Many Lawyers Lack Practical Education

May 9, 2011

(Special) ---If your lawyer has let you down, if he or she has flubbed your case, it may be because most law schools never offer the practical courses lawyers’ need to succeed.

And that’s not exactly an oversight, either. “In line with aggrandizing (law school) faculty desires, the accreditation rules of the American Bar Assn.(ABA) do not require sufficient, or sometimes, any, instruction in the competencies and skills needed by practicing lawyers,” two critics of legal education charge in a new book.

Unlike the professions of medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, psychology, teaching, and even veterinary medicine, the ABA steadfastly refuses to put the focus on teaching law students what they need to know, write Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover(MSL) and Kurt Olson, an assistant professor of law there. Medical schools, for example, require that at least one-third of a student’s study for the MD degree be in practical skills.

“Law deans and law professors have for scores of years been notorious for not liking and for demeaning the actual practice of law, for having little experience with it and therefore little knowledge of the required skills,” Velvel and Olson write in “The Gathering Peasants’ Revolt in American Legal Education”(Doukathsan).

“Therefore, the ABA’s accreditation standards, basically drawn by and drawn entirely for the professoriate, had no requirement that students be taught needed professional skills such as how to conduct pretrial proceedings and trials, how to draft various kinds of legal papers, etc.,” the co-authors say.

Instead, ABA --- the principal accreditor of some 200 law schools---focuses on teaching inputs that are largely about the professors, not the students. Such rules include “limiting hours of teaching, limiting overall workloads, demanding large, full-time faculties via the method of computing the student/faculty ratio and a requirement that most of a student’s hours be taught by full-timers, requiring tenure and sabbaticals, requiring plush facilities and large libraries,” Velvel and Olson write.

By contrast, a growing number of law schools, such as MSL, have revolted against ABA standards and are teaching law students practical competencies such as:

# The ability to write trial court memoranda, motions and appellate briefs, motions, and to draft discovery documents, including interrogatories.

# The ability to speak articulately whether in courtrooms or at hearings and to effectively argue motions in the court room.

# The ability to interview clients, to be sensitive to their needs and desires, and to ferret out facts relevant to their cases.

# The ability to analyze problems and to envision courses of action in response to them.

# The ability to arbitrate and mediate cases and to bring into play professional attributes such as civility, politeness, and promptness.

# How to pass the bar exam, courses the ABA once banned but now grudgingly allows to be taught, although not for credit.

“The ABA accreditors, of course, do not wish to get anywhere near such a list of competencies needed in practice,” Velvel and Olson write, as they would “change the nature of legal education from the overwhelmingly theoretical and abstract character favored by the academics who predominate in legal education and accreditation, to a course of study far better balanced between theory and practice. In so doing, they would cause the theoretically oriented legal academics to lose the cushy life they have built for themselves.”

There is growing sentiment in the legal profession for change. Brian Tamanaha, the Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo Professor of Law at St. John's University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University for 2007-08, wrote:

“The accreditation process is justified as the means to insure a quality legal education so that the public will be served by competent lawyers. Oddly, in the very period in which law schools were being instructed to boost their professors' pay (to attract highly qualified professors)and to cut their teaching hours (so they could do more academic research, which would presumably enhance their knowledge and teaching), the American Bar Association also produced the MacCrate Report, arguing that law schools were doing a poor job of training lawyers. The reason for this failure: law professors were occupied with academic matters while neglecting practical legal training for their students.”

Tamanaha advocated, "Money now allocated to scholarship and research leaves would instead go to clinics and other practice training; professors would teach 15 hours or more a week; faculty would be hired for the desire and ability to train lawyers, not for scholarship; more law schools would look like Massachusetts School of Law (which the ABA has mightily resisted). Schools built around this alternative model would produce capable lawyers at a much lower tuition, which would be good for the students and good for society."

The Massachusetts School of Law was founded in 1988 to provide a practicable, quality, affordable education to minorities, immigrants, and students from low- and middle-income households who might not otherwise be able to enter the legal profession.#

NEEDLESS ABA REQUIREMENTS
DRIVING UP LAW SCHOOL COSTS

(Second of five articles on Legal Education in America)

(Special) ---By requiring law schools to hire more full-time professors and add new buildings, the American Bar Association(ABA) is driving up the cost of a legal education to unprecedented levels, two legal education reformers say.

