Legal workers are the center of our society.
mission statement:
To bring back ethical conduct to the practice of law.
To petition the legal system to weigh practical training and experience for qualification for the bar
To allow the cross sharing of expertise withing the ranks of legal workers.
To create a system whereby the work of individual legal workers is acknowledged by the legal establishment. [presently legal workers are like darkage artistis–annonoymous]
To Place Graduates, Law Schools Are Opening Firms
Laura Segall for The New York Times
Douglas J. Sylvester, dean of the law school at Arizona State University, saw a way to address a shifting job market.
By ETHAN BRONNER
Published: March 7, 2013
TEMPE, Ariz. — When Douglas J. Sylvester, dean of the law school at Arizona State University, was visiting the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota a couple of years ago he mentioned the shifting job market for his students — far fewer offers and a new demand for graduates already able to draft documents and interact with clients.
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Laura Segall for The New York Times
Jason Clark, 24, left, and Arman Nafisi, 27, both students at the Arizona State University law school, working on an unemployment benefits case.
The Mayo dean responded that his medical students and graduates gained clinical experience in hospital rounds closely supervised by attending physicians.
“I realized that was what we needed,” Mr. Sylvester recalled. “A teaching hospital for law school graduates.”
The result is a nonprofit law firm that Arizona State is setting up this summer for some of its graduates. Over the next few years, 30 graduates will work under seasoned lawyers and be paid for a wide range of services provided at relatively low cost to the people of Phoenix.
The plan is one of a dozen efforts across the country to address two acute — and seemingly contradictory — problems: heavily indebted law graduates with no clients and a vast number of Americans unable to afford a lawyer.
This paradox, fed by the growth of Internet-based legal research and services, is at the heart of a crisis looming over the legal profession after decades of relentless growth and accumulated wealth. It is evident in the sharp drop in law school applications and the increasing numbers of Americans showing up in court without a lawyer.
“It’s a perfect storm,” said Stacy Caplow, a professor at Brooklyn Law School who focuses on clinical education. “The longstanding concerns over access to justice for most Americans and a lack of skills among law graduates are now combined with the problems faced by all law schools. It’s creating conditions for change.”
A pilot program at the University of California Hastings College of the Law will place some third-year students into offices like the public defender’s for full-time training on the understanding that the next year those students will be employed there for small salaries. The program is called Lawyers for America, a conscious echo of Teach for America, in which high-achieving college graduates work in low-income neighborhood schools. The hope, said Prof. Marsha Cohen of Hastings, is that other law schools will follow the model. Professor Caplow of Brooklyn Law said her school planned to be one of the first.
A dozen law schools, including City University of New York and Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, have set up incubators to train future solo practitioners in their first year out of school, offering office space and mentors. Pace Law School in White Plains, opened what it calls a community law practice last fall with four graduates serving the region.
“You can’t just hang out a shingle and expect clients to show up in droves,” said Jennifer C. Friedman, executive director of the Pace Community Law Practice. “We want to provide our graduates with the tools of success while serving low- and moderate-income clients.”
And the incoming president of the American Bar Association, James R. Silkenat, of New York, said his top priority next fall would be to establish a “legal job corps” to match lawyers who need jobs with clients who need legal assistance.
“We have these two issues running in opposite directions,” Mr. Silkenat said in an interview. “There are unmet legal needs because of money and geography that seem to be growing, and the question of how to make use of unemployed recent graduates.”
All law schools, including the elites, are increasing skills training by adding clinics and externships. Starting this fall, the University of Virginia will allow students to earn a semester of credit while working full time for nonprofit or government employers anywhere in the world. Law students at the University of Pennsylvania, starting in September, can earn a certificate of management from its Wharton School to improve management skills and accounting literacy. Many of the schools and plans mention medical education as their model.
The Arizona State approach, called the Alumni Law Group, appears to be the most ambitious because of the number of lawyers it will employ (30), its projected cost (a commercial firm of comparable size would cost $5 million a year to run, according to the school’s projections) and its hope to be self-sufficient in a couple of years by charging for its services and gathering donations.
The plan is to have four to five groups of lawyers each overseen by a full-time, salaried supervising lawyer serving a range of clients. The firm will do legal work for other parts of the university, including its high-tech innovation center. The aim is to charge $125 an hour in an area where the going hourly rate is $250. The school also says it wants to reach out to veterans, Hispanics and American Indians whose legal needs are not well met.
Other changes may help the program along. Arizona has just become the first state to allow law students to take the bar exam in their third year rather than after graduation. The school has announced the creation of the North American Law Degree, a three-year J.D. aimed at licensure in both Canada and the United States. Dean Sylvester, who is Canadian, said a big need for lawyers in Canada remained as well as for cross-border practice. The number of Canadians applying to Arizona State for law studies has just risen, as a result.
