Law School Applicants Take Note

My friend (and former employee of the company I own) Rachel Zahorsky has just written a very nice piece on the Cost of Legal Education (below) that was posted recently in the ABA Journal Weekly eNewsletter, called Law News Now.

Ms. Zahorsky write..."Attention, prospective law students: The cost of legal education will continue to rise. That is the prediction shared by two law school deans—Michael Schill from the University of Chicago at a recent panel event in Chicago, and Phoebe Haddon from the University of Maryland, who stopped for a visit with the ABA Journal.

However, Haddon, who opposed a tuition hike in 2011—the freeze remains subject to university approval—also proposed an interesting solution: increased collaboration between rival law schools. Shared faculty appointments, facilities and technology, a trend that has already taken root among colleges within a single university, can alleviate the hefty expenses of boosting practice-based courses as students demand more hands-on experience, Haddon says, even at law schools that compete for the same pool of students and professors.

“We have to be more practical and be more retrospective about our competitive interests,” Haddon said, “[Law schools] need to ask: What are the ways to make this a win-win situation by sharing those types of costs?”  One example Haddon cites is students' work on a leadership journal published jointly by Santa Clara Law and the University of Maryland School of Law that culminated in the Leadership Education Roundtable at Santa Clara last weekend.

And for those law schools that don’t want to share their toys in the sandbox?   “This is the reality for law schools,” Haddon added. “It’s already started, but we will soon see more formalized relationships between law schools.”

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My comment on the topic is this: law school cost will not usually be the driving factor in a much-needed decline in law school enrollment.  For those considering law school, the future lawyer job market, to them, will always be fuzzy based on the continual issue of trying to guess what the actual job market will be "three years from now."   Things can and do change in three years, but in Illinois, every November another 2,200 new lawyers get sworn in.  And may 500-800 more each May.   Rather than the cost factor (families have plenty of money waiting to invest in their children's education), consideration should be given to the number of lawyers in each state as available inventory and to some type of a prediction for future demand.

Marketing (sales!) must also be taught in law school to those lawyers who will be on a law firm employment track.  The same goes for business (law office) management skills must also be taught in law school.  I know this from being married to a person who has taught marketing principals to 3L's at a law school in downtown Chicago.

And else where in that ABA publication we read, "Yale Law School had a 16.5 percent drop in law school applications at its March 1 deadline, the Yale Daily News reports. The average drop in law school applicants nationwide is about 11.5 percent."   This is odd, but good.  I do recall read recently (2009 Debra Cassens Weiss) that "the number of people taking the LSAT is at an all-time high figure, and the recession is a likely reason.  But some are questioning whether bad economic times are a sufficient reason to go to law school."