The Legal Whiteboard

Legal Whiteboard Ceasing Publication

On April 30th, The Legal Whiteboard will cease publication.  During our 5+ years of operations, we generated some very good content, focusing on facts, trends and ideas affecting the legal industry. We made the ABA LawBlawg 100 in 2012 (year 1) and 2016 (year 5).  In particular, some of the most widely read posts were written by Jerry Organ, who focused on legal education.  Jerry painstakingly built numerous datasets to answer important questions related to conditional scholarships, the transfer market, and bar passage. It was a privilege to be associated with this work. I am personally grateful to Blog Emperor Paul Caron for providing us this platform and graciously agreeing to continue to archive our content on the Law Professor Blog Network.

I was the primary editor who launched The Legal Whiteboard. It was also my decision to shut it down.  The reason is not lack of interest in the blogging medium — in fact, the opposite is true.   For the last several years, mediums that started as blogs have been siphoning off readership – and thus power and influence -- from traditional media.  Online publication also facilitates connections with people outside one’s academic silo.  For over a decade now, my online writing has connected me with numerous professionals in law firms, legal departments, bar associations, and legal start-ups. In most cases, I am trading information with my readers, collecting local experience in exchange for macro-level observations. These connections produced countless friendships, enriched my teaching and research, and changed how I viewed the world. 

There is a tension between what counts as serious work inside the academy (e.g., placement and citations in prestigious journals; mentions in the New York Times, etc.) and how serious people in and outside of the academy are accessing information to help them do their work. This is an observation, not a complaint.  Professional and social norms evolve slowly, often to the point of feeling static.  But they do evolve, and generally in the right direction.

I am shutting down The Legal Whiteboard so I can make a more ambitious investment in online publishing.  For the next year or so, and perhaps longer if the experiment works, virtually all of my professional efforts outside of teaching will be focused on building an online publication for my core research on the legal industry.  The publication will be called Legal Evolution.

At this point in my career, I am very interested in doing applied research – i.e., research targeted at solving practical, real world problems. Examples of applied research include rural sociology (agricultural production), industrial/organizational psychology (worker productivity), public health (health outcomes). Online publication drops the cost of doing this type of work while increasing its potential impact – that is a powerful reason to give it a try.

Legal Evolution will be focused on the practical problem of lagging legal productivity in a world of rapidly increasing complexity.   Lagging productivity among lawyers is a serious industry-level issue because it means that solving legal problems is becoming, in a relative sense, more expensive over time.  In the individual client market, more citizens are going without access to legal services.  In the corporate market, heavy reliance on fee discounts is straining client-lawyer relations, as they have yet to see that the only long-term solution is to improve productivity through better systems and more sophisticated sourcing. The second-order effects of lagging legal productivity are now impacting legal education through stagnant entry-level salaries and historically low enrollment levels. I don't think the law professoriate fully appreciates this linkage. 

We lawyers and law professors lack the skills and expertise to solve the legal productivity problem by ourselves.  Whatever form the solutions take, we can be 100% certain that the inputs will be multidisciplinary.  Lawyers and law professors who collaborate with professionals from other disciplines will move a lot faster than those trying to stay at the top of the food chain. The ultimate goal of Legal Evolution is to accelerate this transition by curating examples of what is working in the field, including contextual knowledge to help readers make better decisions within their own organizations. 

Applied research needs to be driven by theory.  Legal Evolution’s editorial strategy will be grounded in the research of the late sociologist Everett Rogers, whose seminal book, Diffusions of Innovations, is one of the most cited books in all of the social sciences.  The first edition of Rogers' book was published in 1962.  In turn, he spent much of his 40+ year career updating subsequent editions with ever richer examples that (a) supported a general theory of innovation diffusion, and (b) demonstrated how knowledge of diffusion theory could be used to accelerate the adoption of innovation, often for important, socially beneficial ends.  

In my own career, shutting down The Legal Whiteboard feels like the end of era, albeit it is necessary to make room for something new.   In the fall of 2008, as I assembled my tenure file at Indiana Law, I remember creating a final attachment ("Attachment 7") that summarized my “internet writings.”  It was a list 216 blog posts I had published between April 2006 (when I joined the Empirical Legal Studies Blog) and Labor Day 2008. For visual effect, I created a hyperlink for all 216 posts. I can remember one of my advisors telling me that I didn’t need the summary and besides, it wouldn’t count toward tenure.  I replied, “I know I don’t need it.  I know it won’t count.  But I am putting it in because I think this work is valuable.  At some point in the future, it ought to count.”

I wrote that nearly 10 years ago. I have learned a lot since then.  With some luck, maybe I can nudge legal academic norms in a positive direction. 

Over the next couple of weeks, we will be reposting some of our favorite LWB stuff.  After April 30^th, I hope to see you on the other side.  Many thanks for your readership.

Building a Portfolio of Court Cases the Way a Quantitative Hedge Fund Buys Stock

For the last couple of years, Dan Katz has been telling me and anyone else who would listen that law will eventually be a subfield of finance. Following Dan's reasoning, this will occur because legal risk can be modeled and quantified like financial risk, thus enabling parties to allocate time, money, expertise based on probabilities. If the modeling is accurate within a fairly predictable range, it facilitates an investment strategy where the business side of legal risk is equally predictable. Add leverage and/or other people's money, and basically you have a hedge fund with legal claims as its primary asset class.

Based on a story in Sunday's Boston Globe, Katz may be on to something.  The story reports the launching of Legalist, which funds lawsuits based on the size and probability of recovery. This concept is not new, as companies like Burford Capital have moved into this market and are growing rapidly. 

Legalist is potentially different, however, because it pools together smaller and medium-sized legal claims that are likely to paid out.  Case evaluations are made using data algorithms that draw upon "a database of 15 million court cases from all over the United States." So, in theory, the company can generate a strong return by building a diversified portfolio of claims that are likely too small for the high-end litigation financiers like Burford. 

One of the co-founder of Legalist is Eva Shang (photo right), who is pursuing the idea thanks to a $100,000 grant from the Thiel Foundation.  This is the Peter Thiel organization that encourages undergraduates to drop out of college in favor of pursuing a promising start-up idea.  After forgoing her senior year at Harvard, Shang also earned a spot in Y Combinator, the famed Silicon Valley accelerator that has a strong record of picking and nurturing successful start-ups. The other co-founder is Christian Haigh, who is a master's degree student in computer science at Harvard.

The core idea here is that with the right quantity and quality of data, computers can be extremely useful in valuing legal claims on several dimensions: size of payout, likelihood of payout, total time to reach a resolution, etc.  Lawyers provide the same service, but with a sample size limited to their own experience.

The most intriguing part of the Boston Globe story is that Shang and Haigh originally thought that law firms would pay for their service in order to improve their own case assessments. But "about a month in, we realized that attorneys weren't all that interested in legal analytics."  The dialogue with lawyers, however, enabled them to learn about the field of litigation finance.

Based on these insights, the Legalist decided to pivot.  In the June 2016 press release from the Thiel Foundation, the company was described as "a legal analytics and alert platform that helps lawyers keep track of new developments in case law so that they can represent their clients more effectively." Today, Shang's LinkedIn page describes Legalist as an "Algorithmic litigation financing for small businesses with meritorious lawsuits" -- a description with a Y Combinator polish.

I have no idea whether Shang or Legalist will be successful.  However, the story provides another striking example of the reluctance or inability of lawyers--I don't know which--to consider data as a tool to better serve their clients and, perhaps as a result, to earn a higher income.  Conversations with lawyers on this topic often stall on what the data cannot effectively model and thus the mistakes that might result. The mindset seems to be, "find an example where it may not work and kill the concept." I really do believe that there are a handful of behavioral economics biases that apply with special vengeance to lawyers. 

Katz is likely right to think of law as a powerful use case for finance.  The goal is not about getting something right this time, but instead getting it right more often than not with a high degree of certainty.  In short, it's probability with reliable estimates of risk.  And for clients, that is valuable.  

If we pull on this string long enough, eventually it will be possible to quantify how, all else equal, particular law firms and lawyers affect the odds of winning a case.  When that happens, there will be strong incentives to deconstruct the skill sets and backgrounds of the most bankable lawyers.  Law will become less a credence good and accordingly the utility of longstanding signals of quality that law schools and law firms are built around will get tested by data and repriced.

I have no idea if this future will actual emerge.  Certainly a case could be made that were are better ways to resolve disputes than protracted litigation where armies of lawyers are hired to advance only one side of an argument. Regardless, I am confident that the practice of law is definitely going to change.

"Income at KPMG legal up 53 per cent"

That is the headline this morning from the Global Legal Post, a publication that compiles legal news from around the world. The context is the UK, where changes in legal regulations now permit nonlawyers to own and control legal enterprises through alternative business structures, or ABSs.  

Victoria Basham writes:

KPMG, one of the Big Four accountancy firms to offer legal services through an alternative business structure, has reported a huge rise in income from the division and pledged further investment.

Net sales in its fledgling legal services division climbed 53 per cent in the year to 30 September. The firm’s newly-published annual report comments: ‘Despite [this growth] being from a relatively low base, it’s clear that clients really like our idea of wrapping multi-disciplinary legal advice around our other propositions.

Continue to invest

The report added that the firm would continue to invest heavily in new hires to grow the business in both existing and new areas, including corporate crime and regulation.

The story reports that three of the Big Four now offer legal services under an ABS license.  Basham credits the The Law Society Gazette as her source.

Related posts:

• PwC expands into the legal market, LWB, Dec. 3, 2015 (discussing Australian market)
• In India, Big 4 and Elite Law Firms in Direct Competition for Highly Lucrative Advisory Work, LWB, Sept 16, 2015.

"PwC expands into legal market"

That's the headline from the Financial Review, a leading Australian business newspaper.  The plot is nearly identical to a September post regarding accounting firms in India. See India, Big 4 and Elite Law Firms in Direct Competition for Highly Lucrative Advisory Work, LWB, Sept 16, 2015.   The salient point is not that accounting firms are outmaneuvering the law firms -- they're not, as both stories report a robust flow of laterals in both directions.  Rather, it's that the accounting firms are in the game at all. 

The story reports:

"There are bigger issues - alternative legal providers, the changing demands of what our people want in terms of non-lineal career paths, the cost pressures on our clients and the demands they place on their lawyers," Baker & McKenzie national managing partner Chris Freeland said.

"That's what keeps me awake at night," he said.

Behind closed doors, however, [the law firms] are genuinely worried about the accounting firms cutting into compliance, due diligence, employment and taxation work, and mergers and acquisitions advisory particularly in infrastructure and inbound investment.

Large law firms identified the accountants as their main rivals in a recent Macquarie Group legal benchmarking survey.

Some law firms are quietly shifting work to boutique accounting firms because they refuse to be in bed with their emerging adversaries.

The Australian legal market liberalized several years, making it possible for nonlawyers to own and control legal enterprises.  In contrast, India has rules that are much closer to the U.S.  Yet, when it comes to the accounting firms, the official rules don't seem to matter much, as the competitive dynamics vis-a-vis big accounting firms in these two countries are very similar.  

A simple explanation is that bar authorities in any country are loath to pursue unauthorized practice of law actions when the clients are multinational corporations and the providers are large accounting firms.  That is too big a fight.  Further, the rules on unauthorized practice are in place to protect clients, not the guild.  Thus, it is not surprising that the accounting firms are getting bolder.  

 The chart below (from The Economist) put things into perspective:

See Attack of the Bean-Counters, Economist, Mar 21, 2015.

The UK's Apprenticeship Levy -- a helpful reset to the legal labor market?

The Law Society Gazette reports a new apprenticeship levy that will be imposed in 2017 on UK employers with more than £3 million in payroll.  The Gazette notes that the levy, which totals .5% of payroll, will sweep in nearly 200 legal employers. 

The program has a potentially clever twist that could prove to be an effective economic stimulus for the UK economy. Employers get a credit for the cost of their current apprenticeship programs.  For the UK legal industry, this means that the bigger firms will be fully paid up just by running their current training contract programs. Yet, the article also notes that "the levy may force a number of firms to develop apprenticeship programmes so that they get their money back."

This is an idea that draws on both liberal and conservative principles.  It's liberal because it mandates, through a tax, a strong national policy that favors human capital creation. Yet, it's also conservative because it lets employers opt out of the tax by running their own apprenticeship programs.  The result is an increase in paid entry-level training for young people and, invariably, some infrastructure being developed around ongoing apprenticeship programs, likely from nonprofits and trade associations who serve or orbit around specific industries. 

