Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Washington & Lee is Biggest Legal Education Story of 2013
Here it is in a nutshell. There is empirical evidence that Washington & Lee’s experiential 3L curriculum is delivering a significantly better education to 3L students—significantly better than prior graduating classes at W&L, and significantly better than W&L’s primary competitors. Moreover, at a time when total law school applicants are on the decline, W&L’s getting more than its historical share of applicants and getting a much higher yield. When many schools are worried about revenues to survive next year and the year after, W&L is worried about creating the bandwidth needed to educate the surplus of students who enrolled in the fall of 2012, and the backlog of applicants that the school deferred to the fall of 2013.
[This is a long essay. If you want it in PDF format, click here.]
Alas, now we know: There is a market for high quality legal education. It consists of college graduates who don’t want to cast their lot with law schools who cannot guarantee students entree to meaningful practical training. Some might argue that W&L is not objectively better-- that the 3L curriculum is a marketing ploy where the reality falls well short of promotional materials and that, regardless, prospective students can't judge quality.
Well, in fact there is substantial evidence that the W&L 3L program delivers comparative value. The evidence is based on several years' worth of data from the Law School Survey of Student Engagement (LSSSE). I received permission from Professor James Moliterno, someone who took a leadership role in building W&L’s third year program, to share some of the key results (each school controls access to its LSSSE data.) They are below.
But before getting into empirical evidence, I want to put squarely on the table the most sobering finding that likely applies to virtually all of legal education. It is this: On several key LSSSE metrics, W&L has made impressive gains vis-à-vis its own historical benchmarks and its primary rival schools. But even for this leader, there remains enormous room for improvement. More on that below.
Here is the bottom line: Traditional legal education, when it is measured, does not fare very well. Yet, as W&L shows, substantial improvement is clearly possible. We law professors can respond to this information in one of two ways:
- Don’t measure, as it may disconfirm our belief that we are delivering a great education.
- Measure—even when it hurts—and improve.
I am in the second camp. Indeed, I don’t know if improvement is possible without measurement. Are we judging art work or the acquisition of key professional skills needed for the benefit of clients and the advancement of the public good?
Moving the Market
I doubt I will ever forget Jim Moliterno’s September 2012 presentation at the Educating Tomorrow’s Lawyers (ETL) conference at the University of Denver. He presented a single graph (chart below) showing W&L actual applicant volumes since 2008 versus what would have happened at W&L if its applicant volume had followed national trends.
While law school applicants crested a few years ago, W&L enjoyed a large run-up in volume of applicants, presumably due to the launching of their new 3L program. This larger applicant pool effectively served as a buffer when applicant declines began in 2011 and 2012. Since 2008, overall law school applicants are down -19%, yet W&L is up overall +33%.
But much more significantly, after their experiential 3L year was up and running and the overall legal job market continued to stagnate, W&L yields spiked. Ordinarily they would enroll 135 students. But for the fall of 2012, they received enrollment commitments from well over 260 students. Indeed, at the ETL conference Jim Moliterno said the school had to offer financially attractive deferments to get the class to approximately 185 incoming students -- a 50 student bulge.
When Jim Moliterno showed the above graph and explained the corresponding changes in yield, my good friend Gillian Hadfield, a skeptical, toughminded, evidence-demanding economist who teaches at USC Law, leaned over and said to me, “that is the single most important takeaway from this entire conference.” I agreed. The market for a legal education with practical training is, apparently, much more inelastic than the market for traditional JD programs.
Yet, what is perhaps most remarkable is that a large proportion of incoming students at W&L were enrolling based on little more than faith. Nobody knew for sure if W&L had the ability to pull off their ambitious 3L curriculum. The program relies on a large cadre of adjunct professors, after all, and W&L is located in remote Lexington, Virginia. Many law faculty outside of W&L, and perhaps some inside, thought (or perhaps think) that the program could not live up to the hype. Well, as shown below, the program appears to have produced meaningful gains.
