Practice Management

Big Law as we know is dying, or at least that is what many very educated people think.  This spells problems for law schools as well.  It might be the kind of problem that brings about real and necessary change.

I recently blogged about the Law School Tuition Bubble.  The model of massive tuition increases for no more visible services that relate to employment and earnings in the future are simply unsustainable.  The model did not fully appreciate how most lawyers practice when the war for rankings started this escalation, and it certainly does not now.

But, with all of the talk about the death of Big Law, law Professor Erik F. Gerding at the University of New Mexico School of Law questions whether we are seeing the death of the Big Law School as well.

The difference for me is that, unlike most law school insiders, I do not see the current financial mess law students find themselves as a "law school boom".  I see it as a dangerous bubble that is unnecessary and artificial.  I think it started over rankings and the thought by all of us that we want to be recognized for the good we do (or want to do).  But, what do you do when you live off the crack of rankings and student loan money to justify your existence and your secret greed.  Like the drug itself, it has a serious consequence to society as a whole.  Law schools simply cannot live off the hope that poor (literally), innocent students can borrow every increasing amounts of money, almost on a whim, to satisfy the peculiar beguilement and distraction of law school insiders.  It is having and will continue to have very sever financial consequences for its graduates; marked by intense dissatisfaction for the choice they made to attend law school in the first place.

Just like the tech bubble of the 90s, and the housing bubble of this decade, this business model (and that is what it is) is not sustainable.

The dependence of law students getting high paying law firm jobs to pay off high law school tuition was primarily a fiction with which to begin, and now with the continuing collapse of Big Law benefactors the economic pressures will mount.

This might not be all bad.  For example, these pressures will push law schools to improve the practical training of graduates so they are practice ready on graduation.  That is the type of training most law school graduates have always needed and have never much received.

With tighter budgets, law schools will face pressures to move in the direction of larger class sizes, maybe.  There will be more adjunct faculty and graduate students teaching.  But, is that all bad?  Those with practical experience teaching the law?  I like it!

More of the faculty will have to fund part of their salary with grants.  Look, however, at UH Law proposing to increase every student's tuition by $4,000.00 a year for the sole purpose of building itself a new edifice to its ego and for purposes of rankings.  The law school has a great building, that might need a little rehab, but ultimately they want everyone to have their own little enclave.  My thought is if they want the building so bad, go find a generous benefactor, but otherwise stop the madness that jobless and impressionable students should pay the tab directly.

I do not much understand the argument that the problem with looking at the business model of a law school means, per se, that law schools then transform law into a business?  It is a business and, whereas I understand the need for professionalism, to suggest that one excludes the other is a fallacy that has been with the law snobs too long.