In the United States, there are roughly 3,000 law firm employers with a payroll of $5 million or more.  They account for roughly half of the $91 billion annual payroll of all US law firms (NAICS 541110 Offices of Lawyers).  Many law firms are not hiring because client demand is sluggish and it's perceived as more cost effective to use senior personnel who are already trained.  As a result, the US legal profession is graying significantly.  See Is the Legal Profession Showing Its Age, LWB, Oct 12, 2014; What is Driving the Demographic Gap between BigLaw Leaders and their CEO/GC Clients?, LWB, Sept 1. 2015.  

Consider the benefits of a program like this operating in the US.  A .5% apprenticeship levy on $45 billion would mean that no less than $225 million per year would be invested in entry-level training contracts in the legal field, with a significant number of legal employers getting off the sidelines to create their own programs.  Astute bar associations would likely step in to provide logistical and administrative support.  Further, the US Department of Labor already has a detailed legal framework around apprenticeships.

With this kind of financial and administrative support, it is plausible to imagine the US legal profession moving to a true apprenticeship model where training contracts replace the 3L year of law school.  I acknowledge this all sounds very fanciful, but a relatively modest employer apprenticeship tax may be better national policy that asking young people to take on more education-related debt. 

Part IV: Alumni Surveys, The Varied Career Paths of Law School Graduates

This is Part IV of a blog series that focuses on alumni surveys based on data for Northeastern Law alumni who graduated between 1971 and 2012 (n = 833, 21% response rate).  Prior posts covered data related to the pre-law (Part II) and law school (Part III) experience.  This final installment summarizes data on the careers of Northeastern alumni. 

Varied Careers

One of the most significant post-law school findings from the Northeastern alumni survey is the sheer breadth of careers.  Sure, we all know in a general sense that lawyers have very diverse careers, yet I found the sheer magnitude of that diversity both striking and surprising.

Below is a graphic that summarizes the percentage of Northeastern alumni who have worked in a particular practice settings,by decade of graduation.

% Alumni/ae who have worked in Practice Setting, by Decade of Graduation

To interpret this graphic [click on to enlarge], it is important to understand the composition of the underlying data.  The survey question asks, “Describe your previous employment history starting with your most recent employer first.”  Some graduates have only one job to report -- the one they started after graduation; others have had many.  These jobs are then classified by practice setting and binned into the six categories shown in the above graphic.  Note that bars total well beyond 100%. Why?  Because alumni are changing not just jobs, but also practice settings—on average, at least once, but sometimes two, three, or even four times over the course of several decades.

The graphic above conveys several significant pieces of information:

General point.  Legal careers are extremely varied.  As it has tightened up, the entry level market has become an area of intense scrutiny, and rightly so because it affects early career lawyers and law school applicant volume.  In contrast, the chart above reflects the longer view. It suggests that very able, motivated people who attend law school go on to varied careers that no one could have predicted at the time of enrollment, including--most significantly--the entering student.  These generational cohorts are a versatile group that comprise a disproportionate number of leaders in industry, government, and the nonprofit world.  Law schools cannot take full credit for this; we admit people of enormous potential.  Yet many alumni tell me that their legal training and knowledge has given them an enormous leg up. One law grad who is now a successful business executive recently asked me, "Why is it JD-advantaged? Why not the advantage of the JD?" 

Northeastern.  It is somewhat surprising that for Northeastern alumni who graduated during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, 48% have worked in government.  That is a big number.  Northeastern’s mission and faculty emphasize public service. This same emphasis appears to be reflected in the careers of its graduates.

Changing Legal Ecosystem.  As noted in Posts II and III, because the Northeastern alumni survey spans multiple decades, it is possible that responses will be influenced by changes in the underlying legal economy. Stated simply, career opportunities and competition may have changed substantially between 1971 and 2012.  Such a pattern appears to be present here.  Specifically, 30% or more of graduates of the 1990s and 2000s have worked in private industry compared to 24% or less for those graduating in the 1970s and 80s.  This would be consistent with the incomplete absorption theory discussed in Part III.  See also Henderson, “Is the Legal Profession Showing its Age,” LWB, Oct 12, 2015.

Practicing versus Non-Practicing Lawyers

Another significant finding that flows from the Northeastern alumni survey are the workplace experiences of practicing versus non-practicing lawyers. 

Approximately 25% of respondents were not practicing lawyers but working, with no significant difference by decade cohort. The chart below compares these two groups based on 19 dimensions of workplace satisfaction. The question is drawn directly from the AJD Wave III:  “How satisfied are you with the following aspects of your current position?” 

Dimensions of Workplace Satisfaction, Practicing vs. Non-Practicing Lawyer

 

Choices ranged from 1 (highly dissatisfied) to 7 (highly satisfied).  The chart above summarizes the differential between the two groups.  For example, on Intellectual Challenge, we subtracted the non-practicing attorney average from the practicing attorney average.  The result is +.35 difference for practicing attorneys, meaning that they are more likely to find intellectual challenge in their work.  Likewise, the same results holds for the substance of one's work.  

In contrast, on workplace diversity, non-practicing lawyers were significantly more satisfied – on average, roughly 2/3 of a response point.  In fact, non-practicing lawyers were more likely to rate their workplaces higher on several surprising factors, including social value of work, performance reviews, work/life balance, and pro bono opportunities.

Can we generalize from these findings?

The results presented in this blog series reflect the collective experience of one law school’s alumni base – Northeastern.  There is no way to know if these results can be fairly generalized to the larger law graduate population, though there is a reasonable basis to believe that at least some of them can (e.g., the changing ecology of the legal job economy).  Yet, why speculate when the cost of collecting and analyzing the data is going down and the value of such applied research is going up?

Let me reiterate my suggestion from Part I that a consortium of law schools should begin this effort under the aegis of the American Bar Foundation (the prime architect of the AJD Project).  Northeastern has agreed to donate the survey and research tools we created as part of the Outcomes Assessment Project.   Such an initiative would enable researchers to draw stronger conclusions from these data, including potentially laudatory school-level effects that can help the rest of legal education. 

I have been researching legal education for many years.  I have spent enough time with alumni at Indiana Law, Northeastern Law, and several other law schools to gain a strong impression that law school graduates are having, on balance, important, satisfying and high-impact careers.  Further, there is strong evidence that the legal industry is undergoing a significant structural change – that is much of what the Legal Whiteboard catalogs.  This structural change topic is of great interest to prospective students, lawyers, and the mainstream press.  Yet, these two themes--the careers of alumni and structural change--are related. 

If legal education wants to influence the narrative on the value of the JD degree, it is far better to rely on data rather than rhetoric.  My sense is that data on our alumni will tell a rich, balanced story that will enable us to make better decisions for all stakeholders, including prospective law students. Further, if we don’t gather high quality facts, we can expect to get outflanked by a blogosphere and a mainstream press that are armed with little more than anecdotes.  To a large extent, that is already happening.  Now is the time to catch up.

Credits

This blog post series would not have been possible without the dedication and world-class expertise of my colleague, Evan Parker PhD, Director of Analytics at Lawyer Metrics.  Evan generated all the graphics for the Northeastern Alumni/ae Survey and was indispensable in the subsequent analysis. He is a highly talented applied statistician who specializes in data visualization.  Evan, thanks for you great work!

For other “Varied Career Path” findings, see the full Alumni/ae Survey Report at the OAP website. 

Links:

Part I:  What Can We Learn by Studying Law School Alumni? A Case Study of One Law School

Part II, Alumni Surveys, Before-Law School

Part III: Alumni Surveys, During Law School

In India, Big 4 and Elite Law Firms in Direct Competition for Highly Lucrative Advisory Work

Lawyers may have a monopoly over the practice of law, but what exactly does the practice of law encompass?  In most common law jurisdictions, the term is not even defined.  And there's likely a self-interested reason why.  Ambiguity produces uncertainty, and uncertainty is a major source of business risk.

In the face of significant uncertainty, why would investors fund a business that encroaches on lawyers' most lucrative work when they'll have to hire a battalion of lawyers to defeat the entire universe of lawyers in front of a judge who used to be a practicing lawyer (and may be one again)? Many lawyers would get rich losing this case for you.

Well, ambiguity may not be enough to permanently fend off the invasion.  There is a controversy taking shape in India that may foreshadow the end of the lawyer guild.  Under India's Advocates Act, only lawyers can own a law firm. Likewise, only chartered accountants can audit companies.  But what about advisory services related to business?  That's a area of tremendous potential overlap between these two professions.

Globally, the Big 4 have been making inroads on lucrative cross-border deal work -- not enough to mortally threaten the major law firms, but enough to get their attention.  Yet, according to this story in the The Economics Times (the leading business paper in India), it's the elite law firms putting the hurt on the Big 4, poaching talent in some of the Big 4's most lucrative practice areas.  Here's how the Indian journalists tell it:

MUMBAI: Two months after the Delhi Bar Council sent a legal notice to top professional services firms EY, KPMG, PwC and Deloitte, the simmering hostility between the Big 4 and the legal fraternity is increasingly coming out in the open.

Earlier this month, Zia Mody's AZB & Partners [the Wachtell Lipton of India] scooped up six forensic experts from EY, a move that has been seen by industry players as part of growing competition between leading law firms and consultancies for business, encroaching into each other's traditional bastions. ...

[Zia Mody, the managing partner of AZB, commented,] "The compliance and investigation practice that we have formalised would help us in due diligence, Indian anti-corruption law investigations, asset-recovery cases, private equity-related post investment investigations and in some anti-trust investigation cases."

Top legal firms in the country are diversifying into forensic operations and undertaking commercial diligence and investigations for their clients.

This comes at a time when consultancies like EY and KPMG are bulking up their teams beyond the traditional forte of audit and tax practices to expand into advisory services. ... 

"What law firms are doing is part of their evolution into full service providers," said Lalit Bhasin, president of the Society of Indian Law Firms, which in July filed a complaint against the Big 4 with the Bar Association of India, saying that they were practicing law without authorisation.

Side note on Lalit Bhasin -- he is the most prominent spokesperson for keeping in place the longstanding prohibition against foreign law firms operating inside India.  He is obviously not too keen on Big 4 accounting firms getting into his business.  The Times quotes a senior partner of a Big 4 firm, speaking on a condition of anonymity,

"The genesis of the problem is: lawyers are a close-knit community and if you don't belong to that club, you don't get lucrative work.  ... Now, the consultancies are increasingly getting their foot in the door, and doing the work at much lower price for which the lawyers would charge a bomb."

The story notes that the law firms and accounting firm are now competing to their mutual detriment, albeit the clients are unlikely complaining:

Consultancies and law firms are competing with each other in several other areas as well, and this is hurting the bottom lines of both sides as undercutting of fees has become rampant. "They (consultants) do an investment banking deal for a mere Rs 5 lakh [~$8000 US], for which a good law firm would charge around Rs 60 lakh [$90,000 US]," said the managing partner of a New Delhi-based big law firm.

Forensic is one of the most profitable business verticals for the Big 4. The total pie for forensics in India is estimated to be around .`850 crore [~$160 million] and is growing at 15-20 per cent year on year, industry experts said. Competition from lawyers, therefore, hurts the big auditors who among themselves control about 80 per cent of the market in India. Smaller rivals such as Alvarez & Marsal, FTI and Kroll [two US-based companies] control the rest.

Suffice it to say, the Big 4 aren't afraid to fight the elite bar in virtually any jurisdiction, as they have deep pockets and a large number of lawyers on their payroll, all of whom, we can be quite sure, are not engaged in the practice of law, whatever that term means.  

This is the beginning of the end of an era, and that's a good thing.  We lawyers/legal professionals will reinvent ourselves by finding new ways to add value.  In fact, that is already happening.  In the long run, we'll feel richer for it. Below is an infographic from The Times story that summarizes the Indian lawyer-accountant standoff.

What's driving the demographic gap between BigLaw leaders and their CEO/GC clients?

Las Vegas, NV.  The illustration to the left was just published in The American Lawyer.  It accompanied a story on how law firm leaders are significantly older than leaders in the large corporations they serve. See MP McQueen, The Generation Gap:  BigLaw's Aging Leaders, Aug 24, 2015. 

At least for me, this is a jarring graphic because it conveys so much truth.  Today's Millennials are so underwhelmed with the BigLaw model.  They like the pay and the perks, as it enables them to live well in attractive large market cities.  They can also quickly pay off their law school debt.  But precious few of them are all in. Illustrator James Steinberg totally nailed it.

There are numerous reasons for the culture divide, but as shown in the chart below, the most obvious is a very large age gap between leaders and entry-level workers -- it tends to be a lot larger in BigLaw than almost anywhere else: 4% of AmLaw 100 leaders are Gen X compared to 33% of NASDAQ-traded companies. 

These data beg the question, why are large law firms so out-of-sync with the institutions they serve?