The only data-driven critique anyone can muster is that the gains remain significantly short of perfection. But that critique bites harder on the rest of us. To use a simple metaphor, W&L is tooling around in a Model-T while the rest of us rely on horse and buggy. What ought to be plain to all of us, however, is that, just like automobile industry circa 1910, we are entering a period of staggering transformation that will last decades. And transformation will be roughly equal parts creation and destruction. See Schumpeter.
W&L Data, Internal Historical Benchmark
LSSSE is a phenomenally rich dataset – nearly 100 questions per year on a wide variety of topics related to student classroom experience, faculty interaction, type and quantity of assessments, time allocation, and perceived gains on a variety of dimensions related to personal and professional development. The survey instrument is online here.
Aside from a host of questions related to demographics, career goals, and debt, major sections in the LSSSE include:
- Section 1, Intellectual Experience (20 questions)
- Section 2, Examinations (1 question)
- Section 3, Mental Activities (5 questions)
- Section 4, Writing (3 questions)
- Section 5, Enriching Educational Experiences (9 questions)
- Section 6, Student Satisfaction (7 questions)
- Section 7, Time Usage (11 questions)
- Section 8, Law School Environment (10 questions)
- Section 9, Quality of Relationships (3 questions)
- Section 10, Educational and Personal Growth (16 questions)
W&L deserves to be a detailed case study. But frankly, legal education can’t wait. So I will do the best I can to cover the landscape in a blog post. I hope every law faculty member who reads this post makes a strong plea to their dean to enroll in LSSSE. Why? So your school can benchmark itself against the detailed LSSSE case studies that are bound to flow out of W&L and other innovative law schools. Though they don’t get much press, there are, in fact, other innovative law schools.
January 29, 2013 in Data on legal education, Important research, Innovations in legal education, New and Noteworthy, Scholarship on legal education, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (20)
Friday, January 18, 2013
A Blueprint for Change
Several months ago I wrote a book review of Brian Tamanaha's important book, Failing Law Schools. In the last paragraph, I wrote:
Brian discusses the bleak employment prospects of law schools, but (through no fault of his own) understates the nature of the structural change that is occurring in the U.S. and global market for legal services. In Part II, I will write about some logical next steps for law schools looking to get ahead of the coming tsunami.
I tried to write Part II, but a blog post just was not up to the task. Further, I sensed that my colleagues were in no mood for half-baked solutions. There has been enormous criticism of legal education on the blogs and in the media, but very little in the way of detailed prescriptions to improve the situation. I felt an obligation to back off on the criticism and focus on solutions. So, in essence, Part II of my Tamanaha review became an article.
I just posted to SSRN an article entitled "A Blueprint for Change" forthcoming in the Pepperdine Law Review. It is both a diagnosis and a proposed solution -- a solution I am actively pursuing. Here is the abstract:
This Article discusses the financial viability of law schools in the face of massive structural changes now occurring within the legal industry. It then offers a blueprint for change – a realistic way for law schools to retool themselves in an attempt to provide our students with high quality professional employment in a rapidly changing world. Because no institution can instantaneously reinvent itself, a key element of my proposal is the “12% solution.” Approximately 12% of faculty members take the lead on building a competency-based curriculum that is designed to accelerate the development of valuable skills and behaviors prized by both legal and nonlegal employers. For a variety of practical reasons, successful implementation of the blueprint requires law schools to band together in consortia. The goal of these initiatives needs to be the creation and implementation of a world-class professional education in which our graduates consistently and measurably outperform graduates from traditional J.D. programs.
I have a large backlog of shorter articles and analyses that I have not posted because I wanted my own detailed solution in the public domain. I hope to tie all of these ideas together over the coming weeks.
Thank you, Brian Tamanaha, for writing an book that required me to think in terms of solutions.
[posted by Bill Henderson]
January 18, 2013 in Current events, Data on legal education, Data on the profession, Innovations in legal education, Scholarship on legal education, Scholarship on the legal profession, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (2)
Monday, November 19, 2012
How to Increase Your Law School's Academic Reputation
Law schools care deeply about their academic reputation. If this were not true, my Indiana Law mailbox would not be stuffed full with glossy brochures sharing the news of faculty publications, impressive new hires, areas of concentration, and sundry distinguished speaker series, etc.
