What Will It Take to Shed Sunlight on NALP Reports from Every Law School?

The response rate to Law School Transparency's Dec. 14, 2011 request for Class of 2010 NALP reports from all US law schools, ABA-approved or not, was under 20%. That begs the question, just how bad can the NALP reports be?

The response rate also begs the question, what will it take to acquire access to NALP reports? For public law schools, it may take an expicited cited state-FOIA request to obtain the data. LST reports

Interestingly, the vast majority of schools providing LST with the 2010 NALP reports were public institutions. This may be because these schools interpreted our request as an open records request. Two schools (Wisconsin and UNC) explicitly treated our request in this way.

For private law schools, I'm thinking it may very well take a Congressional hearing subpoena for LST to pursue its mission "to improve consumer information and to usher in consumer-oriented reforms to the current law school model" by way of government intervention. That or more class action lawsuits... .

Regarding rejections from law schools, LST comments:

We received a handful of responses expressly declining to provide LST with the NALP report. Consistent with past communications with law schools, a number of schools indicated that they had meaningful employment information already available on their websites. In almost every case, this was (and remains) false.

LST also notes that six law schools, Columbia, Kentucky, St. Louis, and the three law schools in Puerto Rico  do not submit employment data to NALP.

This does not mean that these schools do not have ample employment data, however. Rather, these are the only schools who do not have a prepared form in front of them that can quite easily be disclosed to prospective law students.

Details, including links to each NALP report provided in response to LST's request, are availabe at LST Obtains 33 Class of 2010 NALP Reports. See also Staci Zaretsky's Which Law Schools Are Trying to Be Honest About Their Employment Information? on ATL. [JH]