Arizona’s plan, mooted at bar meetings and within law school circles, is producing envy — but also skepticism. Some see a naked attempt to improve the school’s ratings in U.S. News and World Report by increasing the percentage of its graduates who find work while doing little to address the access-to-justice problem.
Critics say that $125 an hour is too high to serve those in need and too low to break even. Others say that Phoenix, a city of intense growth and few law students, could support such an operation but that others could not and that local law firms would resent the competition.
“We charge $50 an hour, and I don’t take any pay,” said Dennis A. Gladwell, who runs a smaller firm at the University of Utah with a staff of five graduates started 16 months ago. “If you are going to charge $125, you are not going to serve an underserved population.” Mr. Gladwell, who retired as a partner from the big firm of Gibson Dunn & Crutcher, also said that despite having asked top local firms to send along cases they considered too small for themselves, none responded.
There are other obstacles. Teaching hospitals have a federal tax dispensation. For nonprofit law firms to qualify for an exemption, legislation is probably required. That seems unlikely at the moment. Arizona State is attaching its firm to its nonprofit alumni association to get around the problem for now.
Still, postgraduate training programs appear to be the way of the future for many of the nation’s 200 law schools. The law dean of Rutgers University just announced plans for a nonprofit law firm for some of his graduates.
“I would love to blink and wake up in 10 years and see where all this ends,” said Ms. Friedman of Pace Law School. “We know about 10 to 15 programs opening in the coming years. That means there are 30 more behind them. Every faculty is talking about this.”
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: March 9, 2013
A capsule summary on Friday for a national article about the efforts by law schools to provide employment and training programs for their graduates misstated the number of Americans who are unable to afford a lawyer. As the article correctly noted, it is a “vast number” of Americans, not a “vast majority.”
As of this month, there were 30,000 applicants to law schools for the fall, a 20 percent decrease from the same time last year and a 38 percent decline from 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council. Of some 200 law schools nationwide, only 4 have seen increases in applications this year. In 2004 there were 100,000 applicants to law schools; this year there are likely to be 54,000.
Such startling numbers have plunged law school administrations into soul-searching debate about the future of legal education and the profession over all.
“We are going through a revolution in law with a time bomb on our admissions books,” said William D. Henderson, a professor of law at Indiana University, who has written extensively on the issue. “Thirty years ago if you were looking to get on the escalator to upward mobility, you went to business or law school. Today, the law school escalator is broken.”
Responding to the new environment, schools are planning cutbacks and accepting students they would not have admitted before.
A few schools, like the Vermont Law School, have started layoffs and buyouts of professors. Others, like at the University of Illinois, have offered across-the-board tuition discounts to keep up enrollments. Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School, who runs a blog on the topic, said he expected as many as 10 schools to close over the coming decade, and half to three-quarters of all schools to reduce class size, faculty and staff.
After the normal dropout of some applicants, the number of those matriculating in the fall will be about 38,000, the lowest since 1977, when there were two dozen fewer law schools, according to Brian Z. Tamanaha of Washington University Law School, the author of “Failing Law Schools.”
The drop in applications is widely viewed as directly linked to perceptions of the declining job market. Many of the reasons that law jobs are disappearing are similar to those for disruptions in other knowledge-based professions, namely the growth of the Internet. Research is faster and easier, requiring fewer lawyers, and is being outsourced to less expensive locales, including West Virginia and overseas.
In addition, legal forms are now available online and require training well below a lawyer’s to fill them out.
In recent years there has also been publicity about the debt load and declining job prospects for law graduates, especially of schools that do not generally provide employees to elite firms in major cities. Last spring, the American Bar Association released a study showing that within nine months of graduation in 2011, only 55 percent of those who finished law school found full-time jobs that required passage of the bar exam.
“Students are doing the math,” said Michelle J. Anderson, dean of the City University of New York School of Law. “Most law schools are too expensive, the debt coming out is too high and the prospect of attaining a six-figure-income job is limited.”
Mr. Tamanaha of Washington University said the rise in tuition and debt was central to the decrease in applications. In 2001, he said, the average tuition for private law school was $23,000; in 2012 it was $40,500 (for public law schools the figures were $8,500 and $23,600). He said that 90 percent of law students finance their education by taking on debt. And among private law school graduates, the average debt in 2001 was $70,000; in 2011 it was $125,000.
“We have been sharply increasing tuition during a low-inflation period,” he said of law schools collectively, noting that a year at a New York City law school can run to more than $80,000 including lodging and food. “And we have been maximizing our revenue. There is no other way to describe it. We will continue to need lawyers, but we need to bring the price down.”
Some argue that the drop is an indictment of the legal training itself — a failure to keep up with the profession’s needs.
