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The Law-School Scam

117 points by gautamnarula 12y ago

omegaham 12y ago
There are way, way too many lawyers in this country. Back in the good ol' days, law was a profitable endeavor. It was limited to the elite, and as a result there was a great scarcity of people who were able to become lawyers. They could then charge a lot of money for their services and become rich. This changed as soon as law schools became the dumping ground for people who wanted to become professionals but sucked at math. Can't do engineering? Programming's a bitch? Your lab grades suck too much to get into med school? Law school will take you! They'd better; they're charging 40k a year for it. Then these kids get out into the working world and find out that BigLaw firms will work your ass to the bone. Why not? You can't quit; you're lucky to have the job in the first place, and you have $250k of debt. Okay, so BigLaw is out if you don't want to be driven to a nervous breakdown. How about being a public attorney? $35k a year salary. Okay, that sucks... how about being an ambulance chasing personal injury lawyer? Not going to happen, because there are tens of thousands of people just like you who went through the above options and realized that they were just as fucked. So now every billboard in town has a different grim-looking face promising the moon to anyone with a slip-and-fall case. "I don't get paid until you get paid!" There's only so many people who can slip and fall on a rogue can of peas at the Kroger, and you can't pay the bills with the few that will come to you. As a result, almost a majority of people who go to law school don't end up as lawyers. The ones who do almost universally say that they wouldn't do it over again if they had the opportunity. The organizations that profit from this? BigLaw and the law schools. BigLaw firms profit immensely because they have a massive supply of new lawyers who will take anything that's given to them. 90 hour weeks? Thank you sir, may I have another! I have student loans to pay! The law schools also make a killing because, like many other colleges, they've managed to convince people that a college degree is The One True Path to attaining the American Dream. The people who get shafted, of course, are the newly minted lawyers.
- jimmaswell 12y ago
  I've been seeing a lot of "DUI attorneys" advertised lately. Maybe that's become lucrative?
  - JustinCEO 12y ago
    That's a bread and butter practice area for lots of criminal defense attorneys but I'd imagine its just as glutted as the rest.
  - roel_v 12y ago
    I see a lot of 'Sell Herbalife, retire in 5 years' signs too.. Same dynamic.
- protonfish 12y ago
  If what you are saying is true (and it sure seems to be) then we should also expect a decrease in the quality of available attorneys. That would also be in agreement of my recent real-life experiences. Now I know it's a tough job blah, blah, but seriously the best experiences I've had with attorneys recently is when they did nothing but held my through the unnecessary complex and unfriendly legal system. I felt I got my money's worth in those instances from their familiarity of jumping through bureaucratic hoops. But I recently spent money on a lawyer that completely screwed everything up. I am certain that I would have been better off cluelessly stumbling into court.
- waylandsmithers 12y ago
  | BigLaw firms profit immensely because they have a massive supply of new lawyers who will take anything that's given to them. I've had this situation described to me a little differently by a friend who has been in the field since the late 70s. Over the past several years, there has been a shift in the general relationship between lawyers and clients. Back then, it would be unheard of for a client to pick through or question the bill from a prestigious BigLaw firm-- that was considered to be an insult. But recently more clients are contesting the bill, specifically, "Why are we paying for hours from these associates you hired six months ago? We want the 40 and 50 year olds who are in their prime." BigLaw can't as easily bill hours for newbies who previously would have been trained on the client's dime, so they just hire fewer of them.
brerlapn 12y ago
For-profit law schools aren't the problem, law schools are. For-profit students at schools like the one in the article may be "subprime" as far as earning potential or the ability to pass the bar goes, but for graduates of schools outside of the top ten or fifteen schools your debt is likely to be nearly as high as from the school in the article without much better job prospects. Florida Coastal's tuition and costs are a lot, but they're not out of line with private law schools and a number of public ones (UPenn-$55k per year/UVA-$48k per year for in-state) until you get past the top 25 schools (and if you're not going to a top school, you really need to do some deep thinking about why you are still going to law school at all). All of the disadvantages of student loans apply to not-for-profit law students, as well. That's a lot of money to pay for a job market that is not great, and the warnings about poor earning potential and high debt load that they cite for students there are just as applicable to non-profit students, too. Law school--for profit or not-for-profit--isn't a bad idea for everyone, but it's hardly a good idea for most, either. Based on the title I fully expected this article to be about the larger law school market and graduates' debt and job prospects. "The Law School Scam" is a lot broader than for-profit schools.
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Indeed, the "School Scam" is a lot broader than law schools.
- hudibras 12y ago
  The author of the article, Paul Campos, has a blog where he regularly talks about the law school scam in much more general terms than just the for-profit schools. He probably circumscribed the article for space considerations at The Atlantic's request. http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/author/paul-campos http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/author/paul-campos
- leoc 12y ago