Because of the timing of these mailings – I got nearly 100 in Sept and October—I am guessing that the senders hoped to influence the annual U.S. News & World Report Academic Reputation survey. Cf. Michael Sauder & Wendy Espeland, Fear of Falling: The Effects of U.S. News & World Report Rankings on U.S. Law Schools 1 (Oct 2007) (reporting "increases in marketing expenditures aimed toward raising reputation scores in the USN survey"). But does it work? A recent study by Larry Cunningham (St. Johns Law) suggests that the effect is, at best, decimal dust.
Glossy brochures may not reliably affect Academic Reputation, but I have uncovered four factors that are associated with statistically significant increases and decreases of USN Academic Reputation. To illustrate, consider the scatterplot below, which plots the 1993 ordinal rank of USN Academic Reputation against the 2012 ordinal rank [click on to enlarge].
Four sets of dot (Red, Blue, Orange, and Green), each representing distinctive shared features of law schools, tend to be above or below the regression line. These patterns suggest that changes in USN Academic Reputation over time are probably not the result of random chance. But we will get to the significance of the Red, Blue, Orange, and Green dots soon enough.
The primary takeaway from the above scatterplot is that 2012 USN Academic Reputation is overwhelmingly a function of 1993 USN Academic Reputation. Over 88% of the variation is explained by a school's starting point 20 years earlier. Part of this lock-in effect may be lateral mobility. That is, there are perks at higher ranked schools: they tend to pay more; the teaching loads are lighter; and the prestige is greater, etc. So school-level reputations rarely change, just the work addresses of the most productive scholars. This is, perhaps, the most charitable way to explain the enormous stickiness of USN Academic Reputation.
That said, the scatterplot does not show a perfect correlation; slightly less than 12% of the variation is still in play to be explained by influences other than starting position. A small handful of schools have made progress over these 20 years (these are the schools above the regression line), and a handful have fallen backwards (those below the line).
The Red circles, Blue rectangles, Orange diamonds, and Green circles represent four law school-level attributes. The Reds have been big gainers in reputation, and so have the Blues. In contrast, the Oranges have all experienced big declines; and as as a group, so have the Greens. When the attributes of the Red, Blue, Orange, and Green Schools are factored into the regression, all four are statistically signficant (Red, p =.000; Blue, p = .001; Orange, p = .012; Green, p = .000) and the explained variation increases 4% to 92.3%. As far as linear models goes, this is quite an impressive result.
Before you look below the fold for answers, any guesses on what is driving the Red and Blue successes and Orange and Green setbacks?
November 19, 2012 in Data on legal education, Important research, Innovations in legal education, Scholarship on legal education, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (4)
Thursday, September 6, 2012
Why Are We Afraid of the Future of Law?
Below is my most recent column in the National Jurist [PDF version]. Although 100% targeted at law students, I think lawyers and law professors might find this topic interesting. [Bill Henderson]
Richard Susskind is a famous British lawyer and technology consultant who travels the world giving speeches on how the legal industry is on the brink of a fundamental transformation. Because his topic is change, Susskind’s ideas are quite controversial among lawyers. But as a futurist, he has a pretty good track record.
Back in 1996, in his book The Future of Law, Susskind predicted that e-mail would someday become the dominant method for lawyers and clients communicate with each other. Because the Web was still a novelty limited to universities and computer aficionados, Susskind’s comments were viewed as reckless and unprofessional—lawyers would never rely on such an insecure method to communicate with clients. Yet, 16 years later, lawyers are daily lives are comprised of an endless stream of emails coming over their desktops, laptops and smart phones.
September 6, 2012 in Current events, Innovations in legal education, Law Firms, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (3)
Saturday, September 1, 2012
"Application, Discipline, Focus, Repetition"
For the Labor Day weekend, I thought I would post this video of Henry Rollins, an American singer and artist who has continually reinvented himself since he left his job as a manager of a Hagen-Daaz ice cream store in 1981 to become the lead singer in Black Flag.
