The Shark

biglaw's out. so you wanna be a... researcher?

[petra]

Students at UCLA Law School can now study to become lawyers — and researchers.

The school has announced the launch of a set of empirical research courses offered under the same roof as its J.D. program. Dubbed the Empirical Legal Scholars Program is the result of a partnership the law school and RAND Corporation struck in 2007 and made formal last month.

Professor Joseph Doherty tells us law students across the nation have gone too long without formal course work in scholarly research. To satisfy their research cravings, students at many schools have had to combine their J.D. studies with a masters in public policy or a PhD program at their universities, or seek out one member of the law faculty to work closely with.

“Students had to pick up the skills as they went along,” Doherty said. “I’d work with five to 10 students individually on projects which they’d do for somebody else.”

Now it will be at their fingertips. The second-year course will include research methods, statistics and data analysis and a seminar in which students conduct original research. All at the law school.

Doherty, who heads the law school’s Empirical Research Group and has been quoted in media on various studies of his own, will be teaching the courses. He’ll also bring in guest lecturers from RAND and the law school and arranging mentorships with law faculty. At the end of the program, each student will have a paper to publish or discuss at a conference.

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

ohio 3Ls now able to try felonies.

[cynthia]

In what The Am Law Daily describes as a "growing consensus that third-year law students are ready to handle criminal felony matters," this week Ohio became the first state to allow 3Ls to try more than just misdemeanors.

The move came after a long lobby of the state by the Indigent Defense Clinic at the Ohio Justice & Policy Center.

"The clinic has long argued that the students are ready and that overburdened public defenders and prosecutors need the help--especially during a deep recession. The Ohio Supreme Court changed the rule over the weekend, leaving just eight states, including New York, in the dwindling minority that limit student involvement to misdemeanors."

Students, who will be required to be affiliated with a local non-profit or clinic in order to handle cases, are "chomping at the bit" to work on felonies and gain more experience, according to Janet Moore, a senior staff attorney at the Center. 

With Ohio's switch, only eight states remain that do not allow law students to handle felonies.

uc irvine school of law goes global. already!

[julie anne]

I hope the inaugural class at the UC Irvine School of Law loves kimchi and Kogi Tacos, because the fledgling law school is going global, and its first stop is South Korea.

According to a press release on the law school's website, the school has established a Korea Law Center to "promote practical solutions to problems arising at the intersection of U.S. and Korean law" as part of the larger UC Irvine International Commerce & Law institute.

"The center, part of a new, multi-continent UC Irvine International Commerce & Law Institute, will provide opportunities for undergraduate and graduate students, legal scholars, judges, lawyers and business people from South Korea and the United States to learn and work together, here and in Korea.

'We intend our Korea Law Center to be the first of several international branches of our UC Irvine International Commerce & Law Institute, the goal of which is to foster international cooperation among the business, legal and educational communities on several continents — so far, Europe, North America and Asia,' said UCI School of Law Dean Erwin Chemerinsky."

Chemerinsky goes further to say that no "other American law school has a business and law institute with a comparable international reach.”

Correct me if I'm wrong, but no school will have that international reach until UC Irvine has established all the partnerships it intends to establish. One partnership with South Korea does not equal widespread "international reach," at least not yet. 

Guess UC Irvine didn't get the hyperbole memo, which was so awesome that anything that would have qualified as awesome before is only mediocre now.

Find more information about the center at UC Irvine's website here.

big law is over.

[cynthia]

So says the New York Times, anyway. Jennifer Lee, of the NYT's City Room blog, attended a NY Bar Association event for unemployed lawyers that featured hiring partners and Above the Law's David Lat, and heard from attendees and panelists alike about the demise of the industry.

It seemed to be a commonly agreed upon that regulatory work will be on the upswing through Obama's administration, and that networking is the key to getting back into "big law" as it stands now.

It begs the question, though: If everyone is unemployed, who exactly should you be networking with?

don't count on those loan forgiveness programs.