One reason is certainly the ownership structure.  Any Fortune 500 or NASDAQ-traded company that got this top-heavy in its senior management would be getting killed on its stock price.  Under the Rule 5.4 prohibition on nonlawyer investors, law firms are spared the anxiety of having analysts and short sellers constantly evaluating their business. Yet, the absence of a public market means that law firm owners and managers cannot fully monetize the enterprise value they create. So what's the effect?  Very little enterprise value gets created.  Instead, lawyer/owners  focus on maximizing this year's net distributable income.

It is important to not knock the BigLaw model too hard.  For about a century, it worked extremely well, as US law firms steadily grew with their clients.  Each unit of economic growth produced some larger unit increase in legal complexity, so demand for sophisticated legal services was a steady upward sloping line. By following a simple model -- hire more associates, promote some to partners, lease more office space, repeat -- equity partners in the AmLaw 100 became millionaires.  

Today, BigLaw is getting grayer because the 100-year old gold factory is breaking down. Law firms' portion of corporate legal spending is no longer growing, as in-house lawyers, NewLaw managed services shops (United Lex, Axiom, Counsel on Call), and technology are all curbing demand for traditional law firm services.   The best economic play for 55- or 60-year old equity partner is to ride out the existing model with the dwindling but still substantial number of Baby Boomer senior in-house lawyers who are themselves not too anxious to change.  

This is not the story equity partners tell themselves; it's the logic that underlies the inertial path.  It's where we end up when we are no longer deeply invested in the places we work.  It's become a job.  I am not judging here; I'm describing what I have observed through hundreds of conversations with large firm partners.

The result of this dynamic is that a large proportion of BigLaw--but certainly not all of it--is just tinkering at the margins of change. A law firm can become more cost-effective for clients, at least in the short to medium term, by reducing reliance on associates.  Associates are expensive and are, by definition, getting paid to learn.  For the last 15-20 years, firms have shifted their leverage model to counsel, staff attorneys and nonequity partners, where (a) there is little to no training, (b) the margins are higher, and (c) the clients can't complain about inefficient associates. This is the Diamond Model, which substantially cuts out the entry-level lawyer.  See The Diamond Law Firm: A New Model or the Pyramid Unraveling? (Dec. 2013); Sea Change in the Legal Market, NALP Bulletin, Aug. 2013.

Unlike the original Pyramid Model, invented by Paul Cravath circa 1910, the Diamond Model is not a carefully conceived business strategy. Rather, it's a way to maximize this year's and next year's net distributable income without making difficult strategic tradeoffs. Yet, in the longer term, which is no longer too far off, the Diamond Model is a disaster.  The few associates who make it into large firms are grateful for the high pay and the training.  But very few if any are impressed with the business model.  Among Millennial lawyers, in-house is the new brass ring.

Law firms are filled with brilliant people. Why are they going down this road?  Three interrelated reasons:

1. Lack of Experience. Today's law firm partners have little or no experience with strategy--for a hundred years, intelligence and hard work worked just fine.  This is not a change in strategy--it is having a strategy.  Then executing.  That's hard.
2. Incentive Structures. Virtually all incentives inside firms today favor revenue generation; as a result, few partners have the mental whitespace to understand, much less think through, the changes that are occurring within the broader industry.  To fix the bridge, you have to slow down the traffic.
3. To Big to Fix.  The first strategy mistake for the current generation of AmLaw 100 leaders was to become bigger without becoming measurably better.  Big firms filled with laterals is a difficult environment to share risk. Maximizing this year's distributable income becomes one of the few things people can agree on.

That said, I am not counting BigLaw out.  I am writing this blog post from the International Legal Technology Association (ILTA) conference in Las Vegas.  From far away, it is all too easy to treat BigLaw as a monolith--it's not.  At ILTA, professionals from several of the most innovative law firms are willing to pop the hood and share what they doing.  See Ahead of the Curve: Three Big Innovators in BigLaw, Aug. 25, 2014. Suffice it to say, some firms are several years into strategies that have the potential to take market share from peer firms.  Further, the innovation teams inside these firms are having the time of their professional lives because the work is so collaborative and creative--the antithesis of billable hour work.  What is also clear is that many competitors just can't muster the leadership nerve to make similar investments. 

In the years to come, some BigLaw firms are going to pull away from the rest, becoming a magnet for talent and then clients.  Younger lawyers are going to thrive there.  Another portion of BigLaw is going to gradually fade away. 

"Solicitors 'in denial' about threat from accountants"

That's the headline from today's Law Society Gazette, the publication of record for solicitors in England and Wales.  The UK is fairly far along in liberalization of its legal markets, progressing from the Clementi Report in 2004 to the Legal Services Act 2007 to the licensing of Alternative Business Structures in 2012.  Now several hundred entities have obtained ABS status.  

The Gazette article reports that accountants are poised to be large players in the ABA space:

Accountants will soon be competing directly with solicitor firms ‘on every high street in the country’, according to a leading financial advisor to the legal sector.

Ian Muirhead, chairman of Solicitors Independent Financial Advice, said he expects 750 accountancy firms – three times more than first envisaged – to move into probate work after securing an alternative business structure licence.

The Institute of Chartered Accountants in England & Wales has accredited 113 entities as an ABS since last October, having been accepted as an approved regulator almost a year ago. A further 34 applications are being processed.

Speaking at a Westminster Legal Policy, Muirhead said too many solicitor firms are ‘in denial’ about the threat from the accountancy profession.

‘Success will go to those who can manage businesses and I query whether that’s going to be the solicitors or whether solicitors are going to be the back room boys,’ he said.

Muirhead argued that law firms’ response so far has been focused on consolidation, mergers and acquisitions – but this risks playing into rivals’ hands.

‘[The response is] safety in numbers, more of the same, not thinking outside the legal silo, and therefore missing the opportunity of which many new ABSs are availing themselves, of providing a more diversified and holistic client service,’ he added. ... 

Some U.S. lawyers believe that liberalization won't come to the U.S. because the legal industry is too balkanized by state bar authorities.  

I think this view, however, is likely naive. The market can change because regulators change the rules (the UK). Alternatively, the market can change because clients change their buying habits in favor of nontraditional legal service providers that are financed by sophisticated nonlawyer investors (the US).  See, e.g., Is Axiom the Bellwether for Disruption in the Legal Industry, LWB, Nov. 10, 2013.

In the US, it is probably true that regulators lack the stomach to initiate a regulatory action where the client ostensibly being protected is a Fortune 500 corporation.  If the action ends up in federal court, the bar officials risk looking like protectors of the guild and have a decent chance of losing.  The prohibition against nonlawyer investment (MR 5.4) is based on the assumption that the nonlawyer profit motive will compromise lawyer independence, thus harming the unwitting and unsophisticated legal consumer.  But that does not describe IBM's or JP Morgan's relationships with sophisticated LPO or analytics shop (or any general counsel charged with stretching his or her legal dollar). As a result, the venture capital money flows in.

When liberalization is viewed in this light, there are probably more similarities between the US and UK than we might want to acknowledge. 

What is more important for lawyers: where you go to law school or what you learned? (Part II)

If you're trying to maximize the financial value of an undergraduate degree, it is better to bet on course of study than college prestige.  Indeed, prestige is largely irrelevant to those who major in engineering, computer science, or math.  In contrast, prestige does matter for art & humanities grads, albeit the financial returns are significantly lower than their tech counterparts.  

These are some of the takeaways from Part I of this blog post. Part I also presented data showing that law is a mix of both: financial returns have been high (cf. "red" tech majors) and prestige matters (cf. "blue" arts & humanities crowd).  

The goal of Part II is to address the question of whether the pattern of high earnings/prestige sensitivity will change in the future. I think the answer to this question is yes, albeit most readers would agree that if law will change is a less interesting and important question than how it will change.  Speed of change is also relevant because, as humans, we want to know if the change is going to affect us or just the next generation of lawyers.

Shifts in the Legal Market

There are a lot of changes occurring in the legal market, and those changes are altering historical patterns of how legal services are being sold and delivered to clients. In the past, I have thrown around the term structural change, yet not with any clear definition.  To advance the conversation, I need to correct that lack of precision. 

In economics, there is a literature on structural change as applied to national or regional economies (e.g. moving from a developing nation to an industrial nation; or moving from an industrial to a knowledge-based economy).  Investors also focus on structural change within a specific industry because, obviously, large changes can affect investor returns.  When I have used the term structural change on this blog, it has been much closer to investor conceptions.  Investopedia offers a useful definition even if it's somewhat colloquial: 

Definition of 'structural change': An economic condition that occurs when an industry or market changes how it functions or operates. A structural change will shift the parameters of an entity, which can be represented by significant changes in time series data.

Under this definition, the legal industry is certainly undergoing structural change.  The proportion of law graduates getting a job in private practice has been on the decline for 30 years; over the last 35 years, the average age of the licensed lawyer has climbed from 39 to 49 despite record numbers of new law school graduates; the proportion of associates to partners has plummeted since the late 1980s.  See Is the Legal Profession Showing its Age? LWB, October 12, 2014.  Since the early 2000s, long before the great recession, associate-level hiring has been cut in half. See Sea Change in the Legal Market, NALP Bulletin, August 2013.

Likewise, among consumers of legal services, there is a lot of evidence to suggest that lower and middle class citizens can't afford a lawyer to solve life's most basic legal problems, thus leading to a glut of pro se litigants in state courts and many more who simply go without things like contracts and wills.  This troubling trend line was obscured by a boom in corporate legal practice, albeit now even rich corporations have become more sensitive to legal costs -- the sheer volume and complexity of legal need is outstripping their budgets.  In response to the lag in lawyer productivity and innovation, there is a ton of investor-backed enterprises that are now elbowing their way into the legal industry.  See A Counterpoint to "the most robust legal market that ever existed in this country", LWB, March 17, 2014.  

The impact of all this change -- structural or otherwise -- is now being felt by law schools. Applicants are down to levels not seen since the 1970s, yet we have dozens more law schools. It has been said by many that law schools are losing money, albeit we have zero data to quantify the problem.  Based on my knowledge of my own law school and several others I am close to, I am comfortable saying that we have real changes afoot that affect how the legal education market "functions or operates."

There is a sense among many lawyers and legal academics that the legal world changed after 2008. None of the "structural" changes I cite above are pegged in any way to the events of that year.  

What did change in 2008, however, was the national conversation on the legal industry, partially due to the news coverage of the mass law firm layoffs, partially due to important books by Richard Susskind and later Brian Tamanaha and Steve Harper, and partially due to a robust blogosphere.  This change in conversation emboldened corporate legal departments to aggressively use their new found market power, with "worthless" young associates getting hit the hardest.  This new conversation in turn exposed some of the risks of attending law school, which affected law school demand.  But alas, this was all fallout from deeper shifts in the market that were building for decades. Let's not blame the messengers.

Dimensions of Change

I am confident that the future of law is going to be a lot different than its past. But I want to make sure I break these changes into more discrete, digestible parts because (a) multiple stakeholders are affected, and (b) the drivers of change are coming from multiple directions.

Dimension 1: basic supply and demand for legal education

To unpack my point regarding multiple dimensions, let's start with legal education. Some of the challenges facing law schools today are entirely within the four corners of our own house.  Yet, legal education also has challenges (and opportunities) that arise from our connection to the broader legal industry.  This can be illustrated by looking at the relationship between the cost of legal education (which law schools control, although we may blame US News or the ABA) and entry level salaries (which are driven largely by the vagaries of a client-driven market).  

The chart below looks at these factors.  My proxy for cost is average student debt (public and private law schools) supplied by the ABA.  My income variables are median entry level salaries from NALP for law firm jobs and all entry level jobs.  2002 is the first year where I have all the requisite data.  But here is my twist:  I plot debt against entry-level salary based on percentage change since 2002.  

If a business nearly doubles its price during the same period when customer income is flat, demand is going to fall.  Thus, the sluggish entry-level market presents a difficult problem for legal education.  Sure, we can point to the favorable statistics from the AJD or the premium that a JD has historically conferred on lifetime earnings, but law professors are not the people who are signing the loan papers.  The chart above documents a changing risk/reward tradeoff.  To use the frame of Part I, the red dots are sinking into the blue dot territory, or at least that is the way prospective students are likely to view things.

Fortunately, smaller law school classes are going to be a partial corrective to low entry-level salaries.  The biggest law school class on record entered in the fall of 2010 (52,488); in 2014, the entering class had shrunk by over 27% (37,942). When entry-level supply is reduced by 25+%, upward pressure on salaries will build.  Yet, the composition of the legal economy and the nature of legal work is clearly changing.  Further, the rate of absorption of law school graduates into the licensed bar has been slowing for decades.  See Is the Legal Profession Showing its Age? LWB, October 12, 2014. It would be foolhardy to believe that time and fiscal austerity alone are going to solve our business problems. Instead, we need to better understand our role as suppliers to a labor market.