Tuitions at some ABA-accredited law schools have breached the $40,000 per year mark, forcing many students to assume debts that will take years to pay off.

The matter is so dire that university presidents “describe a situation where the ABA would…threaten…disaccreditation of the law school if they would not play ball,” write Lawrence Velvel and Kurt Olson in their new book “The Gathering Peasants’ Revolt In American Legal Education”(Doukathsan). Velvel is cofounder and dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover(MSL) and Olson is an assistant professor of law at the school.

“Disaccreditation would mean that the law school’s graduates would not be able to sit for the bar, and the school thus could not continue to exist,” they write. They quote Kenneth Pye, formerly acting president of Duke University as saying the ABA’s conduct “sometimes makes it appear to (university) presidents more like the Brotherhood of Railway Engineers than an accrediting organization.” Other critics have bluntly described the ABA as a “guild” to enrich law school professors.

Velvel and Olson charge the ABA has drastically lowered the permissible student-to-full-time faculty ratio, “thus forcing schools to double or triple the number of expensive full time faculty members. At the same time, the ABA’s method of calculating the ratio would not permit even the fractional counting of adjunct faculty members, thus reducing an institution’s ability to reduce costs by using far less expensive part-time faculty members, even judges and expert practitioners.”

In a secret student-to-faculty standard that is far more stringent than the written one known to the public, Velvel and Olson write, the ABA has pressured deans to adopt a 15 to 1 or even a 12 to 1 student-to-faculty ratio.

“The (ABA) Standards also forbade professors from doing administrative work, thus forcing schools to hire numerous non-faculty deans, admissions personnel, recruiting personnel, loan personnel, and placement personnel,” the co-authors say.

Velvel and Olson go on to write, “The ABA also forced almost all schools to build brand new physical facilities or to renovate existing facilities, all costing millions of dollars…”(that) “drove tuitions to the astronomical levels they have reached today.”

The authors say big name law schools like Harvard, Yale, Chicago and Columbia, etc., “could have broken up the ABA’s stranglehold on legal education” but have “almost always” gone along because ABA’s system “was increasing law school salaries generally, reducing faculty workloads, increasing the length of vacation time and sabbaticals, and generally pampering the professoriate.”

Deans of less established law schools are “frightened” to criticize the ABA system as “they feared the ABA would retaliate by taking steps to disaccredit their schools,” Velvel and Olson write.

Dean Velvel, a cofounder of MSL, has been honored for his work in legal education reform by The National Law Journal and cited as one of the leading reformers in the field by National Jurist magazine. MSL was founded to provide a quality legal education to minority students and those from low-income households who could not otherwise afford a legal education. Its tuition is about half that charged by typical New England law schools. #

HOW MINORITIES, POOR, ARE KEPT OUT OF LAW SCHOOL

(Third of five articles on Legal Education in America)
(Special) --If law school enrollment today is made up largely of the white and the wealthy, it is because the American Bar Association, the chief accreditor of the nation’s law schools, has designed the rules that produce this outcome. It’s not that minorities and students from low-income households don’t want to attend law school; it’s that they are being priced out by soaring tuition costs, up 267 percent since 1990, and shut out by the culturally biased Law School Admissions Test(LSAT).

Only 3.9% of the nation’s one million lawyers are Black, only 3.3% are Hispanic, and whites of modest means likely are underrepresented as well. How many families can afford to pay $100,000 to $150,000 to put a child through three years of law school? At present, law school enrollment is just 6.6% for African-Americans and 5.7% for Hispanics.

The ABA is aware of this. Five years ago, then-president William Paul decried the alarming lack of “minority representation in the legal profession.” And the ABA’s own Commission on Racial and Ethnic Diversity in the Legal Profession has since reaffirmed his view. New York Law School professor Elizabeth Chambliss, author of the Commission’s report, described law as “one of the least racially integrated professions in the United States ...” She called the LSAT “one of the main barriers to increasing diversity among law students.” Yet ABA insists that the 200 law schools it accredits administer the LSAT, and for ABA schools it often is the main determinant of admission and is always one of the two main determinants.

