ABA Journal - Law News Now

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1. Posted by msg, esq. - 2 months, 1 week, 6 days, 13 hours, 36 minutes ago

   You have got to be kidding me!  There are way to many attorneys everywhere!  And too many attorneys that should never have become attorneys and too many that are good attorneys and can’t find good work!  There are a lot of law schools that need to shut down and stop putting out so many lawyers to let the market adjust for a while.  The promises some law schools make to incoming students are down right fraudulent misrepresentations.  The last thing we need is another law school!

2. Posted by WL - 2 months, 1 week, 6 days, 8 hours, 4 minutes ago

   The last sentence is telling. The boosters of the new schools are only looking at them as cash cows. For a big state like NY, I agree that going to school far from home is an issue for people who already have families, but not so much for people coming straight out of college. But this is also an argument to end the ABA policy against accrediting online law schools like Concord. As for the issue of affordability, that’s something that needs to be address across the board in higher ed., not just at law schools.

3. Posted by Nicolas Martin - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 16 hours, 15 minutes ago

   If lawyers competed in a free market, rather than operating as a cartel, Mutua’s Marxist logic would be met with scorn. But, then, in a free market, demand would determine the number of lawyers needed, not governments.

4. Posted by Florida Law - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 15 hours, 54 minutes ago

   Preplexing, but true.  As an ‘07 law grad I’d have to agree that there are just too many law schools and too many lawyers.  The supply has exceeded demand and the quality and commitment of young lawyers is suffering as a result.  I think the biggest risk in the proliferation of new law schools is finding quality law professors - is the rate of lawyers seeking advanced legal degrees and doing scholarly writing and research keeping pace with the increases in enrollment and graduation?

5. Posted by Prof. JR, Esq. - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 15 hours, 13 minutes ago

   As both a full-time college professor and an attorney managing limited practice, I have mixed feelings in regard to the development of three new law schools in NY. While there may be an over abundance of practicing attorneys, there is also distinct lack of affordable educational opportunities for individuals wishing to pursue a professional degree in law. Law school tuition costs have skyrocketed to the point of negatively impacting the ability of individuals to afford such education or take on the burden of astronomical loan payments after graduation. While it is true that there is not a shortage of either public and private providers for educational loans, recent law school graduates are not always assured of finding a position that allows them to deal with the ensuing average $400 to $500 monthly student loan payments. As an educator and pre-law advisor, I never want to dissuade anyone with the academic ability from pursuing their dream, but when advising undergraduate students that have an interest in entering a career in public interest law they repeatedly raise the issue of cost.  As an attorney that maintains a small practice exclusively as a Law Guardian, the crisis regarding the shortage of attorneys willing to participate as assigned counsel continually presents serious concerns. In my opinion it is not the number of law schools that is significant, but the fact that the predominant number of law schools available are of the private variety.  With private law school tuition costs averaging over $30,000, perhaps the New York State Legislature should enact loan forgiveness programs for public interest lawyers to address some of these issues.  If the legislature is not willing to make this investment in this key aspect of the infrastructure of the State’s legal system, perhaps more State University of New York system law schools and/or competition may benefit all in providing impetus to all the law schools to over increased grants, scholarship, or fellowships to well qualified students that maybe struggling with the ability to pay for a legal education.

6. Posted by R - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 15 hours ago

   $400 a month in school loans?  Try $1500!  And I got scholarships.

7. Posted by KXM - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 14 hours, 58 minutes ago

   The high cost of legal services indicates that there are not enough lawyers. The middle-class has just as much difficulty affording legal work than the poor.  However, building new law schools alone is not the solution: so long as tuition is high and borne by student loan debt, the cost of legal services will be high because the cost of paying those loans are passed on to the consumer.

8. Posted by 2L - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 14 hours, 49 minutes ago

   The last sentence is disturbing.  “Affordable legal education” is an oxymoron.  Even if these will be state schools with a lower tuition than a private school, they’ll initially be poorly ranked and will have no alumni network.  This combination will make finding a job incredibly difficult.  End result, more temp doc review attorneys paying off student loans.