“We have a significant mismatch between demand and supply,” said Gillian K. Hadfield, professor of law and economics at the University of Southern California. “It’s not a problem of producing too many lawyers. Actually, we have an exploding demand for both ordinary folk lawyers and big corporate ones.”
She said that, given the structure of the legal profession, it was hard to make a living dealing with matters like mortgage and divorce, and that big corporations were dissatisfied with what they see as the overly academic training at elite law schools.
The drop in law school applications is unlike what is happening in almost any other graduate or professional training, except perhaps to veterinarians. Medical school applications have been rising steadily for the past decade.
Debra W. Stewart, president of the Council of Graduate Schools, said applicants to master of business degrees were steady — a 0.8 percent increase among Americans in 2011 after a decade of substantial growth. But growth in foreign student applications — 13 percent over the same period — made up the difference, something from which law schools cannot benefit, since foreigners have less interest in American legal training.
In the legal academy, there has been discussion about how to make training less costly and more relevant, with special emphasis on the last year of law school. A number of schools, including elite ones like Stanford, have increased their attention to clinics, where students get hands-on training. Northeastern Law School in Boston, which has long emphasized in-the-field training, has had one of the smallest decreases in its applicant pool this year, according to Jeremy R. Paul, the new dean.
There is also discussion about permitting students to take the bar after only two years rather than three, a decision that would have to be made by the highest officials of a state court system. In New York, the proposal is under active consideration largely because of a desire to reduce student debt.
Some, including Professor Hadfield of the University of Southern California, have called for one- or two-year training programs to create nonlawyer specialists for many tasks currently done by lawyers. Whether or not such changes occur, for now the decline is creating what many see as a cultural shift.
“In the ’80s and ’90s, a liberal arts graduate who didn’t know what to do went to law school,” Professor Henderson of Indiana said. “Now you get $120,000 in debt and a default plan of last resort whose value is just too speculative. Students are voting with their feet. There are going to be massive layoffs in law schools this fall. We won’t have the bodies we need to meet the payroll.”
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Juliana Thomas/New York University School of LawRichard L. Revesz, dean of N.Y.U. School of Law.There is an old saying that in the first year of law school they scare you to death; in the second year, they work you to death; and in the third year, they bore you to death.
The usefulness of the third year of study ranks high among the growing chorus of complaints — which includes soaring tuition and a glutted job market — about law schools.
New York University School of Law is now trying to address those questions about the utility of the third year. On Wednesday, the school is expected to announce an overhaul of its curriculum, with an emphasis on the final two semesters.
The move comes as law schools are being criticized for failing to keep up with transformations in the legal profession, and their graduates face dimming employment prospects and mounting student loans.
N.Y.U. Law’s changes are built around several themes, including a focus on foreign study and specialized concentrations. Some students could spend their final semester studying in Shanghai or Buenos Aires. Others might work at the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington, or the Federal Trade Commission. Another group, perhaps, will complete a rigorous one-year concentration in patent law, or focused course work in tax.
“There are perennial complaints about the third year of law school being a waste of time,” said Brian Z. Tamanaha, a law professor at Washington University and the author of the recently published book “Failing Law Schools” (University of Chicago Press). “It is important that an elite law school like N.Y.U. is making these changes because the top schools set the model for the rest of legal academia.”
N.Y.U. Law is the latest law school to alter its academic program significantly. Stanford Law School recently completed comprehensive changes to its third-year curriculum, with a focus on allowing students to pursue joint degrees. Washington and Lee University School of Law scrapped its traditional third-year curriculum in 2009, replacing it with a mix of clinics and outside internships.
“There is a growing disconnect between what law schools are offering and what the marketplace is demanding in the 21st century,” said Evan R. Chesler, the presiding partner of the law firm Cravath, Swaine & Moore and a trustee of N.Y.U. Law. “The changes we’re rolling out seek to address that.”
There has been much debate in the legal academy over the necessity of a third year. Many students take advantage of clinical course work, but the traditional third year of study is largely filled by elective courses. While classes like “Nietzsche and the Law” and “Voting, Game Theory and the Law” might be intellectually broadening, law schools and their students are beginning to question whether, at $51,150 a year, a hodgepodge of electives provides sufficient value.
“One of the well-known facts about law school is it never took three years to do what we are doing; it took maybe two years at most, maybe a year-and-a-half,” Larry Kramer, the former dean of Stanford Law School, said in a 2010 speech.
Yet no one expects law schools to become two-year programs any time soon. For one thing, law schools are huge profit centers for universities, which are reluctant to give up precious tuition dollars. What is more, American Bar Association rules require three years of full-time study to obtain a law degree. Several law schools, including Northwestern University School of Law, offer two-year programs, but they cram three years of course work — and tuition — into two.