Dimension 2:  The content of legal education

The content of legal education is not necessarily fixed or static.  We could change the content, thus affecting how the market responds.  

To provide a simple example, one of my students is starting work this fall at Kirkland & Ellis.  From a financial perspective, this is a good employment outcome.  He will be moving to Chicago with his girlfriend who just received her MS in Information Systems from IU's Kelley School of Business.  The MS from Kelley is a very "red" degree.  It can also be completed in one year (30 credit hours).  Well before she graduated, this recent grad had competing offers from PWC and Deloitte, both in the $80,000 range.   For many Indiana Law students, an ideal post-grad outcome would be $80K in Chicago at an employer who provides challenging work and high-quality training.  Yet, my student's girlfriend got this ideal outcome in 1/3 the time and likely 1/2 the cost of an Indiana Law grad.  

Perhaps we should consider cross-pollinating these disciplines. A huge portion of the legal profession's economic challenges is attributable to flat lawyer productivity -- customers are struggling to pay for solutions to their legal needs.  Information systems are a huge part law's productivity puzzle.  Below is a chart I use in many of my presentations on the legal industry.  The chart summarizes the emerging legal ecosystem by plotting the Heinz-Laumann two-hemisphere model against Richard Susskind's bespoke-to-commodity continuum. [Click-on to enlarge.]

The key takeaway from this diagram is that the largest area of growth is going to be in the multidisciplinary green zone -- the legally trained working shoulder-to-shoulder with those skilled in information systems, statistics, software development, and computational linguistics, to name but a few.  These are "red" disciplines.  Do law schools want to be part of this movement?  Let me ask this another way -- do law schools want to be relevant to the bulk of the legal market that needs to be rationalized in order to maintain its affordability? Harvard grads will have options on Wall Street for the foreseeable future.  But 98% of law schools operate in a different market.  Further, some HLS grads, or students who might qualify for admission to Harvard, might prefer the big upside rewards that are only available in the green zone.  In short, a new hierarchy is emerging in law that is still very much up for grabs.

If an academic wants to better understand the rapidly changing nature of legal work, I would urge them to visit a large legal department with a substantial legal operations ("legal ops") staff.  These are the professionals who have been empowered by general counsel to find ways to drive up quality and drive down cost using data, process, and technology.  These are the folks who are making build-versus-buy decisions, putting pressure on law firms to innovate in order to hang on to legal work, and experimenting with NewLaw legal vendors. 

I am finishing up a story on legal ops professionals for the ABA Journal.  (By the way, legal ops exist in law firms as well as legal departments and green zone legal vendors. The role is most developed, however, in legal departments.)  My editor flagged the issue that virtually all of the legal ops people in the story did not graduate from prestigious law schools (or any law school).

My only response is that legal operations people have specialized skills and knowledge (often "red" but sometimes involving EQ) that others lack; without these skills, they can't do the job.  Legal ops people live in a world of outputs and metrics.  For example, are legal expenses and settlement amounts trending down over time -- yes or no? If so, by how much?  How much internal staff time does it take to negotiate a revenue contract? How much of this process can be automated? What will it take to get our staff to accept the new system?

As these examples show, a legal ops person is typically going to be evaluated based on measurable outputs -- do they get results? Where someone went to law school is an input that is likely irrelevant to the question.  The only qualifier is whether the curriculum of that school provided valuable, specialized domain knowledge -- most likely non-legal red skills but also skills related to teams, communication, and collaboration. 

Dimension 3:  The value of pedigree to the customer 

Law has historically been what economists call a “credence good.”  This means that a layperson has a difficult time assessing quality.  As a result, proxies for quality, such as pedigree or prestige, have historically been very important when hiring a lawyer or law firm.  

One of the reasons that the field of legal operations is gaining momentum is because it is creating tools and systems that enable clients to look past credentials to obtain information on things they really care about, such as cost, outcome, and speed of delivery. There are now companies coming into existence that are gathering data on lawyers' win-loss rates. See Another Example of Using Big Data to Improve Odds of Winning in Court, LWB, April 12, 2015.  Sure, apples-to-apples comparisons are very difficult to make -- every case is unique in some respect. But the amount of money at stake is large enough that the data challenges will be surmounted.  When that day arrives, we won't opine on the value of pedigree to legal outcomes; we'll just calculate it. More significantly, clients focused on outcomes will change their buying patterns.  Early returns I have seen suggest that the value of pedigree to legal outcomes may be close to negligible.

Do any of us care where the engineers who designed our smart phones went to college? Not really. We just care how well the smart phone works. 

In this respect, the future of law is likely headed in the direction of Google (a pure red company).  In the early days, the founders of Google favored grads of Caltech, Stanford and Berkeley.  But over time, the company learned that prestige of graduate school was a poor predictor of job success. Because Google lives and dies by its outputs, the company changed its hiring model to attract the most qualified engineers.  See George Anders, The Rare Find: How Great Talent Stand Out 1-5 (2012) (telling the story of how data changed the attitudes of Google founders regarding elite credentials and altered the Google hiring model).

I have lived long enough to know that the changes I describe above are not necessarily going to be welcomed by many lawyers and law professors.  If a group benefits from a lifelong presumption of merit, it is natural that group will resist evidence that the presumption is not fully warranted. Indeed, much of the skepticism will be rooted in subconscious emotion.  If the presumption is dashed, those of us in the elite crowd will have to spend our days competing with others and proving ourselves, or even worse, watching our kids soldier through it.  We have little to gain and a lot to lose in the world we are heading into.  Yet, behind the Rawls veil of ignorance, how can we complain?

So with the red-blue crosscurrents, is law school still worth the investment?

That is a relevant and reasonable question that many young people are contemplating.  I will offer my opinion, but markets are bound to follow their own logic. 

This is a time of enormous uncertainty for young people. Education clearly opens doors, but tuition is going up much faster than earnings.  Further, competition among knowledge workers is becoming more global, which is a check on wages.  Of course, if you don't invest in education, what are your options?

I am generally on the side of Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntrye that the education provided by a law degree, on average, significantly increases lifetime earnings.  See The Economic Value of a Law Degree (April 2013).  How could it not?  The law is too interconnected to every facet of society to not, on average, enhance the law grad's critical thinking skills. Nearly 15 years of out of law school and I regularly use what I learned at Chicago Law to solve problems and communicate solutions, particularly in my applied research work with law firms and legal departments. While my Chicago Law credential has value independent of the skills and knowledge I obtained (the red AJD bar chart in Part I strongly suggests that), I can't deny the additional value of the actual skills and knowledge I obtained to solve real world business problems. It's been substantial.

In general, I also agree with Deborah Jones Merritt that there is significant evidence that the entry-level market for lawyers is weak and oversaturated.  See What Happened to the Class of 2010? Empirical Evidence of Structural Change in the Legal Profession (April 2015).   The class of 2010 is not faring as well as the class of 2000.  Indeed, the lead economist for Payscale, Katie Bardaro, recently noted that wages are stagnating in many fields, but especially in the legal profession. "More law schools are graduating people than there are jobs for them...There’s an over-saturated labor market right now. That works to drive down the pay rate.” See Susan Adams, The Law Schools Whose Grads Earn the Biggest Paychecks in 2014, Forbes, Mar. 14, 2014. 

In the face of these stiff headwinds, I think law schools have an opportunity to pack more value into three years of education. See Dimension 2 above.  To be more specific, if you are a protege of Dan Katz at Chicago-Kent, you will have a lot of career options. Ron Staudt, also at Chicago-Kent, has quietly built a pipeline into the  law and technology space.  Oliver Goodenough and his colleague at Vermont Law are making rapid progress with a tech law curriculum.  And at Georgetown Law, Tanina Rostain and Ed Walters (CEO of Fastcase) provide courses that are cutting edge.  

But absent these types of future-oriented instruction, what is the value of a JD degree as it is commonly taught today? That value is clearly positive; I would even call it high.  But whether the value is sufficient to cover the cost of attendance is likely to vary from law grad to law grad.  Lord knows, in a world of variable tuition based on merit scholarships and merit scholarships that go away after the 1L year, the swing in cost can be a $250K plus interest.

What is killing law school applications these days is the lack of near certainty among prospective students that the time and expense of law school will pay off.  The world looks different than it did in the fall of 1997 when the vast majority of the AJD respondents entered law school. Tuition and debt loads are higher and high paying entry-level jobs are harder to obtain.

So what is the solution?  For students, it's to bargain shop for law schools, which is bad news for law schools.  For law schools, it's to add more value to an already valuable degree.  Some of that value will come in the form of red technical skills that will make lawyers more productive.  In turn, this will prime demand for more legal products and services.

What is more important for lawyers: where you go to law school or what you learned? (Part I)

The Economist reports a very interesting analysis from Payscale.  The questions being asked are pretty simple: If you want to generate earnings that justify the time and cost of an undergraduate education, what should you study and where should you enroll?

Lots of people have strong opinions on this set of questions, but Payscale has the data to answer them empirically. It turns out that at the undergraduates level, course of study is much more important than the prestige of the college or university you attend.  The hard evidence is shown below.

For those working in law or thinking about attending law school, a natural question to ask is whether the legal industry is closer to the blue dot (art & humanities) or red dot pattern (engineering/CS/math).  A second, related question whether the future of law is more blue or more red.

This a two-part blog post.  Part I tries to answer the first question, starting with a careful analysis of the undergraduate chart, which provides a valuable frame of reference that can be discussed more dispassionately (at least among lawyers and law students) than an analysis that questions the value of law school prestige and hierarchy.  

Part II, which I will post on Wednesday, explores the second, future-oriented question.  I will tip my hand now and say that the future of law will be less blue (arts & humanity) and more red (math/CS/engineering).  Within the legal industry, there will be winners and losers; but from the perspective of broader society, this change is a very good thing. 

Undergraduate ROI

In the Payscale chart above, the y-axis (vertical) is 20-year annualized returns from college fees paid.  The x-axis is selectivity, running from under 10 percent to near open admissions.  

The Payscale chart is a very good example of how data visualization can be used to communicate both core facts and useful nuance.  Here, the lede is unmistakable:  the red dots (engineering/CS/math) are overwhelming higher on the ROI scale than the blue dots (arts & humanities).  Sure, there are exceptions to this rule, but they don't occur very often. (Observe how rarely a blue dot is above the red fit-line.) This suggests it would be very foolish to get a blue degree and expect a red paycheck unless you have very good information (or skills or talent) that others lack.

The chart conveys another important piece of information -- the red fit-line is flat.  This means that for engineering/CS/math majors, prestige has not been very relevant to their eventual earnings.  I'll add a nuance here that some empirically savvy readers are bound to point out:  It is possible (indeed likely) that fees are higher at more selective schools. So if MIT costs twice as much as a public polytech, and both yield 12% over 20 years, one might wish they had gone to MIT.   Still, the flat trendline is surprising.  As a general matter, lower ranked schools are not dramatically cheaper than higher ranked schools, and many public schools are highly selective.  The flat red trendline suggests that there are (or were, remember these are historical data) many bargains out there.  If one is trying to maximize financial returns, the goal is to find a school that will, in the future, be well above the red fit-line (and avoid those below).  

The flat red fit-line is also surprising because college selectivity is almost certainly highly correlated with ACT or SAT scores, which our society often views as measures of general intelligence. Yet, there we have it -- a flat trendline. Four years of education seem to be more relevant than a standardized test score taken during high school.  That is heartening at many levels.

A third interesting trend -- the blue fit-line is sloped downward.  This suggests that in the arts & humanities, selectivity/prestige does have a financial payoff.  I don't think this will surprise many readers, albeit the prestige payoff is not very large. To use a simple metaphor, if you attend a more selective college or university to get your arts or humanity degree, you are likely to have a better house in the arts & humanities neighborhood.  But on average, you won't be able to afford the same neighborhood as the engineers, computer scientists, and math majors.

What about Law?

Moving on to law, if we want to examine the relationship between earnings and law school attended, the best available evidence is probably the After the JD Study (AJD), which is large, representative sample of law graduates who took and passed the bar in 2000.  

Data from AJD Wave 3 suggests that the financial returns are relatively strong for all law school graduates -- ten years out and graduates of Tier 4 schools have median earnings of $100,000 per year. As shown in chart below, this is akin to shifting the blue dots up into the red territory.  

The downward sloping fit-line remains, but that doesn't seem to matter very much to happiness. Other AJD data shows that regardless of tier of graduating school, AJD respondents show relatively high and uniform satisfaction with (a) the decision to become a lawyer, and (b) the value of the law degree as an investment. By 2010, 48% of respondents had no debt; only 5.1% had more than $100K in educational debt remaining. 

