Go to Lunch With Your Law Professor: Get Personal
I always find my professors a little intimidating the first couple of weeks of class before I get to know them a little better. I’m especially afraid of them when they use the Socratic method…but this semester I got a head start. My secured transactions professor offered to take us out to lunch in small groups and put out a sign up sheet the very first class. A couple of friends and I decided to take him up on his offer and went out with him last Wednesday after class. The day that we were scheduled to go out to lunch with him, our Professor started class by saying how disappointed he was in us as a group. I thought he was going to say something about us not understanding the material or something but instead he said that no one had signed up for lunch with him for the rest of the semester. I felt relieved and glad that he really wanted us to sign up for lunch with him. Professor Kaufmann insisted that we had to pick the restaurant so of course we went with Thai food, our favorite. We walked to 9 Tastes in Harvard Square.
The walk over was full of small talk and long awkward pauses because none of us knew what to ask or say at first. About halfway there we came to an understanding that we would just alternate asking questions. By the time we got to 9 Tastes we knew what everyone was doing for the summer and that our professor had clerked for Justice Rehnquist on the Supreme Court. Our conversation in the restaurant was much less awkward. We slowly became more and more comfortable talking. Professor Kaufmann told us how he came to write a biography of Justice Cardozo, what the law school was like forty years ago, and how he came to teach secured transactions. We got to know our professor on a more personal level as well, which was really nice.
I sometimes forget that my professors are people who go home after work and have normal lives. I find that my professors intimidate me less the moment after they mention a child or spouse in an anecdote they tell in class. So getting to know my professors helps me to get over my fear of the Socratic method, which Professor Kaufmann definitely loves to use, and just focus on learning the material rather than freak out because I might be called on next. I definitely think the rest of my class should take advantage and sign up for lunch as soon as possible. Teachers who have been around as long as Professor Kaufmann have a lot of wisdom to share and not taking advantage of that seems just silly.
[thanks to nicmcphee and hls in focus via cc]
Law School Dress Code: Jeans & T-Shirts or Suits & Tie?
The first time this concept occurred to me, I was packing my bags for law school and my mother was staring at my clothes as I packed them. I asked her what was wrong and all she did was ask me whether that was all the clothes I was going to take with me. I said that of course it was because I had just packed all the clothes I owned. She looked at me in disbelief and said, “Don’t you know where you are going? You need to take some dress clothes.” She refused to believe that my jeans, t-shirts and sweatshirts were going to do the job. I didn’t really want to argue so we went to the store to buy some more “professional-looking” clothes. The first few days of orientation it was humid in Cambridge, so I didn’t need my “professional” clothes then. When classes started, I tried to wear slacks and collared shirts but after a while I noticed that not many other people were wearing anything fancier than jeans and polos or blouses. I decided to push the more “work-like” clothing to the back of my closet and get back to my more comfortable clothing.
Although I had returned to my more normal attire, I didn’t stop paying attention to what everyone was wearing so that I wouldn’t slip up and find myself completely underdressed. After a while, though, I stopped worrying about it because I realized that people were all over the board. Male students tend to wear jeans or khakis and polo shirts. Female students tend to have more variation. In my section, there were a few women who definitely shared my mother’s mentality. They came to class everyday with perfectly coordinated outfits and nail polish that matched their lipstick. Then there were people like me who generally didn’t wear makeup and only wore jeans and sweaters to class. Toward the end of the semester a friend of mine and I even started to wear sweats to our 8 a.m. property class because we routinely went to the gym together after class.
It wasn’t until the middle of the spring semester of that year that I thought about the subject again. I was sitting down with a group of people for lunch in the Hark. Somehow we ended up talking about clothes. I think someone said that they didn’t like wearing t-shirts and then suddenly another student from my section saw his opening and let us all know how he felt about the way students dress at HLS. I know he isn’t the only one that believes people should try a little harder when they are getting ready in the morning, but he went as far as saying he believed there should be a dress code. “This is professional school,” he exclaimed, “people should be dressing like professionals.” His plan involved a ban on jeans, sweatshirts and t-shirts. As someone who loves to be able to wear her gym clothes to class (and no, I’m not the only one), I have to say that I’m glad there isn’t a dress code here. I do applaud this guy though, I have never seen him wear gym shoes to class and I have never seen him without a collar.
Rest assured there is no dress code at HLS. I think people feel pretty comfortable wearing whatever they want and I don’t think that anyone ever looks out of place. On any given day there will be one person wearing a suit to class and another who looks ready for the gym. If you’re like me, you shouldn’t worry too much about buying special new clothes just to come to law school. You should just come with whatever makes you feel comfortable.
[thanks to ed yourdon and hls in focus via cc]
How the Changing Legal Landscape Will Affect Legal Education
As the fall progresses, many law students and law school administers will be trying to assess the direction of three market trends: (1) the number or percentage of summer associates who receive offers of permanent employment; (2) the prevalence of deferrals among those lucky enough to be offered jobs; and (3) the volume of summer offers coming out of this year’s OCI process. Nobody expects cheery numbers. But as the market information comes in over the next few months, law schools will be in a better position to assess the new landscape.