9. Posted by Caroline Conway - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 14 hours, 34 minutes ago

   I think it’s great that they are paying attention to the need for more affordable education closer to home.  I’d have gone to SUNY Stony Brook if there was a law school there, instead of leaving New York to be able to afford to live near school.  There might be a glut in NYC, but there is a need for law schools in greater New York.
   As for SUNY being “crummy,” as someone stated, UConn is a state school and it’s top tier, and SUNY has an excellent reputation, particularly in Stony Brook, so do some research before you bad-mouth a state school system.  It will automatically have more resources and a better reputation behind it than some private schools.

10. Posted by Joe - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 14 hours, 31 minutes ago

    If lawyers were required to serve a two year internship, arranged by the law school, before they could practice before the bar, this entire problem would be solved. Law schools that couldn’t arrange the interships would simply go out of business. The public would be better served because no new lawyer would be unleashed on an unsuspecting public without a reasonable likelihood of not tripping over his legal shoe laces bang-out-of-the-box.

11. Posted by Jon - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 13 hours, 50 minutes ago

    what defines crummy?  I attend a state school, the only law school in my state, private or public.  Our state Supreme Court comes to the law school and hears oral arguments in front of the students.  Our first year students in moot court competition get to argue their case to the S.Ct as well.  Every one of our current justices is a graduate of our school.  You don’t need to know what state, I don’t want your attitude here.

12. Posted by Danielle - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 13 hours, 26 minutes ago

    Jon, I’d say I think I know what school you’re talking about because I’m pretty sure I go to the same one, but it’s a private school, not state school, so I wonder if there’s any other state with only one law school and a Supreme Court that hears arguments in the school’s courtroom.

13. Posted by Nina - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 12 hours, 49 minutes ago

    Yes, I believe there is a glut of lawyers and that tuition costs are too high for those who want to enter public service. I attended a state school, easily passed the bar, but I don’t practice. There are few legal jobs that pay a living wage unless you were on bar review.  Salaries are higher in technical, and that’s also a financial bar to switching careers. Another cost related question I have is why the ABA charges such a high annual membership fee. It’s out of line with other professional organizations. Costs like these add up to inflated fees to clients.

14. Posted by John Donovan - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 12 hours, 45 minutes ago

    Referrubg to Comment #5: There’s no way Mike Hunt is someone’s name.  I’d disregard that comment.

15. Posted by Jan - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 12 hours, 26 minutes ago

    I don’t know a single person who’s loan payments are less than $1500 a month, and that’s with scholarships.
    My school consistently increased their tuition $5K each year claiming it was consistent with the increases in tuition across the nation. I completed my first year, and then received the letter in June. A little too late to transfer, and I sure as heck can’t just drop out. My scholarship covered just over 1/2 of my tuition and expenses the first year. By my third year, my scholarship was nearly eclipsed by the increase in tuition, leaving me to take out private loans to cover what was now 3 times what it cost me to go the first year.
    In spite of this, there’s no shortage of students applying to get in, even in the absence of good jobs after graduation. Prospective students need to be better informed about expenses (e.g. $1000/semester just for books) and repayment. And there has to be some cap on increasing tuition after a student is already in.
    Where we have a society that requires a graduate education, something has to be done so that MA and JD graduates aren’t struggling to pay off their “first mortgage” before they can even move out of their parent’s homes.

16. Posted by esq2 - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 12 hours, 22 minutes ago

    in defense of the crummy comment (which was calling SUNY crummy, not state education in general): TONS of states have amazing public law schools and public universities. NY is just not one of those states. The quality of public education in NY is severely lacking compared to other large states like Virginia, California, North Carolina, Texas, etc. The simple fact is that the best overall schools (and best according to rankings) in NY are private. Making a new law school in upstate NY that will take forever to become accredited will not solve that problem.