This is all good news.  But is it reasonable to extrapolate forward and assume the past is a fairly accurate barometer of the present and the future? 

One way to address that question is to ascertain what has changed since 2000.  As noted earlier, the AJD sample was composed of law graduates who passed the bar in the year 2000. Figures published by NALP and the ABA show that the percentage of full-time bar passage required jobs has dropped significantly over the last 13+ years -- from 77.3% for the class of 2000 to 57% for the class of 2013. That is a huge delta.

One of the reasons why law school applicants have plummeted is that the career path from JD graduates has become murky.  And that is a good place to start Part II. 

The Early Days of Legal Analytics

There is an interesting story in Forbes on Lex Machina, a legal start-up that provides analytics for use in patent litigation.  See Dan Fisher, Stanford-Bred Startup Uses Moneyball Stats to Handicap Judges, Forbes, Feb. 2, 2015.  The company was created by faculty at Stanford Computer Science and Stanford Law.  As the company emerged from the University, the reigns were handed to Josh Becker, a Stanford JD-MBA.  To date, the company has raised $8 million in start-up funding.  According to the Forbes article, the company's clients include some of the nation's large technology companies plus one-third of the AmLaw 100.

What makes Lex Machina so interesting is that the company is not a NewLaw service provider that trying to take marketshare. Instead, Lex Machina is a toolmaker.  It is a true Big Data company that provides analytics to (a) value contested patents and (b) protect/maximize that value through a litigation strategy that is informed by data.  

The impact of Lex Machina is hard to decipher, primarily because if it does provide an edge, the customers are unlikely to be too vocal. Just like a hedge fund with an effective trading strategy, why advertise the ingredients of your secret sauce? Indeed, compared to other toolmakers (e.g., predictive coding, expert systems) Lex Machina's benefits are less about efficiency and more about affecting the outcomes of cases -- who wins and by how much.  If Lex Machina is truly delivering, it will eventually touch-off a Big Data legal analytics arms race akin to the quant revolution on Wall Street.  Dan Katz frequently makes this point, and I think he is right.  The Forbes article makes the point that Lex Machina is already moving into adjacent areas of IP law and general commercial litigation.  

The broader legal industry is unlikely to notice Lex Machina until it has a substantial liquidity event -- i.e., it's acquired or goes public, making if founders far richer than the BigLaw partners and in-house lawyers they currently serve.  

If we are looking for early signs of a tipping point for legal analytics, one marker may be the number of Stanford Law grads who are turning down entry-level opportunities in BigLaw to pursue legal start-ups.  In recent years, Stanford Law grads fresh out of law school have gone on to found other venture-backed legal start-ups like Ravel Law, Judicata, and Law Gives.  Back in 2013, The Stanford Lawyer (SLS alumni magazine) had an extensive write-up with several examples.  See Sharon, Driscoll, A Positive Disruption, June 4, 2013.  In 2014, Stanford's CSO offered a program titled, An Alternative to BigLaw -- Startups.

The legal world isn't going away; it's just changing.

Size of the US Legal Market by Type of Client

Washington, DC.  The AALS Section on Professional Responsibility hosted a vigorous discussion today on the evolving ethical duty of competency, a topic partially inspired by the recent changes to Model Rule 1.1 cmt. 8 (requiring lawyers to stay abreast of the "benefits and risks associated with relevant technology").  As part of this panel, I showed a chart on the size of the US legal market, which was promptly tweeted by CALI 's Director of Community Development, Sarah Glassmeyer, a law librarian who is a total data subversive in a style and manner I fully support.

Well, despite a less-than-optimal photo angle, the chart was retweeted and favorited, so I figured I ought to just post the actual chart here. [Click on to enlarge]

In a competitive market, the threshold question, asked by potential entrants and those who might finance them, is often the same: "what is the size of the available (or addressible) market?" Because lawyers and law schools are feeling unprecedented economic pressure, I thought it would be worthwhile to run this exercise for the U.S. legal industry and break it down by type of client.

The figures above are estimates of 2014 receipts going to organizations and individuals in the business of providing legal services.  My calculations are derived from US Census Bureau data. They exclude the cost of in-house and government lawyers.  More granular calculation details will be laid out in a forthcoming publication.

At today's AALS Professional Responsibility session, technology was framed as an ethical issue. And that is certainly right:  technology can deliver enormous cost and quality benefits to clients, so we have both a fiduciary and professional duty to be up-to-date.  Yet, there is a flip-side here that is crucially important -- to ignore or fall behind on technology is to run the risk of commercial ruin. This axiom applies to lawyers in private practice and to law schools that want employers to hire their graduates. 

Building upon that theme, I used the Market Size chart to make two points today, one based on the high-end corporate market (right side of chart) and the other directed toward the individual consumer market (left side of chart). 

Re the corporate side, the data show that a relatively small roster of large corporations are spending vast sums each year on legal services -- more than $10 million per year for a publicly held company.  Because large national and international corporations are awash in a sea of growing legal complexity, they are turning to technology, process, and data to keep legal costs in line with overall company revenues.  From the perspective of a large corporate client, the typical junior law firm associate has little to offer.  A more seasoned partner or counsel is a better value, but this is by virtue of experience rather than technology or process.  As a result, law firm hiring remains stagnant, and more legal work is being taken in-house or given to LPOs or New Law legal service providers like Axiom, Elevate, or Novus Law.  It may take a generation for the law school--law firm--legal department supply chain to come into a reasonable alignment.  Right now, it's broken.

Re the individual retail market, the $232 annual legal spend per citizen means that there is not enough money go around to pay for all the legal need.   If a middle-class professional couple with kids has a contested divorce, that could easily chew-up $50,000 to $100,000 in legal fees.  A DUI is likely to cost $1,500.  A worker's comp claim might be 30% of an award.  Probate work runs well into the thousands.  In reality, most citizens go without.  One of our co-panelists today, retired US Magistrate Judge John Facciola, made the claim that 83% of American never talk to a lawyer to help them with a legal problem.  "The middle class is largely gone from federal court."  To my mind, technology is the only vehicle for tapping into a large latent market for legal services.  LegalZoom, Rocket Lawyer, Modria, Shake, and many other legal technology companies all see the potential here. And so do the venture capital and private equity firms that are funding them. 

 Today's panel was one of the most lively I have ever attended at AALS, owing in part to my excellent co-panelists but also an audience that asked some great, tough questions.  Many thanks to Andy Perlman (Suffolk Law) for organizing a terrific session and Natasha Martin (Seattle) for her skillful moderation of the panel.

The Composition of Graduating Classes of Law Students -- 2013-2016 -- Part One

PART ONE -- Analyzing the LSAT Profile/Composition of Entering First-Years from 2010 to 2013 and 2014

In the fall of 2013, I had a series of blog posting about the changing demographics of law students.  In the first, I noted that fewer students were coming to law school from elite colleges and universities.  In the second, I noted that between 2010 and 2013 there had been a decline in the number of matriculants with high LSATs and an increase in the number of matriculants with low LSATs such that the “composition” of the class that entered law school in the fall of 2013 was demonstrably less robust (in terms of LSAT profile) than the “composition” of the class that entered law school in the fall of 2010.  In describing this phenomenon, I noted that when the entering class in fall 2013 graduates in 2016, it might encounter greater problems with bar passage than previous classes. 

In light of the significant decline in the median MBE scaled score in July, which Derek Muller has discussed here and here, and which I have discussed here, and a significant decline in first-time bar passage rates in many jurisdictions this year, it seems like an appropriate time to look more closely at changing class profiles and the likely impact on bar passage in the next few years.

This is the first of two blog posts regarding the changing composition of entering classes and the changing composition of graduating classes.  In Part I, I analyze the distribution of LSAT scores across categories based on the LSAC’s National Decision Profiles for the years 2009-2010 through 2012-2013, and then analyze the distribution of law school median LSATs and the 25^th percentile LSATs across ranges of LSAT scores.  In Part II, I will analyze how attrition trends have changed since 2010 to assess what that might tell us about the composition of graduating classes three years after entering law school as a way of thinking about the likely impact on bar passage over time.

Tracking Changes Based on National Decision Profiles – 2010-2013

The following discussion summarizes data in the LSAC’s National Decision Profiles from the 2009-10 admission cycle (fall 2010) through the 2012-13 admission cycle (fall 2013).  The National Decision Profile for the 2013-14 admission cycle (fall 2014) has not yet been released.

Let’s start with the big picture.  If you take the matriculants each year and break them into three LSAT categories – 160+, 150-159, and <150 – the following chart and graph show the changes in percentages of matriculants in each of these categories over the last four years. 

Percentage of Matriculants in LSAT Categories – 2010-2013

                        2010    2011    2012    2013

160+                40.8     39        36.3     33.4

150-159           45        45.3     44.3     44.1

<150                14.2     15.7     19.3     22.5

Notably, this chart and graph show almost no change in the “middle” category (150-159 -- purple) with most of the change at the top (160+ -- orange -- decreasing from 40.8% to 33.4%) and bottom (<150 -- blue -- increasing from 14.2% to 22.5%).  This chart and graph also show only a modest change between 2010 and 2011 with more significant changes in 2012 and again in 2013 – when the percentage of students with LSATs of 160+ declines more substantially and the percentage of students with LSATs of <150 grows more substantially.

While I think this tells the story pretty clearly, for those interested in more detail, the following charts provide a more granular analysis.

Changes in LSAT Distributions of Matriculants – 2010-2013       

                            2010    2011    2012    2013         Chg in Number     % Chg in Number       

170+                3635    3330    2788    2072                -1563               -43%   

165-169           5842    5622    4783    4082                -1760               -30%   

160-164           10666  8678    7281    6442                -4224               -39.6%

155-159           11570   10657  9700    8459                -3111                -26.9%

150-154           10626  9885    8444    8163                -2463               -23.2%

145-149           5131     5196    5334    5541                 410                  8%      

<145                1869    1888    2564    2930                1061    `           56.8% 

                        49339  45256  40894  37689 

Note that in terms of percentage change in the number of matriculants in each LSAT category, the five highest LSAT categories are all down at least 20%, with 160-164 down nearly 40% and 170+ down over 40%, while the two lowest LSAT categories are up, with <145 being up over 50%.

 

Note that in the line graph above, the top two categories have been combined into 165+ while the bottom two categories have been combined into <150.  Perhaps most significantly, in 2010, the <150 group, with 7,000 students, was over 2,400 students smaller than the next smallest category (165+ with 9.477) and more than 4,500 students smaller than the largest category (155-159 with 11,570).  By 2013, however, the <150 category had become the largest category, with 8,471, just surpassing the 155-159 category, with 8,459, and now 2,300 larger than the smallest category, 165+ with only 6,154.

Changes in Percentage of Matriculants in LSAT Ranges – 2010-2013

                        PERCENTAGE OF MATRICULANTS

                        2010    2011    2012    2013    % Chg in %    

>169                0.074   0.074   0.068   0.055   -25.7%

165-169           0.118   0.124   0.117    0.108   -8.5%  

160-164           0.216   0.192   0.178   0.171   -20.8%

155-159           0.235   0.235   0.237   0.224   -4.7%  

150-154           0.215   0.218   0.206   0.217   0.9%   

145-149           0.104   0.115    0.13     0.147   41.3% 

<145                0.038   0.042   0.063   0.078   105.3%                       

In terms of the “composition” of the class, the percentage of matriculants in each LSAT category, as noted above, little has changed in the “middle” – 155-159 and 150-154, but significant changes have occurred at the top and bottom, with declines of 20% or more at 160-164 and 170+ and with increases of 40% at 145-149 and over 100% at <145.

Tracking Changes in Law School Median LSATs by LSAT Category

A different way of looking at this involves LSAT profiles among law schools over this period.  Based on the data law schools reported in their Standard 509 Reports, from 2010 to 2014, the chart below lists the numbers of law schools reporting median LSATs within certain LSAT ranges.  (This chart excludes law schools in Puerto Rico and provisionally-approved law schools.)

Number of Law Schools with LSAT Medians in LSAT Categories – 2010-2014

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
165+	30	31	26	23	21
160-164	47	41	39	31	29
155-159	59	57	56	53	51
150-154	50	52	53	56	59
145-149	9	14	22	28	29
<145	0	1	0	5	7

 

The chart above pretty clearly demonstrates the changes that have taken place since 2010, with declines in the number of law schools with median LSATs in higher LSAT categories and increases in the number of law schools with median LSATs in the lower LSAT categories.  The number of law schools with median LSATs of 160 or higher has declined from 77 to 50.  By contrast, the number of law schools with median LSATs of <150 has quadrupled, from 9 to 36.   Moreover, the “mode” in 2010 was in the 155-159 category, with nearly 60 law schools, but as of 2014, the “mode” had shifted to the 150-154 category with nearly 60 law schools.