What the ABA continues to be about is lining the pockets of law professors, some of whom earn as much as $300,000 or more a year, often for teaching very few hours. Renowned Federal Judge Richard Posner thinks the ABA conducts itself like a “medieval guild” in behalf of its members. George Leef, vice president for research at The John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, Raleigh, N.C., believes the ABA’s aim is to keep legal fees high by restricting the overall number of attorneys. Leef, a Juris Doctor from Duke University School of Law, says that because of the “connivance” between state bodies and the American Bar Association, “law school costs much more than it needs to. If we allowed a free market in legal education, the cost of preparing for a legal career would fall dramatically.” Leef adds, “The ABA’s accrediting body, the Council of the Section of Legal Education, has established standards that are designed to keep law school very costly and very restrictive.”

As President Saul Levmore and Vice President David Van Zandt of the American Law Deans Association (ALDA) stated: “The ABA continues to impose requirements on the law schools it accredits that are not only extraneous to the process of assuring the quality of legal education, but also that improperly intrude on institutional autonomy in seeking to dictate terms and conditions of employment.” Levmore is dean of the University of Chicago Law School. Van Zandt is dean of Northwestern University Law School.

ALDA’s “improperly intrude” depiction is an understatement. In 1995, the Justice Department formally charged the ABA with fixing law professors’ salaries, among other Sherman Anti-Trust Act violations. Justice asserted the ABA acted to further “the self-interest of professors instead of improving education.” In 1996 the ABA entered into a consent judgment agreeing to reform its practices and to stop dictating a number of dubious, costly and illegal regulations to schools. Yet, in 2006, the Justice Department charged the ABA with violating provisions of the decree and called for it to take remedial action as well as to pay Justice $185,000 for its enforcement troubles.

The ABA shackles law school deans by imposing accreditation rules on them that focus on “inputs” --- the ABA’s idea of the kind of plant, policy, and personnel a law school should have. These rules do not focus on what students learn or if they are learning what they need to know to practice law, i.e., the “outcomes.” The ABA input rules demand hiring of very large and expensive full-time faculty with light teaching loads; they place de facto limits on hiring of less expensive adjunct professors from the ranks of expert lawyers and judges who could contribute their expertise; they demand the building of $70- and $80 million palaces; they require stocking of large, multi-million dollar hard copy libraries even though nearly all needed legal materials may be found on line or obtained on CD-ROMs; and they require applicants to post high LSAT scores.
If many of the ABA’s costly rules are in writing, the ABA has other, unwritten policies that make the published rules even more daunting. The existence of these subterranean codes was brought to light in 2006 at a Federal Department of Education hearing in Washington on renewing for five years the ABA’s federally-approved accreditation status. A classic example of the ABA’s secret rules is that, although ABA guidelines do not specify that the LSAT is obligatory, in practice the ABA secretly requires law schools to use the test and has never accredited a law school that did not use it. By discouraging law schools from accepting applicants who score below a particular score, the ABA screens out large numbers of low-income whites, Hispanics, and African-Americans -- graduates of poorer quality high schools and colleges than those attended by the children of the rich.

Writing in the Journal of Legal Education, Emory law professor George B. Shepherd notes if the ABA lowered its LSAT score accreditation cutoff just slightly, it “would allow the creation of more than 40 new 600-student majority-black law schools. Eliminating the LSAT cutoff altogether would permit more than 80, an average of one or two per state.” “The ABA’s accreditation standards and the way the ABA applies them have had the same impact on blacks as (former Governor) George Wallace standing with policemen at the school house door in Alabama , blocking blacks from entering,” he wrote.

