propaganda business.

From Profession to Factory Worker: the Rise of the Contract Attorney from the WSJ

The Wall Street Journal has an interesting article today that should be mandatory reading for anyone considering law school, although it's nothing new for those already in the know. It's about contract attorney/doc review gigs and how experienced attorneys have turned to these temporary gigs to pay their bills.

This new "third tier" of the legal world illustrates the commoditization of the legal profession, which once offered most new entrants access to prestige and power, as well as a professional lifestyle. It also shows how post-recession belt-tightening is permanently altering some professions.

For 10 to 12 hours a day—and sometimes during graveyard shifts—contract attorneys such as Mr. Aponte sit silently in a big room, at rows of computer monitors. Each lawyer reads thousands of documents online and must quickly "code" every one according to its relevance in litigation or an investigation.

Supervisors discourage talking and breaks are limited. The computer systems count each lawyer's speed...

About 10% of all private practice jobs accepted by last year's law school graduates were reported as temporary, a steady increase from 5.4% in 2007...

The article notes that many of the 3rd-party companies have seen surges in their business this year from large white-shoe firms that used to actually hire more associate attorneys (or summer associates or clerks) to do much of this grunt work. The article's only mistake is thinking this is a recessionary phenomenon. It's not - doc review has been growing since before the recession.

And consider, young law aspirants, that the ever-expanding pool of unemployed attorneys will continue to drive wages down in these monotonous, soul-crushing, factory-type environments. That 40-50k cited in the article (note: that's not even worth the law school tuition price) will likely drop as a function of market dynamics. Oh, and don't forget that what they're doing is easily off-shorable, moreso than all the factories that easily packed up and abandoned the U.S. in the 70s. (for more on outsourcing, see this recent post from Brett Clark at Minnesota Lawyer).

No one in their right mind would spend three years of their life and a six-figure investment to do this type of work. Yet it was the destination for a few thousand graduates of last year's class, and will likely be the destination for even higher numbers until the the Indians can do it. And those are graduates who get to be counted as "employed."

LaVerne Denied; Others At Risk? Not Really.

As has been widely reported, the ABA has formally denied LaVerne College of Law full accreditation citing its low bar passage rates. I've already written extensively on this topic and have noted that the many of the current students may suffer most, so I'll not regurgitate those feelings here. That said, I'm happy the ABA took a stand against a mediocre institution and only wish they would do it in areas other than bar passage (which, let's face it, can be taught with an intensive study course and can be gamed like any other standardized test), like actual attorney employment [x] months after graduation.

Now that the hammer has fallen on LaVerne, should anyone else be sweating?

According to this link, Thomas Jefferson, Whitter, Western State, and Southwestern were all at least 15% below the California State average in 2010. But all of them are already fully accredited, and they didn't do nearly as bad as LaVerne, so I don't expect any action here.

What about the nation's other four provisionally-accredited law schools? Well, none of them provide an easy out for the ABA.

The Charleston School of Law had a 72% bar pass rate last July, -4% against the overall, and -11% compared to the University of South Carolina. The previous exam was similar. Although there's no compelling reason to have more than one law school in South Carolina, they're in almost no danger on this front, and they're in the worst shape.

Drexel had an excellent year in 2009 and posted the state's best result in Feb. 2010. Elon has done well, and Charlotte isn't doing nearly as bad as LaVerne.

So unfortunately, I fear this will just be a one-time thing. The other new schools apparently have learned how to emphasize bar pass rates and teach to the test so that the ABA won't have a good reason to reject them. Not that being a graduate of Elon will be any easier for a prospective student than being a graduate from LaVerne, but I suppose one less school in the mix is a net positive.

EDIT: Looks like Charlotte and Elon both gained full accreditation (the title of the article reads "earned...") at the most recent vote despite graduates from either having little to no chance at meaningful legal employment. Way to go, ABA.

Viva Reform! ABA Adpots Some Changes to Reporting, Industry Shill Objects

The ABA Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has adopted more enhanced reporting standards. Law school transparency has a good write-up of the changes, and I encourage readers to just go there, but the basics, and my minor criticisms, are as follows:

1. Job placement: Will be divided into (1) employed in position w/ JD; (2) employed w/ JD preferred; (3) another professional job; (4) non-professional job; (5) student; (6) unemployed, seeking; (7) unemployed, not seeking; (8) unknown.

I really dislike keeping the "unknown" category, and believe those students should be presumed unemployed, seeking. I also dislike the "professional/non-professional" dichotomy and feel a generic "non-law" category with salary data would suffice. My fear is that schools are going to count legal and administrative assistants and anything "sales" as "professional" jobs.

A very welcome change is that schools will now apparently be required to disclose if they are funding any of the positions. The type of job (firm size, government, etc.) information looks the same, but they've added an "employment location" section, so prospective law students can know where they'll likely wind up, how they have no prayer at practicing internationally, etc.

2. Salaries: As far as I can tell, this is the biggest change. Salaries are now going to be divorced from the institution. They seem to be doing away with school-specific salary information, citing the unreliability of the surveys, the lack of available data, the granularity of the data, etc. Instead, they're going to look at it by state.

I think this is still subject to being confusing (e.g. Syracuse and SUNY-Bufallo are going to be advantaged by higher New York City salaries, right?), but it's a step in the right direction, because it at least seeks to address the "skewing" that takes place that allows schools to report median private practice salaries in the six figures.

LST has a summary of the other minor concerns. Also on their entry is a comment by Linda A. Spagnola-Wendling, assistant dean at N.C. Central, who whines for far too many paragraphs about the "statistics beast."

