A Brief Open Letter to Those Students Enrolled at Indiana Tech Law School

Guys, a few days ago, I wrote a piece about how it’s not too late to really evaluate whether or not you are making the right decision.

I’ll cut to the chase.  You’re not making the right decision.

Attending an unaccredited law school is always a bad decision.  Paying $30,000 per year in tuition alone for an unaccredited JD – and one from a school that explicitly “makes no representation to any applicant that it will be approved by the American Bar Association prior to the graduation of any matriculating student” makes this bad decision even worse.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to pay off that kind of debt, which will be well above six figures – maybe even close to $200,000 – by the time all your living expenses, bar review courses, interest, books, and other fees and charges are added on?

And do you have any idea how impossible it will be to pay off coming from an unproven, probably-unaccredited law school?  Half of all law graduates today find no work as lawyers.  There are twice as many grads as there are jobs.  For schools at the bottom of the pile (which is where Indiana Tech is, and is likely to remain), the chances of ever working as a lawyer are dramatically reduced.  With your unaccredited Indiana Tech JD, you stand a very good chance of never working as an attorney, but paying the same price for your JD as those students who attend some fine law schools.

Indiana Tech wanted an enrolment of 100 students.  As of yesterday, there are 24.  On the one hand, this makes me very happy – at least 76 people are seeing sense and being smart about their futures.  But on the other hand, 24 clearly still don’t get it.  You are one of those 24, who rank as some of the most willfully-blind, poorly-informed individuals living in a snowflake dream world who just don’t see how you will regret this decision for the rest of your lives.  Some of the lower ABA-accredited law schools are begging for good applicants right now.  Is Indiana Tech really the best you could do?  Is law school even right for you?  The school is not even open yet, and it’s already giving Cooley a run for its money in terms of being a punch line.

The scam isn’t some pretend scheme that we’ve made up.  It’s not a group of disgruntled grads who failed because they were lazy.  It’s a legitimate problem, recognized by many people, clearly documented and based on facts.  And you 24 students are about to become its latest victims.

Why are you ignoring this?  Do you still not get it?  What parts of it do you still not understand, because maybe we need to be clearer?

I strongly urge you to read everything on this site, then on Inside the Law School Scam.  Then read Nando’s work at Third Tier Reality.  It’s all free, and it will take maybe a few hours to browse through in its entirety.  Then read Paul Campos’ book, Don’t Go To Law School (Unless), and then read my book, Con Law.

No, I’ll go one step further than that. If you are one of those 24 students who have enrolled at Indiana Tech Law School, I will send you a copy of my book for free.  You don’t even have to pay the $2.99 to download it from Amazon.  It’s on me.

Look, at this point in time, you’re a mere $400 out of pocket.  That’s the sum of the non-refundable deposits you’ve sent into Indiana Tech.  Please, for your own sake, walk away.  $400 lost now is far better than $200,000 lost over the next two decades, along with the countless opportunities you’ll miss out on because you’re in debt up to your eyeballs and branded as a lawyer.  Leave the $400 on the table, write a quick email to the admissions dean, and walk away.  Save law school for next year if you have to, and make sure you at least go to an accredited school.  Rolling the dice for a $200,000 bet on law school is risky even at the best ABA-accredited law schools in the nation.  Rolling the dice for a $200,000 bet on an unaccredited new law school where you will be “educated” by the most ridiculous bunch of academic misfits I’ve ever seen calling themselves a law faculty is insane.

You can do far better than this.

Anyone attending Indiana Tech this fall must want to be a lawyer really badly.  Or perhaps just wants to be a really bad lawyer.

Charles Cooper is the author, along with Thane Messinger, of “Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession)”, in addition to being the moderator at Nontradlaw.net and the author of “Later in Life Lawyers”.  He can be contacted at charlescooperauthor@gmail.com.

Back to the Future II

My vacation allowed me to think about my place in the legal profession, such as it is.  I have decided to relate a few personal experiences to approach from a different angle the topic of why solo practice is a bad career path for most new attorneys.

I have an unusual experience in that I have developed a solo practice and have turned a $25,000 profit after business expenses and taxes in one year.  Also, this current year is getting progressively better.  Because of a variety of factors with my constantly changing debt payments, I did not subtract student debt from this “profit” calculation—which is important to recognize.

Most people would see this first year out of law school as a pittance, which it is.  After seven years of post-high school education and a lot of stress, opportunity cost, and debt, I am able to make the same amount of “profit” that I made before law school.  And I am a rarity!  I know of no other recent graduate in this hyper-glutted city to earn this much money as a solo attorney out of law school.  So, I relate my experience as a warning that I am the so-called “success story” for hanging out a shingle.  This reality should scare you.  It scares me.