Number of Law Schools with 25^th Percentile LSAT in LSAT Categories – 2010-2014

	2010	2011	2012	2013	2014
165+	17	16	11	10	10
160-164	26	20	21	17	15
155-159	55	54	49	42	41
150-154	67	69	59	65	57
145-149	26	33	46	48	48
<145	4	4	10	14	25

 

For those who want to focus on the bottom 25^th percentile of LSAT profile among law schools, the chart above shows a similar trend when compared with the medians, except that the number of law schools with a 25^th  percentile LSAT between 150-154 also declined (as opposed to an increase with respect to medians). The number of law schools with 25^th percentile LSATs of 160 or higher has declined from 43 to 25.  Similarly, the number of law schools with 25^th percentile LSATs of 150-159 has declined from 122 to 98.  By contrast, the number of law schools with 25^th percentile LSATs of 145-149 has nearly doubled from 26 to 48, while the number of law schools with 25^th percentile LSATs of <145 has sextupled from 4 to 25. 

One other way of looking at this is just to see how the average first-year LSAT profiles have changed over the last four years. 

Average LSATs of Matriculants at Fully-Accredited ABA Law Schools

            75^th Percentile             Median            25^th Percentile

2010                160.5               158.1               155.2

2011                160.1               157.8               154.5

2012                159.6               157                  153.6

2013                158.7               156                  152.6

2014                158.2               155.4               151.8

This shows that between 2010 and 2014, the average 75^th percentile LSAT has declined by 2.3 points, the average median LSAT has declined by 2.7 points and that the average 25^th percentile LSAT has declined by 3.4 points.

Conclusion

If one focuses on the LSAT score as one measure of “quality” of the entering class of law students each year, then the period from 2010-2014 not only has seen a significant decline in enrollment, it also has seen a significant decline in quality.  On an axis with high LSATs to the left and low LSATs to the right, the “composition” of the entering class of law students between 2010 and 2014 has shifted markedly to the right, as shown in the graph below.  Moreover, the shape of the curve has changed somewhat, thinning among high LSAT ranges and growing among low LSAT ranges.  

This shift in entering class composition suggests that bar passage rates are likely to continue to decline in the coming years.  But in terms of bar passage, the entering class profile is less meaningful than the graduating class profile.  In part two, I will look at attrition data from 2011 to 2014 to try to quantify the likely “composition” of the graduating classes from 2010 to 2013, which will give us a more refined idea of what to expect in terms of trends in bar passage in 2015 and 2016.

(I am grateful to Bernie Burk and Alice Noble-Allgire for helpful comments on earlier drafts.)

The Market for Law School Applicants -- A Milestone to Remember

In early 2013, Michael Moffitt, the dean of Oregon Law, was interviewed by the New York Times about the tumult affecting law schools. Moffitt, who is a very thoughtful guy, reponded, "I feel like I am living a business school case study.”  

I think the analogy to the business school case study is a good one.  In the nearly two years since that story was published, the market for law school applicants has actually gotten worse.

Yesterday's Dealbook column in the New York Times featured Northwestern Law Dean Dan Rodriguez (who also serves at President of the AALS) speaking candidly about the meltdown dynamics that have taken hold.  See Elizabeth Olson, "Law School is Buyer's Market, with Top Students in Demand," New York Times, Dec. 1, 2014. 

"It's insane," said Rodriguez, "We’re in hand-to-hand combat with other schools." The trendlines are indeed terrible.  Year-over-year, LSAT test-taker volume is down another 8.7%.  See Organ, LWB, Nov 11, 2014.  So we can expect the situation to get worse, at least in the near term.      

I applaud Dan Rodriguez for this leadership instincts.  He is being transparent and honest.  Several years ago the leadership of the AALS went to great lengths to avoid engagement with the media. Dan has gone the opposite direction, inviting the press into our living room and kitchen.  

Want to know what leadership and judgment look like?  It looks like Dan's interview with Elizabeth Olson.  Dan's words did not solve anyone's problem, but his honesty and candor made it more likely that we help ourselves.  Because it's Northwestern, and Dan is president of the AALS (something the story did not mention but most of us know), and this was reported by Elizabeth Olson in the New York Times, the substance and tenor of discussions within law school faculties is bound to shift, at least slightly and in the direction favoring change.   

What is the de facto plan at most law schools these days?  Universities are not going to backstop law schools indefinitely. I think the sign below is not far off the mark.  

We are indeed living through a business school case study, which is both bad and good.   At many schools -- likely well more than half --  hard choices need to be made to ensure survival.  (And for the record, virtually all schools, regardless of rank, are feeling uncomfortable levels of heat.)   A law school needs cash to pay its expenses.  But it also needs faculty and curricula to attract students. The deeper a law school cuts, the less attractive it becomes to students.  Likewise, pervasive steep discounts on tuition reflect a classic collective action problem. Some schools may eventually close, but a huge proportion of survivors are burning through their financial reserves.  

Open admissions, which might pay the bills today, will eventually force the ABA and DOE to do something neither really want to do -- aggressively regulate legal education.  This is not a game that is likely to produce many winners.  Rather than letting this play out, individual law schools would be much better off pursuing a realistic strategic plan that can actually move the market. 

The positive side of the business school case study is that a few legal academics are finding their voice and learning -- for the first time in several generations -- how to lead.  Necessity is a wonderful tutor.  Law is not an industry on the decline -- far from it.  The only thing on the decline is the archetypal artisan lawyer that law schools are geared to churn out.  Indeed, back in 2013 when Dean Moffitt commented about living through a business school case study, he was not referencing imminent failure.   Sure, Moffitt did not like the hand he was being dealt, but as the 2013 article showed, his school was proving to be remarkably resourceful in adapting.

The good news resides on the other side of a successful change effort.  The process of change is painful, yet the effects of change can be transformative and make people truly grateful for the pain that made it all possible.  In our case, for the first time in nearly a century, what we teach, and how we teach it, is actually going matter.  If we believe serious publications like The Economist, employers in law, business, and government need creative problem solvers who are excellent communicators, adept at learning new skills, and comfortable collaborating accross multiple disciplines -- this is, in fact, a meaningful subset of the growing JD-Advantage job market.

In the years to come, employers will become more aggressive looking for the most reliable sources of talent, in part because law schools are going to seek out preferred-provider relationships with high quality employers.  Hiring based on school prestige is a remarkably ineffective way to build a world-class workforce -- Google discovered this empirically.  

From an employer perspective, the best bet is likely to be three years of specialized training, ideally where applicants are admitted based on motivation, aptitude, and past accomplishments. The LSAT/UGPA grid method misses this by a wide margin. After that, the design and content of curricula are going to matter.  It is amazing how much motivated students can learn and grow in three years. And remarkably, legal educators control the quality of the soil.  It brings to mind that seemingly trite Spiderman cliche about great power.

For those of us working in legal education, the next several years could be the best of times or the worst of times.  We get to decide.  Yesterday's article in the Times made it a little more likely that we actually have the difficult conversations needed to get to the other side. 

What Law Schools Can Learn from Dental Schools in the 1980s Regarding the Consequences of a Decline in Applicants

For four consecutive years we have seen a decline in the number of applicants to law school and a corresponding decline in the number of matriculating first-year students.  Over the last year or two, some have suggested that as a result of this “market adjustment” some law schools would end up closing.  Most recently, the former AALS President, Michael Olivas, in response to the financial challenges facing the Thomas Jefferson Law School, was quoted as stating that he expects several law schools to close. 

To date, however, no law schools have closed (although the Western Michigan University Thomas M. Cooley Law School recently announced the closure of its Ann Arbor branch).  

Have law schools found ways to cut costs and manage expenses in the face of declining revenues such that all will remain financially viable and remain in operation?  Is it realistic to think that no law schools will close?

Although there may be a number of people in the legal academy who continue to believe that somehow legal education is “exceptional” – that market forces may impose financial challenges for law schools in the near term, but will not result in the closing of any law schools -- this strikes me as an unduly optimistic assessment of the situation. 

To understand why, I think those in legal education can learn from the experience of those in dental education in the 1980s.

The Dental School Experience from 1975-1990

In the 1980s, dental school deans, along with provosts and presidents at their host universities, had to deal with the challenge of a significant decline in applicants to dental school. 

At least partially in response to federal funding to support dental education, first-year enrollment at the country’s dental schools grew throughout the 1970s to a peak in 1979 of roughly 6,300 across roughly 60 dental schools.  Even at that point, however, for a number of reasons -- improved dental health from fluoridation, reductions in federal funding, high tuition costs and debt loads -- the number of applicants had already started to decline from the mid-1970s peak of over 15,000. 

By the mid-1980s, applicants had fallen to 6,300 and matriculants had fallen to 5,000.  As of 1985, no dental schools had closed.  But by the late 1980s and early 1990s there were fewer than 5000 applicants and barely 4000 first-year students – applicants had declined by more than two-thirds and first-year enrollment had declined by more than one-third from their earlier peaks. (Source – American Dental Association – Trends in Dental Education – U.S. Dental School Applicant and First-Year Enrollment Trends 1955-2009 (copy on file with author).)

How did dental schools and their associated universities respond to this changing market?  Between 1986 and 1993, six private universities closed their dental schools: Oral Roberts University, Tulsa, Oklahoma (1986); Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia (1988); Georgetown University, Washington, D.C. (1990); Fairleigh Dickinson University, Rutherford, New Jersey (1990); Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri (1991); and Loyola University, Chicago, Illinois (1993). (Source: Dental Education at the Crossroads:  Challenges and Change, Table 1.1 (Institute of Medicine 1995)).  According to a New York Times article from October 29, 1987, “Georgetown, formerly the nation's largest private dental school, decided to close after a Price Waterhouse study found that the school would have a $3.6 million deficit by 1992.” (Source: Tamar Lewin, Plagued by Falling Enrollment, Dental Schools Close or Cut Back, New York Times, Oct. 29, 1987).

Some of the primary factors contributing to the closing of dental schools were described as follows:

Financial issues were repeatedly described as critical. Dental education was cited as an expensive enterprise that is or may become a drain on university resources. On average, current-year expenditures for the average dental school are about $1 million more than current revenues. … The declining size and quality of the applicant pool during the 1980s played a role in some closures by threatening the tuition base and prestige on which private schools rely. Faculty and alumni resistance to change may feed impatience among university administrators. In some institutions, the comparative isolation of dental schools within the university has provided them with few allies or at least informed colleagues and has left them ill-prepared to counter proposals for "downsizing." (Source: Dental Education at the Crossroads:  Challenges and Change, at 202-203 (Institute of Medicine 1995)). 

The Law School Experience from 2004-2014

In terms of applicants and enrollment over the last decade, the trends law schools have experienced look remarkably comparable to the experience of dental schools in the 1970s and 1980s.  According to the LSAC Volume Summary, applicants to law schools peaked in 2004 with 100,600 applicants (and roughly 48,200 first-year students).  By 2010, applicants had fallen to roughly 87,600, but first-year enrollment peaked at 52,500.  Over the last four years, applicants have fallen steadily to roughly 54,700 for fall 2014, with a projected 37,000 first-years matriculating this fall, the smallest number since 1973-74, when there were 40 fewer law schools and over one thousand fewer law professors.  (Source - ABA Statistics)(For the analysis supporting this projection of 37,000 first-years, see my blog post on The Legal Whiteboard from March 18, 2014.)  

The two charts below compare the dental school experience from 1975 to 1990 with the law school experience in the last decade.  One chart compares dental school applicants with law school applicants and one chart compares dental school first-years with law school first-years.  (Note that for purposes of easy comparison, the law school numbers are presented as one-tenth of the actual numbers.)

(Sources – American Dental Association – Trends in Dental Education – U.S. Dental School Applicant and First-Year Enrollment Trends 1955-2009 (copy on file with author) and the LSAC’s Volume Summary  (with my own estimates for 2014 based on the LSAC’s Current Volume Summary)).

The Law School Experience 2014-2019

Notably, these charts do not bode well for law schools.  The law school experience tracks pretty closely the dental school experience over the first ten years reflected in the charts.  For law schools, 2014 looks a lot like 1985 did for dental schools.

There might be any number of reasons why the law school experience over the next several years might be different from the dental school experience in the late 1980s and early 1990s, such that the next several years do not continue as a downward trend in applicants and matriculants.  The market forces associated with changes in the dental profession and dental education in the 1980s are not the same as the market forces associated with changes in the legal profession and legal education in the 2010s and the cost structures for dental education and legal education are not exactly the same.