Law School Career Services Offices (CSO’s) cannot mandate, coerce, bribe, or otherwise direct their new graduates to answer the annual questionnaire. It is a completely voluntary exercise which only goodwill and nagging manages to elicit responses.
....
Compounding this stress now is US News & World Report’s new method of calculating the overall employment rate used in their ranking system. Instead of using the number of graduates whose status is known as the denominator, they are using the number of total graduates. What this does in practical, mathematical terms is calculate all unknown graduates as unemployed. Regardless of the reason that the graduates failed to respond, to presume that they are unemployed is inaccurate, misleading and extremely detrimental to all the constituencies that rely on this information.
...
Calculating the employment rate based upon the known statuses of graduates who have responded supplies us with a representative sample – a well-known and widely accepted statistical practice. To deviate from this simply counters good reporting practices.
...
The statistical beast does not serve any master, either; merely its own greediness. Prospective law students will not get any more accurate information from this process, in fact it may be worse than before. The new ranking system races full steam ahead without notice to the law schools and without a plan of guidance or tools to help them reach the same point.

I've read a lot of dumb comments in my time blogging on this field, but this woman might take the cake in terms of unabashed, lazy inanity, and it appears that her poorly-written whine-fest was copied-and-pasted from elsewhere to boot.

First, she is statistically retarded. Voluntary "opt-in" responses from a diverse population never provide a valid sample when the variable affects the likelihood of response! To even use the term "representative sample" when the survey participants have the option to respond or not borders on statistical blasphemy. This is taught during the first week of any self-respecting college statistics course. But apparently this nimrod didn't learn basic statistics on her way through Rutgers (Bachelors) and Seton Hall (J.D.).

As I've explained previously, there was no basis for the previous U&S News assumption that 25% of the unknown graduates were employed. What that baseless assumption did was promote the unscrupulous to ignore graduates that they might have otherwise known to be unemployed, or to be more aggressive in contacting those who graduated at the top of the class.

No one is "presuming" that anyone is unemployed. But what I and the new U.S. News ranking will not do is presume someone is employed without proof. That's what the old system did. That's why it's changed, and why career service shills are the only people who favored it.

Second, Linda, no one is asking you and your crappy little office to be perfect and collect a response from every single graduate. But what I expect, and prospective law students need, is an accurate portrayal of that data. Notice in the standards that no one is really asking your office to work harder; I'm sure you work hard already. The crux of the changes is on the presentation side.

Her stringent efforts to oppose it with distortions of basic statistics and clumsy, heavy-handed metaphors suggest that she prefers the old, demonstrably-flawed system to the changes being made, which are being unanimously met with approval from groups like LST (although they say they don't always go far enough; I obviously concur). Gee, I wonder why that is?

Is this not a blatant admission that the old system distorted reality in favor of the law schools and the people who benefit from them? Is this not a strong sign that the changes are closing some oft-used loopholes to make the sky appear more blue?

Third, did y'all notice her use of words? "The statistical beast does not serve any master, either; merely its own greediness." This brazen piece of human waste is a law school administrator accusing industry reform advocates of greed, truly a ballsy approach. Linda Spagnola-Wending makes $75,000 a year working a relatively cushy administrative job (stable work week, light summers, etc.) in a low-rate state school whose tuition has increased 90+% for in-state residents since 2005 (hint: that's far more than the flagship university...), all in a state that has seven law schools and no major metro areas (unless you count Charlotte or Raleigh, which you shouldn't).

And yet we - those who want to better illuminate the collected data so that the numbers reflect reality instead a marketing narrative - are the greedy ones. I would have thought her Seton Hall legal education would have given her a better term, but I suppose not. In any event, this is truly Orwellian: those who want to enhance consumer protection and prevent consumer regret are greedy.

The real tell that this woman is an insufferable education-sector bureaucrat comes in the last paragraph of what I've quoted: "The new ranking system races full steam ahead without notice to the law schools ...."

Because, you see, to a career services person, the endgame isn't actually employing students or even getting accurate data, it's gaming the rankings. Don't take my word for it. Take hers. Why else do you think she feels the law schools need "notice" of how a 3rd-party "journalism" outlet ranks their institutions? Why should they be entitled to notice, and what self-respecting journalist outlet would actually give it to them? And if all the law schools are on an even playing field with respect to presentation, is it really a problem? And why, regardless of what the journalist outlet decides to do with the data, does that have anything to do with how the ABA collects data, which, one would assume, would have more to do with accreditation concerns?

In this ridiculous and ill-conceived letter, Spagnola-Wending wants us to believe that transparency is important, but not worth the extra effort for her office; that data collection issues are the same as data presentation issues; that the ABA somehow has authority over third-party ranking systems that should give schools notice so they can be more quickly manipulated; that we can assume many students not responding may "be indeed employed but merely too busy working in fulfilling and demanding legal jobs to respond" (yes, she actually wrote that); and that the ABA/state bars need to put another mandatory hammer on recent law graduates, as if non-dischargable debt isn't enough ('cause, you know, everything should be blamed on students and graduates; note how in this industry the previous customers are the bad guy...think about it).

Again, no one is asking career services offices to track down every last graduate. But if they do present the information, it needs to be an accurate portrayal of the class rather than a misleading presentation where half the class is in private practice making six figures when, in reality, 50+% are working jobs no one would ever go to law school to take. That's what these reforms get at, and that's why I think they're a positive step.

In fact, almost anything is a positive step when the previous methods of data collection have led to complete retards like Arthur Snyder ignoring the brutal job market while he builds a useless law school. The time for the ABA to stop being complicit in the misrepresentation of the legal reality has long passed. It's nice to finally see an attempt to correct some of the loopholes.