The point of posting this video is not to glorify Henry Rollins, but to consider, on its own terms, the life narrative of one interesting person. Rollin's formula of "application, discipline, focus, repetition" sounds a lot like deliberate practice. Based on my own research, I have broken this process into two steps:
- Identifying the core elements needed to be become an expert or master in a specific domain -- Jeff Lipshaw was alluding to this in his post on Donald Schon and reflective practice;
- Practicing, through thousands of hours of effort, on elements that one lacks in order to move along the continuum to mastery. Number 2 works best when the person has the benefit of feedback and coaching. Of course, they also have to be willing to do the work.
For an individual, it may not be necessary to formally break down the core elements into specific pieces. Instead, these pieces can be obtained iteratively through trial and error and reflection. I think this is what Rollins has done. It is a formula that works for one highly determined person. But can it be scaled?
As an educator, I am interested in making the components of practice mastery more explicit and transparent--this is step #1 above. To accomplish step #1, we still need to do foundational research that deconstructs the careers of outstanding lawyers into sets of specific skills, abilities, and competencies--i.e., the things to be practiced. (Notice I said "sets" -- outstanding lawyers often master different domains.) At present, the Shultz-Zedeck Effective Lawyering study is the only solid published research that is even adjacent to this topic.
Once these components of effective lawyers are identified--i.e., a law school identifies the skills, abilities and competencies it wants to develop over the course of three years--we move to step #2. This step raises complex questions of order (which competencies first, which come second, etc.) and pedagogy (best and most cost-effective methods) and measurement (how do we know we have made progress?). I think the answers would have to come iteratively, through trial and error.
Any educational institution pursuing this strategy would have to commit itself to studying and continuously improving the educational process. For law schools, this would be new. At the vast majority of law schools, we mostly teach legal knowledge, we don't articulate our intended educational outcomes, we let students pick their courses ala carte with minimal guidance, and we don't engage in serious measurement. But we could. I think this is the next great frontier--an enormous opportunity for any law school willing to think for itself, to experiment and to change. The data needed would come from one's own alumni, ideally supplemented with data sharing within a law school consortium.
[posted by Bill Henderson]
September 1, 2012 in Blog posts worth reading, Cross industry comparisons, Innovations in legal education, Video interviews | Permalink | Comments (1)
Monday, July 2, 2012
The Inferiority Complex of Law Schools
[by Bill Henderson, originally published in The National Jurist, March 2012 (PDF)]
For over a century, law schools have suffered from an inferiority complex. We have masked it well, but its consequences are finally coming home to roost. Like most psychological conditions, our lives will be much better and healthier when we deal with its root cause. Further, when law students understand this history, they will better understand the changing nature of the legal economy. They can even help law schools with the cure.
In 1918, the renowned economist Thorstein Veblen famously quipped, “the law school belongs in the modern university no more than a school of fencing or dancing.”
Veblen, like many of his academic colleagues, believed that universities should be citadels for science-based learning and the production of knowledge. Law, in contrast, was a trade. Indeed, in the early 1900s, a substantial portion of the practicing bar had obtained their skill and knowledge through office apprenticeships. When law schools did begin to appear, they were just as likely to be proprietary law schools operating out of a local YMCA than to be part of an established university.
Despite the skepticism of the academic class, there were a host of practical reasons for universities to create (or, in some cases, acquire) a law school. First, the law was the primary occupation for many elected officials, which held out the prospect of reflected glory. (Veblen recognized this motivation, which compounded his worry.) Second, a handful of law schools at prestigious universities had begun adopting the so-called case method, which purported to find objective legal rules and principles akin to a scientist working in a laboratory. The perceived rigor of the case method provided at least a veneer of science. Third, with their large lecture halls filled with tuition-paying law students, law schools made money.
July 2, 2012 in Data on legal education, Innovations in legal education | Permalink | Comments (1)
Friday, June 29, 2012
What is the "Ignite" Format of Presentation?
Ignite rules are simple: a talk with 20 PowerPoints that advance automatically every 20 seconds. Six minutes to make your point. It you don't know your material, it's a disaster. If you are prepared and you understand how to connect with your audience, you educate and inspire -- in a word, you ignite the audience.
Below is an example of Ignite done very well, by Michael Bossone (Miami Law, co-founder of Law Without Wall). This presentation just got a rousing ovation at the Law Tech Boot Camp in London. I saw it happen live. It was awesome.