In a nutshell, here is the issue: Since the last major legal recession of the early 1990s, elite law schools adapted their business model to the seeming certainty of virtually guaranteed high paying jobs for their graduates. This meant increasing tuition, hiring more faculty, reducing teaching loads, and generally loading more debt onto students. For at least the last 15 years, the sizzling corporate legal market made this high-cost model financially viable, even though the only thing these models maximized (or strongly incentivized) was faculty scholarship. Because corporate counsel are fundamentally changing how they value and buy outside legal services, there may not be enough high-paying entry level jobs to support the very high cost of legal education, even at elite schools.
Yet, unbelievably, due to the weighting of per pupil direct expenditures, schools with higher cost structures generally fare better in the US News rankings. Among elite schools, direct expense (financed with high tuition, high student debt, and large endowments) is the input that keeps the elite schools at the top of the pecking order — Yale’s is three times the average, and Harvard, Stanford, NYU, and Columbia are more than double. Of course, less elite law schools wishing to become more elite–i.e., pretty much every school with a few exceptions– have tried to keep up by modeling themselves after elite schools, including a “scholarship-first” strategy. Thus, the cost structure at virtually all law schools has climbed far in excess of the earning capacity of the median law school graduate. See Morriss & Henderson, The New Math of Legal Education, ABA Young Lawyer (July 2008). Yet, due to deficiencies in (a) information, and (b) how information is analyzed, the status quo rolls on.
I can think of at least four reasons for these information inefficiencies.
- Naivete. The modal student entering law school is not homo economicus. Rather, he or she is young, inexperienced, and overly impressed with branding–largely through US News–and the opinions of peers. IQ does not shield the young from overconfidence and the reflexive desire to impress others through the acquisition of positional goods. Indeed, sometimes intelligence in the absence of commonsense can make matters worse.
- Poorly Priced Credit. Banks have lent students funds without a sharp eye to repayment risk. The terms of loans are largely the same regardless of law school attended, geographic market conditions, and law school performance. Yes, historically law students have repaid their loans. But that is the same sloppy logic that created the housing bubble. The only way the math works is if the vast majority of law school graduates, despite low or no starting salaries, experience a steady, multi-year surge in income. This is a foolish assumption for anyone who understands the current state of law firm economics. Of course, just like most home mortgages, student debt over and above the Federal Stafford Loans, often get bundled together, turned into securities, and sold.
- Law Schools are Self-Interested and Locked in a Positional Competition. This is not a criticism; it is a statement of fact. Law schools work very hard to manage their market position, including their US News rank, because students and alumni can be completely demoralized with a significant decline. It does not matter if the decline in quality is illusory; stakeholders will declare the patient sick. This may surprise naive law students, but law schools cannot be counted on to be an objective broker. We need a regulator to level the playing field and force us to be transparent. Which brings me to my fourth point … .
- Failure of Self-Regulation. The ABA Section on Legal Education and Admission to the Bar bears some responsibility here, but not become it has accredited too many law schools — the antitrust implications of barring market entry are real. Rather, the Section has become too focused on the comfort of its law school members. If the Section collected and published detailed employment outcome information in a way that facilitated school-to-school comparisons–yes, just like US News–the information would trickle down to potential law schools. It is not helpful to say that 15% of a school’s graduates work in business — they need to know how many of those 15% are waiting tables, driving a cab, or selling insurance. Re jobs in private practice, how many are working as contract attorneys? Nobody really knows, and the issue is not on the Section’s agenda. If these data are published, some law schools would probably go out of business.
With corporate firms experiencing sluggish demand and tremendous downward pressure on fees, changes in hiring patterns (both the number of jobs and their remuneration) are going to exert tremendous pressure on law schools to rethink their business models. To my mind, the proper response is for law schools to really think through how they can maximally enhance the human capital of law school graduates. (Others might think the proper response is offer the same quality at a lower price, which is the situation confronted by most law firms these days.)
Here, the greatest risk is drawing the wrong inferences from the historical record and confusing market signals with professional education that truly enhances the decision-making and judgment of young lawyers. For the last several decades, entry level-lawyer remuneration–a tempting market-based metric of value-added–has been based on a combination of branding and sorting of raw inputs. In other words, it is not the curriculum at Harvard or Yale, or the massive scholarly output of the faculty, that drove the demand for their graduates. Rather, it was the Ivy-League brand (think Pavlov’s dog) buttressed by statistics that these schools had admitted students with very high IQs. In turn, firms used this information to signal their superior collective credentials to their clients. At end of the day, pedigree definitely has CYA value for many general counsel. But the Bi-Modal distribution suggests that this signal became dramatically overvalued. See Henderson, The Bursting of the Pedigree Bubble, NALP Bulletin (July 2009).
So the open question goes to the very heart of professional education: what type of law school curriculum and teaching methods are really worth the price paid by today’s students? Even if law schools instituted a moratorium on the writing of law review articles for an entire academic year, our collective brain power may be inadequate to answer this question. But I guarantee that the answer requires a strong engagement with practicing lawyers and recourse to empirical methods — not necessarily to publish articles (that is a mere second order effect) but to refashion and retool what and how we teach. The schools that rise to this challenge are, in the long run, going to fare better than those who continue to be believe that more faculty law review articles will raise the school’s ranking, thus enticing more employers to hire their students.
[thanks to shopliftertoo and bill henderson via cc]