  I think the article addressed this very squarely: > It is important to note that while InfiLaw’s abuse of the student-loan system may be egregious, it is far from unique. Ultimately, this story is about not only for-profit law schools, or law schools, or even for-profit higher education. It is about the problematic financial structure of higher education in America today. It would be comforting to think that the crisis is confined to for-profit schools—and indeed this idea is floated regularly by defenders of higher education’s status quo. But it would be more accurate to say that for-profit schools, with their unabashed pursuit of money at the expense of their students’ long-term futures, merely throw this crisis into particularly sharp relief. To see why, consider the regulatory and political mechanisms that have allowed InfiLaw to make such handsome profits while producing disastrous results for so many of its “customers.” [...] > What, after all, is the difference between the InfiLaw schools and Michigan’s Thomas M. Cooley, or Boston’s New England Law, or Chicago’s John Marshall, or San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson? All of these law schools feature student bodies with poor academic qualifications and terrible job prospects relative to their average debt. In recent years, as law-school applications have collapsed, all of these schools have, just like the InfiLaw schools, cut their already low admissions standards. And, like Florida Coastal, Arizona Summit, and Charlotte, all of these schools now have a very high percentage of students who, given their LSAT scores, are unlikely to ever pass the bar. Ultimately, what difference does it make that none of these schools produce profit in the technical (and taxable) sense, because they are organized as nonprofits? > The only real difference between for-profit and nonprofit schools is that while for-profits are run for the benefit of their owners, nonprofits are run for the benefit of the most-powerful stakeholders within those institutions.
JustinCEO 12y ago
Law school grad here (top 10 school). Anyone asks my opinion (which seems to happen an awful lot -- I guess lots of people consider law school at some point or another), I tell them I think it's a pretty bad idea. 1) The cost (direct and opportunity) is ENORMOUS. And even with special federal govt repayment plans, if you don't get that big firm job, the debt will potentially weigh you down well into middle age (with the possibility of a nasty tax bite at the end if you have any assets and the law isn't changed). 2) The likelihood of getting a high paying job is slim. It's even pretty risky from top 10 schools. 3) Even during the boom times, when people from top schools were getting jobs at top BIGLAW firms left and right, people were HATING LIFE at the firm because they didn't realize what it was going to be like. And more broadly, lots of people get all the way through law school and realize they don't wanna be lawyers. This is super common. 4) Non-big-firm opportunities are either super competitive (like govt or public interest), super low paying (also includes lots of govt and public interest), or not a great value proposition (how'd you like 200k in debt to try scratching out 50k a year as a solo?) Lots of the reasons people want to attend law school are pretty dumb/false (stuff like: like to argue, wanna be prestigious, think its a safe/good-paying career track). The people that should attend law school are those who: a) won't be financially ruined by the decision, b) actually want to be a lawyer, and c) have some real sense of what being a lawyer actually means (e.g. they spent at least a couple years working at a firm in some non-lawyer capacity, or they have a parent who was a lawyer and told them lots about their job, or they spent tons of their time researching law and legal practice. In other words their knowledge of legal practice is not based entirely on fictional TV and movie lawyers). I'd say that describes under 1% of the people enrolled in law schools nationwide.
- graeme 12y ago
  Have you found any way of framing this that actually convinces prospective law students to change their minds? I agree entirely. And eventually, the bubble will burst, and presumably we'll have a sane system of lawyer training. But for now, there's a lot of misery in the pipeline. I work in LSAT prep. I've found I can tell people this, to no effect.
  - QuantumGood 12y ago
_delirium 12y ago
Since getting a law degree here (Denmark) is tuition-free, and the incoming class is regulated to be approximately in line with the annual demand for new lawyers, everything in this article reads like bizarro-land. Yeah, it would be a mess if students paid for educations out of pocket, and also were the ones who decided how many people were needed in a given field (a field in which they did not as of yet have any expertise). That does sound like a good recipe for a bunch of people in debt not able to get jobs. Here is a solution: don't do that.
- omegaham 12y ago
  The result of that would be similar to medical school in the US - a very small percentage of those who apply can get in. I think it's what the profession needs, but good luck convincing the BigLaw companies and law schools to go along with you. "Well yeah, the legal profession is inundated with unemployed kids in debt up to their eyeballs. That's what makes it so great!"
  - jessaustin 12y ago
    Since most of us will only ever see medical care from the patient's perspective, it might surprise us that many physicians consider the medical profession to have the same problem, just not yet to the same degree as the legal profession. Of course the externalities of surplus lawyers are much worse for society than the externalities of surplus physicians.
    - robryk 12y ago
      > Of course the externalities of surplus lawyers are much worse for society than the externalities of surplus physicians. Would you care to explain why? My guess is that you mean that a surplus of lawyers can cause additional demand for lawyers, which can't happen for physicians. Do I understand you correctly?
      - ufmace 12y ago
        I suppose if you have too many lawyers and not enough jobs for them, some will run around filing frivolous lawsuits that the counterparty will have to hire more lawyers to defend against. If you have too many doctors and not enough hurt people for them to heal, what are they going to do? Run around hurting people so that they can then heal them?
misiti3780 12y ago