Kudos to Dan Katz, Renee Newman Knake, and Michigan State Law for putting together a program chock full of substance on the application of technology to the law.
[posted by Bill Henderson]
June 29, 2012 in Current events, Innovations in law, Innovations in legal education, New and Noteworthy, Video interviews | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, May 23, 2012
What is the Answer to High Student Debt?
This question is coming up a lot these days, but the nation's best minds are swinging and missing.
- The New York Times asked it today, and suggested that "full disclosure" is the answer. That is just crazy -- students are going to college or graduate school so they have the skills and knowledge to do complex things like conduct a reliable cost-benefit analysis.
- In the column in The New Yorker titled "The Cost of College," Nichlas Lehman, Dean of the Columbia School of Journalism, wonders whether higher education is suffering from a pricing bubble. Then, remarkably, he goes on declare that "higher education is actually underpriced .... in the top-tier schools" because "price is determined by what people are willing to pay." [Yes, and the highest bid will be accepted right before the bubble bursts.] Regardless, Lehman is pleased that both Obama and Romney will try to keep interest rates low on undergraduate Stafford loans -- which just kicks the can down the road without imposing any pricing pressure on colleges or universities.
- In contrast to Lehman's conclusion that top-tier schools are a bargain, in the Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin consults with two policy wonks from conservative think tanks who argue that institutions like Harvard are gouging students due to misguided federal subsidies and tax policies that shelter massive multi-billion dollar endowments. This analysis is long on blame but short on solutions.
- As noted in my prior post, entrepenuer Peter Thiel is offering $100K fellowships for students to "stop" their formal education to pursue ideas that may contribute to viable new businesses. Love the idea, but it is a tiny niche solution.
My own belief is that educational quality is the next great frontier. If we can put a man on the moon in the 1960s, surely with four years and $120K we can turn a reasonably able and motivated 22 year old into a critical thinker who can reliably communicate, collaborate, gather facts, assess data, lead, follow, and approach problems with both empathy and objectivity. Further, improving quality changes the debate from "how much does higher education cost?" to "how much is higher education worth?" And if the worth is sufficiently high, both public and private employers would be willing to subsidize it in exchange for preferred access to graduates.
The only barrier is institutional focus. To make this happen, a university has to take an "Apollo Project" approach that focuses purely on education. After figuring out the "how high" and "how fast" possibilities, an institution could then focus on controlling costs through process improvements and building modules. First quality (worth), then cost. This is not trade school education; this is about fully exploring human potential.
The first university to break into this space will have a profoundly disruptive effect the rest of higher education. The future of higher education is education.
[posted by Bill Henderson]
May 23, 2012 in Blog posts worth reading, Current events, Fun and Learning in the classroom, Innovations in legal education, New and Noteworthy | Permalink | Comments (12)
Thursday, April 26, 2012
A New Tool for Law Student Professional Development
In retrospect, it looks pretty simple: (1) find a convenient time for 1Ls, (2) provide pizza, (3) invite successful lawyers to talk about their careers, (4) have law faculty gently moderate, and (5) implement a modest attendence requirement tied to a 1L substantive course.
This is the format for Indiana Law's Career Choices program, which is an important part of our 1L Legal Professions curriculum. The goal of the Career Choices program is to provide students with a more realistic and structured view of modern law practice. The 2011-12 edition, which concluded earlier this month, consisted of 45 lawyer speakers spread over 24 lunchtime programs.
Why does this matter? If students have better information and have a broader view of the profession--created through a balanced and well structured programming--they can make sense of the world more quickly and in turn make better decisions related to their own professional development. Immediate benefits include:
- Shedding stereotypes of what lawyers do--often stereotypes created by the media and pop culture). Almost everything looks different from far away--sometimes better, sometimes worse. Although the up-close view takes time and effort to acquire, it is the view needed for reliable decisionmaking.
- Developing a more sophisticated vocabulary that enables students to adopt and mimic the language of practicing lawyers. This subtly impresses and flatters practicing lawyers. It signals engagement. And it opens doors.
