The Shark

blawg quotables #1

[dennis]

Advice to 0Ls. The Divine Details:

Apply early or else you’ll be the only person in your class to be waitlisted at a peer school and it’ll be embarrassing when the inevitable “So why’d you chose x over y?” conversation comes up.

This brief is driving me crazy. A Woman in Law School:

I have a brief due in a week. I realize that I have way too much on my plate, but I can’t let my team or partner down now-just too late.

Potty Time (at work). Law School Indeed:

Personally, I’m not pee shy, but I certainly don’t revel in the fact that someone might be watching me do my business.

Guess who has Swine Flu. The Reasonably Prudent Law Student:

I still can’t believe I have swine flu. Who gets swine flu anymore? That’s, like, so three months ago.

Increments. New Law Mom:

I have no idea what I am doing, but I sure am getting it done. Piece by little tiny piece.

Trying to avoid a panic attack. The Moonshine Project:

Would somebody please explain to me why I thought it would be a good idea to attend a career-planning session at lunch today, and schedule an individual appointment for tomorrow when I have a week’s worth of reading to catch up on?

pay-as-you-go law school?

[dennis]

Oh the irony of law schools charging future lawyers hidden fees! A student from the UVA law school has an interesting idea, the pay-as-you-go law school: 

The announcement that 3Ls planning on attending their own graduation have to toss in $55 for the pleasure to do so has highlighted the Law School’s clever use of hidden fees: You enroll for what seems to be a (relatively) reasonable tuition, only to end up being charged for all kinds of things one would have assumed to have been covered by the initial $150,000 price.

Such hidden fees have been off-putting to users of other products, for example, cell phones. The popular solution? Pay-as-you-go phone plans. Why can’t a legal education be similarly consumer-savvy? Accordingly, I suggest that UVA become the world’s first pay-as-you-go law school.

I personally applaud the new graduation fee: If there’s one thing us lawyers need to learn, it’s how to take money from helpless people who are deep in debt and without any other options. We should be thanking UVA Law for teaching us the valuable lesson that when people have already put a lot of money into something, you can just keep charging them for whatever you want and they’re too financially invested to refuse! As for my ideas about a revolutionizing legal schooling, I hope you’ve enjoyed them . . . because there’s a $15 “column fee” for reading this.

...and we wonder why we are being replaced by Legalzoom.com.

Obviously a law school would never dream of offering students a discount. A gross example is Northwestern's decision to charge students in the two-year JD program for three year's worth of law school:

Less time on campus most likely won't mean a break on tuition.

While Northwestern has not yet set the costs for its two-year program, administrators have hinted that fast-track students will be paying somewhere around the $128,016 that students shell out over the course of three years to get a J.D.

"We generally charge by the degree rather than the time served," says Van Zandt. "The real savings will be the extra year of salary students make by getting out into the marketplace faster."

That's around $150,000 and up for most Northwestern Law grads working as first-year associates at top law firms.

The Time article was obviously written by a non-lawyer who doesn't read ATL.

I have not experienced any hidden fees at UMN Law School. My school smacks us with a huge tuition bill and then spends the rest of the year mitigating our horror with an aggressive regime of free muffins and pizza. This is a pretty effective tactic so far...

two california law schools get huge grant for innocence project.

[petra]

The federal government has dropped some major moolah into the hands of two California law professors for clinical programs that investigate inmates’ claims of innocence.

California Western School of Law and Santa Clara University School of Law will split $2.4 million in grants from the Justice Department. Cal Western professor Jan Stiglitz, who directs the school’s California Innocence Project, says the amount is significant. “I think it’s the biggest grant we ever got – we’ve had half a million before,” Stiglitz said.

The money for the 18-month program, called the Post-Conviction DNA Testing Assistance Program, will cover the salaries of two new staff attorneys and some paralegals. They, in turn, will help expand the clinic’s reach by letting staff seek out cases where DNA evidence might exonerate wrongfully convicted inmates, rather than just reviewing claims that come in, Stiglitz said.

The 12 Cal Western students enrolled in the program will be in the thick of it. The biggest expense, says Stiglitz, is travel. The grant money will cover trips lawyers, staff and students will be making to prisons, evidence rooms and crime labs all over California.