No other professional accrediting body uses input rules as does ABA: not in medicine, not in dentistry, nowhere. But in the world of legal education, a law school that finds better, less expensive ways to teach effectively is not allowed to exist in almost any state. The private initiative of such schools is deliberately choked off by the controlling ABA accreditors, each a hand-picked employee of or friend to the ABA schools toeing the ABA line. Even many state-supported law schools must charge $15,000 to $30,000 or more in tuition to survive. The ABA’s input-based policies begun in the 1970s are driving law school tuition and fees far ahead of inflation. During the 1990s, tuition, room and board at undergraduate institutions increased by 58%, but comparable law school costs jumped 88%. Today, more law schools are punching through the $40,000 tuition barrier and the $50,000-a-year law school appears only a few years away.
Among the big winners of the ABA accreditation game have been ABA officials themselves. The ABA in the past has encouraged fledgling law schools seeking its imprimatur to hire ABA officials, or current accrediting committee members, as deans at handsome salaries. In 1994, at Texas Wesleyan University School of Law, Ft. Worth, only 53% of graduates passed the Texas bar on their first attempt compared with 74% for the state overall. The ABA said the school suffered from a number of gross deficiencies. Happily for TW, these supposedly vanished less than a month after the school hired as dean Frank Walwer from the ABA’s Accreditation Committee. A mere 27 days after he was hired the law school got ABA accreditation! What’s more, although the ABA’s written policy forbids a school to delay students’ graduation until after it is accredited, the ABA ignored this requirement for Dean Walwer to allow TW’s graduates to take the Texas bar.

Writing in the Chicago Tribune of February 15, 2004, Ameet Sachdev, reported, “The coziness between the ABA and law schools, though, troubles some educators and others involved in accreditation. They question whether such hiring is at odds with the ABA’s ethics policy and contend such arrangements raise the appearance of a conflict of interest.” He quoted Gary Palm, a Chicago lawyer who had served on the ABA’s governing body overseeing accreditation as saying, “I think it’s wrong that people in leadership in the accreditation process end up back at law schools doing business before the accreditation council . . . .”

The ABA has prevailed upon Supreme Courts and Legislatures in 45 states to keep students from non-ABA law schools even from taking State bar exams. This restraint of trade funnels students into schools belonging to the ABA guild. Graduates of non-ABA law schools are denied even the opportunity to sit for a bar exam at all in most states or are not permitted take a state’s bar exam until three, five or ten years of practice elsewhere (in the minority of states that do let them take bar exams ultimately). One wonders how the United States ever produced lawyers such as Abraham Lincoln and Clarence Darrow in the years prior to 1921, before the ABA undertook its campaign to “upgrade” the profession.

There are several impartial educational accrediting bodies that can also bestow accreditation on law schools. One of these, the New England Association of Schools & Colleges, accredits Massachusetts School of Law at Andover (MSL). With no vested interest in enriching law school professors, such bodies have, in fact, established rational standards applicable to law schools, focusing on the quality of the education. More of these general bodies would flourish except that they have been discouraged because the Federal Department of Education has made ABA its sole federally-recognized, accreditor. This controversial arrangement, though, may change since, at its December, 2006, review, DOE rejected the ABA’s request for a five-year renewal of recognition, granting the ABA just 18 months to get its act together owing to DOE’s dissatisfaction with the ABA’s performance.

The ABA likes to say only schools it accredits can provide a quality education, yet student teams from MSL swept all four top spots in the Black Law Students Association Northeast Regional trial competition last February, finishing ahead of prominent schools such as Harvard University Law School, St. John’s University Law School and Syracuse University School of Law, and MSL then placed third nationally in the finals at Detroit. MSL, which was in the eastern region of the American Constitutional Society’s appellate competition in Washington, had the highest scoring brief of 31 teams in the east region, and its brief was scored higher than the best western region brief, submitted by a team from the prominent University of Michigan Law School. Staffed only by a small core of full-time professors and relying largely on adjunct instructor-lawyers that teach in their specialties as well as sitting judges, MSL can educate a student for a tuition of $14,490, a sum less than half of what ABA-accredited New England law schools charge.