The problem for law schools, however, is that without an upward trend law schools will continue to face significant financial pressures for the next few years just as dental schools did in the late 1980s.  There might be some encouraging news on the employment front over the next few years as the decreasing number of matriculants will mean a decreasing number of graduates in 2015, 2016 and 2017.  Even without any meaningful growth in the employment market for law graduates, this decline in the number of graduates should mean significant increases in the percentage of graduates finding full-time, long-term employment in bar passage required jobs.  Over time, this market signal may begin to gain traction among those considering law school such that the number of applicants to law school stops declining and perhaps starts increasing modestly. 

But the near term remains discouraging.  The number of people taking the June 2014 LSAT was down roughly 9% compared to June 2013 and the anticipation is that the number of test-takers in the most recent administration in late September was down as well compared to October 2013.  Thus, applicants well might be down another 5-8% in the 2014-15 admissions cycle, resulting in perhaps as few as 51,000 applicants and perhaps as few as 35,000 matriculants in fall 2015.  Even if things flatten out and begin to rebound modestly in the next few years, it would appear to be unlikely that the number of matriculants will climb back near or above 40,000 before the fall of 2017 or 2018.

Moreover, if current trends continue, the matriculants in 2015 also are going to have a significantly less robust LSAT/GPA profile than the matriculants in fall 2010.   As I noted in a blog posting on March 2, 2014, between 2010 and 2013, the number of law schools with a median LSAT less than 150 grew from 9 to 32, and the number with a median LSAT of 145 or below grew from 1 to 9.

What Does this Mean for the Average Law School?

Assume you are the Dean at a hypothetical private law school that had 600 students (200 in each class) and a budget based on $18 million in JD tuition revenue in 2010-11.  (This reflects a net tuition of $30,000 from each student – with nominal tuition set at $40,000 but with a discount rate of 25%.)  Further assume that with this budget, your law school was providing $2.0 million annually to the university with which it is affiliated.  As of 2010-11, your entering class profile reflected a median LSAT of 155 and a median GPA of 3.4.

Assume first-year enrollment declined to 170 in 2011, to 145 in 2012, and to 125 in 2013, a cumulative decrease in first-year enrollment since 2010 of 37%.  As you tried to balance enrollment and profile, the law school managed to maintain its median LSAT and GPA in 2011, but saw its LSAT and GPA medians decline to 153 and 3.35 in 2012 and to 152 and 3.30 in 2013.

This means that for the 2013-14 academic year, the law school had only 440 students, a decrease of roughly 27% from its total enrollment of 600 in 2010, with a much less robust entering class profile in comparison with the entering class profile in 2010. (Note that this assumes no attrition and no transfers in or out, so if anything, it likely overstates total enrollment).  (For comparison purposes, the National Jurist recently listed 25 law schools with enrollment declines of 28% or more between 2010-11 and 2013-14.)

Assume further that the law school had to increase its scholarships to attract even this smaller pool of students with less robust LSAT/GPA profiles, such that the net tuition from each first-year student beginning in fall 2012 has been only $25,500 (with nominal tuition now set at $42,500, but with a discount rate of 40%). 

For the 2013-14 academic year, therefore, you were operating with a budget based on $12,411,000 in JD tuition revenue, a decrease in JD tuition revenue of over $5.5 million since the 2010-11 academic year, over 30%.  (170 x $32,500 for third years ($5.525 million), 145 x $25,500 for second years ($3.698 million), and 125 x $25,500 for first-years ($3.188 million)).

What does this mean?  This means you have been in budget-cutting mode for over three years.  Of course, this has been a challenge for the law school, given that a significant percentage of its costs are for faculty and staff salaries and associated fringe benefits.  Through the 2013-14 academic year, however, assume you cut costs by paring the library budget, eliminating summer research stipends for faculty, finding several other places to cut expenditures, cutting six staff positions and using the retirement or early retirement of ten of your 38 faculty members as a de facto “reduction in force,” resulting in net savings of $3.59 million.  In addition, assume you have gotten the university to agree to waive any “draw” saving another $2 million (based on the “draw” in 2010-2011).  Thus, albeit in a significantly leaner state, you managed to generate a “balanced” budget for the 2013-14 year while generating no revenue for your host university.    

The problem is that the worst is yet to come, as the law school welcomes a class of first-year students much smaller than the class of third-years that graduated in May.  With the continued decline in the number of applicants, the law school has lower first-year enrollment again for 2014-15, with only 120 first-year students with a median LSAT and GPA that has declined again to 151 and 3.2.  Projections for 2015-16 (based on the decline in June and October 2014 LSAT takers) suggest that the school should expect no more than 115 matriculants and may see a further decline in profile.  That means that the law school has only 390 students in 2014-15 and may have only 360 students in 2015-16 (an enrollment decline of 40% since 2010-11). Assuming net tuition for first-year students also remains at $25,500 due to the competition on scholarships to attract students (and this may be a generous assumption) – the JD tuition revenue for 2014-15 and 2015-16 is estimated to be $9,945,000, and $9,180,000, respectively (a decline in revenue of nearly 50% from the 2010-11 academic year). 

In reality, then, the “balanced” budget for the 2013-2014 academic year based on revenues of $12,411,000, now looks like a $2,500,000 budget shortfall in 2014-15 and a $3,200,000 budget shortfall for the 2015-16 academic year, absent significant additional budget cuts or new revenue streams (with most of the “low hanging fruit” in terms of budget cuts already “picked”). 

While you may be able to make some extraordinary draws on unrestricted endowment reserves to cover some of the shortfall (assuming the law school has some endowment of its own), and may be creative in pursuing new sources of revenue (a certificate program or a Master of Laws), even if you come up with an extra $400,000 annually in extraordinary draws on endowment and an extra $400,000 annually in terms of non-JD revenue you still are looking at losses of at least $1,700,000 in 2014-15 and at least $2,400,000 in 2015-16 absent further budget cuts.  Even with another round of early retirement offers to some tenured faculty and/or to staff (assuming there are still some that might qualify for early retirement), or the termination of untenured faculty and/or of staff, the budget shortfall well might remain in the $1,000,000 to $1,700,000 range for this year and next year (with similar projections for the ensuing years).  This means the law school may need subsidies from the university with which it is affiliated, or may need to make even more draconian cuts than it has contemplated to date.  (For indications that these estimates have some relation to reality, please see the recent stories about budget issues at Albany, Minnesota and UNLV.)

Difficult Conversations -- Difficult Decisions

This situation will make for some interesting conversations between you as the Dean of the law school and the Provost and President of the university.  As noted above in the discussion of dental schools, the provost and president of a university with a law school likely will be asking:  How “mission critical” is the law school to the university when the law school has transformed from a “cash cow” into a “money pit” and when reasonable projections suggest it may continue to be a money pit for the next few years?  How "mission critical" is the law school when its entering class profile is significantly weaker than it was just a few years ago, particularly if that weaker profile begins to translate into lower bar passage rates and even less robust employment outcomes?   How “mission critical” is the law school to the university if its faculty and alumni seem resistant to change and if the law school faculty and administration are somewhat disconnected from their colleagues in other schools and departments on campus?

Some universities are going to have difficult decisions to make (as may the Boards of Trustees of some of the independent law schools).  As of 1985, no dental schools had closed, but by the late 1980s and early 1990s, roughly ten percent of the dental schools were closed in response to significant declines in the number and quality of applicants and the corresponding financial pressures.  When faced with having to invest significantly to keep dental schools open, several universities decided that dental schools no longer were “mission critical” aspects of the university. 

I do not believe law schools should view themselves as so exceptional that they will have more immunity to these market forces than dental schools did in the 1980s.  I do not know whether ten percent of law schools will close, but just as some universities decided dental schools were no longer “mission critical” to the university, it is not only very possible, but perhaps even likely, that some universities now will decide that law schools that may require subsidies of $1 million or $2 million or more for a number of years are no longer “mission critical” to the university. 

(I am grateful to Bernie Burk and Derek Muller for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this blog posting.)

 

Is the Legal Profession Showing Its Age?

The figure below suggests that a growing number of students are attending law school but not going on to become lawyers.  This conclusion requires some explanation, which I will supply below.  Alternative explanations are also welcome, as I’d like to find a plausible narrative that foreshadows a brighter future for the licensed bar. [PDF version of this essay]

I generated this figure based on data from various editions of The Lawyer Statistical Report, which is periodically compiled by the American Bar Foundation (ABF).  The ABF's gets the underlying data from Martindale-Hubbell, which is a comprehensive directory of the licensed bar.  As of 2005, the sample was roughly 1 million lawyers who work in law firms, solo practice, in-house legal departments, government, and the judiciary.

The big surprise here is that the proportion of young lawyers (under age 35) has been declining for several decades.  And not by a little, but by a lot.  During this period, the median age went from 39 in 1980, to 41 in 1991, to 45 in 2000, to 49 in 2005.  See ABA Market Research Department.

I would be tempted to attribute a demographic shift of this magnitude to a computational error.  But that is unlikely because the underlying data were calculated at four different points in time, yet the results come together to produce a single, steady trendline -- a trendline that shows a licensed bar that is steadily aging.  

Another possible factor to consider is whether there are any significant data collection or sampling issues that skew the data in a manner that dramatically undercounts younger lawyers. For example, Martindale-Hubbell is largely irrelevant to today's younger lawyers.  So, in solo and small firm practices, where they are making the business decisions, we might expect plummeting subscription rates.  But subscribing and requesting the publication of additional biographical information (in the hope of garnering referral business) is not the same thing as being listed. Martindale Hubbell attempts to track lawyers who did not subscribe to the directory, as the near-universe level of inclusion increases the directory's value.  

To illustrate this point, consider that in 2000, the Lawyer Statistical Report (which relies on Martindale-Hubbell data) counted 909,000 lawyers.  According to the ABA, the total number of lawyers licensed in the US (compiled from state bar roles) was 1,022,000, and that almost certainly includes some double counting of lawyers licensed in more than one state.  While I have no doubt that younger lawyers are becoming harder to hunt down because of cell phones and home-based offices, the gap of missing lawyers is just not big enough to fully account for the sharp drop-off in younger lawyers. 

I have shown this chart to various law firms, legal departments, law faculty and bar association audiences.  Through this process, I have developed two working theories that are not mutually exclusive:

1. Increased exits from law practice based on gender integration
2. Slowing absorption of law graduates into the licensed bar

Theory 1: Gender Integration

One explanation is gender integration.  In short, over the last 40 years, more women have entered the legal profession; and as an empirical matter, they are much more likely to exit the workforce in order to focus on childcare.  Thus, more gender integration over time would cause a proportional decline in the younger lawyer cohort.

So let's examine the data.  According to the figure below, which shows number of male and female 1Ls enrolling by year at ABA-accredited law schools [Click-on to enlarge], the high water mark for male 1L enrollment occurred over 40 years ago -- in 1971!   The high water mark for female enrollment in percentage terms was 2000 (49.4%). In absolute numbers, the high was the class entering in the fall of 2009 (24,305).  

Presumably, the higher the percentage of female graduates, the lower the percentage of lawyers under the age of 35.  In 1968, a 22 year old female 1L, if she graduated from law school and stayed in the legal profession, would be part of the younger lawyer cohort in 1980. Yet, her 1L cohort included only 1,179 females (7.4% of all 1Ls).  By 1993 (12 years before 2005), the number of female 1Ls had increased to 19,059 (nearly 44%). So exits based on childcare factors would likely be increasing.  

I can readily accept gender integration as a partial, but not a complete, explanation.  Why? Because female exits are likely to be siphoning off a substantial portion of the over 35 cohort, as this group is still having and raising children.   It seems implausible that female lawyers are leaving in droves before age 35 (reducing the younger lawyer cohort) yet returning in droves thereafter (swelling the over 35 cohort).  Further, according to the figure above, the absolute number of law school graduates is increasing during this entire period.  Sheer numbers are likely a partial counterbalance to the impact of gender-related exits.

Theory 2:  Slowing Absorption of Younger Lawyers

It is important to keep in mind the magnitude of the overall slide in younger lawyers -- from 36% in 1980 to 13% in 2005.  One would think the trendline would be moving in the exact opposite direction -- that larger graduating classes would be replacing the much smaller number of law school graduates from 40 years earlier who were retiring or passing away.  But such a youth movement does not appear to be happening, at least based on data through 2005.

I think the most likely explanation is that the rate of absorption of law school graduates into the licensed bar has been steadily declining over time.  This explanation, which would affect men and women equally, is directionally consistent with the percentage of entry-level jobs in private practice, which has been declining since in the late 1980s. See figure below.

The slower absorption theory is also directionally consistent with the shifting demographics of large law firms, which now have more partners than associates.  See figure below.

Despite the higher number of partners compared to associates, it is worth noting that large law firms are not becoming more generous in sharing the partnership pie.   

