Debt and Disaster

Anyone who has observed the legal job market over the last few years knows that the years since 2010 have been tough times for new law school graduates.  The legal profession has shrunk, and the number of high-dollar salaries for newbie lawyers has declined substantially.  But even as this was happening, the number of law schools, the applications to those schools, and the number of graduates churned out by those schools all increased up until 2010, when the numbers (at least for new law school admissions test takers) dropped precipitously, though they appear to be leveling off, since.  One thing is clear, and that is many of the best and brightest college students are now avoiding law school.

So what’s behind the numbers up until 2010?  According to Anna Alaburda, whose case went to trial this week in California, it’s fraud.  Alaburda alleges that Thomas Jefferson School of Law in San Diego, where she received her law degree in 2008, misrepresented its success in placing students in the legal profession post-graduation.  It’s no secret that law school is expensive, and Alaburda’s complaint states that the average student indebtedness for Jefferson graduates is $135,000, while their bar passage rate is under 50 per cent.  As for herself, Alaburda started with $150,000 in student debt (now up to $170,000) and complains that she still has no prospects of obtaining a full-time position as an attorney, despite graduating from Jefferson with honors.

The allegations make for some fairly damning reading.  According to Alaburda’s complaint, Jefferson deliberately misrepresented the number of its graduates holding full-time, law-related positions nine months after graduation in order to increase its position in annual rankings published by U. S. News & World Report. Again, according to the complaint, Jefferson represented a 92.1 per cent employment rate for graduates in 2009-2010, but Alaburda alleges that the school included graduates involuntarily working in part-time or non law-related positions to make the picture look rosier than it actually is.  Indeed, with as low a bar passage rate as indicated by the complaint, it seems unlikely any law school could obtain the sort of employment figures Jefferson claimed.

The big-firm, big-money associate position has long been the brass ring for many law students, and law schools tend to cater to that kind of thinking.  Indeed, one criticism I had of my own law school education was that it seemed to assume that every one of us was going to work for a national law firm on graduation.  (For myself, having worked for a large law firm before law school, I was pretty sure that I never wanted to see the inside of one ever again.)  But law schools don’t promise a legal job, just a legal education.  The old saw is that they teach you to think like a lawyer, not that they teach you the law, which changes every few years, anyway.

So, while I have tremendous sympathy for someone like Ms. Alaburda, since I first heard of her case several years ago, I have a hard time seeing it getting any traction.  A lot of judges have agreed. Several similar cases have been brought across the country, many, including Ms. Alaburda’s, as putative class actions. Only in California, where the consumer laws are strong, and the legal culture much more consumer-friendly, has any of these cases made it to trial and then only for purposes of Ms. Alaburda’s own claim, itself, class certification having been denied.

The U. S. News listing for Thomas Jefferson indicates that the typical graduate (or at least, about 82% of them) graduate with nearly $130,000 in student debt. Meanwhile, the average private sector starting salary for its graduates is $50,000 per year. Is that sufficient incentive to take on in the neighborhood of $45,000 per year full-time tuition? Seems unlikely.  Law schools clearly shouldn’t be allowed to misrepresent their success in post-graduate placement, but prospective students need to take a hard look at the realities of the legal market before buying into the spin.  Turn off the legal dramas and go down to the courthouse and talk to a few real lawyers.  I suspect they’ll tell you a lot more about your prospects than the U.S. News ever could.