The key to providing a quality legal education that is affordable to ordinary citizens is to once again allow the sunlight of free market competition to shine through law school windows. Schools must be allowed to take steps to reduce their costs and focus on student performance outcomes. Deans must be allowed the autonomy to run their own schools without ABA meddling. The Department of Education must drop the ABA as the federally approved national accreditor of law schools and make room for objective educational bodies. State Supreme Courts must open bar examinations to all applicants. And if the courts do not allow competition, State representatives need to legislate to make the courts respect free market principles. Again, to quote Shepherd, “A law school that is good enough to receive accreditation in one state should be good enough in all states.”

The ABA claims that unless law schools follow its pricey rules, students won’t get a good education. That’s bunk. Price and quality are not synonymous, as shown by medical care. The ABA has misused the absolute power granted it by our government and has beguiled state supreme courts to accept its dictates in determining who can sit for the bar. It deliberately causes to remain largely unserved by the nation’s law schools people from working-class backgrounds, immigrants, and minorities. America urgently needs new law schools that will serve the American working-class and minorities so that their voice may be heard. Nothing less than the substance of our democracy is at stake.
#

SHOULD LAW SCHOOLS FOLLOW THE MEDICAL SCHOOL TEACHING MODEL?

(Fourth of five articles on Legal Education in America)

(Special) ---The outstanding record compiled by the trial advocacy teams of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover(MSLAW) in recent years is directly attributable to the school's innovative teaching methods, the team's coaches believe. Otherwise, how explain the law school's moot court victories over so many formidable law school opponents, including the best of the Ivy League?

Founded in 1988, the law school has rejected the teaching methods of the American Bar Association(ABA) to instead stress courses that prepare graduates to function in the everyday world of law---and that seems to be paying off in advocacy competitions. The primary innovative teaching approach used by the law school is one long used successfully by medical schools nationally but ignored by law school educators. “The medical school model is 'see one, do one, teach one,'” says Coyne, associate dean of MSLAW and director of the trial advocacy program. “Students see a surgery, do a surgery, and teach a surgery. Our students don't just read about the law.”

In 2008, MSLAW swept all four top places in the Thurgood Marshall Mock Trial Northeast Regional competition at Newark. “I do not know of any other law school that has ever done that,” says Coyne. (In the finals, MSLAW teams faced other MSLAW teams.) This past March, MSLAW won the New England competition of the American Association of Justice, (formerly the American Trial Lawyers Assn.), considered the most prestigious of the competitions. In the last five years in the Thurgood Marshall competition, MSLAW teams have finished nationally in third place three times, second place twice, and first place once. There are more than 200 law schools in the country.
Coyne attributes the success of MSLAW's students to using teaching techniques borrowed from U.S. medical schools, to law professors who spend more time in the classroom with students than in working on their own scholarly research, to early advocacy training that continues throughout the academic year, and also to hard work.

“We start advocacy training the first day students arrive, preparing them for the time they will be advocates in trial procedures in the court room or advocates for their clients in the conference room,” Coyne says. To begin with, he explains, “We devote more time to actually teaching students than at a law school where professors spend a lot of time doing scholarly research that no one else is ever going to read. There's no doubt about it: our professors are in the classroom more and they teach more because we are a student-centered institution.”

In 1995, the Justice Department formally charged the ABA with fixing law professors’ salaries, among other Sherman Anti-Trust Act violations. Justice asserted the ABA acted to further “the self-interest of professors instead of improving education.” In 1996 the ABA entered into a consent judgment agreeing to reform its practices and to stop dictating a number of dubious, costly and illegal regulations to schools. Yet, in 2006, the Justice Department charged the ABA with violating provisions of the decree and called for it to take remedial action as well as to pay Justice $185,000 for its enforcement troubles.

Velvel points out that MSLAW relies on a small core of full-time professors supported by many lawyers who teach in their specialties and judges who bring the years of their experience on the bench into the classroom. Relying on adjunct professors contrasted to full-time research professors saves the law school money and enables it to reduce tuition to about half that of the typical New England law school.

“Our theory is that students need to do more than understand the law: they need to be able to explain it. When you have the ability to teach others what the law is, that's when you've brought the mastery of law to the next level,” Coyne adds. “When we graduate students they haven't learned just what the book says but have spent two years mastering advocacy so they will be effective advocates of their position.”