Imagine the irony of clicking on this article and then seeing this ad: https://www.dropbox.com/s/smy9xlxvdynr91f/Screenshot%202014-08-15%2000.08.03.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/smy9xlxvdynr91f/Screenshot%202014-...
- rquantz 12y ago
  I got the same thing. Amazing.
brianbreslin 12y ago
Interesting piece. A couple local law schools here in Florida tried to double their enrollments in the last 5 years. What ended up happening was they had to bankroll bullshit clerkship jobs for the students to be able to get any sense of a job, lest their rankings tank. By having these 3-6month clerkships underwritten by the school (presumably paid for by the ridiculous tuition), the school was able to say that 90% of their students had a job within 6 weeks of graduation. I at one point in my life thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I even took the LSAT prep stuff while interning at a law firm while in college. That was the most boring, time wasting 3 months of my life. I RARELY meet a lawyer who loves being a lawyer.
- voolite 12y ago
  Lawyer here-- graduated in the 1990's. I do enjoy being a lawyer, but I have a solid job working for a government agency where my particular skills and area of expertise (a relatively obscure set of federal regulations) are valued and I have interesting co-workers. I would not want to work for a large firm, however, even though I theoretically could be paid much more. Before I went to law school, I worked for over a year in a small law office, where I was taught the old fashioned way how to do legal research; I enjoyed the heck out of it. All my life I've been the kind of person who likes to look up stuff just for fun. Funny what you say about LSAT test prep-- actually taking the LSAT was one of the most enjoyable, exhilarating moments in my life. For those who haven't taken it, it's basically a test of reading comprehension and logic puzzles, all taken at breakneck speed. I've always been able to read more quickly than most, and I enjoy logic and mathematics so it's not like these skills were new to me, I felt like I'd been preparing for it my whole life. It was like doing a speed run down a mountainside, but with my mind. I scored at the 99.3%. I also really enjoyed law school, and I wound up graduating at the top 5% of my law school class. However, it really, really isn't for everyone.
VMG 12y ago
> For-profit law schools are a capitalist dream of privatized profits and socialized losses Oh come on now...
burritofanatic 12y ago
Yet there are hidden gems like like CUNY Law, which really should get more looks, particularly if a student is truly interested in doing public interest work. http://www.law.cuny.edu/admissions/tuition.html http://www.law.cuny.edu/admissions/tuition.html Though I don't truly regret going through law school then transitioning after, I really should have looked at financing the education like buying a home with a 30 year mortgage. A 20% downpayment would have defrayed quite a bit of the cost, and the path to saving that money would have given me time to consider the decision further. This doesn't have to be the rule, but it's an excellent guideline for anyone making such a big financial investment.
GoldenHomer 12y ago
I was reminded of a Simpsons quote: "You let me down, man. Now I don't believe in nothing no more. I'm going to law school".
spiritplumber 12y ago
My cousin graduated from arguably the best law school in our country, got a job with a multinational firm right out of school... and six months later I (who was still in engineering school) had to go wrestle with him, AND security guards, to get him out of the office where he had barricaded himself after a paranoid breakdown. Later, he had to talk me out of demolishing the firm. I have no first hand experience with the legal profession other than paying the guy who does my patent paperwork, but from what I've read, there is way too much stress, both in and out.
imroot 12y ago
I [semi-foolishly] graduated from law school in 2008. I was fortunate, as an employer paid for the cost of my law degree (and for my bar exam), and then laid me off in 2010 due to the economy tanking (and forgave all of my debt). Since graduating, most of my friends (including myself) have all moved to careers where the law is not the primary driver; most are saddled with a mountain of debt, make between 40 and 80K/year (most first year law grads make less than 60K in their first year). People think that lawyers are glamorous, due to the fictionalization of their career (law and order). You have attorneys who are either left or right wing whackjobs (I went to law school with a woman who was only going to law school so that she could overturn Roe v. Wade) who have no sense going into law, let alone practicing with clients. I'm much happier as a programmer/nerd. Even with being on call, I still sleep much much better at night. I'll still do legal things (contract law, estate planning, and not giving legal advice to drunk people), but, I never call myself an attorney and I rarely admit that I'm a lawyer to anyone outside of my friends and family. With that said, Law school is something that plays on the dreams of these kids. They're saddled with debt from undergrad and post-grad, thinking that they're going to be the next Erin Brokovich or Jack McCoy. My friends joke that Law School made them better drinkers, better readers, and that their 6-figure student loan debts came with a great group of friends. Sadly, that's where most kids come out of law school with these days -- a drinking problem, a mountain of debt, and nowhere to go.
jstalin 12y ago