Keep in mind, I only have paying clients (no government work), and I only eat what I kill.  The optimist in me looks at my situation and sees a solid beginning for an upward climb.  I have been steadily increasing my monthly client retention and retainer intakes, finding bigger cases, and if all continues I am set to make as much as an entry-level mid-law slave by the end of this year.  Of course, keep in mind that I do not get a guaranteed salary—a dry month could be right around the corner.  I get no benefits.  I get no retirement plan.  The market could again shift, causing my various sources of clients and income to dry up. 

Yet, on the bright side, I have no boss, which is easily the biggest perk of solo practice.  I schedule my own cases, which means that I can take (theoretically) a vacation whenever I want to by scheduling my court dates accordingly.  Also, unlike most law school graduates, I actually enjoy day-to-day lawyering, including the legal research of weirdly specific issues (did the prosecutor check the correct box on the Order of Protection?).  My work on a few big-dollar cases has made me proud.  For example, I wrote an excellent motion for keeping an autistic young man off of the sex offender registry after he plead guilty to statutory rape and several other felonies.  I love appearing at court dates, litigating, writing motions, bargaining with over-worked prosecutors who want to lighten their caseloads if given the right incentives, and I shine during a trial.  I have not yet had a client’s case end with a conviction of the original charges.

However, I spend 20-30 hours a week hustling, advertising, making “connections,” and engaging in other unorthodox methods of finding work.  I expend this time and effort after I do all of the actual lawyering work, including client consults, court appearances, legal research, motion practice, investigation, etc.  My solo practice is really a hodgepodge of various sub-businesses and arrangements, which includes a sprinkle of per diem work and drafting motions for attorneys who have now seen my usefulness with specific tasks.  My channels for getting the big-dollar clients ($5K retainers or higher) are unorthodox.  If you do not love the work, as I do (so far), this type of makeshift law practice will bore, frustrate, intimidate, and depress the average new lawyer.  It will take as much time as a Biglaw career but without the financial rewards.

Some shills might argue that I am living proof that solo practice is a realistic option for new attorneys.  It is not!  I am an unusual bird for many reasons and not representative of the typical law school graduate.  I have seen a few other people try to solo “on the side” and to take $500 divorces or misdemeanors or whatever comes their way.  Or they take whatever “pro bono client” an older attorney dumps off on these naïve souls.  These younger attorneys get sucked dry before they even start.  Most new solos have a desperate doe-eyed look that attracts the bloodsuckers (including other attorneys who will take advantage of their desire to get “experience”). 

Other unusual factors of my situation: I have a husband with good business sense and disciplined accounting.  He brings in a part-time income as well.  And we have no kids!  This is extremely important—seriously.  If you plan on having kids, or if you already have kids, you cannot be a new solo—sorry!  It is financially impossible.  My husband and I barely can afford our nephew!  If you don’t believe me, just ask Charles Cooper.  He provided an excellent detailed account of how easy it was to fall from Biglaw to Mid-law to Rock Bottom Solo despite his excellent credentials, experience, and drive.  The responsibilities of family (and common sense) made it impossible for him to stick out the dubious solo-waiting-game for more than a few months. 

I think it is important to provide my story of currently surviving total destruction (so far) and of starting to find a place in The New Normal of the legal profession.  However, this path is not realistic for most people, and it is not what most people signed up for when they attended law school.  It was not what I expected.  No one ever taught us how to develop and operate a business, how to catch clients, how to get paid, how to network with quid pro quo arrangements, and how to perform very basic tasks in any single area of practice in our jurisdiction.  I did not even know how to do an arraignment or calendar call until I faked my way through it a few times.  I am guessing that most new lawyers or current law students have no desire to follow this stressful path, and some might complain that it is reckless and unethical to even try (although no more reckless than a client hiring most of the “grey-beards” who I see in court).

A new attorney going solo "by default" is not a viable backup plan for temporarily avoiding unemployment.  For most people, a half-assed last-minute solo practice just wastes more time and money on a losing proposition.  For a few of us, a carefully developed small-budget solo practice allows us to survive and to practice our favorite areas of law despite the daily struggles...Or perhaps it just extends the path to inevitable financial ruin.  I shall see, I suppose.

For a solo practice to succeed in both the short-term and the long-term, an attorney must make an all-consuming life commitment to his business.  And for the first few years, the "successful" solo will be only a step ahead of dumpster diving and homeless panhandling.  Not many young lawyers understand that after the three years of stressful law school exams followed by the more stressful bar exam, those people who did not get into Biglaw will earn a lower salary than before they went to law school, and yet they must suddenly throw a huge percentage of that income into the black hole of enormous debt.  A person must sacrifice everything, including one's first born children, to keep treading water.  And still, the few people who actually start to make any money will face the strong likelihood of eventual failure.

