Reality Check - LSAT Apps Down

Yes, applications to take the LSAT have decreased. Mark Giangrande, writing on the Law Librarian Blog, has made a post about the decrease here - LSAT Applications Down. He cites from the LSAC President's report here. Will this mean a better new lawyer to job ratio in three years making it easier for this potential crop of graduates to find jobs? Maybe. But as Giangrade points out, there will still be a glut of JD graduates.

Lawsuit Loans - Regulation Required

In today's NY Times, Benyamin Appelbaum continues his brilliant series on lawsuit loans. Today's article - Lawsuit Loans Add New risk for the Injured - details abuses by this niche market industry. Readers of this blog will recall four previous posts here, here, here, and here.

Lenders argue that they should not be covered by existing lending laws because borrowers don't repay the loans unless they recover in their suits. Some states are fighting back. Colorado recently filed suit against two lenders - Oasis and LawCash. From the story -

“It looks like a loan and smells like a loan and we believe that these are, in fact, high-cost loans,” John W. Suthers, the state’s attorney general, said in a recent interview. “I can see a legitimate role for it, but that doesn’t mean that they shouldn’t be subject to regulation.”

"High-cost" is a real understatement. In fact, according to a survey by the Center for Public Integrity, some of these loans appear to accrue interest at the rate of 100% annually plus fees. The lenders, through their industry spokesman, argue that these are risky loans because the plaintiffs (the injured) may never recover. This is a disingenuous argument. As discussed in previous posts, these loans are carefully vetted by the lender (or investor if you will) before one dime is sent to the injured plaintiff.

How big is the market for these loans? Just consider that the industry has hired a spokesman. That's a pretty good indication that this market has reached critical mass and is ready for national regulation.

The Need for Law Student Financial Counseling

Yet more fallout from the story last Sunday in the NY Times - Is Law School a Losing Game? - by David Segal.

The article highlights the sad story of one Michael Wallerstein. This student (with what Segal calls a "surfer dude" mentality) appears to have been more than slightly irresponsible in his excellent law school adventure. He attended a for profit stand alone law school that charges high tuition - Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego. Here's the Top-Law-School.com profile. The Top-Law-School profile shows that -

The average TJSL law student graduates with an overwhelming $131,800 in law-school-related debt, giving the school the honor of saddling its graduates the highest debt load in the nation. Thomas Jefferson School of Law does not offer its students a loan repayment assistance program.

Segal describes how Wallerstein chose this school -

WHEN he started in 2006, Michael Wallerstein knew little about the Thomas Jefferson School of Law, other than that it was in San Diego, which seemed like a fine place to spend three years.

“I looked at schools in Pennsylvania and Long Island,” he says, “but I thought, why not go somewhere I’ll enjoy?”

Segal goes on to detail some of the debt that Wallerstein proceeded to incur while a student. Apparently, Wallerstein was not in the mood for "austerity" during his education -

... Mr. Wallerstein rented a spacious apartment. He also spent a month studying in the South of France and a month in Prague — all on borrowed money. There were cost-of-living loans, and tuition of about $33,000 a year. Later came a $15,000 loan to cover months of studying for the bar.

In the end it appears that Wallerstein owes about $250,000 for his legal education. The figure is approximate because, as Wallerstein admits, “I’m not really good at keeping records.” Is this the kind of person you want planning your parent's estate?

But this student's attitude is only part of the problem. Apparently, the school in question failed to offer or require any form of financial counseling; not an uncommon situation in most law schools. So, is this the student's fault? Some may say so. The Subprime JD blog perceptively refers to this as a form of cognitive dissonance - delusional thinking on the part of the law student. And, the #Crasstalk blog calls this The least sympathetic 'I have lots of student debt" story ever.

But the larger fact is that many schools have no incentive to provide or require financial counseling or to put any kind of realistic constraints on the borrowing habits of their students. Private for-profit schools are especially under scrutiny right now. As mentioned Sunday, it may only be a matter of time before the ABA or the Department of Education begin to take a closer look at law schools.

Can You Get Your Law School Tuition Back?

Well. You can certainly ask for it. And that's exactly what one law student did. Readers of this blog will recall a recent post on this issue here. As mentioned in the story from Sunday's NY Times - Is Law School a Losing Game? - a BC law student asked the Dean of that school for his tuition back. The story was originally reported in a Times blog onNovember 8th - Tuition Reimbursements for Jobless Graduates. Here's a copy of the letter to Interim Dean Brown at Boston College Law School as posted in the student online newsletter the EagleiOnline. BC's response is here.