The Massachusetts School of Law was founded to provide a quality, affordable education to students from minority, immigrant, and low-income households who otherwise would be unable to enter the legal profession. The Wall Street Journal referred to MSLAW as "The Little Law School That Could" and renowned jurisprudence scholar Brian Tamanaha at Princeton University has called upon the nation's law schools to shift their teaching approach from the 'academic' or research model to one designed to train "good lawyers," citing MSLAW's example. MSLAW's dean Velvel has been cited by The National Jurist magazine as "one of the most influential people in legal education over the past 15 years" and The National Law Journal has honored Velvel for his contributions to law school education reform. Tamanaha, the Chief Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo Professor of Law at St. John's University and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University for 2007-08, wrote:

“The accreditation process is justified as the means to insure a quality legal education so that the public will be served by competent lawyers. Oddly, in the very period in which law schools were being instructed to boost their professors' pay (to attract highly qualified professors)and to cut their teaching hours (so they could do more academic research, which would presumably enhance their knowledge and teaching), the American Bar Association also produced the MacCrate Report, arguing that law schools were doing a poor job of training lawyers. The reason for this failure: law professors were occupied with academic matters while neglecting practical legal training for their students.” Tamanaha advocated that "Money now allocated to scholarship and research leaves would instead go to clinics and other practice training; professors would teach 15 hours or more a week; faculty would be hired for the desire and ability to train lawyers, not for scholarship; more law schools would look like Massachusetts School of Law (which the ABA has mightily resisted). Schools built around this alternative model would produce capable lawyers at a much lower tuition, which would be good for the students and good for society."

“Law deans and law professors have for scores of years been notorious for not liking and for demeaning the actual practice of law, for having little experience with it and therefore little knowledge of the required skills,” Velvel and MSLAW professor Kurt Olson write in their book, “The Gathering Peasants’ Revolt in American Legal Education”(Doukathsan).

A growing number of law schools, following MSLAW's lead, are among those revolting against ABA standards and are teaching law students practical competencies such as:

# The ability to write trial court memoranda, motions and appellate briefs, motions, and to draft discovery documents, including interrogatories.

# The ability to speak articulately whether in courtrooms or at hearings and to effectively argue motions in the court room.

# The ability to interview clients, to be sensitive to their needs and desires, and to ferret out facts relevant to their cases.

# The ability to arbitrate and mediate cases and to bring into play professional attributes such as civility, politeness, and promptness.

“The ABA’s accreditation standards, basically drawn by and drawn entirely for the professoriate, had no requirement that students be taught needed professional skills (such as) how to conduct pretrial proceedings and trials, how to draft various kinds of legal papers, etc.,” the co-authors say. Instead, ABA --- the principal accreditor of law schools---focuses on teaching inputs that are largely about the professors, not the students. Such rules include “limiting hours of teaching, limiting overall workloads, demanding large, full-time faculties via the method of computing the student/faculty ratio and a requirement that most of a student’s hours be taught by full timers, requiring tenure and sabbaticals, requiring plush facilities and large libraries,” Velvel and Olson write.

But teaching methods are not the only reason for the success of MSLAW's advocacy teams. Coyne believes, “Our students have a greater work ethic than students at other schools. It came to us that a model for the students is 'play hard, work harder, fear nothing.' We believe there is no reason for anyone ever to outwork you. They may be smarter but if you have to work 22 hours a day to beat your opponents that's what you need to do. And that's what we do.”

“Our students are used to hard work. They have overcome a lot of challenges to get to this point and if they work extraordinarily hard they can beat the best students of the best law schools anywhere in the country. Our success in trial advocacy competitions is proof to us that our approach is capable of producing outstanding lawyers,” Coyne concludes. #

MANY YOUNG PERSONS BECOMING LAWYERS
OUT OF DESIRE TO HELP THE UNDERDOGS

(Last of five articles on Legal Education In America)

(Special) --- While the public may generally believe lawyers have chosen their profession “for the money,” in fact many pick law as a career from a burning desire to help the underdog.