- Broadening minds to consider practice areas, internships, and training opportunties that students would otherwise overlook.
- Improving student time allocation. And time is students' single greatest asset!
Because the benefits of better decisions compound over time, there is no better time to start than the 1L year. Over the medium to long term, this simple action can elevate the entire law school community.
The Career Choices Program evolved over a period of years. It is only one piece of Indiana Law's 1L Legal Professions curriculum, but it is critically important to professional identity formation. Cf. Sullivan et al., Educating Lawyers (2007) [aka The Carnegie Report] (discussing legal education's neglect of the professional identity apprenticeship).
The value of the Career Choices program can be separated into two buckets:
- What the program looks like today--let's call it Career Choices 4.0
- The evolutionary process that produced the current program.
Career Choices 4.0
The success of the Indiana Career Choices program is the result of the joint efforts of the Indiana Law faculty, our two deans of students, and our world-class Office of Career and Professional Development (OCPD). Indiana Law's OCPD (staff photos below) deserves special credit. Among their many other responsibilities, they handle all the complicated event planning logistics so that it is an enjoyable experience for both lawyers and students. According to Law School Survey of Student Engagement data, Indiana Law's OCPD is objectively one of the best career services offices in the nation, at least as judged by law student respondents.
In 2011-12, the Career Choices program consisted of 24 programs featuring 45 law school graduates (approximately 85% Indiana Law alumni). It kicked off on the first day of class in January. It was then followed by a program virtually every Thursday and Friday for the next twelve weeks, excluding spring break. Career Choice forums are scheduled well in advance and space is limited (capped at ~40 to 100 student depending upon room size). To attend, students sign-up through OCPD using Symplicity, a widely used career services software.
Career Choice events were typically organized around practice settings (i.e., small firms, big firms, in-house lawyers, personal injury lawyers, prosecutors, public defenders, state agency lawyers, public interest lawyers, business and nonprofit executives, etc.) and substantive areas (IP, sports and entertainment law, international law, family law, bankruptcy, etc.) An ideal panel would be one where the practitioners moderately disagree with each other -- this is why we like having more than one lawyer in at a time. When lawyers disagree, students have to engage their minds in order to make sense of the differing perspectives.
The lynchpin of the Career Choices program, however, is its integration into the Indiana Law's Legal Professions course, which is required 4-credit course taught in the second semester of the 1L year. The course covers traditional professional responsibility and the law of lawyering. But it also focuses on the structure of the legal profession itself. The course is explicitly designed to get our students to think about their future careers in a realistic and structured way. Course requirements include:
- Five in-person informational interviews
- Team based projects
- Personality and motivation asseessments
- 360 degree peer feedback
- An end-of-semester reflective essay.
Career Choices is another required element. Every 1L is required to attend at least three Career Choice events. At Indiana Law, we tend to focus on data so we can track evidence of progress, or lack thereof. A ID scanner (placed between the door and the pizza) is how we track attendance. It is very fast.
This year, we have 230+ 1L students spread across four sections of the Legal Profession class. The average 1L attended 5.5 Career Choice events. Well over 60% of the class attended more than the mandatory three sessions, which is pretty remarkable. 1Ls are a notoriously harried group of students. Every hour spent in a non-mandatory activity is one hour less that can be devoted to beating the 1L curve. Ask any law school career services professsional how difficult it is to get students to invest in voluntary professional development -- 600 hours in a single semester for 1L is a miraculous feat. Now that learning is compounding for the students' and, indirectly, IU Law's benefit.
Here is another statistic: we served 2,800 slices over the course of the semester. 1L students are busy and relatively cash-strapped. By putting these events at a time when students would ordinarily break for lunch, we are making it easy for them to give the programs a try. For the last several years, an alumnus has paid for the pizzas. He believes it is a small price to pay to get students in the door. No studennt learning can take place if students never show up.
When guest speakers are available to stay for dinner, the same alumnus also pays for dinners for speakers and three to five students. Over the years, I have attended roughly two dozen of these meals. Many times students tell me that the insights shared over these dinners are among the most memorable and fulfilling learning experiences of their 1L year.