For the few lottery winners in the long-term solo practice game, the game I have chosen, a “success” story means steady earnings in the mid-five-figure range, something that most people could achieve outside of the legal profession and without student debt.  A few people may become JeffM and earn high-five and low-six figure wages…but the chances of that happening are as remote as the chances of a long-term Biglaw career. 

The Millon Dollar Law Degree?

A new study by Michael Simkovic and Frank McIntyre argues that a law degree gives the holder one million dollars more income than someone who only has a bachelor’s degree. Where can I even start? The usual suspects are defending the study, wanting the gravy train to keep running a little while longer. But, is the hypothesis of this study even remotely plausible? Let’s take a look.

Elis Mystal of Above The Law did a great job picking the study apart. Firstly, this study encompassed the period from 1996 to 2008. Hmmm, when exactly did the bottom fall out of the legal job market? Oh right: 2010. Second, the study did not factor in tuition costs. What??? The explanation from Simkovic is that including the tuition costs was too complicated because students all pay different prices. Well Michael, how about using an average? The data is not hard to find, because I found it in 20 seconds using Google. The omission of this data is like bragging you got a great deal on a 1985 Caprice Classic you bought for $600, while ignoring the fact that you will likely spend at least twice that amount in gas each year. Simkovic responded to Mystal and other critics with more fancy charts, but the major flaws in the study remain.

Mystal points the reader to some studies that are actually truthful. Simkovic displays the type of blatant intellectual dishonesty that law schools and their minions need to employ to keep their delusions intact. They use charts and “data” to delude readers into thinking all is well. They will tell you that over a lifetime, a law degree will pay off handsomely. This study fails to account for the fact that the outcomes in the legal profession are bimodally distributed, more so over the past five years. If 20% of grads are making $80,000 or more and another 20% are making less than $20,000, of course you can show an average of $60,000 in yearly earnings. But this method ignores the fact that the legal profession is a boom or bust proposition. Like the country at large, the middle class is rapidly disappearing.

Studies such as this one fall apart under scrutiny like law school lies do. But, the legal education industrial complex (to borrow a term from Con Law) requires more and more sacrifice on the part of young people so that law professors can have the highest paid part time job in America. But, as long as this type of drivel has outlets that will publicize it, naive young people will continue to fatten the pockets of Brian Leiter and his cohorts.

Abolish the Law Schools.

The New Republic recently featured a mini-symposium on "how to fix law school."  However, I wonder if the thing should be repaired at all, as opposed to being consigned to the junkyard. Why not consider the benefits of eliminating almost all non T13 law schools, and returning to some version of the apprenticeship model of legal education, appropriately modified and updated for these more complicated times? The apprenticeship model produced Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, and Justice Robert Jackson, so maybe there are few things to learn from the 19th/early 20th centuries.

The model would work something like this: Following a bar-review-like crash course to teach core doctrine fast, law students would undergo a two year long structured series of apprenticeships and clinics to train them to try a case, handle an appeal, and represent clients in a couple of practice areas of their choice. The supervisors would be successful local practitioners and, maybe, public sector agencies. Not six-figure-salaried pedagogues who haven't seen the inside of a courtroom in many years, if ever.  

 

There would be no more hide-the-ball classroom bullying sessions, the core of the prevailing method of legal education. This method sometimes goes by the name "Socratic," but is really just the practice of self-interested law professors, who are either lazy or do not know much about legal practice, of stretching out a few months worth of doctrine to fill three long years, thereby draining their students of three years of tuition.

 

The costs of an apprenticeship education would be considerably less than the current black hole of law school debt. There would be no need for 90 million dollar "state of the art" School of Law buildings, no need for $500,000+/yr. law school deans,  and no need for faculties filled with dozens of six-figure-salaried academics who, over and above their salaries and benefits and summer research stipends, expect to be subsidized to travel to luxury resorts in Florida and Hawaii for, uh, academic conferences. As well, there would be no need to hire a bunch of do-nothing career services employees. Moreover, for apprenticeship supervisors, tuition would merely be a supplement to their salaries or income, not the whole thing.

Because lawyers should, indeed, have highly developed critical thinking and writing skills, a prerequisite for admission to a law apprenticeship program could be a year or more of grad school, plus excellent grades in college, plus a high score on the LSAT or some other standardized test or tests designed to measure critical thinking skills.
 

The practicing bar, which would accredit apprenticeship programs, and monitor them for quality, would be unlikely to follow the example of law schools, and allow training programs to flood the market. Practitioners have an interest in keeping the number of bar admissions down, whereas law schools have little stake in the legal profession, and must extract enormous sums of money, mostly from students, just to meet expenses.