“Just like Superman and Batman they come to the rescue of people in great distress, to battle evil, well-armed opponents in the name of justice and to aid widows and orphans against Wall Street villains and greedy finance companies,” says Michael Coyne, associate dean of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover(MSLAW).

In interviews he conducted with law students on the Comcast show “Educational Forum,” to air at 11 a.m. October 24th, 2010, Coyne says, “I want you to meet today's lawyers, the next generation of leaders, and learn why people turn to the law, how the face of law school has changed and how law schools must change to remain relevant.”

To begin with, Coyne interviewed Clynetta Neely, whose application was rejected by 27 different law schools as she repeatedly scored law on the entry-level Law School Admissions Test(LSAT), which supposedly screens out poor prospects at most of the nation's 200-plus law schools recognized by the American Bar Assn.(ABA). Even though Neely was working as a paralegal in immigration law at the Department of Justice, law school admissions officials would not credit her experience or prior excellent academic record.

When she applied at MSLAW, though, Neely said she was interviewed in person by an admissions person who was “more interested in how I had established myself as an adult since I graduated from undergrad, and by what I had done in the workforce. It was just enlightening to be able to get into a school where the LSAT was not a..factor.”

(Note: MSLAW does not choose to affiliate itself with the ABA. In fact, it was instrumental in inspiring a suit by the U.S. Department of Justice against ABA for attempting to dictate policies to law schools. ABA settled by signing a consent decree to stop such practices and paying a fine.)

Not only is Neely graduating from MSLAW with honors but she has been highly successful as a member of its trial advocacy teams, winning against schools such as Harvard and Syracuse. In the last five years in the Thurgood Marshall competition, for example, MSLAW teams have finished nationally in third place three times, second place twice, and first place once. “It's what's here and now that counts, it's not what a multiple choice test says you should have the ability to do,” Coyne said, “because you've won the Dean's Award for significant accomplishments and you've proven by a long shot that you're going to be just one terrific lawyer.”

Neely said the most important things she learned in law school were “tolerance for other people...from different backgrounds of life”; teamwork, because nobody in law school makes it alone; and to lead by example because “a great leader's a leader not because they put themselves out but because they make others greater.”

Albanian-born Daniel Terpollari said he grew up in a totalitarian society that imbued him with a desire for justice that led him to law school. While Americans were enjoying freedom of speech, he said, “we weren't able to speak, we weren't able to think, we weren't able to do anything that a free person should do. Some of our relatives were executed for speaking out by that horrible regime.”

“When I was 10 or 15 years old, I would think to myself and say, 'One day I will become an attorney...and fight injustice in the world, because unless you experience it you never know what freedom means, what freedom of speech is, and what great opportunities this country has to offer people,” Terpollari said. After completing law school, he says, “I'm still passionate, and I still love the legal profession and I'll be able to fight for people in the future.”

After arriving in the U.S., Daniel met his wife, Aurora, a foreign exchange student and they decided to go to law school together, which he described as “not a piece of cake” for a married couple, either. “You have to just keep plugging, keep on pushing, you have to work in law school as never before. And even though we had our hard times and our trials, we just kept talking to each other, put our heads down, and worked hard,” he said.

As immigrants, he said, “We have had to surpass all the challenges with a foreign language, and also the financial difficulties, and also other social and economic difficulties that everyone has but are more difficult for us being foreigners in America.” In the process of overcoming those challenges, however, Daniel said the dedication and motivation created in him a work ethic “that will help you in the future.”

Being bilingual, Daniel said, will equip him to help other Europeans who have settled in the U.S. but do not seek legal counsel as needed due to the language barrier. These immigrants, he says, “don't have friends, they don't have connections..and I know for sure that so many people suffer because of that.” He concluded that law school had made him “a different person” by enhancing his levels of confidence and knowledge and prepared him to fulfill his dream of helping people in need of a lawyer.

Daniel's wife, Aurora, added she believes that “everybody should go through law school because the knowledge you get is so broad and deep it makes you more confident going towards the future” and “what I learned for myself made me a stronger person.”