But this is not a new story. Read the Wall Street Journal article from September 24, 2007 about the increasingly difficult job market for law school graduates - Hard Case: Job Market Wanes for U.S. Lawyers.

The story of the BC student went virtually viral in October of 2010. Here are links to the Boston Herald story, the CTI Career Search blog, the BrainTrack blog (Universities Colleges and Careers), the Consumerist blog (Shoppers Bite Back), the NECN New England cable news site (complete with video!), the Tax Prof Blog, and, of course Gawker (with humorous posed photograph). These are just a few of the dozens of posts.

More to come...

Is Law School a Losing Game?

Maybe. At least that's the premise behind this Sunday's article in the NY Times by David Segal. The lengthy article includes interviews with former students who don't know how they are going to pay off their student loans and educators who feel the need to change the system. The main culprit appears to be the U.S. News and World Report rankings -

"Enron-type accounting standards have become the norm,” says William Henderson of Indiana University, one of many exasperated law professors who are asking the American Bar Association to overhaul the way law schools assess themselves. “Every time I look at this data, I feel dirty.” It is an open secret, Professor Henderson and others say, that schools finesse survey information in dozens of ways. And the survey’s guidelines, which are established not by U.S. News but by the American Bar Association, in conjunction with an organization called the National Association for Law Placement, all but invite trimming.

A law grad, for instance, counts as “employed after nine months” even if he or she has a job that doesn’t require a law degree. Waiting tables at Applebee’s? You’re employed. Stocking aisles at Home Depot? You’re working, too.

Number-fudging games are endemic, professors and deans say, because the fortunes of law schools rise and fall on rankings, with reputations and huge sums of money hanging in the balance. You may think of law schools as training grounds for new lawyers, but that is just part of it.

The U.S. Department of Education recently proposed regulations that require certain kinds of for-profit schools to disclose post-graduation placement and employment statistics and to establish some kind of nexus between the school's curriculum and real-world employability. Here's a NY Times article that's on point. Maybe it's time to force law schools to follow suit.

Open Access Online Casebook Preview

At last - an open access legal text.

A preview of the first open access legal casebook is now available on the eLangdell site. The Legal Informatics Blog reports -

The preview — which consists of portions of Roger C. Park and Douglas D. McFarland’s Evidence for Civil Procedure Students — is available in several formats: ePub, mobi, PDF, and HTML, and is licensed under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 license.

This is a monumentally positive development for law students. The price of casebooks has reached dizzying heights in recent years. Open access casebooks and text will almost certainly be the norm in a few short years.

As a rule, unless a casebook reaches some kind of cult status, most academic authors are not particularly well paid. To produce and publish an open access casebook is akin to publishing an articles in a student edited journal. Thus, publishing open source becomes yet another way to achieve and maintain tenure while benefiting the primary casebook consumers - law students.

You can almost hear the shifting of the foundations of the casebook industry.

WestlawNext and the 2010 Buzz

The West-maintained blog, Legal Current, has noted that WestlawNext created a "buzz" in the legal research community in 2010...

So much so that Massauchsetts lawyer, writer and media consultant, Robert Ambrogi recently announced that his post titled “A First Look at WestlawNext” was the most widely read entry on his popular legal blog LawSites for all of 2010.

Ambrogi is, indeed, a leader in keeping track of online tools, practices, and electronic developments in the legal field. His blog, Law Sites, is well worth reading for the material about online legal research alone.

Legal Current also links to its post from early 2010 that recaps comments in the blogosphere about WestlawNext. These links, mostly posted at the time of the introduction of WestlawNext, all seem to be positive. Well. That's no surprise.

Juror Behavior In the Social Media Age

Ken Strutin has posted a compilation of news and case reports in which juror behavior in the information/social media age is considered. The article, on one of the premire legal information websites, LLRX.com, can be found here - Juror Behavior in the Information Age.

Strutin correctly makes the point that if one of the virtues of the jury system is that the jury itself is comprised of our peers, it is logical to assume that members of the jury will ordinarily do internet research using Google or Bing and may maintain a blog, a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It is also logical to assume that these jurors might be inclined to use these resources before, during, and after the trial. Strutin's article provides specific instances in which these activities came to light and how the courts dealt with this kind of activity.