Relevant: Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a popular restaurant located on a street with many restaurants. You do your best to provide the best experience to your customers while staying ahead of the competition by keeping your prices down. You try to avoid spending too much on labor, and do as much of the work yourself as you can, often putting in long hours. Although there is a good wholesale market nearby, you drive an extra hour to another market just to get your ingredients a little cheaper. One day a wealthy patron who is a big fan of your cooking announces a new idea. Because he wants as many people as possible to enjoy your food, he is going to pick up the tab for most of your customers. You can just go on doing what you always do, but when the check arrives for many tables, this wealthy patron will pay the tab. The next day, your waitress complains that there are too many tables and you should hire more help. What would you do? Normally, you would try to find a way to avoid hiring another person as it would eat into what little profits you make. But now you realize there is another solution. You can just raise prices. Since most of your patrons are not paying for their meals, your place will still stay popular and you won’t have to worry about losing business to your competition. So why not hire another waitress? While you are at it, why not hire a manger so you don’t have to be there all time, and stop driving to the further market?. Whatever increase in costs you suffer you can make up for by raising prices more and more. Now imagine all your competitors also have wealthy benefactors picking up the check for many of their customers. You can all raise prices constantly without losing any sleep – or business. This scenario is effectively what America’s higher education financing system has turned into. There are many reasons why college tuition is rising faster than virtually anything else, from more applicants than ever to state budget cuts for public universities, but all of those factors are allowed to persist because often times the person getting the degree is not the person paying the tab – not for today anyway. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-09/why-tuition-keeps-rising-spoiler-alert-government-intervention http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-09/why-tuition-keeps-r...
- joshuaheard 12y ago
  This is the same scenario for our health care industry.
- pzxc 12y ago
  > often times the person getting the degree is not the person paying the tab – not for today anyway The same thing -- only an indirect connection between buyer and seller -- could be seen as a primary cause of the rise in healthcare costs as well.
rrggrr 12y ago
Prospective law students, some things to look forward to at many firms: - Wannabe litigators, most of your cases will settle. You'll spend agonizing hours preparing and rarely see a courtroom battle. Your time will spent posturing for your client and opposing counsel, pandering to your client's aspirational fantasies of outcome, and dealing with internal office politics. When you do make it to Court inept Judges and unsympathetic clients will weigh on you. - Transactional attorneys, your eyes will bleed from the thousands of pages of boilerplate text you're going be reading every day, and the copy & paste keys on your keyboard will be worn beyond recognition. The dissonance between helping clients manage risk (ghost chasing) and not screwing up their deals will be maddening. - The pressure to bring in business can be crushing. You signed on to practice law, only to find out it soon becomes a sales, marketing and customer service gig.
brotoss 12y ago
I dropped out after my 1L year last summer and could not be happier with the decision. I landed a job working in compliance and have time to teach myself to code or whatever else. Law school is the worst.
dmarble 12y ago
Georgetown law grad here who maxed out loans, worked during school, and put the excess capital into my first startup (cheaper than a small business loan!), which was law/tech-related. Not that I recommend that approach... I'm now back in software product management, which is what I did before law school. I tell people law school is a bad book club. You read a crap-ton of mostly boring books, talk about them, and usually take a test at the end of each course. Occasionally there's an amazing instructor to make a subject enjoyable. I'd prefer in the US we keep law as a graduate program, but tear down the antiquated 3 year system. Law school should be one year, with optional "residency" and specialist training like medicine. You'd get the research, writing, and basic subjects in that one year, which are all you need for most actual lawyering. Residency would be the hands-on training you never get at law school unless you had an amazing clinical program. Bar exams should be 1 basic exam covering that 1-year curriculum, and additional exams if you want to be certified to practice a specialty.
joshuaheard 12y ago
I went to a for-profit law school and it is not a "scam" as the article suggests. The law school described itself as the school of last resort for those wanting to go to law school but not able to get into more exclusive schools. They would take almost anyone into the program, but the grading was rigorous: 1/3 flunked out the first year, 1/3 flunked out over the course of the program, so only 1/3 of entering students graduated. At least they were given the opportunity to try. The problem identified in the article is not the for-profit schools. It is rational for private enterprise to respond to government incentives. The problem is the excessive government incentives. There are too many lawyers, so the government should not be subsidizing legal educations. That is the solution. By the way, my for-profit law school has a four-year part-time night program so I worked as a paralegal to pay for my tuition. I only took out a small loan to take time off to study for and take the bar exam, which I passed on the first try.
- coldcode 12y ago
  What idiotic politician(s) thought that unlimited guaranteed law study loans was a good idea? I guess if you own such a for profit law school it is a good idea. But it's dreadful governance. I'm not against helping people get a decent education but infinity is not a reasonable limit.
- dandare 12y ago
  Yep, the author of the article is apparently pushing some socialist agenda. Socializing losses is in no way part of Capitalism and actually could not happen without state setting distorted incentives.
dandare 12y ago
"...capitalist dream of privatizing profits while socializing losses" - what a nonsense! Socialising losses has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism as an economic system. Take your stinky socialist agenda elsewhere.
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Socialising losses has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism as an economic system. That (and how) it socializes harms while privating profits, and thereby serves to advance the interests of the capitalist class at the cost of others, is the feature for which the system was given the name "capitalism".