N.Y.U. Law’s new curriculum plan is highlighted by experience outside of the school’s Greenwich Village campus. While the school has dabbled in foreign study, it is now redoubling its focus on international and cross-border legal practice. N.Y.U. Law is preparing to send as many as 75 students to partner law schools in Buenos Aires, Shanghai and Paris, where the students will study the legal systems and the languages of those regions. With the ever-increasing influence of government and the regulatory state in private legal matters, N.Y.U. Law will also offer students a full semester of study, combined with an internship, in Washington.
Another key initiative gives students the chance to build a specialty. Called “professional pathways,” the program will offer eight focused areas of instruction, including criminal law and academia.
None of these programs will be mandatory, as students can still choose a conventional course load. But Richard L. Revesz, the dean of N.Y.U. Law, said that he hoped the students would take advantage of the new offerings.
“The third year of law school has never had a clear mission, and these steps now give us that,” Mr. Revesz said. “Students will not maximize their final year here if they just take a random set of courses.”
N.Y.U. Law’s moves illustrate the continuing evolution of the legal education model. Until the late 19th century, most lawyers — like Abraham Lincoln — were trained through the old-fashioned apprenticeship method. But for the last hundred years, law school classrooms have been dominated by the case method of instruction, which trains law students by having them read court cases and questioning them via the Socratic method.
Now, in an era of globalization and specialization, law schools are acknowledging the inadequacy of the traditional approach.
“Training lawyers to think like lawyers was once law schools’ entire mission,” said Mr. Chesler, the N.Y.U trustee and Cravath presiding partner. “That doesn’t work anymore.”
The reworking of N.Y.U.’s curriculum is the result of recommendations made by a strategy committee of alumni formed in May 2011 by Mr. Revesz. Mr. Chesler was chairman of the 12-person committee, which included Randal S. Milch, the general counsel of Verizon Communications; Eric M. Roth, a partner at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; and Sara E. Moss, the top lawyer at Estée Lauder.
“The group that came up with these new measures is comprised of leading lawyers who are creating the market to hire our students,” Mr. Revesz said. “Perhaps more than any of the substantive changes, I’m most proud of who has recommended them.”
Behind the revamp is a recognition that the job market has become markedly worse since the financial crisis, even for students at well-regarded law schools like N.Y.U. The country’s largest law firms are hiring 40 percent fewer lawyers than they were five years ago, according to a new study from the National Association for Law Placement. Reflecting the shrinking job market, the number of people taking the law school admission test has fallen by nearly 25 percent in the last two years.
“The social compact that you attend an elite law school and get a high-paying job has started to erode,” said William D. Henderson, a law professor at Indiana University who studies the legal industry. “Law schools must change, and while it’s great to hear about this news about N.Y.U., they have lots of resources and money. The greater sense of urgency lies with the lower-tier schools.”
Our request is to have the Most valuable skills for false claims to be indexed and prioritized
1 Often it is the Doctors who alert us to potential false claims.
2 We would like to do an outreach for doctors to make them aware of what to look for.
3 We are considering the idea of going undercover into the field.
WASHINGTON — As the Obama administration has cracked down on corporate fraud, lawyers representing whistle-blowers have reaped multimillion-dollar rewards. Now, as they seek to sustain these historic payouts, they are donating generously to the president’s re-election campaign.
John R. Phillips, one of the nation’s top whistle-blower lawyers, has raised more than $200,000 for Mr. Obama’s re-election from colleagues.
John Morgan has represented whistle-blowers and donated heavily to the Obama re-election campaign.
Share your thoughts.
Lawyers in the tight circle who specialize in filing fraud claims with the federal government on behalf of clients with evidence of wrongdoing have raised more than $3 million so far for President Obama. The government, meanwhile, has paid out $1.6 billion to whistle-blowers during his tenure, with law firms taking a cut in some cases of up to 40 percent of the proceeds.
The lawyers have contributed directly to Mr. Obama’s campaign, served as “bundlers” who solicit contributions from others, donated to the Democratic National Committee and written large checks to Priorities USA, the “super PAC” supporting Mr. Obama’s re-election efforts. They have also donated heavily to Congressional Democrats.
Their support comes as Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential nominee, has called for repeal of the Dodd-Frank Act, which imposed new oversight of the financial services industry and expanded the government’s whistle-blower program to the Securities and Exchange Commission, which has set aside $430 million for payouts. Business groups have also pushed for legislation imposing a cap on payments to whistle-blowers, arguing that rewards reaching as high as $104 million, as happened in one case, have turned anti-fraud efforts into a lottery.
“The risks are enormous there will be real pullback because of pressure from the industry that has paid billions in penalties,” said John R. Phillips, one of the nation’s top lawyers for whistle-blowers, who has raised more than $200,000 for Mr. Obama’s re-election from colleagues, after first working in 2008 to help Mr. Obama get elected.