Students would complete their apprenticeship program with the confidence, experience, and local contacts to practice law and make money, even if, sometimes, not enough to sustain an entire legal career.  And, being practice-ready and far less indebted, recent grads would be able to take many more low bono cases, thereby actually advancing justice by meeting the unmet legal services needs of the working poor. Under the current system, by contrast, newly minted JDs are rarely practice-ready, and their hideously expensive legal educations are frequently a total loss, especially as document review dries up. 

 

Futhermore, I believe that nonlaw white collar employers would not despise a practical legal education, as they currently despise JDs. To many such employers, a JD represents a bundle of elite expectations, rather than a bundle of actual skills. It is a degree that screams: entitled asshole. By contrast, an apprenticeship law degree/license would signify skills rather than entitlement. Nobody despises skills even if they are not immediately useable.

What about legal scholarship? Much of that could be done over on the undergrad campus, in philosophy, history, sociology, poli-sci, or cultural studies departments, which is where many of the "Law and __" or "Critical-This-or-That-Theory" law professors belong. (Though, unfortunately, many such law school professors are just overpaid dilettantes, and would find the transition to scholarly rigor and peer review to be a trying experience). The best of the "Law and __" professors would land in the T13 law schools, which would continue to provide havens for scholars and valuable credentials for well-bred overachievers. There should also be foundations to subsidize select practicing lawyers of a scholarly bent to take one or two year leaves of absence from their jobs in order to write academic-style articles.

 

There are a handful of law professor critics who have truly honored their moral obligations to their students (and who are far braver and smarter than I am). I would hate to see these professors hurt in any way by the collapse of the system, and so I hope they succeed in reforming the current system from within somehow. I don't think that is possible anymore, and so my proposed solution is Ecrasez l'infame.

A Dose of Humor : Tenure

Oh, but in Law School, it's Critically Necessary(tm).  Just ask your local ScamDeans/LawProfs.  Defending Liberty, Pursuing Justice, and all that jazz.

Applications are still available!

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3059#comic

CounterPoint #1: Law School Tuition is too LOW

Previously, I told you, my dear readers, that I decided to become a law school advocate. (Is shill a bad word? Advocate sounds better). Today I become the number one advocate on the internet for legal education services and begin balancing the ridiculous rhetoric heretofore seen on this "site". I think it is time to have some counterpoints to respond to the lying scambloggers. You are too quick to blame law schools for your own failures, as if you were not responsible for your own life decisions. Ridiculous.

So my first point to make is that contrary to what the Toileteers claim, tuition at law school today is not too high. In fact, based on what you get, it is too low.

An article from 2011 about designer jeans discusses that a pair of jeans, made domestically in the USA, cannot be sold for under $200. Most jeans are imported, because as it turns out, 99% of jeans bought today are sold for under $50. There was a chart and explanation to justify the cost of domestically produced jeans. Many commenters did not like the fact that jeans could cost so much, when they are used to themselves paying much less. But that "is what it is", as dumb people (non-JD holders) like to say.

When it comes to domestically producing something, things just cost a lot in the United States. Despite the myth of the US not being socialized and having a "free market" (you get taxed for free, that is) it is similar to other western "socialist" countries in that we have mucho regulations, laws, agencies, state local and federal, environmental and employment issues to comply with, all of which cost money. True, universities & law schools are generally tax-exempt non-profits, but ignore that for now, it does not concern you. To wit, our schooling of you dear students costs lots of money. Your tuition goes right back to you. We need to operate physical plant buildings, heat, air conditioning; did you think that paid for itself? Duh. We have to pay our stonemasons and architects: see? Not to mention the landscaping costs—take a look at Lewis & Clark's foliage, which some students on "TLS" said makes it worth the tuition alone.  It just costs a lot to provide the services you students need; not want, but need. Tuition increases because demands made on us by you increase. It is an increase, but a student-driven one. Which of you did not demand that your professors get two-year sabbaticals? Or that they get guest houses overseeing some large body of water? It wasn't from the administration, I can guarantee that. We don't even like professors much, especially ones with blogs. Maybe a few deans got some bennies like that, but most of us are working hard at working for you. 

Perhaps I haven't persuaded you that paying the equivalent of 4-5 new Mercedes isn't worth getting a degree already held by over a million people in this country alone. So be it; but look at the other opportunities, JD Plus we call them. The best thing about law school is if you play nice, you can be an advocate, like me, and advocating a position is what we were (in theory) trained to do. Money isn't everything; a J.D. is as precious as a little cute fat baby. What price could you put on the head of a cute little newborn? Ridiculous; how dare you then try to price a doctoral education in law. 

GO TO LAW SCHOOL!

Strictly Platonic... Internship?

I have heard that it's tough finding internships, but advertising on the strictly platonic section of Craigslist?