[julie anne]

Law school tuition for one year? $37,950

Room and board in Orange County, Calif.? $15,300

Personal expenses? $5,277

Books and supplies? $1,560

One year of law school, including living expenses? $63,000

Getting a quality legal education? Upwards of $140,000

You were expecting me to write “priceless” to last one, right? Ha. I’m not going to trivialize the cost of a law school education by turning it into a MasterCard commercial.

The truth is, law school costs money. Lots and lots of money.  Scrooge McDuck pools and pools of money.

I knew that while applying to law school, but it was still a bit of a shock when I got my financial aid award letter from the Chapman University School of Law.  At first I thought that maybe there was a decimal point missing somewhere, but no. The first year of school will in fact cost about the same as a really nice car, and tuition and living expenses for all three years would cost about the same as a house in some parts of California.

Given the cost of a legal education, it’s no surprise that many students who had their hearts set on public interest work go into high paying jobs in Big Law.

Still there are a few who opt to continue with their public interest plans, banking on federal or state programs that promise to forgive a portion of their debt if they choose public service fields.

According to a New York Times article published last week, about 7,500 teachers, nurses and public interest lawyers benefited from Kentucky’s loan forgiveness program since 2003, at a cost of $77 million.

But just how reliable are these programs?

In another article also published last week, the Times found that while federal programs are safe, many states’ loan forgiveness programs are tied to the state budget.

As a result, the Times says, states sometimes see stories like that of Adam and Katie Thomas:

“… teachers of special needs children, the Thomases had a combined $85,000 in student loans. Partway through the payback period on those loans, however, the forgiveness program in their state cut its annual subsidy from 20 percent of the couple’s total loan balance to just 1 percent. That pushed them so close to the edge financially that they decided to sell their home and move in with Ms. Thomas’s parents.”

Yipes.

If you consider that the average law student graduates with about $80,000 in debt, and the average public interest lawyer makes about $36,000, a career in public interest can turn students saddled with thousands of dollars in debt off.

I’m not certain of the type of law I want to practice once out of law school, but I am certain that I and other law school students want public interest law to be a viable and financially sound option when we do graduate.

Forget about the car industry, President Obama. Where’s the graduate student bailout? At the very least, those interested in serving the public interest should have the continued financial incentive to pursue that interest without fear that the programs they rely on will be cut back or canceled several years down the line.

Find more information on federal student loan forgiveness here.

JFK not afraid: new marketing push during an economic downturn.

[petra pasternak]

We predict no shortage of lawyers in the foreseeable future.

The blood letting in the legal profession has neither snuffed out the spirits of would-be first-years, nor the ambitions of one JFK law school. We've noted their enthusiasm on BART rides, as it seems every car has an ad for the school.

With a campus in Pleasant Hill, John F. Kennedy University School of Law remodeled and expanded its campus in Berkeley last summer and rolled out a new public interest law program (built on the curriculum core of the now-defunct New College law school). Now the tiny East Bay school is wooing more students to check it out. 

Chris Kanios, a professor and associate dean, says that the main university has plunked down more than $100,000 for an ad campaign to promote the law school’s new offerings. Billboards featuring actual JFK law students have punctuated the walls at select BART stations (pictured), the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle and local airwaves for the past few weeks. Kanios said it’s a spring effort to attract up to 30 more students this fall, for a total first-year class of about 75 students, up from between 50 and 60 in past years.

So far, Kanios said that applications are up by about 13 percent over the same period last year. By April 30 last year, 95 had come in, compared with 108 by April 20 of this year. JFK will accept applications until July 1.

Where will all these people work in three years? 

“I do think that most people are confident that the economy will come back in the next few years,” Kanios said. With tuition costing $20,500, JFK is not cheap, but he notes that alums don’t typically go work in the largest firms that take the biggest beating during a downturn, he said. Though there is no career office to track alumni, Kanios says JFK grads end up working at small local firms (those with no more than 12 lawyers), and with local nonprofit agencies and in public sector jobs.

And JFK students don’t come in expecting that they’ll be as pampered as students in more mainstream schools, who rely on a summer internship formula that has – at least historically – had their future employment pegged by the second year of law school. “Here people have never had that expectation,” he said. “They’ve really had the expectation of finding their own way, and people have been doing that for years.” 

Maybe they’d have a few pointers for students at big-name schools who aren’t so used to fending for themselves?