“Another graduating lawyer is one of the rare individuals who also possess a medical degree. Adam Beck told interviewer Coyne that he was inspired to attend by San Francisco Forty-Niners quarterback Steve Young, who got his law degree on the side and, in fact, had to be in class the day after he won the Super Bowl. Beck thought if Young could do it, he could do it as well. Asked how earning a law degree had helped him in his medical practice, Beck replied, “It's really forced me to look at both sides. Going in, I was (as an expert witness) always on the doctor's side, pro-doctor everything, and there really are two sides to every story. So I think I try to be as fair as possible.”

Beck says that he also learned to be more careful going over documents such as consent for surgery. “Before I started law school I wasn't able to even read a contract and make heads or tails of it. Now I can pick up almost anything and read it, and decipher it without calling somebody.” What's more, he added, he no longer fears lawyers as do a lot of doctors. Additionally, becoming a lawyer has reinforced his approach to treating patients. “In medicine we try not to direct the patient anywhere. We just let them speak and we're able to formulate a diagnosis. It's very similar to law in that way. We categorize in our brains where we want to go with a different set of symptoms so I think the two (professions) overlap in that way.”

The most significant lesson he learned in law school, Beck says, was “You really want to get cases over early. Nobody wins in a lawsuit. If there's a conflict, we try to negotiate or mediate it early. It's always better if you can talk things through upfront and communicate with the other side, and if you hear both sides of the issue hopefully you can get to a compromise quickly that saves a lot of time and money and stress on everybody.”

Amy Dimitriadis, one of the stars of MSLAW's trial advocacy teams, said the competitive experience taught her to “stand up in court and get your voice heard.” In most law schools, she said, students are just reading and briefing cases and writing memos. But in actual practice, it's the courtroom where you really practice law. “And it gave me a feel for what it's actually going to be like out there eventually when I get to it.” She goes on to say that “for me right now practicing law is about helping people when they need it the most without necessarily holding a badge or a scalpel...it's helping them when perhaps they are at their most desperate, when they need justice, when they need someone to help them when no one else can.” She said that law school made her even more determined to achieve her career goal of becoming a practicing lawyer.

Neil Judd, another advocacy team winner, recalled that he was “trembling tremendously” when he gave his opening statement in his first competition. But he told himself that the judges are “going to like me or aren't going to like me but at the end of the day, this is me. And I wish I knew that earlier in life.” Judd added that law school prepared him for those moments because it taught him, “Not everything is handed to you on a silver platter. You actually have to work for it, fight for it. And at the end of the day, you need to only be happy to yourself.” Today, he adds, “you can put anyone else at the other table next to me and I'm not afraid of them, no matter what school they say they're from, or whatever their background is. We practiced and prepared so much no one else could have done it more than us.”

Shane Rodriguez said he was inspired to attend law school from his childhood days watching Perry Mason on television. “But more than that, it was a way out of the inner city for me. It was a way for me to climb out of living in poverty and to help others climb out once I became an attorney.” Rodriquez, who is assistant chief of police at a public university, said he juggled both time-consuming efforts by “making sacrifices, by giving up a number of different things” so that one day he would pass the bar exam. Law school, he says, has helped him in his work as “one of the things it's really taught me is to have an open mind and to go into cases and people's particular situations with an open mind.” He explained that in law enforcement “it's very easy to rush to judgment when you're dealing with criminal defendants all the time...and to look at the circumstances behind a particular situation instead of just coming in with a very narrow focused view.”

The Massachusetts School of Law was founded in 1988 to provide a quality, affordable education to students from minority, immigrant, and low-income households who otherwise would be unable to enter the legal profession. A Wall Street Journal article referred to MSLAW as "The Little Law School That Could" and renowned jurisprudence scholar Brian Tamanaha at Princeton University has called upon the nation's law schools to shift their teaching approach from the 'academic' or research model to one designed to train "good lawyers," citing MSLAW's example. MSLAW's dean and cofounder, Lawrence Velvel, has been cited by as The National Jurist magazine as "one of the most influential people in legal education over the past 15 years" and The National Law Journal has honored Velvel for his contributions to law school reform. #

© Scoop Media