117 points by gautamnarula 12y ago

There are way, way too many lawyers in this country. Back in the good ol' days, law was a profitable endeavor. It was limited to the elite, and as a result there was a great scarcity of people who were able to become lawyers. They could then charge a lot of money for their services and become rich. This changed as soon as law schools became the dumping ground for people who wanted to become professionals but sucked at math. Can't do engineering? Programming's a bitch? Your lab grades suck too much to get into med school? Law school will take you! They'd better; they're charging 40k a year for it. Then these kids get out into the working world and find out that BigLaw firms will work your ass to the bone. Why not? You can't quit; you're lucky to have the job in the first place, and you have $250k of debt. Okay, so BigLaw is out if you don't want to be driven to a nervous breakdown. How about being a public attorney? $35k a year salary. Okay, that sucks... how about being an ambulance chasing personal injury lawyer? Not going to happen, because there are tens of thousands of people just like you who went through the above options and realized that they were just as fucked. So now every billboard in town has a different grim-looking face promising the moon to anyone with a slip-and-fall case. "I don't get paid until you get paid!" There's only so many people who can slip and fall on a rogue can of peas at the Kroger, and you can't pay the bills with the few that will come to you. As a result, almost a majority of people who go to law school don't end up as lawyers. The ones who do almost universally say that they wouldn't do it over again if they had the opportunity. The organizations that profit from this? BigLaw and the law schools. BigLaw firms profit immensely because they have a massive supply of new lawyers who will take anything that's given to them. 90 hour weeks? Thank you sir, may I have another! I have student loans to pay! The law schools also make a killing because, like many other colleges, they've managed to convince people that a college degree is The One True Path to attaining the American Dream. The people who get shafted, of course, are the newly minted lawyers.

jimmaswell 12y ago
I've been seeing a lot of "DUI attorneys" advertised lately. Maybe that's become lucrative?
- JustinCEO 12y ago
  That's a bread and butter practice area for lots of criminal defense attorneys but I'd imagine its just as glutted as the rest.
- roel_v 12y ago
  I see a lot of 'Sell Herbalife, retire in 5 years' signs too.. Same dynamic.
protonfish 12y ago
If what you are saying is true (and it sure seems to be) then we should also expect a decrease in the quality of available attorneys. That would also be in agreement of my recent real-life experiences. Now I know it's a tough job blah, blah, but seriously the best experiences I've had with attorneys recently is when they did nothing but held my through the unnecessary complex and unfriendly legal system. I felt I got my money's worth in those instances from their familiarity of jumping through bureaucratic hoops. But I recently spent money on a lawyer that completely screwed everything up. I am certain that I would have been better off cluelessly stumbling into court.
waylandsmithers 12y ago
| BigLaw firms profit immensely because they have a massive supply of new lawyers who will take anything that's given to them. I've had this situation described to me a little differently by a friend who has been in the field since the late 70s. Over the past several years, there has been a shift in the general relationship between lawyers and clients. Back then, it would be unheard of for a client to pick through or question the bill from a prestigious BigLaw firm-- that was considered to be an insult. But recently more clients are contesting the bill, specifically, "Why are we paying for hours from these associates you hired six months ago? We want the 40 and 50 year olds who are in their prime." BigLaw can't as easily bill hours for newbies who previously would have been trained on the client's dime, so they just hire fewer of them.

brerlapn 12y ago

For-profit law schools aren't the problem, law schools are. For-profit students at schools like the one in the article may be "subprime" as far as earning potential or the ability to pass the bar goes, but for graduates of schools outside of the top ten or fifteen schools your debt is likely to be nearly as high as from the school in the article without much better job prospects. Florida Coastal's tuition and costs are a lot, but they're not out of line with private law schools and a number of public ones (UPenn-$55k per year/UVA-$48k per year for in-state) until you get past the top 25 schools (and if you're not going to a top school, you really need to do some deep thinking about why you are still going to law school at all). All of the disadvantages of student loans apply to not-for-profit law students, as well. That's a lot of money to pay for a job market that is not great, and the warnings about poor earning potential and high debt load that they cite for students there are just as applicable to non-profit students, too. Law school--for profit or not-for-profit--isn't a bad idea for everyone, but it's hardly a good idea for most, either. Based on the title I fully expected this article to be about the larger law school market and graduates' debt and job prospects. "The Law School Scam" is a lot broader than for-profit schools.