17. Posted by Angie - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 12 hours, 16 minutes ago

    The market cannot currently support more attorneys.  I have friends that graduated in the top of their class from a ranked top 25 school that still cannot get jobs.  On top of that, those that are arguing that we need more lawyers for the disadvantaged is ridiculous.  The problem is many lawyers cannot afford to go into public interest law because like many of already stated we have an average of $1000-$1500 a month in loan payments.  We cannot afford to work for $30,000 that legal aid or other associations like it is able to pay.  We need to put money into assisting lawyers in the public interest sector so they can maintain those jobs before putting more lawyers into the market.

18. Posted by new law grad with a great job - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 12 hours, 6 minutes ago

    I agree with most of this… especially the preclusive effect the high cost of law school has on new lawyers being able to enter the public interest sector.  I went to a really affordable state law school with a great reputation, however, AND took out loans for two summer study abroad programs, and my loan payments each month are only $333.  Students wanting to go into public interest work need to do the research, take time off to work and establish residency if necessary, and be realistic about what they’ll be able to do with the loans they have taken out.  Too often students are lured to the big names of private school without considering the benefits of going to a perfectly decent state school.  I have the job I wanted to have after graduating because public interest employers care less about the name and more about your committment to the issues.  That being said, I’m still competing with a million new graduates for the fellowships and clerkships I want… so it’s not just the private sector that’s out of control with too many new lawyers and not enough jobs.

19. Posted by anonymous - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 11 hours, 42 minutes ago

    Ugh! We do not need new law schools.  We need better quality lawyers.  Long Island does not need another law school, geographically we have a disproportionate amount of lawyers on the island.  This has created too many mediocre lawyers with too much debt who see nothing wrong with backhanded tactics practicing law.  What I see in court on a daily basis is frightening.  Clients are being taken advantage of by unscrupolous lawyers who think nothing of stealing clients in the hallway with the lure of a better rate.  In reality, many of them bleed the clients bank accounts then leave them high and dry.  The o ther day one of the sleazier lawyers was overheard telling another attorney how he just maxed out a clients 2 credit cards to pay his fee, and how he loves that.  Too many lawyers in a small geographic region creates bad lawyers and just further adds to the demise of the practice of law.

20. Posted by Susan - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 11 hours, 14 minutes ago

    Comment #8 said that the high cost of attorney fees indicates that there are not enough attorneys.  What planet do you come from? Some fields on earth actually pay higher than others due to factors other than economics, i.e., 3 extra years of schooling, grueling coursework, long hours at work, huge levels of responsibility (client goes to jail or stays free?).  Maybe you should write a list of pros and cons before posting something so clueless.  Aside from this, I think that there are too many lawyers in the job market but more schools is not the problem.  It may be that our work culture needs an overhaul, so that we will actually stay with a job longer than 5 years.  It may be that we need to broaden our work experience rather than specialize, except for those truly specific niche lawyers.  It may be that our entire economy is adjusting faster than we are, since we all know how slow the law profession is to change!  I just don’t think that new schools (or new branches as the case may be) is the problem with our market.  Maybe it’s all because of poster #8....

21. Posted by J - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 10 hours, 57 minutes ago

    I agree with 19, the last thing NYS needs is another law school.  The state funds 50 million for three schools to examine if they want to open a law school, while tuition where I graduated (SUNY Buffalo) has doubled in the last ten years.  NY should pay attention to the law school it has which has fallen in the rankings mostly due to issues regarding lack of funding.  Upstate NY has a shrinking economy and population which can not support a new law school.  With regard to #5, there are law schools in most geographic sections of NY state.  With regard to #8, opening more law schools is not going to make legal services more affordable, these graduates will come out with crushing debt and will have to take the highest paying job they can find.  Part of the solution is the opposite approach.  Fewer, but larger law schools could operate on an economies of scale and keep tuition lower.