The fund-raising is already a flash point in Washington, where lawmakers have been divided along partisan lines over the administration’s efforts to regulate the financial industry and the political parties have long been at odds over trial lawyers and class-action suits. On the campaign trail, Mr. Romney has cast himself and fellow Republicans as champions of business and the president and Democrats as hostile to business interests.
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which represents many of the companies that have been targets of the whistle-blower investigations, has criticized the lawyers’ efforts, particularly their aggressive outreach for potential clients.
“If someone is defrauding the federal government or investors, they should have the book thrown at them,” said Matt Webb, senior vice president for legal reform policy at the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform. “But increasingly, this is not just about exposing wrongdoing. It is about trying to generate as much money and fees for the firms handling the cases.”
Some of the lawyers in the field, including several from Mr. Phillips’s firm, played a central role in advising the Securities and Exchange Commission on the rules creating its whistle-blower program, including a provision to broaden the list of who was eligible to file a claim. In the last year, law firms that represent whistle-blowers have hired several top S.E.C. officials who helped write those rules. They include Jordan Thomas, who has started a new S.E.C. whistle-blower unit at Labaton Sucharow, a New York firm whose employees have contributed to the Obama campaign.
“We have had hundreds and hundreds of inquiries,” said Mr. Thomas, who has sought out clients and promoted his firm’s practice in speeches nationwide, an Internet blog andYouTube videos. “Our phones are ringing off the hook.”
The push to crack down on Medicare fraud, for example, started long before the Obama administration, with many cases initiated by the Justice Department under President George W. Bush. But the Obama administration has been particularly aggressive in pursuing them.
Since January 2009, $13.2 billion has been collected by the federal government from companies through the False Claims Act, the primary whistle-blower tool, with about $9.4 billion of that involving alleged health care fraud. The federal government has recovered more in financial penalties against drugmakers since 2009 than in the previous 18 years combined, with whistle-blowers credited for helping initiate about three quarters of the cases, according to a recent study by Public Citizen, a nonprofit group.
Among the biggest False Claims Act settlements was a $2 billion fine against GlaxoSmithKline, accused of illegally promoting one of its blockbuster drugs, which could translate into a more than $100 million bounty for the whistle-blowers, two of whom were represented by Mr. Phillip’s firm. In May, Abbott Laboratories agreed to pay an $800 million fine, which included an $84 million payment to the whistle-blowers, four former Abbott sales staff members, who tipped off authorities about illegal marketing of an antiseizure drug to children and elderly patients. The lead whistle-blower was represented by Grant & Eisenhofer, a Delaware-based firm whose managing director has also served as bundler and contributor to Mr. Obama.
The S.E.C. whistle-blower program targets fraud that harms investors or consumers through a securities law violation, while the health care cases typically involve cheating the Medicare or Medicaid programs. No big fines have resulted yet from the S.E.C. program because cases typically take several years to develop. But the office is receiving on average 10 tips a day, and got nearly 3,000 in its first year.
Mr. Phillips and other lawyers said their contributions are unrelated to their work and he said they have sparred with the Justice Department during Mr. Obama’s tenure because of its efforts to minimize payouts. Corporate lawyers who defend companies, he added, typically make more money on a case than the lawyers for whistle-blowers do.
Still, the ranks of lawyers seeking to represent whistle-blowers has grown quickly in the last several years, as the value of the awards has skyrocketed. Lawyers at dozens of these law firms nationwide have contributed to Mr. Obama, campaign finance records show, while only a sprinkling of checks have been written from employees at the same firms to Mr. Romney.
The single biggest fund-raiser is John Morgan, a Florida lawyer. He has collected more than $1.7 million for Mr. Obama’s re-election or for the Democratic National Committee, making him one of the campaign’s biggest bundlers nationwide. He has also raised money for Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts Democrat running for the United States Senate. Ms. Warren served as interim head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, also created as part of the Dodd-Frank law.
Mr. Morgan said his support for Mr. Obama and Ms. Warren was entirely motivated by his admiration for their leadership. But his fund-raising blitz occurred just as he was expanding his personal injury and trial law practice into the whistle-blower field, with a television advertising campaign and new Web site.
“America is full of crooks who are defrauding the government and investors every day,” Mr. Morgan said. “We are talking about billions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. We win one case and it will pay for our entire national advertising budget.”
Sean McKessy, a former corporate attorney who leads the new S.E.C. Whistleblower Office, said he welcomed the support of outside lawyers. Whistle-blowers get paid only if the claim is substantiated and results in a fine of at least $1 million — meaning there is no incentive to flood the agency with frivolous complaints.
“There is an extraordinary important role that good lawyers that understand the regulatory process can play,” Mr. McKessy said, adding that individuals can also submit a tip without hiring a lawyer at all, although many do.
