Recently, some deans of California law schools whose students had a high failure rate on the bar exam accused the bar examiners of putting standards too high.
Increasingly, there are lawsuits by law students against their law schools alleging that they were lured into incurring debt for 3 years of law schools by misleading law school statistics regarding employment rates of their graduates.
Law schools, in answer to such lawsuits, claim that law students enter law schools with open eyes and should have known about their job market prospects - and so far, law schools have won such lawsuits.
Yet, such lawsuits, and the general market tendencies of legal jobs market, do not help future enrollment, and law schools try to invent tricks to wiggle out of regulation in order to survive financially.
One of such tricks is to accept GRE scores instead of LSAT scores for enrollment - even Harvard Law School is doing it now.
Another, just recently, was proposed by a law professor - for law schools to be OWNED by law firms.
While a law professor would have a vested interest for law schools (in their current format) to survive, the concept of ownership of law schools by law firms runs contrary to the declared purpose of attorney regulation in the first place (that keeps falling through the cracks) - protection of consumers, quality of legal services.
If standards of legal education are to be maintained in order to protect consumers, it is consumers and not providers who need to set those standards - that should be a given, but somehow this common sense concept is not implemented in attorney regulation across the country.
If legal education (required by regulators in order - ostensibly - to protect consumers of legal services) is OWNED by providers of legal services - it is apparent that it is not consumers' interests, but interests of providers that would be dictated and met by such legal education, and interests of a provider of services and of a consumer of such services may be vastly different, especially in terms of scope and price of services.
A provider has an interest to provide
- the narrowest scope of service,
- with the least innovation,
- at the highest price possible.
A consumer has the opposite interest on all three points above.
Of course, the law professor suggesting ownership of law schools by law firms argues actually that ownership by law firms (whose interest is to provide, once again,
- the narrowest scope of service,
- with the least innovation,
- at the highest price possible -
will actually enhance efficiency and innovation of legal education. Of course, that was a person on the brink of unemployment speaking.
To a point, I am glad that such a proposal was made - and, by a law professor, too, because it simply makes the current status quo of law schools, already heavily sponsored by law firms (which is as good as owned by them) more apparent.
It is very clear that having foxes guard chicken coops is not going to work - it will create problems, not resolve them.
In the U.S., heavy regulation of the market of legal services has already caused, and ever expands the "justice gap", where the majority of Americans cannot afford a lawyer, while not being able to hire who they want (like any individual they trust, on a power of attorney), to represent them in court or draft a legal document for them.
As I wrote before, such regulation by legal profession to allegedly protect the consumer of legal services makes no sense in the first place because of the concept of presumption of knowledge of the law BY ALL people in the U.S.
It does not make sense for the government:
- to presume that all people know all the law - in order to put them in jail; but
- to presume that the same people do not know the law - for purposes of hiring their own legal representatives, including for the defense in the same criminal actions where their knowledge of the law is presumed for purposes of criminal liability.
Of course, the author of the piece suggesting ownership of law schools by law firms is the Professor of the struggling Charlotte School of Law, a candidate for unemployment as soon as this coming August - because his law school stands to lose its state license to operate in North Carolina if it does not prove its financial stability by this coming August.
As the saying goes, desperate people do desperate things, but in this particular situation, the desperate thing suggested - to sell law schools out to law firms - strips the fig leaf of alleged consumer protection as the justification of why law school education in a certain way is even required for legal representatives of consumers, overriding consumers' free choice of their own providers to protect themselves the way they want it.
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