22. Posted by Stan - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 10 hours, 46 minutes ago

    There are already FAR too many lawyers.  Duh.  And the ABA and the profession do nothing to restrain the continued increase.  Why is that?  American medical and osteopathy schools graduate only a total of about 18,000 medical students a year, and there are residency positions in hospitals for 27,000 medical graduates each year.  This virtually guarantees a job for every graduate of an American medical or osteopathy school who passes his medical board exams. Despite the medical profession’s need to “import” 9,000 foreign medical school graduates every year to fill the available residencies, no new med schools have been founded in recent years and existing ones do not expand.  This is presumably the AMA’s doing.  It would be instructive to chart the effect on relative income of doctors and lawyers over the past 30 years, and even more instructive if the chart compared (1) all graduates of US medical or osteopathy schools, to (2) all graduates of US law schools.

23. Posted by Susan - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 9 hours, 38 minutes ago

    Stan (Poster #22), I can’t disagree with your analogy, but a law degree can take a person into so many other areas of work that a medical degree, uh, cannot.  I think it’s a narrow-minded approach to view it as if all graduating law students intend to work at firms. They are totally different fields.

24. Posted by Diego - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 7 hours, 28 minutes ago

    Susan, a law degree can take you into many other fields.  However, there are other, less expensive, educational programs for going into those fields.  All the lawyers going into investment banking and private equity would have been better served by business school.

    Regardless, the only way to stop new law schools from opening is for undergraduates to accept the economic and career realities about going to law school and go do something else.  If fewer university graduates were lining up to sign promissory notes to go to law school, no one would want to open a new one.

25. Posted by Joseph - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 6 hours, 35 minutes ago

    The New York legislature should do a study on whether further lawyers are needed in the state before spending taxpayer money for law schools.  “Low priced” public law schools simply means taxpayers are footing much of the bill, and they should not do so without a need.  I doubt they can show such a need.

26. Posted by Irwin Eisenstein - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 6 hours, 8 minutes ago

    Should we consider a different approach? 
    In the past, a person could apprentice as a lawyer with a law firm and then take the bar.  This is still available in several states.  The difficulty with this approach was that the interns earned very meager salaries while in the internship. 
    Examples of New York lawyers who went this route include Justice Jackson of the US Supreme Court, and Mayor Ed Koch. 

    The Author of Marbury v Madison had less than four months of legal training.  Justice O’Connor graduated in 2 and 1/2 years.  One reason might be that the cost was excessive.

    Some of my fellow students have taken that route and have been successful.  The GPA’s may suffer but after a few years of practice that is meaningless.
    
    I wonder if either could afford a modern law school education!  Perhaps, several alternatives should be considered in New York. 

    1.  Try to reinstate practical clerkships with taking the bar (I understand that the ABA may oppose this, but the ABA has been wrong in the past.) For a period of ten (10) years the ABA was being observed by the Justice Department for questionable practices related to law schools. 

    2.  Consider a combination of online law schools and internships that allow a person to take the bar. 

    3.  Law Schools are frequently cash cows for universities so obviously, they may not want competition from the public sector. 

    One reason for State schools is that they are much less expensive than private schools and the result is that students have lower debt burdens.  Lawyers may then be less likely to sell their souls.

27. Posted by Manuel - 2 months, 1 week, 4 days, 5 hours, 33 minutes ago

    What is needed are more flexible programs that allow folks to obtain a quality legal education while working. The ABA does everything in its power to discourage “part-time” programs, and dings schools for hiring adjunct instructors (who sometimes know a bit more about the practice of law than their erudite full-time counterparts). I teach at a Big Ten law school as an adjunct, and many of my second and third-year full-time law students have jobs where they are working more than the 20 hours the ABA permits for full-time students. Rather than making liars of these students (who swear that they won’t work more than 20 hours), I say we should make it easier for them to study part-time. After the first two years, I’d suggest providing an oportunity for an apprenticeship (maybe two or three years) followed by the bar.

    Members of professions often claim there are too many; this is a natural response to competition. As long as we ensure training programs are turning out well-qualified individuals, there is no such thing as too many lawyers.

    To the person who said, “All the lawyers going into investment banking and private equity would have been better served by business school,” one could just as easily say all the MBAs going into IV and PE would have been better served by law school. I frequently encounter business managers trained as lawyers who demonstrate excellent strategic and operational thinking, I believe, based in part on their training as lawyers.