At a recent gathering at a Washington hotel of lawyers who represent whistle-blowers, several hundred of them sipped on glasses of wine and cocktails as they began a series of meetings with senior officials from the Justice Department, the S.E.C. and Medicare programs — as well as Mr. McKessy — to compare strategies on how to bring in more corporate wrongdoers.
“The way you get more hunting dogs showing up is you feed them,” said Patrick Burns, communications director at Taxpayers Against Fraud, the legal industry group that sponsored the conference. “And the Justice Department is cooking with Crisco right now.”
License Plate Tracking and survelance
9/27/2012COMMENTS (0)
By Jessica Dye
NEW YORK, Sept 27 (Reuters) – A Long Island judge has overturned 12-year term limits for the Suffolk County district attorney, clerk and sheriff, saying the power to limit the officials’ terms belonged to the state, not the county.
Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota, Sheriff Vincent Demarco and Clerk Judith Pascale had argued that the term limits under Local Law 27-1993 were invalid under the New York State Constitution and New York State County Law, which do not set such limits.
The local law was adopted in 1993 as an amendment to the Suffolk County charter.
In granting summary judgment to the officials, Acting Supreme Court Justice Ralph Gazzillo wrote, “(I)t is beyond the power of a county to restrict the number of times that such a county’s district attorney, sheriff and/or clerk may run for office; under our existing law, the authority to promulgate such additional qualifications is solely vested with and retained by the state.”
However, the judge said in the Sept. 25 ruling that his finding was limited to these three offices.
Spota, Demarco and Pascale challenged the Local Law in February when they sued Suffolk County, asking a judge to invalidate the term limits. Spota, whose third four-year term expires on Dec. 31, 2013, has not yet publicly announced whether he will seek re-election. DeMarco and Pascale are both in their second terms, which are due to expire by the end of 2013 and 2014, respectively.
The county denied that the limits were invalid, according to the ruling. It also said the claims weren’t ripe because Spota had not expressed an interest in running for a fourth term and DeMarco and Pascale had not yet reached their term limits.
Gazzillo disagreed, saying that a decision “could not be more ripe,” since it is “appropriate that he (Spota) know whether he may or may not run for re-election within the next year.”
The judge noted that term limits are not per se illegal. But he said when the state interest in particular offices trumps the local one, the state should have the final say.
“(C)learly the state’s interest in those offices is paramount to that of a county, local or other subdivision,” Gazzillo wrote.
An attorney for the plaintiffs could not be reached for comment. Suffolk County and the district attorney’s office did not return requests for comment.
The case is Spota v. County of Suffolk, New York State Supreme Court, Suffolk County, No. 4268/2012.
For the plaintiffs: Kevin Snover.
For the defendants; Not immediately available.
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Public Comment Invited
The Commission indicated in Matter of Schilling that it intends to issue a report on the subject of judicial license plates. A letter to various judicial, bar and civic associations invited comment. The Commission will also accept comment on the subject from interested organizations or individuals by letter, memorandum or email. 61 Broadway, Suite 1200, New York, NY 10006 (cjc@cjc.ny.gov).
Harry CampbellLaw schools have come under fire during these tough economic times, with critics saying that they leave too many graduates in debt, chasing too few employment opportunities. But it could be worse. Consider the plight of veterinarians.
The average tuition and expenses for a veterinary degree at a private school has doubled in the last 10 years to over $200,000, well above the typical cost of law school. Yet their pay remains moribund at an average of $66,469 — much less than lawyers.
But unlike law schools, veterinary school is not regularly being called a scam or bubble. In fact, applications to veterinary schools were up about 2 percent last year.
Meanwhile, the number of applicants to law school is down 13.7 percent for this year’s class after a 10 percent drop from 2011, according to the Law Students Admissions Council.
Perhaps today’s youth are more eager to defend animals than people. Or maybe lawyers are better at voicing their dissatisfaction.
Regardless, the trend away from law schools has prompted much discussion about what structural changes may be needed. Should law schools charge less? Should they strip down their programs? Should they abandon their collegiate ivory towers in favor of a trade-school approach by having “real world” lawyers teach practical skills?
None of these solutions, however, are likely to improve the economics of law school.
I believe that law students do need more training in practical skills, but a focus on that is probably only going to make law school more expensive.
A single law professor can easily teach 70 students in one contracts law class, but a clinical professor is limited to six to 10 people a class. If reducing costs is the goal, then more clinical education will only increase it.
A second alternative is to pay professors less, or replace them with practitioners who would also be paid less. The average senior law professor who is not at a top-ranked school makes $130,000 to $150,000 according to a survey by the Society of American Law Teachers. It’s a nice salary, but certainly not comparable to what a law firm partner earns.