Rather, the real sea change is the decline in the number of traditional law firm associates, who have been slowly supplanted by staff attorneys, permanent of counsel lawyers, and nonequity partners. Indeed, over 40% are large law firm partners (defined at AmLaw 200 / NLJ 250) are nonequity. Three decades ago, this category of partner was relatively rare.  See Henderson, An Empirical Study of Single-Tier Versus Two-Tier Partnerships in the Am Law 200, 84 NC L Rev 1691 (2006).  The growth of nonequity partners reflects a new kind of law firm leverage that relies on senior lawyers. The annual ALM/Major Lindsay & Africa study of partner compensation reveals that equity partners make dramatically higher incomes than nonequity partners and that the size of the pay gap is widening over time. See Ross Todd, A Widening Partner Pay Gap, American Lawyer, Sept 29, 2014.  

The primary advantage of nonequity partners and other senior lawyers, like permanent counsel, is that training costs fall to near zero. Cf. Elizabeth Olson, Corporations Drive Drop in Law Firms’ Use of Starting Lawyers, Study Finds, New York Times, Oct. 10. 2014 (showing drop over time in use of first year associates because clients are refusing to pay for training costs).

To my mind, however, the most persuasive support for the lower absorption theory is the simple delta between the growth in the licensed bar--which has clearly hit a plateau--and the size of graduating classes from ABA-accredited law schools--which, until recently, had been steadily increasing. The figure below shows these macro-level trendlines.

If younger lawyers were replacing older lawyers and also growing to keep pace with the broader economy, the under 35 young lawyers cohort would be getting bigger or at least remain relatively constant in size.  But instead, as the first figure in this essay showed, the younger lawyer cohort has gotten smaller.  Arguably, the simplest explanation for these patterns is that it has gotten much harder over time to parlay a JD degree into paid employment as a licensed lawyer.  So, faced with a saturated legal market, law school graduates have been pursuing careers outside of law.  

What Does This Mean?

The analysis above suggests that the JD Advantage / JD Preferred employment market started to take shape several decades ago, long before these terms were put in place by the ABA and NALP.  Yet, we really don't know about these careers.  To construct a more useful, informative narrative, we'd have to systematically study the career paths of our alumni.  That task is long overdue.  

I started teaching at Indiana Law in 2003.  Since I first saw the declining trendline for the young lawyer cohort, I have been thinking about the roughly 1,600 students who have taken my Corporations, Securities Regulation, Business Planning, Project Management, Law Firms as a Business Organization, and Legal Professions classes.  

• What percentage are working as licensed lawyers?  
• For those doing something different, where are they working?  
• Has their legal education opened doors for them? 
• Did those doors lead to interesting and remunerative work?

The After the JD Study is based on law school graduates who passed in the bar in the year 2000.  The Wave III results provide some clues to how at least one cohort of younger lawyers fared during their first ten years in practice.  

• Roughly a quarter of the class of 2000 is no longer practicing law (remember the base sample excluded those who never took or passed the bar).
• The migration out of practice is generally in the direction of private sector business.  
• Ten years out, the median pay for full-time work is more than $100,000 for both men and women.  No tears need to be shed here.
• Roughly three-quarters report being satisfied with their decision to attend law school. 

These statistics are generally encouraging, but some caution is in order, as the entry-level legal economy was quite different in 2000.  

Because of the law school transparency movement, we lack commensurable data between 2000 and 2013.  That is an important piece of information right there, as changes in collection and reporting standards were caused by student protests, including several lawsuits surrounding allegedly misleading employment data. Yet, we can cobble together some potentially useful comparisons:

• According to NALP data, 77.3% of the class of 2000 obtained full-time legal positions nine months after graduation.  See NALP, Employment of New Law Graduates Exceeds 90% for Second Year in a Row, July 23, 2001.
• According to the ABA, 57% of the class of 2013 obtained full-time bar-passage required jobs. See ABA 2013 Law Graduate Employment Data.  

Even if NALP's full-time legal positions in 2000 is a more expansive category than the ABA's full-time bar-passage jobs in 2013, the gap is startling -- over 20 percent!  Further, we have additional evidence of a major shift in the job market, as law firm summer associate positions have declined in size by more than 50% since in the early 2000s. See Henderson, Sea Change in the Legal Market, NALP Bulletin (Aug 2013).   Between 2008 and 2013, there has also been a drop in median starting salaries, from $72,000 to $62,500. See NALP, Employment for the Class of 2013 – Selected Findings. 

Demand Drops, but Supply Marchs On

Cumulatively, the trendlines presented in this essay suggest that we are on the tail end of a multi-decade structural shift in the legal economy.  So what comes next?

Law schools were recently taken to task in an editorial by the Young Lawyers Board of Philadelphia Legal Intelligencer.  See If Unchanged, Legal Education will Remain a Business in Decline, Legal Intelligencer, Sept 25, 2014.  According to the young lawyers, "One reason graduates have difficulty obtaining employment is that most of them need to be trained in how to practice law, and clients are unwilling to pay for training new lawyers. Law schools need to step up and train students on how to practice law."

I am very sympathetic to the young lawyers, but I think they are missing something essential.  A law school that improves the quality of its skills training reduces the training costs to prospective employers.  That is a good thing, but it does not change the underlying demand for legal services. And it appears that that demand is eroding on several fronts:  (a) wealthy corporations are balking at the price of outside counsel and looking for credible substitutes, (b) ordinary citizens are struggling to afford a lawyer at all, and (c) a new segment of the legal economy is emerging that is financed by nonlawyers and heavily focused on data, process, and technology, which taps into skill sets not traditionally taught in law school. See Henderson, A Counterpoint to "The most robust legal market that ever existed in this country", Legal Whiteboard, Mar 17, 2014.  

Conclusion

My own conclusion is that neither the organized bar nor the legal academy has a firm grip on the changes that are occurring in the legal marketplace.  This uncertainty and confusion is understandable in light of the magnitude of the shift.

Nonetheless, these market shifts create special urgency for legal educators because we can't teach what we don't understand.  The thesis of the Young Lawyers Board is surely right -- if unchanged, legal education will remain a business in decline.  Much of legal education today is premised on a 20th century professional archetype--an archetype that is, based on the data, becoming less and less relevant with each passing day.  Thus, we are under-serving our students.  And frankly, they are figuring that out.  

Change is hard for people and organizations they work in.  And law professors and law schools are no different.  The retooling of legal education will likely be a slow, painful process that will take the better part of a full generation to complete.  I am trying to do my part.

Yet, the brunt of the demographic shift falls on the licensed bar, which is getting older and thus weaker with each passing year.  This is a problem that belongs to the ABA, the state bars, and the state supreme courts, not the legal academy.   [PDF version of this essay]

Artificial Intelligence and the Law

Plexus, a NewLaw law firm based in Australia, has just released a new legal product that purports to apply artificial intelligence to a relatively common, discrete legal issue -- detemining whether a proposed trade promotion (advertisement in US parlance) is in compliance with applicable law. 

In the video below, Plexus Managing Partner Andrew Mellett (who is a MBA, not a lawyer), observes that this type of legal work would ordinarily take four to six weeks to complete and cost several thousand dollars.  Mellett claims that the Plexus product can provide "a legal solution in 10 minutes" at 20% to 30% of the cost of the traditional consultative method -- no lawyer required, albeit Plexus lawyers were the indispensible architects for the underlying code. 

From the video, it is unclear whether the innovation is an expert system -- akin to what Neota Logic or KM Standards are creating -- or artificial intelligence (AI) in the spirit of machine learning used in some of the best predictive coding algorithms or IBM's Watson applied to legal problems.   Back when Richard Susskind published his PhD dissertation in 1987, Expert Systems In Law, an expert system was viewed as artificial intelligence--there was no terminology to speak of because the application of technology to law was embryonic.  Now we are well past birth, as dozen of companies in the legal industry are in the toolmaking business, some living on venture or angel funding and others turning a handsome profit.

My best guess is that Plexus's new innovation is an expert system.  But frankly, the distinction does not matter very much because both expert systems and AI as applied to law are entering early toddler stage.   Of course, that suggests that those of us now working in the legal field will soon be grappling with the growth spurt of legal tech adolescence.  For law and technology, it's Detroit circa 1905.  

NewLaw, Innovation, and the Importance of Failure

Jordan Furlong is one of the first-rate commentators on the legal industry. He is an excellent observer, a deep thinker, and skilled and stylish communicator.  

Over at Law 21, Jordan has written a set of companion essays that explain the ferment that is now taking hold in the legal industry.  Check them out if you need or want the seemingly complex made simple.

The first essay is a highly useful reference guide to NewLaw (#NewLaw), a category coined by the Australian consultant George Beaton.   Jordan modestly titled the essay "An Incomplete Inventory of NewLaw," but its alleged incompleteness does not distract from its usefulness.  Complicated things like new business models need to be organized and simplified before we can get our heads around them.  Here, Jordan creates a elegant typology and fills it out with example after example.  Before Jordan's essay, few of us could be sure we were discussing the same ideas or concepts.

One of Jordan's most noteworthy observation is that the talent side of NewLaw is appears to be growing faster in the UK (new models of organizing and delivering legal services and content) while the US seems to be getting the most traction in legal tech.  The former is likely due to liberalization of regulations that flow from the UK's Legal Services Act of 2007 and the latter from the proximity to venture funding.  To have similar legal ecosystems developing in different ways is bound to trigger consequences and interactions that we cannot fully anticipate. 

Jordan's second post is on the failure of legal innovation, which he points out is nothing more than the precursor long-term success.  See  "The Failure of Legal Innovation," Law 21, May 29, 2014.  I definitely agree.  When I look at the legal innovation space in 2014 -- and my frame for reference is LegalTech, LexRedux, ReInvent Law, some of the ABA Legal Rebels, and a lot of shoe-leather research on my part -- I think of Detroit in 1905.  There were roughly 125 car manufacturers and hundreds more in other parts of the country, as Detroit was not yet car capital of the world.  All of those business owners were right about one thing:  The car is the future.  But they wistful optimists about something else -- their car company is the future. 

A start-up is like a sapling in the woods -- the odds are against it ever growing to the treeline. Fortunately, in the start-up ecosystem good ideas and talented entrepreneurs never really lose.  Instead, they are rolled up into competitors to form the types of companies that can truly shape an entire new industry.  Along these lines, if I were working in investment banking these days, I would be trying to specialize in the legal sector, as the roll-ups in this space are going to be fast and furious in the years to come.  

Let's fasten our seatbelts.  The next several years are going to be time of great tranformation.

What Ails the Large Law Firm? Will the Real FutureFirm Please Stand Up

Five years ago this April, I helped organize a novel experiment on how to reengineer the modern law firm.  The occasion was FutureFirm 1.0, a collaborative competition in which teams of law firm partners, associates, and in-house lawyers to create a strategic plan for the fictional firm of Marbury & Madison (M&M).  The goal was a new business model that would enable the firm "to survive and thrive over the next 20 years."  See M&M Fact Pattern.   

We planned FutureFirm 1.0 in the fall of 2008, but by April 2009, things looked pretty unstable.  Deal flow had ground to a halt, and corporations were reluctant to fund noncrucial litigation.  Law firms in turn were rescinding offers to thousands of law students.  Further, the specter of law firm failure hung in the air.  Suffice it to say, the timing was not right for sharing the results of FutureFirm.  As a result, my analysis of the event, "What Ails the Large Law Firm?  Will the Real FutureFirm Please Stand Up," was never published or circulated.  

With five year anniversary of FutureFirm 1.0, I decided to uncork my time-in-a-bottle essay and post it on SSRN and JDSupra.  

Having not read this essay for five years, I am surprised at how well the FutureFirm analysis holds up.  Yet, the biggest takeaway from my FutureFirm experience is not the specifics of the analysis, but acclimating myself to the permanence of new change dynamic, much of which I can see through the participants of FurtureFirm 1.0.   

• Two law firm partners subsequently left to start their own boutiques, one of which is aggressively moving into managed services in South Africa.  
• Another law firm partner became a judge in King County, Washington (Seattle).
• Several summer associates joined BigLaw only to leave within three or four years to become sophisticated in-house lawyers who are themselves driving change.
• Several people in all roles have switched over to the business side.  Indeed, new legal businesses are actively being planned.

In the spring of 2014, the new normal is here to stay, and it has no froth.  FutureFirm was probably a fringe activity back in 2009.  Now, an event like FutureFirm would be one of the key places to go for answers.  Indeed, I have very serious senior in-house lawyers at Fortune 100 companies who want to run this type of colloborative competition to help better design tomorrow's legal departments.  So stay tuned for that.

I hope you are sufficiently curious to do a bit of time travel and give "What Ails the Large Law Firm?" a read.  I would welcome your thoughts and feedback.