The Evolution from 1.0 to 4.0
Remember that I said that the Career Choices formula looks so simple "in retrospect."
The most important lesson we learned from Career Choices experience is that any significant success in programmatic or curricular changes is going to require several iteratives until the program's progress is reasonably near its ambitious goal. Fortunately, we were sufficiently committed to the mission that we built feedback loops and retooled accordingly. Here is some the trial and error:
- Respect student preferences. During the 1.0 version, we had four mandatory sessions at 4:30 on Thursday afternoons -- and as a result, we were leaning heavily into a headwind. A minority of students resented the imposition on their time; and this negativity affected the general mood of the students, which created an uphill battle for even the finest guest speakers. It is easy to conclude what students "ought" to value. But such judgments don't improve the situation at hand. The smart person accepts; the idiot insists.
- Impact of size on participation. We learned through experience that 1Ls go silent when they are in a big, full auditorium. Even the gunners shut down. Holding speaker quality constant, smaller groups and more intimate venues produced dramatically more student engagement. This meant that four or six Career Choice events, though cheaper and easier to manage, was not going to work. The program had to be bigger to be successful.
- Choice matters. Students can have pretty fixed ideas on who is worth listening to. This is a constraint. But when students can exercise some choice on speakers, they show up with a positive attitude and higher levels of curiosity. These positive experiences bring them back voluntarily --now, voluntary participation is well beyond the minimum. The choice created the way for buy-in.
- Timing really matters. Pizza is not enough to get students to give up a lunch hour. The winning combination is lunch plus content plus a time period when students are not scramblng to read for class. Moving from Wednesdays to Thursdays was huge for student participation--albeit it was less convenient for faculty. We learned that faculty need to bend as much or more than students.
- Faculty involvement. Faculty involvement (or lack of involvement) sends a strong message to students on what is important. Career Choices has been a required element of the 1L Legal Professions curriculum since 2009. But this year, Legal Professions instructors served as the moderators. This enables us to bring the practitioner themes back into the classroom and tie them into our discussions of legal ethics and professional development. Many times faculty attended just to hear the speakers. If I am in town, I am there. Students noticed.
Last week our OCPD/instructor team debriefed on the 4.0 version. This discussion was substantially informed by student feedback. Some improvements for version 5.0 include (1) a better mix of young versus old lawyers, as the best panels had often someone five years out with someone 20 to 30 years out, (2) a more standardized format that permits lawyers to tell their stories but also ties their experiences into specific themes in the course, and (3) careful attention to diversity, something that our students really care about.
Finally, the biggest surprise our Career Choices program has been the reaction of its guest speakers. Although a typical guest speaker's day might include a lunch-time program, meeting with OCPD and faculty, two hour long informational interviews with students, and a long dinner, invariably the lawyers have more energy at the end of the day than the beginning. If you think about it, it makes sense. Lawyers seldom have a time to reflect on their careers to discern meaning and priorities. Career Choices provides them an entire day devoted to just that. Knowing how lawyers react to the program makes it much easier to ask them to participate.
At Indiana Law, the success of Career Choices has enabled us to consider more ambitious goals for the future. 5.0 will be better.
[posted by Bill Henderson]
April 26, 2012 in Innovations in legal education, New and Noteworthy | Permalink | Comments (1)
Saturday, April 14, 2012
What is Law Without Walls? Why does it matter?
I am spending the weekend in Miami at the Law Without Walls (LWOW) ConPosium. What's LWOW? Not an easy question, but here it goes: LWOW is a completely new forum and methodology for teaching, learning, collaborating and -- most importantly -- spurring innovation in legal education and the legal services industry. Twelve U.S. and foreign law schools are involved, with Miami Law taking the lead. LWOW is part law school class, part idea laboratory, part networking venue, and part case competition. I struggle in vain to find an adequate metaphor.
What's a ConPosium? It's LWOW's annual penultimate event. Over the course of the weekend, students present their "Projects of Worth" to a large audience of students, lawyers, law professors, regulators, business executive and entrepenuers. The presentations are evaluated American Idol-style by a panel of experts, including -- yes -- a handful of venture capitalists. Thanks to the efforts of LWOW founders Michele DeStepano and Michael Bossone, the weekend also is an amazing aesthetic experience -- a theater of sofas and overstuffed chairs, inspiring music, multi-media stimuli, and a nonstop train of cleverly presented ideas from students, professors, judges and the audience.