The online misconduct of jurors seems to be categorized to four general areas -

1. Publishing or distributing information about a trial, e.g., tweeting or posting updates on a social media site.
2. Uncovering information about the case by searching the Internet, entering social networking sites or visiting virtual crime scenes.
3. Contacting parties, witnesses, lawyers or judges via social networking for example.
4. Discussing or deliberating the merits of the litigation prematurely or inviting outside opinions.

Stetin gives current examples of all four. He poses this question -"The revolutions in technology, especially social media, invite the question of how litigants can hope to find a jury of impartial strangers in a world where everyone is connected?"

Links to news reports, cases, and legal articles make this a good place to start research on the issue of juror conduct in a digital age.

Readers of this blog may recall a recent post that discussed the issue of how evolving technology can affect the role of jury, counsel, and court when faced with certain kinds of evidence. It seems increasingly clear that social media and the Internet will necessarily affect the way in which jurors are to be instructed about their duties.

Law Professors Sue for Defamation - Win $5+ Million

The case of Rudovsky v. West has resulted in a stunning victory for the plaintiffs. In 2009, Professor David Rudovsky of the University of Pennsylvania Law School and Professor Leonard Sosnov of Widener Law School sued West for publishing a poorly researched 'sham' pocket part to a Pennsylvania criminal law treatise they had written. Even though it had been prepared by the West staff, the pocket part featured the names of Rudovsky and Sosnov. Late last week the jury in the case found West liable for defamation and returned a verdict for $90,000 in compensatory damages and $2.5 million in punitive damages for each professor. You can find the verdict form here on Google Docs.

The treatise, Pennsylvania Criminal Procedure: Law, Commentary and Forms has been in print since 1991 and is a part of the West Pennsylvania Practice Series - quite similar to the Connecticut Practice Series. In 2008 Rudovsky and Sosnov wanted to revise and republish the 2001 edition. You can read the Declaration of David Rudovsky here from Justia Dockets. You can review the full Complaint here. Each new pocket part had, for years, included citations to 100 - 150 new cases, code sections, rules and, of course, expert commentary. West resisted the preparation of a revised edition and, without the participation of the professors, indeed, without their knowledge, published a new pocket part that did not contain the numerous changes that had taken place in Pennsylvania law since the publication of the last pocket part. According to West, there is a contractual provision that allows them to publish an update without changing the names of the authors. Regardless, it seems clear that the jury adopted the plaintiff's argument that West's actions constituted defamation per se.

Possibly the best overall review of the litigation is by Erika Wayne here on the Legal Research Plus blog. A good explication of all of West's mistakes during the litigation is here on the Law Librarian Blog. There is another concise review here on Jonathan Turley's blog, Res ipsa loquitor. Turley's post also addresses the probability that the verdict will be reduced.

A pre-verdict review of the case is here on the online version of the ABA Journal. The National Law Journal published an insightful article early on and you can find it here. For other comments see posts here on the Legal Skills Prof Blog, and here on 3 Geeks and a Blog, both of which helped develop the story and provided links to the relevant documents.

Although, as Turley points out, the verdict will almost certainly be reduced this will be a clear opportunity for the Court of Appeals to comment on what many consider to be West's hubris and greed

Legal Travails of Superheros and Supervillians

Here's a super-duper new blog to add to your RSS reader: Law and the Multiverse - Superheros, Supervillians and the Law. Here's the description of the blog by the originators:

"If there’s one thing comic book nerds like doing it’s over-thinking the smallest details. Here we turn our attention to the hypothetical legal ramifications of comic book tropes, characters, and powers. Just a few examples: Are mutants a protected class? Who foots the bill when a hero damages property while fighting a villain? What happens legally when a character comes back from the dead?"

This is a new blog but some of the universe-shattering topics discussed so far include -

Supervillians and Insurance: Who's Gonna Pay for That? - Is it an insurable risk when the Joker blows up half of Gotham City?

RICO and the Legion of Doom - Acting in concert to destroy the universe may very well subject the individual members of a group of supervillians to federal prosection.

Is Batman a State Actor? - Does Batman's close working relationship with Commissioner Gordon make him a state actor subject to constitutional guarantees and protections?

Still not convinced? Here's a review on Lowering the Bar (the blog of legal humor) and for the more serious minded (sort of) the Volokh Conspiracy. And, you'll like the interview with the originators of the blog here at the NY Times Arts Beat section. Here's the take from Above the Law. They like it(?).