28. Posted by Susan - 2 months, 1 week, 3 days, 10 hours, 51 minutes ago

    No, no, no!  I mean, lawyers who are law librarians, political analysts, judges, tax men, members of the executive branch of government.... why is this so hard?

29. Posted by Susan - 2 months, 1 week, 3 days, 10 hours, 49 minutes ago

    P.S. please (please!) excuse the “tax man” thing from being derogatory against the male species… ;op

30. Posted by Elliott - 2 months, 1 week, 3 days, 8 hours, 39 minutes ago

    I agree with the overwhelming number of posts. I would slightly modify the too many lawyers point though. There are not necessarily too many lawyers, the problem is an extremely poor distribution of lawyers. The reason for this has been stated; many of the public interest/criminal justice positions simply don’t pay anywhere near enough to cover the cost of legal education in this country.
    The early post about there not being enough lawyers because fees were too high totally missed the mark. A large part of the reason for fees being so high is the way states use the bar exam to artificially keep numbers down. Look at the fee chart for the Florida bar exam and it reeks of protectionism. Delaware is no better.
    Putting more law schools in the mix won’t remedy fee issues. In fact, it won’t remedy much of anything.The students that the legislature wants to lure to the area will likely leave after their three year term and go where the (few) jobs are. The legislature would do better to look at loan forgiveness.

31. Posted by bg - 2 months, 1 week, 3 days, 7 hours, 37 minutes ago

    The state law schools in New York are located at each end - Buffalo and NYC.  Putting one in Binghamton and another in Long Island will not alter that isolation.  As for St. John Fisher, talk about a regional school!  It’s tuition is also on par with any other private university in the state so I am not sure where “affordable” comes into the picture.  As for the “closer to home” bit, Rochester is already equidistant between three law schools:  Buffalo, Syracuse, and Cornell. Binghamton is less than an hour brom both Syracuse and Cornell.  The Upstate legal market is already flooded with law students, recent graduates, and lawyers who cannot find jobs.  Two more law schools, especially in the central and western areas of the state where there are already three law schools, will just compound this problem further!  Personally, if they must spend this money on law school issues unstead of the numerous pressing problems in this state, this money could be much better spent improving the state’s existing state law schools and perhaps funding lower tuition at private schools.  I am against having my tax money spent to open new law schools that will not initially be accredited, requiring many more millions to reach decent levels of facilities and faculties, and will ultimately flood the market with even more people that have no business practicing law that cannot get the limited jobs that are available.  If the state want to open new schools, let it go on a B-school frenzy.  The library would cost a fraction of a law library and alumni seem to have more money to give back.

32. Posted by Stan - 2 months, 1 week, 2 days, 6 minutes ago

    It’s obvious we don’t have enough posts to have a balanced viewpoint from people whose law degrees have left them disappointed with their job prospects.  Presumably there are many law degree holders whose viewpoint might be relevant here, but who are not affiliated with ABA or who have long ago lost interest in the legal profession. 

    Granted, law school training can be helpful to people who perform a wide variety of jobs besides practicing law full-time.  But that is beside the point.  The point is the oversupply of people who wish to practice law and are well qualified to do so as compared to their counterparts from the legal profession of 30-50 years ago.  This has adverse effects on those people and also creates a large supply of talented but underutilized and often unhappy people who might be more gainfully employed to the benefit of society had they chosen a different field.  This overcrowding, with its related consequence of increased attorney aggressiveness, has also contributed to the negative perception of lawyers by the public. 

    If law school education were such a universal good, maybe the country would be better off if everyone went to law school?  Since that proposition is patently absurd, it should be equally obvious that some lesser level of “market penetration” might also be excessive.
    In today’s market we have the situation where lawyers older than 50 are routinely being forced out of positions in the practice to make way for the never ending hordes of newbies.  (This seemingly occurs everywhere except for law school faculties). If not for the massive oversupply of practitioners, there would not be this rush to discard well qualified highly experienced lawyers.