This year, the law school at Ohio State University, where I teach, hired a former editor in chief of The Michigan Law Review and a Supreme Court clerk. Both could be paid far more in the private sector, where the hiring bonus alone for a Supreme Court clerk can be $280,000. If the salaries for their positions are even further reduced to make Ohio State’s law school cheaper, they are likely to be replaced by less qualified people.
For this reason, good practitioners are likely to be even more expensive than law professors. After all, the average partner at a big law firm can make well over a million dollars a year.
So what if universities hire less qualified, lower-paid practitioners instead, you may ask? Well, quality matters.
U.S. News & World Report lists 15 law schools where tuition is currently less than $15,000 a year. CUNY School of Law, in New York City, has an in-state tuition of $12,090 and is ranked in the third tier by U.S. News. But there is not a flight of applications to these lower-cost schools from higher-paying ones. Instead, students still flock to top-tier schools with the highest-quality professors. In 2011, CUNY’s applications were down from the year before.
Creating less expensive law schools with less-qualified staff may give graduates a degree, but that may not better qualify them for jobs. This points to another inherent problem with critiques of law schools — all are lumped together. This points to another inherent problem with critiques of law schools — all are lumped together.
There is, however, a qualitative difference between the top 15 law schools and the rest. These elite schools charge sky-high tuition that can exceed $50,000 a year. But graduates have a good chance of securing a coveted job with a starting salary of $165,000 a year — a salary that is likely to improve as the economy does. For a 26-year-old, that’s certainly good money. Duke, for instance, which was No. 11 on the U.S. News rankings, said its graduates had a 95 percent employment rate last year, with an average private sector salary of $160,000.
There may be valid criticism about lower-ranked law schools, particularly those U.S. News places in the third and fourth tier. Such private schools often charge significant tuition but do not obtain the same employment outcomes. The question is whether changes can be made to lower their costs, and whether this will lead to better opportunities for their graduates.
The problem of law school is one that is ubiquitous to higher education — the current model is inherently expensive but even today, lower-priced alternatives don’t seem to meet the standards or be desired by many students.
It is here where revolutionary technologies like online learning may come into play. If it becomes accepted that many basics like contracts law can be easily taught by one professor online to thousands of students, then a law school can charge a lot less. But this is still mostly a theoretical change embraced by those outside academia that has yet to sweep universities. Even with one online course, some local presence will be needed to facilitate learning, particularly if there is skills training involved.
It may not be simple enough to just pin the blame on the costs of law school education. For 2011 law school graduates, as of nine months after graduation, only 65.4 percent were employed in jobs requiring passage of the bar. And law schools should learn to be more innovative, as other types of graduate programs are doing.
Law schools have also hurt themselves badly by failing to fully disclose certain statistics, including their employment rates. It is clear that the number of lawyers in the United States will fall as fewer people apply to law school. But this trend will probably shrink enrollment, not decrease the number of schools over all.
In the longer term, the question is whether there will be a recovery in law jobs as the economy heals. There is hope that will be the case. One study has found that the average lawyer will earn about $4 million — or twice as much as someone with a bachelor’s degree — over their lifetime of employment. In addition, law school provides a general education that is useful in other areas. Both presidential candidates have law degrees, as do the chief executives of a substantial number of companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500-stock index.
A hard look at reform appears to be a worthy goal, but any changes should consider whether they will actually reduce costs, and provide something students want. The problem of law school is thus the problem that all schools of higher education, even veterinary school, face.
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Chief Judge Jonathan Lippman’s goal is to provide legal services for those who cannot afford it.
The rule requires law students to do pro bono work for the poor, nonprofit or civil rights groups or any of the three branches of government, between the first year of law school and the time they apply for a license. The work can be performed anywhere in the world but students must be under the supervision of a practicing lawyer, a judge or a member of a law school faculty. The law goes into effect for new students in law schools on Jan. 1.
When the judge, Jonathan Lippman, proposed the rule in May, some in the legal community said it might be burdensome for new lawyers in a tough economy. Others voiced concerns about using those new to the profession to fill what Judge Lippman calls the justice gap: the growing number of people who cannot afford legal services.
But an advisory committee that formulated the final version of the rule answered some of those criticisms: students have a full three years to complete the work and they must be under the counsel of more experienced lawyers.
“I see absolutely no reason why aspiring lawyers can’t do this without greatly burdening themselves,” Judge Lippman said in an interview. He added, “This idea that you have to be a lawyer with 25 years experience to provide a service doesn’t make any sense to me.”
The financial crisis and a slow economy have increased the demand for civil legal services. A task force convened by the judge in 2010 to evaluate the need in the state found that only 20 percent of the legal needs of New York residents were being met. Among those who rarely have the help of a lawyer are people involved in eviction, child support and consumer credit cases.