As an educator, the most exciting facet of the LWOW format/methodology is that it pressures law students to be creative and economically viable. (Understatement: these topics are generally not covered in law school, especially the latter). Not all ideas are good; and good ideas by themselves are not enough. As the venture capitalists tell us, nine out of ten good ideas fail due to lack of execution. To survive, hard questions have to be asked, and the answers provided have to be realistic and accurate. And then there is follow-through. That requires passion.
LWOW is a grand experiment. 20 years from now, the DNA of a lot of innovation in legal education and legal services will be traceable to the seemingly impractical ideas that were trial-ballooned here. And one or two may be brand names in a few short years. So cool.
[Posted by Bill Henderson]
April 14, 2012 in Current events, Innovations in law, Innovations in legal education, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (0)
Wednesday, February 1, 2012
Legal Education's Ninety-Five Theses
Brent E. Newton, an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, has posted a legal education reform piece on SSRN, entitled The Ninety-Five Theses: Systemic Reforms in the American Legal Education and Licensure [Hat-tip TaxProf]. Judging by his title, Newton is hoping to spur a Reformation of legal education, akin to what Martin Luther did for Christianity in the 16th century. If that is his agenda, I will not stand in his way.
According to his GULC web bio, Newton is Deputy Staff Director of the U.S. Sentencing Commission; prior to that, he had a distinguished career as a public defender. Newton is not the only adjunct-practitioner who has forcefully challenged U.S. legal education. In 2008, Jason Dolin (solo practitioner, adjunct at Capital), published Opportunity Lost: How Law School Disappoints Law Students, the Public, and the Legal Profession. In 2010, Steve Bennett (partner at Jones Day, adjunct at Fordham) published a law review article entitled, When Will Law Schools Change?
Law professors rarely engage with these critiques; to acknowledge these critiques, some might argue, is to give them oxygen and legitimacy. I think this approach is a huge mistake. Any enterprise interested in long-term success cares about the perceptions held by its stakeholders -- and adjuncts are definitely in that group. In times of crisis, we need friends, not enemies. Further, Newton, Dolin and Bennett are serious people and very capable lawyers. If you leaf through these articles, you'll see that they read like Brandeis Briefs against the legal education establishment. The authors present thoughtful, fact-based, and (albeit occasionally) trenchant arguments on why we, speaking as a legal education insider, should change.
Simple question: Can any of us identify a single historical example in which the establishment reformed itself because a critic effectively marshaled facts and logic to reveal the errors of its ways? Institutional change doesn't happen that way -- facts and logic are no match for a few thousand egos and pious rationalizations for why others should change, but not me.
The common storyline for institutional change is failure, with the rise of other institutions that better address the social, political and economic needs of stakeholders and broader society. A less common narrative is institutional adaption, thanks in part to (1) the self-interest and survival instincts, and (2) the serendipity of timely, brilliant leadership. (Does the legal academy have a few hundred great leaders?)
That said, Newton, Dolin and Bennett may be on the right side of history. Because of the overproduction of law school graduates and their high levels of debt, we are now at a point when survival for a large proportion of law schools can no longer be taken for granted. "What cannot go on forever, won't." Herbert Stein, economist.
Prediction: In the next few years, some law schools will change and thrive. Others won't and they will fail. There will be nasty recriminations and gnashing of teeth. A few at the very top will throw dice and decide not to change. They will survive, but the innovations taking root in the rest of the law school hierarchy will make them look like anachronisms. It will be a slow decay. In the meantime, some aspects of the Post-Langdellian paradigm will look a lot like the suggestions made by Newton, Dolin and Bennett. In twenty years, maybe sooner, the revolution will be over. Finally, Newton et al. will get a must deserved footnote.
[Posted by Bill Henderson]
February 1, 2012 in Current events, Data on legal education, Innovations in legal education, Scholarship on legal education, Structural change | Permalink | Comments (1)