jessaustin 12y ago
Indeed, the "School Scam" is a lot broader than law schools.
hudibras 12y ago
The author of the article, Paul Campos, has a blog where he regularly talks about the law school scam in much more general terms than just the for-profit schools. He probably circumscribed the article for space considerations at The Atlantic's request. http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/author/paul-campos http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/author/paul-campos
leoc 12y ago
I think the article addressed this very squarely: > It is important to note that while InfiLaw’s abuse of the student-loan system may be egregious, it is far from unique. Ultimately, this story is about not only for-profit law schools, or law schools, or even for-profit higher education. It is about the problematic financial structure of higher education in America today. It would be comforting to think that the crisis is confined to for-profit schools—and indeed this idea is floated regularly by defenders of higher education’s status quo. But it would be more accurate to say that for-profit schools, with their unabashed pursuit of money at the expense of their students’ long-term futures, merely throw this crisis into particularly sharp relief. To see why, consider the regulatory and political mechanisms that have allowed InfiLaw to make such handsome profits while producing disastrous results for so many of its “customers.” [...] > What, after all, is the difference between the InfiLaw schools and Michigan’s Thomas M. Cooley, or Boston’s New England Law, or Chicago’s John Marshall, or San Diego’s Thomas Jefferson? All of these law schools feature student bodies with poor academic qualifications and terrible job prospects relative to their average debt. In recent years, as law-school applications have collapsed, all of these schools have, just like the InfiLaw schools, cut their already low admissions standards. And, like Florida Coastal, Arizona Summit, and Charlotte, all of these schools now have a very high percentage of students who, given their LSAT scores, are unlikely to ever pass the bar. Ultimately, what difference does it make that none of these schools produce profit in the technical (and taxable) sense, because they are organized as nonprofits? > The only real difference between for-profit and nonprofit schools is that while for-profits are run for the benefit of their owners, nonprofits are run for the benefit of the most-powerful stakeholders within those institutions.

JustinCEO 12y ago

Law school grad here (top 10 school). Anyone asks my opinion (which seems to happen an awful lot -- I guess lots of people consider law school at some point or another), I tell them I think it's a pretty bad idea. 1) The cost (direct and opportunity) is ENORMOUS. And even with special federal govt repayment plans, if you don't get that big firm job, the debt will potentially weigh you down well into middle age (with the possibility of a nasty tax bite at the end if you have any assets and the law isn't changed). 2) The likelihood of getting a high paying job is slim. It's even pretty risky from top 10 schools. 3) Even during the boom times, when people from top schools were getting jobs at top BIGLAW firms left and right, people were HATING LIFE at the firm because they didn't realize what it was going to be like. And more broadly, lots of people get all the way through law school and realize they don't wanna be lawyers. This is super common. 4) Non-big-firm opportunities are either super competitive (like govt or public interest), super low paying (also includes lots of govt and public interest), or not a great value proposition (how'd you like 200k in debt to try scratching out 50k a year as a solo?) Lots of the reasons people want to attend law school are pretty dumb/false (stuff like: like to argue, wanna be prestigious, think its a safe/good-paying career track). The people that should attend law school are those who: a) won't be financially ruined by the decision, b) actually want to be a lawyer, and c) have some real sense of what being a lawyer actually means (e.g. they spent at least a couple years working at a firm in some non-lawyer capacity, or they have a parent who was a lawyer and told them lots about their job, or they spent tons of their time researching law and legal practice. In other words their knowledge of legal practice is not based entirely on fictional TV and movie lawyers). I'd say that describes under 1% of the people enrolled in law schools nationwide.

graeme 12y ago
Have you found any way of framing this that actually convinces prospective law students to change their minds? I agree entirely. And eventually, the bubble will burst, and presumably we'll have a sane system of lawyer training. But for now, there's a lot of misery in the pipeline. I work in LSAT prep. I've found I can tell people this, to no effect.
- QuantumGood 12y ago

_delirium 12y ago

Since getting a law degree here (Denmark) is tuition-free, and the incoming class is regulated to be approximately in line with the annual demand for new lawyers, everything in this article reads like bizarro-land. Yeah, it would be a mess if students paid for educations out of pocket, and also were the ones who decided how many people were needed in a given field (a field in which they did not as of yet have any expertise). That does sound like a good recipe for a bunch of people in debt not able to get jobs. Here is a solution: don't do that.

omegaham 12y ago
The result of that would be similar to medical school in the US - a very small percentage of those who apply can get in. I think it's what the profession needs, but good luck convincing the BigLaw companies and law schools to go along with you. "Well yeah, the legal profession is inundated with unemployed kids in debt up to their eyeballs. That's what makes it so great!"
- jessaustin 12y ago
  Since most of us will only ever see medical care from the patient's perspective, it might surprise us that many physicians consider the medical profession to have the same problem, just not yet to the same degree as the legal profession. Of course the externalities of surplus lawyers are much worse for society than the externalities of surplus physicians.
  - robryk 12y ago
    > Of course the externalities of surplus lawyers are much worse for society than the externalities of surplus physicians. Would you care to explain why? My guess is that you mean that a surplus of lawyers can cause additional demand for lawyers, which can't happen for physicians. Do I understand you correctly?
    - ufmace 12y ago
      I suppose if you have too many lawyers and not enough jobs for them, some will run around filing frivolous lawsuits that the counterparty will have to hire more lawyers to defend against. If you have too many doctors and not enough hurt people for them to heal, what are they going to do? Run around hurting people so that they can then heal them?