Stiglitz said students will get to flex their fact-investigation skills, examining the evidence in rape, murder and certain types of manslaughter cases. They’ll help determine what evidence was used to make a conviction, and whether new evidence would help undermine a conviction.

He says this type of fact investigation rounds out students’ more scholastic classroom experience. “By the time they graduate, they’ve all read cases and written memos,” he said. But in real cases, he says, whether you win or lose is typically a product of the facts and not the law. “Why wasn’t OJ convicted [of killing his wife]?” Stiglitz said. “Because factually, the prosecution didn’t convince the jury that OJ was the one wielding the knife.”

For more on Santa Clara’s role, check out Legal Pad.

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

justice thomas loosens the tie at a law school event.

[cynthia]

Sharon Nichols, a blogger and law student from Alabama, posted an interesting recap today of SCOTUS Justice Clarence Thomas's appearance at her school. 

Justice Thomas played the question and answer game with law students, resulting in some pretty casual, conversational comments that almost verge on blase. Some excerpts below, but check out the full post at Thank You Ma'am to read more (including what happened when Sharon asked how a law school-trained individual can actually come down on side or another in a close argument).

"First year [of law school] was clear as cement!"

"You'd think I was in a concentration camp or something and I had to find a way to fill my time -- law school."

"I don't like excerpts because people have agendas when they excerpt cases."

more rankings, more problems: us news to blame for high tuition.

[cynthia]

According to a study released by Government Accountability Office, we can all gather 'round and blame US News (and its less popular siblings) for the rapid clip of tuition increases in the last few years.

According to my much-loved Tax Prof, the study (which came out Monday) pinpoints rankings, not accreditation, for your big bills.

From the GAO:

"According to law school officials, the move to a more hands-on, resource-intensive approach to legal education and competition among schools for higher rankings appear to be the main factors driving the cost of law school, while ABA accreditation requirements appear to play a minor role."

Prior to these revelations, the Internet was awash in ABA-blame for the problems modern law schools face. Instead, unsurprisingly, it is not the gargantuan, antiquated bureaucracy that is to blame, but the trend-obsessed and more nimble law school administrations that have subjected their institutions to the whims of PR.

A page from the study says it all: 

Of course, to add to the absurdity, as ATL calls it, this last week has seen news that federal loan levels are remaining stagnant even as tuition prices inflate. Where are you all getting the money to feed the US News monster? It's certainly not coming from your state government, anyway.

hastings mid-year tuition increase: not happening. everyone breathe!

[petra]

Hastings students anxious about mid-year tuition increases can relax – at least for now.

I caught up with law school CFO Dave Seward this evening to ask about today’s meeting where tuition was discussed. Seward assured me that there will be no mid-year fee increases at Hastings. He basically said he’d kill puppies before he let that happen. (Well, he didn’t say that, but he agreed something really drastic would have to happen before the school made such a move.)

“We feel very strongly about advanced notice,” Seward said.

A memo did go out to first- and second-years about the fees that were approved in September for the school year starting in fall of 2010. Enrollment fees will go up to $36,000 (not including health insurance and such) – up from $29,383 in the 2009-10 school year. For details, check out the memo.

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

would you like fries with that? the disconnect between career services and students.

[dennis]

Law Week reports that things are bleak in Colorado:

In 2009, more people passed the July Colorado bar exam than in any other year this decade. But the boom in the number of new lawyers is happening during a bust in the job market.

About 35 percent of the University of Colorado School of Law’s class of 2009 had jobs at graduation, down from 55 percent the year before.

The school’s Career Office is probably embarrassed; good thing that it does not view itself as a placement office:

“I think that we have out of necessity had to rethink our role in career development,” said SuSaNi Harris, assistant dean for CU law school’s Office of Career Development.

Most law schools no longer have traditional “placement offices” that line students up with jobs, she said.

“We got away from that because no office is staffed to place, one by one, each of their students. But what we’re exploring here is sort of a pseudo-placement effort.”

Details are in development.

There is an expectation gap at many law schools: law students expect job placement, law school career offices expect only to provide job hunting skills.

