Legal Profession
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Speaking of the legal job market…
…no indication yet that AI is affecting hiring by large law firms.
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Is a law degree “worth” the cost in terms of return-on-investment?
The answer is still “emphatically” yes. Lawprof Sloan Speck reviews some recent research on the topic; an excerpt: Among eighteen graduate degrees, law provided the third-highest return to earnings (59%) and cost-adjusted returns (41%). Only medicine and pharmacy provided higher returns. Similar patterns held for gains in net present earnings (41% for law) and internal rate of return (22%).…
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Even judges cannot figure out whether lawyers are incompetent or using AI!
Philosophy graduate student Charles Bakker sends me this interesting article from Canada about an “Ontario lawyer [who] filed seven completely fake quotations from court cases to a judge while arguing in court, but claims it was human error and not artificial intelligence tools behind it. A skeptical judge wonders if the lawyer’s claim makes things…
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The rule of law in America hangs on (UPDATED)
Not in international affairs, of course, where it never did,but domestically: the Trumipistas are abandoning their efforts to coerce law firms in violation of the 1st and 5th Amendments of the Constitution. Kudos to Perkins Coie, Wilmer Hale, Susman Godrey, and Jenner & Block. And eternal shame to Paul Weiss, the first to capitulate. UPDATE:…
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AI developer warns the AI jobs apocalypse is closer than we realize
Here; an excerpt: [O]n February 5th, two major AI labs released new models on the same day: GPT-5.3 Codex from OpenAI, and Opus 4.6 from Anthropic (the makers of Claude, one of the main competitors to ChatGPT). And something clicked. Not like a light switch… more like the moment you realize the water has been…
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Texas ousts the ABA from any role in lawyer admissions
The Texas Supreme Court will create its own list of accredited law schools whose graduates may practice in the state. Admittedly, Texas has not in recent years been at the forefront of human progress, but in this case, they may be the canary in the coal mine. Perhaps this will encourage the ABA’s Council on…
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AI grades law school exams about as well as human law professors
Here. ADDENDUM: I joked with Professor Schwarcz (Minnnesota), one of the co-authors, that soon AI would be writing exam answers, and AI grading them! He replied, sensibly, as follows: The key difference is that students SHOULD not use AI to craft their exam answers. The purpose of a law school exam is to show their…
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Supreme Court of Texas tentatively recommends removing the ABA’s authority to determine which law school graduates can sit for the Texas bar
Here. The ABA brought this on itself with its continued heavy-handed attempts at regulating law schools to pursue the goals of the special interests that have captured the Council on Legal Education.
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Law school applicants increase
Blog Emperor Caron collects the details from LSAC, but as he notes the Trump changes to federal student loans may change this situation significantly. If students cannot get federal loans for the total cost of three years of legal education, they will have to turn to the private loan market, which will no doubt price…
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ABA Council on Legal Education tables proposal on doubling experiential credit hours (for now)
That doesn't mean it's gone for good, but it's a hopeful development! My earlier post got rather a lot of traction on social media, including among practitioners, so one may hope the Council is rethinking its approach. And, of course, they must in light of the latest research.
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Experiential legal education: what does the evidence really show?
This new empirical study by my colleague (and Dean) Adam Chilton, Peter Joy (Wash U/St. Louis), and Kyle Rozema (Northwestern) could not be more timely. And if the ABA Council is actually responsive to evidence (that's a big "if") this would get them to change course. The paper uses data from ABA disclosures to study…
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ABA Council on Legal Education ignores critics, offers no substantive responses, and says “full speed ahead” with disrupting legal education at most of the nation’s law schools
I take it that's the upshot of this. The contempt for law schools and legal educators in this memo is palpable, given the devastating (and still unanswered) criticisms of the proposal to double experiential credit hours required for graduation. The two small concessions are: (1) the Council now recommends that 3 of the 12 required…
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How new restrictions on student loans affect prospective law students
Here, from the ABA Journal.
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If this report is correct, then everyone should boycott the Harvard Law Review
Is this for real? [Harvard Law Review] Editors complained that a piece had cited "A LOT of old white men," attempted to guess whether a scholar was "Latina," complained that an author was "not from an underrepresented background," and praised an article for citing "predominantly Black singers, rappers, and members of Twitter." Another article was…
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Law schools should oppose an ABA proposal to double the experiential learning credits from 6 to 12
The ABA is up to mischief again, which needs to be opposed for the sake of law students. Here's what I wrote the last time this awful idea was being floated: Law schools differ, in their student bodies, in their employment outcomes. Law students differ, in their personal and professional goals, and in their…
Sorry to keep beating a dead horse, but something just occurred to me that I haven’t seen anyone discuss. Why…