misiti3780 12y ago

Imagine the irony of clicking on this article and then seeing this ad: https://www.dropbox.com/s/smy9xlxvdynr91f/Screenshot%202014-08-15%2000.08.03.png https://www.dropbox.com/s/smy9xlxvdynr91f/Screenshot%202014-...

rquantz 12y ago
I got the same thing. Amazing.

brianbreslin 12y ago

Interesting piece. A couple local law schools here in Florida tried to double their enrollments in the last 5 years. What ended up happening was they had to bankroll bullshit clerkship jobs for the students to be able to get any sense of a job, lest their rankings tank. By having these 3-6month clerkships underwritten by the school (presumably paid for by the ridiculous tuition), the school was able to say that 90% of their students had a job within 6 weeks of graduation. I at one point in my life thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I even took the LSAT prep stuff while interning at a law firm while in college. That was the most boring, time wasting 3 months of my life. I RARELY meet a lawyer who loves being a lawyer.

voolite 12y ago
Lawyer here-- graduated in the 1990's. I do enjoy being a lawyer, but I have a solid job working for a government agency where my particular skills and area of expertise (a relatively obscure set of federal regulations) are valued and I have interesting co-workers. I would not want to work for a large firm, however, even though I theoretically could be paid much more. Before I went to law school, I worked for over a year in a small law office, where I was taught the old fashioned way how to do legal research; I enjoyed the heck out of it. All my life I've been the kind of person who likes to look up stuff just for fun. Funny what you say about LSAT test prep-- actually taking the LSAT was one of the most enjoyable, exhilarating moments in my life. For those who haven't taken it, it's basically a test of reading comprehension and logic puzzles, all taken at breakneck speed. I've always been able to read more quickly than most, and I enjoy logic and mathematics so it's not like these skills were new to me, I felt like I'd been preparing for it my whole life. It was like doing a speed run down a mountainside, but with my mind. I scored at the 99.3%. I also really enjoyed law school, and I wound up graduating at the top 5% of my law school class. However, it really, really isn't for everyone.

VMG 12y ago

> For-profit law schools are a capitalist dream of privatized profits and socialized losses Oh come on now...

burritofanatic 12y ago

Yet there are hidden gems like like CUNY Law, which really should get more looks, particularly if a student is truly interested in doing public interest work. http://www.law.cuny.edu/admissions/tuition.html http://www.law.cuny.edu/admissions/tuition.html Though I don't truly regret going through law school then transitioning after, I really should have looked at financing the education like buying a home with a 30 year mortgage. A 20% downpayment would have defrayed quite a bit of the cost, and the path to saving that money would have given me time to consider the decision further. This doesn't have to be the rule, but it's an excellent guideline for anyone making such a big financial investment.

GoldenHomer 12y ago

I was reminded of a Simpsons quote: "You let me down, man. Now I don't believe in nothing no more. I'm going to law school".

spiritplumber 12y ago

My cousin graduated from arguably the best law school in our country, got a job with a multinational firm right out of school... and six months later I (who was still in engineering school) had to go wrestle with him, AND security guards, to get him out of the office where he had barricaded himself after a paranoid breakdown. Later, he had to talk me out of demolishing the firm. I have no first hand experience with the legal profession other than paying the guy who does my patent paperwork, but from what I've read, there is way too much stress, both in and out.

imroot 12y ago

I [semi-foolishly] graduated from law school in 2008. I was fortunate, as an employer paid for the cost of my law degree (and for my bar exam), and then laid me off in 2010 due to the economy tanking (and forgave all of my debt). Since graduating, most of my friends (including myself) have all moved to careers where the law is not the primary driver; most are saddled with a mountain of debt, make between 40 and 80K/year (most first year law grads make less than 60K in their first year). People think that lawyers are glamorous, due to the fictionalization of their career (law and order). You have attorneys who are either left or right wing whackjobs (I went to law school with a woman who was only going to law school so that she could overturn Roe v. Wade) who have no sense going into law, let alone practicing with clients. I'm much happier as a programmer/nerd. Even with being on call, I still sleep much much better at night. I'll still do legal things (contract law, estate planning, and not giving legal advice to drunk people), but, I never call myself an attorney and I rarely admit that I'm a lawyer to anyone outside of my friends and family. With that said, Law school is something that plays on the dreams of these kids. They're saddled with debt from undergrad and post-grad, thinking that they're going to be the next Erin Brokovich or Jack McCoy. My friends joke that Law School made them better drinkers, better readers, and that their 6-figure student loan debts came with a great group of friends. Sadly, that's where most kids come out of law school with these days -- a drinking problem, a mountain of debt, and nowhere to go.

