Lincoln Caplan’s Observer column in Sunday’s New York Times (“An Existential Crisis for Law Schools”), while offering nothing new, provides a pretty accurate description of the challenges facing America’s law schools. To summarize: only 55% of 2011 law school graduates had obtained full-time jobs requiring a law degree nine months following graduation; only 67% had obtained full-time professional jobs of any kind. The problem is probably more structural than cyclical, as the market for legal services forces law firms to trim their staffs, outsource work not requiring full-time lawyers, and streamline routine work through the use of paralegals and computer software.
Potential law school applicants have read the handwriting on the wall. Nationwide, applications to law school this past year were down about 14%, as potential applicants recognize that a law degree is not an automatic ticket to riches. As I have stated previously, none of this should dissuade the conscientious student who has a genuine intellectual interest in the law, a passion for justice, and a desire to serve people. There will always be rewarding work for such people, although the “good” jobs are a little less likely to fall into the laps of the next generation of law students. Lest we delude ourselves, the highest paying entry-level jobs with the biggest firms never employed more than about 20% of any class of law school graduates. Now, as much as ever, law school applicants must approach the endeavor with their eyes open, fully attuned to the potential risks and rewards.
How should law schools respond to these challenges? First, law schools should admit classes commensurate in size with the applicant pool and the market for our graduates. Wayne Law is one of several law schools that have reduced their class size so as to maintain academic quality. As my predecessor, Frank Wu (now dean at Hastings College of Law) has said, it is irresponsible for law schools to continue to mint more lawyers than the legal employment market can bear. But the problem cannot be remedied through the conduct of a relative handful of law schools. It may be a little easier for the career services offices at Hastings and Wayne to help a smaller number of graduates find jobs, but the overall effect of our efforts on the apparent oversupply of lawyers is minimal if other law schools continue to expand their campuses and new law schools open their doors each year.
A reduction in class size is not without its financial consequences. If the law of supply and demand is to be believed, significant tuition increases cannot be used to make up the revenue shortfall. Economies are possible (and we have taken reasonable economies at Wayne Law), but one can go only so far in the face of the demand for increased academic support, career services, and the kind of low-enrollment courses needed to accommodate the demand for more skills training. The staffing of law schools is neither fungible nor fully flexible; like most academic institutions, we employ a highly skilled, mostly tenured workforce which can neither contract nor make radical programmatic adjustments on a dime. So as state legislatures continue to disinvest in public education, even state-supported law schools will have to look increasingly to the generosity of our alumni and other supporters to sustain high quality programs. For all but the most selective schools, the tuition gravy train is over.
Second, those law schools that wish to thrive will have to revise their academic programs to distinguish themselves from the pack and equip their students with essential practice skills. At Wayne Law, the Damon J. Keith Center for Civil Rights, Public Interest Law Fellowships, and Pro Bono Program – plus a tradition of student activism – have set us apart as the leading public interest law school in the Great Lakes region. Our Program for International Legal Studies (which sponsors several International Public Interest Law Fellowships) has underscored our identified faculty expertise in international law. And the newly established Program for Entrepreneurship and Business Law is embarked on a course of extending one of our traditional strengths into business development (through, among other things, our Business and Community Law Clinic) and the burgeoning field of intellectual property law.
We have recently surveyed both leading practitioners and judges (the kind of people who hire lawyers) and fairly recent graduates to find out what they think we should be doing to better equip our students for practice. Overall, they thought we were doing a good job, but thought that law students would be better prepared for the world of practice – and more employable – if law schools devoted greater attention to legal writing skills. So that is what we shall do. Currently, several groups within our law school are working on the improvement of writing and related practice skills from a number of angles – creating new courses, reworking existing courses, and enhancing our overall program of academic support. It will not be a cakewalk for our students (or our faculty), but we should all emerge better for the effort.
We should also realize that the traditional JD degree need not be the only mission of a good law school. At Wayne Law, we have recently added an LLM Program in United States Law for the benefit of foreign lawyers. And we will be exploring whether businesspeople, human resources executives, health care personnel and others would benefit from some form of legal education short of a three-year JD degree.
What makes law such an intriguing profession is the ability of lawyers to reinvent themselves – to develop new skills, new lines of practice – and to find better ways to serve clients and the cause of justice. Likewise, law faculties must reinvent themselves. I remain unconvinced that legal education will go the way of the buggywhip. But we cannot be so enamored of an 1870’s template for legal education1 that we are unable to meet the challenges of the day.
Finally – I have previously reframed the problem of “not enough jobs for lawyers” as one of “perhaps not enough jobs, but plenty of work for lawyers.” We have an abundant supply of new lawyers, willing to serve the public for reasonable compensation. There are an untold number of potential consumers of legal services – small businesspeople, homeowners, families – in need of legal services, who have yet to tap into the supply. Law schools and bar associations should explore ways of linking supply to demand, providing employment for our recent graduates and serving the public as well. A handful of law schools (none in the Great Lakes region) have established law practice incubators in which recent law school graduates share office space and supplies, and the law school provides mentoring and other forms of expertise. We will be exploring this and other alternatives in the months to come. At Wayne Law, we are intent on being the solution, not the problem.
1 In 1870, Christopher Columbus Langdell, dean of Harvard Law School, brought the case method and Socratic dialogue to legal education, and that methodology remains the dominant – although not exclusive – form of legal education to this day.
The law of supply and demand. is a post from: The Dean Bob Law Blog