Students tune out when they hear that the Career Office doesn’t offer anything more than resume critiques and a mock interview. I think that the majority of law students had some form of interviewing experience during undergrad (or during their previous careers) so the services offered by the Career Offices are pretty useless.

A student at my coworker’s law school was told by her career office that her grades were so bad that she should not bother with OCI. She was told that she shouldn't even go for practice because she was unemployable.

The student was so offended that she contacted the OCI employers, arranged her own interviews, and scored a job. She then returned to the career office and told them exactly what she thought about them.

But most students don’t approach the career office and say, “Hey, you are useless!” – they simply ignore the office.

Read Dennis's tale of woe and ineptitude regarding an interaction with his career services department, after the jump.

true life: i'm a gunner?

[cynthia]

MTV and Cardozo are apparently in talks to produce a reality show based on life at the law school.

Above the Law says the school is gathering opinions from students via Twitter. So, what's the consensus?

So far only three replies, but they're all a resounding no:

@caseyvaughn cardozo on MTV? http://bit.ly/3l2aNQ . GOD NO, DON'T DO IT. a solid 50% of the class is brain dead. talk about PR nightmare. @cardozolaw

@joshuetree @cardozolaw absolute not! I am one of your students too...don't do this to me.

@soverykerry @cardozolaw no. also, my boyfriend is an alum, and he says no. (Ed. note: Thanks for polling the bf, soverykerry. Cardozo appreciates your thoroughness.) 

ATL, which seems to have more success with crowd-sourcing information than, well, anyone else (including Cardozo on Twitter), ran a poll on the issue. 50%+ of poll takers agreed that Cardozo should stay away from MTV. As an avid appreciator of the egomaniacal genius of Spencer Pratt on The Hills and believer in reality TV in general, I'm gonna have to go ahead and hope this show really does happen.

skipping class is okay, really.

[dennis]

It is mid-October. Brief due dates are looming, and class attendance is dropping.

Attendance was so bad in my tax class yesterday that the professor thanked us for showing up. Today in employment law, I was the only person in my row. 

My professors fall into two camps: those who don't care whether we show up and those who claim that attendance is "essential" to foster discussion. I disagree.

The students who actively participate in class tend to be the ones who show up regularly. The skippers are obviously not interested in participating, so why demand the presence of people who are just going to spend their time on farmville and TMZ? Will the increased body count lower our heating costs? Having more people in the room does not mean you have more people listening.

Ironically, my professor who is most adamant about class attendance is the professor who promotes the least fruitful discussions. He wants us to parrot the reading, and the remainder of the time is monopolized by a few people who love to hear themselves talk.

I attend class out of politeness to the professor, and not because attending class is always worth my time. There are a few classes that I would not dream of missing (tax, conflicts) but there are other classes where my sole purpose is to provide an audience for the professor and the divas in the room. 

My school threatens to un-enroll us if we stop going to class. This threat carries some vague reference to ABA standards, but I think this is ridiculous.

We've already paid tuition, extra people in class doesn't enrich the learning environment, and our degree isn't that helpful in securing employment anyway.

That's why people skip. And I that's why I think it is okay.

twitter adds list feature.

[cynthia]

One of the cornerstones of social media is being able to organize others into groups according to your relationship with or interest in them. Twitter's joined the ranks of sites making customizable groups available to its users - well, some of them.

Social Media Law Student reported this morning that Twitter's unveiled its "Lists" feature, which allows you to organize the accounts you follow and allows other users to add you to lists as well. The feature's not available on all accounts yet (our Twitter account doesn't have it yet, for example), but once it's universally available it'll be an easy way for you to follow all of your law school-related social media at once.

Some of our favorite law school tweeters, who will be added to a list once we have list-making capabilities:

@Lessig: Stanford professor Lawrence Lessig

@BitterLawyer: "entertainment" law blog 

@EvilEsq: The Bar Association for Evil and Unethical Lawyers

@BlawgWhisperer: ABAJournal.com web editor

@blackbooklegal: law blog out of Philly

And, your Shark contributors on Twitter:

@julieanneines and @no634

Please feel free to share your favorite law/law school-related Twitter accounts in the comments.