Petra is a Cal Law reporter.

surprise: biglaw deferrees are cramping style of public-sector hopefuls.

[cynthia foster]

Colby Freeman (left) is a 3L at USF and has been volunteering for the San Francisco DA's office for four years.  He's committed a huge chunk of his life to the office, and of course was hoping that time served would land him with a job after graduation. 

Unfortunately, timing is not on Freeman's side.  Despite the fact the DA's offices across the country have rescinded offers to 3Ls (citing budget cuts, in most cases), there's an added layer of distress: biglaw refugees looking for public interest work to tide them over until their firms can afford them, according to a really interesting Cal Law story by Petra on the subject (free reg. req.).

Across the bay from Freeman, Alameda County's DA office is experiencing a crunch that seems to paint a pretty scary public-sector picture:

"Senior Deputy DA Kevin Dunleavy said his office relies on its summer program as its main hiring vehicle; it typically fills higher positions from within the office. In a typical year, the DA hosts eight to 12 summer clerks and makes offers to about six, contingent on openings. In 2008, there were 11 summer clerks. A letter went out in January, with apologies for the delay, explaining that no offers could be made, Dunleavy said. What's more, the office isn't able to pay its new deputy district attorneys the starting salary of about $75,000. Four deputies who passed the bar in November are getting a law clerk wage of roughly $21 an hour, with limited benefits."

Despite the fact that sympathy for biglaw deferrees rages on throughout the blogosphere, I think a fair amount of attention needs to be paid to these governmental offices who are struggling to now accomodate all of the country's law grads.  While the private sector bides its time, the Dunleavys of the world are forced to make tough decisions that will have a real impact on the futures of recent grads. 

So far, several counties in California (including Contra Costa) are not offering positions to biglaw deferrees.  According to Petra, "some [DA's offices] said they [are] weighing the fairness to those for whom this would not just be a pit stop until the economy improves."  Sounds like a tough call.

the land of opportunity, after all.

[cynthia foster]

On your way out of law school with nary a job in sight?  Here are two options you might not have considered: tournament poker player and JAG Corps captain.

public defenders descend on stanford for panel on budget cuts.

[cynthia foster]

For those of you curious about how the indigent defense panel went down in Stanford earlier this week, Stanford News Service has a quick piece up about those involved and what was said.

The panel focused on the challenges public defenders (and prosecutors) face during times of slashed budgets and withering public funds.  This is a "system-wide problem," said San Francisco Public Defender Jeff Adachi.  Adachi is currently "ignoring Mayor Gavin Newsom's call for city departments to cut their budgets by 25 percent, a move he says would cost nearly 40 lawyers."

There was a question about whether or not Mayor Newsom, who was invited to the panel by Adachi, would attend.  By the looks of the Stanford News Service item, he did not.

more on the biglaw associate invasion of public interest.

[brian lauter]

In yesterday’s item on federal loan forgiveness, I mentioned that law students looking for jobs in public interest will likely face stiffer competition as deferred incoming Biglaw associates try to take advantage of their law firms’ public interest fellowships.

A commenter pointed out that many public interest organizations have been creating special fellowships for deferred associates.  I hadn’t heard about it, but it sounded interesting.

PSLawNet is an excellent resource for finding public interest jobs, and it now has a page dedicated to law firm deferral programs.

Local pro bono organizations are working with public interest organizations to find appropriate positions for deferred associates. Find one near you here (pdf).

It looks like The Legal Aid Association of California is looking to help out, but so far all it’s got up is a survey. Maybe check back for some real info soon?

Public Interest Clearinghouse is working with California public interest organizations to formulate placement plans for deferred associates.

If you’re in New Jersey next week, check out the New Jersey Deferred Associates Fair for assistance. These may become more common as the year unfolds.

That’s literally all I found and, judging by a few of the law school career services websites I looked at, that’s about all anybody has found. If public interest organizations are creating special fellowships for deferred associates, they’re not doing a great job of advertising them.

Special fellowships for deferred associates mean less competition for the long-term public interest jobs some students have been waiting for, so they’re a win for everybody.

If you see any resources I’ve missed, let me know.