jstalin 12y ago

Relevant: Imagine for a moment that you are the owner of a popular restaurant located on a street with many restaurants. You do your best to provide the best experience to your customers while staying ahead of the competition by keeping your prices down. You try to avoid spending too much on labor, and do as much of the work yourself as you can, often putting in long hours. Although there is a good wholesale market nearby, you drive an extra hour to another market just to get your ingredients a little cheaper. One day a wealthy patron who is a big fan of your cooking announces a new idea. Because he wants as many people as possible to enjoy your food, he is going to pick up the tab for most of your customers. You can just go on doing what you always do, but when the check arrives for many tables, this wealthy patron will pay the tab. The next day, your waitress complains that there are too many tables and you should hire more help. What would you do? Normally, you would try to find a way to avoid hiring another person as it would eat into what little profits you make. But now you realize there is another solution. You can just raise prices. Since most of your patrons are not paying for their meals, your place will still stay popular and you won’t have to worry about losing business to your competition. So why not hire another waitress? While you are at it, why not hire a manger so you don’t have to be there all time, and stop driving to the further market?. Whatever increase in costs you suffer you can make up for by raising prices more and more. Now imagine all your competitors also have wealthy benefactors picking up the check for many of their customers. You can all raise prices constantly without losing any sleep – or business. This scenario is effectively what America’s higher education financing system has turned into. There are many reasons why college tuition is rising faster than virtually anything else, from more applicants than ever to state budget cuts for public universities, but all of those factors are allowed to persist because often times the person getting the degree is not the person paying the tab – not for today anyway. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-09/why-tuition-keeps-rising-spoiler-alert-government-intervention http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-07-09/why-tuition-keeps-r...

joshuaheard 12y ago
This is the same scenario for our health care industry.
pzxc 12y ago
> often times the person getting the degree is not the person paying the tab – not for today anyway The same thing -- only an indirect connection between buyer and seller -- could be seen as a primary cause of the rise in healthcare costs as well.

rrggrr 12y ago

Prospective law students, some things to look forward to at many firms: - Wannabe litigators, most of your cases will settle. You'll spend agonizing hours preparing and rarely see a courtroom battle. Your time will spent posturing for your client and opposing counsel, pandering to your client's aspirational fantasies of outcome, and dealing with internal office politics. When you do make it to Court inept Judges and unsympathetic clients will weigh on you. - Transactional attorneys, your eyes will bleed from the thousands of pages of boilerplate text you're going be reading every day, and the copy & paste keys on your keyboard will be worn beyond recognition. The dissonance between helping clients manage risk (ghost chasing) and not screwing up their deals will be maddening. - The pressure to bring in business can be crushing. You signed on to practice law, only to find out it soon becomes a sales, marketing and customer service gig.

brotoss 12y ago

I dropped out after my 1L year last summer and could not be happier with the decision. I landed a job working in compliance and have time to teach myself to code or whatever else. Law school is the worst.

dmarble 12y ago

Georgetown law grad here who maxed out loans, worked during school, and put the excess capital into my first startup (cheaper than a small business loan!), which was law/tech-related. Not that I recommend that approach... I'm now back in software product management, which is what I did before law school. I tell people law school is a bad book club. You read a crap-ton of mostly boring books, talk about them, and usually take a test at the end of each course. Occasionally there's an amazing instructor to make a subject enjoyable. I'd prefer in the US we keep law as a graduate program, but tear down the antiquated 3 year system. Law school should be one year, with optional "residency" and specialist training like medicine. You'd get the research, writing, and basic subjects in that one year, which are all you need for most actual lawyering. Residency would be the hands-on training you never get at law school unless you had an amazing clinical program. Bar exams should be 1 basic exam covering that 1-year curriculum, and additional exams if you want to be certified to practice a specialty.

joshuaheard 12y ago

I went to a for-profit law school and it is not a "scam" as the article suggests. The law school described itself as the school of last resort for those wanting to go to law school but not able to get into more exclusive schools. They would take almost anyone into the program, but the grading was rigorous: 1/3 flunked out the first year, 1/3 flunked out over the course of the program, so only 1/3 of entering students graduated. At least they were given the opportunity to try. The problem identified in the article is not the for-profit schools. It is rational for private enterprise to respond to government incentives. The problem is the excessive government incentives. There are too many lawyers, so the government should not be subsidizing legal educations. That is the solution. By the way, my for-profit law school has a four-year part-time night program so I worked as a paralegal to pay for my tuition. I only took out a small loan to take time off to study for and take the bar exam, which I passed on the first try.

coldcode 12y ago
What idiotic politician(s) thought that unlimited guaranteed law study loans was a good idea? I guess if you own such a for profit law school it is a good idea. But it's dreadful governance. I'm not against helping people get a decent education but infinity is not a reasonable limit.
dandare 12y ago
Yep, the author of the article is apparently pushing some socialist agenda. Socializing losses is in no way part of Capitalism and actually could not happen without state setting distorted incentives.

dandare 12y ago

"...capitalist dream of privatizing profits while socializing losses" - what a nonsense! Socialising losses has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism as an economic system. Take your stinky socialist agenda elsewhere.

dragonwriter 12y ago
> Socialising losses has absolutely nothing to do with capitalism as an economic system. That (and how) it socializes harms while privating profits, and thereby serves to advance the interests of the capitalist class at the cost of others, is the feature for which the system was given the name "capitalism".