The Legal Aid Society, the largest provider of those services in the state, turns away eight of every nine people seeking help, said Steven Banks, the chief lawyer of the organization. Mr. Banks said the pro bono requirement would give his lawyers some much needed assistance.
“This is literally a shot in the arm to help address a very serious gap in access to justice,” Mr. Banks said.
The chief judge also obtained $40 million in this year’s state budget to help finance civil legal services. With the rule change, the judge said, the state will set a new standard for the provision of civil legal services.
“We’re going to write the script nationally,” Judge Lippman said. “I think what we’re doing will be replicated around the country.”
July is the cruelest month for recent law school graduates. State bar exams next week are make-or-break affairs, determining how many will be allowed to practice law. Those exams once set a graduate on the path to a lifelong career. Not anymore. A huge number of new graduates, if lucky enough to find work, will not be employed in legal jobs that require passing the bar.
Only 55 percent of 43,735 graduates in 2011 had a law-related job nine months after graduation, said William Henderson of the Indiana University Maurer School of Law, who analyzed recent data from the American Bar Association. Twenty-eight percent were unemployed or underemployed. And at the 20 law schools with the highest employment, 83 percent of graduates were working as lawyers. At the bottom 20, it was a dismal 31 percent.
These numbers are far worse than jobs data going back a generation and should be a deep embarrassment to law schools, which have been churning out more graduates than the economy can employ, indulging themselves in copious revenues that higher tuitions and bigger classes bring in. A growing list of deans acknowledge that legal education is facing an existential crisis, but the transformation to a more sustainable model will be difficult and messy.
The number of law office jobs began to decline in 2004, well before the recession. And demand for new lawyers isn’t expected to grow much even when the economy recovers. Outsourcing of legal work to places like India and greater efficiencies made possible by smarter software to search documents for evidence, for example, are allowing firms to cut the positions of multitudes of low-end lawyers. In 2009, twice as many people passed bar exams as there were legal openings — a level of oversupply that may hold up for years. There is, of course, tremendous need for lawyers to serve the poor and middle class, but scant dollars to pay them.
Law schools have hustled to compensate for these shifts by trying to make it look as if their graduates are more marketable, even hiring them as research assistants to offer temporary employment. But those strategies won’t fix legal education, particularly when students are starting to see that a high-priced degree, financed by mountains of loans, may never pay off. The number of people taking law school admissions tests fell 24 percent in the last two years, to the lowest level in a decade. Law schools will be crushed if they don’t remake themselves, said Frank Wu, dean of Hastings College of the Law at the University of California in San Francisco. “This is Detroit in the 1970s: change or die.”
Hastings, for example, is reducing the number of its J.D. students by 20 percent in the next three years. It trimmed staff jobs to cut costs, and it increased the teaching load of each faculty member by 20 percent to reduce the need for adjunct professors, among other reasons. But Mr. Wu says the school has no plans to cut the size of its full-time faculty or its compensation or tuition — and tuition is an unavoidable problem.
Brian Tamanaha reports in “Failing Law Schools” that in-state annual tuition at public law schools rose to an average of $18,472 in 2009 from $2,006 in 1985, and tuition at private law schools increased to $35,743 from $7,526.
A lot of money went to raising faculty salaries. With salary and summer pay, the average now is likely close to $170,000 — and some law professors make $350,000 or more.
As tuition has soared, so has student debt. Nearly 9 out of 10 graduates have sizable debt, with $98,500 the average for the class of 2010, or about $1,200 a month in loan payments over 10 years. Most schools and many students have banked on students’ being able to pay back enormous loans with ample salaries, but that flawed model is irretrievably broken.
It will be hard for any school to alter its cost structure without making substantial changes to its faculty and pay, though some schools are earnestly considering two-year J.D. programs and beginning to experiment with more virtual learning in selected courses. Course-sharing among law schools in lecture courses is another cost-saving option.
But in some ways the crisis of law schools goes well beyond the unsustainable economics. Their missions have become muddled, with a widening gap between their lofty claims about the profession’s civic responsibility and their failure to train lawyers for public service or provide them with sufficient preparation for practical work.
Some schools are trying to break out of this dead end. Boston’s Suffolk University Law School is planning to focus on the justice gap by preparing more students to serve the middle class and poor. At Washington and Lee School of Law in Virginia, the third year is now devoted to practical training. Others have increased courses in negotiation, counseling and other skills. The A.B.A., which accredits law schools, could help by allowing much more experimentation and differentiation among schools — and by being much more skeptical of diploma mills.
This crisis makes it easy to forget that the law attracts pragmatic types, able to handle changed circumstances. And in fact, huge law firms, hot areas of practice and outsized salaries at top firms are fairly recent developments. Law schools need to be pragmatic, too, finding ways to ensure that graduates can afford to take jobs where the salary is less important than the impact.
Graphic 
Legal Workers Union 