Good luck to everyone taking the bar exam over the next few days. Hopefully it will be a happy conclusion to a lot of hard work over the last 3+ years.
{ 0 comments }
While I will be standing right next to Above the Law when it comes time for the revolution that will start cutting down the number of law schools, I try to stay away from banging on individual schools. In a competitive, free market economy, new schools must come and innovate to push the industry forward. Without it, we are left with the current state of affairs: increasing costs for an education that seems increasingly irrelevant, protected by monopoly powers (ABA accreditation).
But sometimes a school just begs for it. So when Cooley Law School decides to purchase the naming rights to the former Oldsmobile Park, home of the class “A” Lansing Lugnuts, it deserves to be reviewed.
A Short Aside and Disclaimer
I’m not here to bang on Cooley students. I’m sure there are many bright students there. I’m sure they will produce lawyers who will go on to great careers. Every ranked industry or trade needs a “second chance” stop for people with talent who don’t have the traditional qualifications.
But that said, Cooley is a school that targets a specific demographic: people who want to go to law school but could not get in anywhere else. They use all the normal third-tier tactics for churning through students and tuition checks, including scholarships that are impossible to keep, high attrition rates, and blocking transfers.
Not to mention Cooley is the worse offender in an industry (law schools) that is ignoring the needs of one of its chief customers (the legal industry) and continuing to produce too many graduates.
So suffice to say that I’m somewhat suspect of anything Cooley does.
The most obvious criticism here is that Cooley has enough money to purchase some of the most expensive advertising there is during a down economy. Naming rights deals in minor league baseball vary wildly, but Cooley is investing at least $250,000 in the sponsorship. But one of the rules of thumb in sports marketing is that you spend three times as much as the sponsorship to leverage it. So a conservative estimate puts Cooley’s total commitment around $1 million.
More importantly though is that Cooley has no committed fully to simply exchanging as many J.D.s for cash as possible. A $1 million investment in faculty, facilities, scholarships (that students keep), or any number of academic areas could help Cooley attract better students, climb the rankings and produce better graduates.
Instead, Cooley has decided to invest that money to attract the law school equivalent of impulse buyers. Businesses buy sponsorship to stay near the top of the minds of a certain audience. When it comes time to make a buying decision, the hope is that the sponsor is thought of first. So when someone in the Midwest decides to take the LSAT on a whim, Cooley hopes to be the first school the student decides to apply to.
As a non-profit organization, Cooley’s goal is unclear. At least schools like Ave Maria have a clear political and/or religious mission. Cooley appears to simply educate 3,600 law students for the sake of educating 3,600 law students. Perhaps Cooley sees itself as the everyman’s law school. But that goal doesn’t require Cooley to try and get a J.D. into the hands of everybody.
{ 3 comments }
One thing that throws just how contrived law school can be into sharp relief is when a law student sees real lawyering in action. That’s what happened to Jansen:
Unlike the raging husband, the Moot Court clients aren’t standing next to me. There’s no sobbing wife, angry mother, or threat of jail time. The lack of stakes makes Moot Court feel like a very charmed exercise. And yes, I just said that.
I love that phrase: “a charmed exercise.” It describes a lot of the features of law school, where instead of providing you with skills, you are expected to pick them up as you “play lawyer” for three years.1 The lack of stakes is supposed to allow for the learning to just happen.
Except the stakes are high. You’ve invested three years of your time and a mountain of debt. That investment doesn’t pay off unless it turns into skills and opportunities. Skills and opportunities that only go to people who succeed right out of the gate.
Jansen has a great advice post for 0Ls up today, but his best piece of advice is the disclaimer at the end:
Again, I recommended that you run, so don’t batter me with nasty messages this fall about how I ruined your life because this blog convinced you that law school is all sunshine and lollipops. It is not. Run.
Not the running part. I’m not that pessimistic about law school. I love the “don’t say I didn’t warn you part.
Despite the sunshine and rainbows story a law school will tell you, stakes are high and tensions higher. It will be a stressful three years where what you do matters. Maybe it won’t matter in the grand scheme of things like saving whales or building a clinic in Haiti, but it will matter to you.
Law school isn’t a place you can float through and get rewards at the end. The “participation ribbons” of six-figure salaries are gone. If you want those rewards, you’re going to have to commit to them, take a risk, and work hard.
It’s not a war, but it’s certainly not a charmed exercise anymore. It’s definitely a live-fire exercise. Yes, it’s not the real thing, but it’s pretty close. Be careful, someone could get hurt out there.
- Or maybe more accurately you “play law professor.” ↩
{ 0 comments }
Adam Vella over at Legal Geekery has two informative posts about taking your textbooks from 1000-page back breaking behemoths to weightless, useful digital copies, then to books that read themselves.
Digitizing your textbooks is a process of cutting off the bindings and scanning the pages in. Adam’s tips are all dead on and highlight the one big point in this endeavor: you will be making some major investment. Either it will be a major investment of money to have Kinko’s or another copy shop do it, or to buy a scanner that does duplex scanning1 with an automatic document feeder. Or it will be a major investment in time to scan the books by hand on a cheaper flatbed scanner. Plus there’s the cost to the books, although that’s not a total loss:
Now that you have your book full digital, what is left over of your book may make you want to cry considering what you spent on it. Fear not, people WILL still buy them on Ebay as long as indicate that the book is unbound. You never know, maybe someone else is looking to digitize the book as well.
I would only do this if you are comfortable doing at least some of your reading on the computer. If you are going to print out every page, just have the books cut into smaller sections. That said, the benefits of being able to copy/paste material from the book into an outline are a big plus.
Once you have digital, PDF copies of the books, there are a number of text-to-speech solutions that allow you to create your own audiobooks. Adam focuses on two key features you’ll want in the software you use: the ability to export audio files and the ability to edit the speaking.
You can literally type in the mispronounced word into an editor and provide it with a phonetic equivalent. This is helpful for those various Latin terms that come up, or mapping the word ’section’ to the ‘§’ symbol or handling other commonly used abbreviations.
I would caution anyone who is ready to run out and declare your days of reading textbooks dead. Audio files of your textbooks are great, but think of how difficult it is to stay awake when your professor is droning on? This will likely be worse. Audio casebooks are a great supplement for people who want to do studying or review while running, working around the house, or while driving.
More than anything, Adam’s two posts show just how far behind textbook publishers are. I would have gladly paid the same price I did for my casebooks for digital copies if I had the freedom to copy and paste or create these audio files, or put the books on a smaller device. Hauling around a 5 lb. pile of dead paper is the past. It’s time to move on.
- Both sides ↩
{ 2 comments }
