Lawyers Losing Money

Bryce Stucki has an an excellent piece about law schools using LLMs as a profit-taking vehicle of very dubious value, featuring a guest star you might know:

Since schools must now be transparent about employment numbers, many are seeking to maintain revenues by lowering their admissions standards and venturing further into what Paul Caron, a visiting professor at Pepperdine University calls the “unregulated wasteland” of the LLM. The ABA does not require schools to publish employment figures for LLMs and does not plan to. Law schools are still free to disseminate these numbers but the few that do, such as New York University and Northwestern, often release stats that are not up to ABA standards for JD outcomes. To critics, the lack of transparency is strikingly familiar to the opacity surrounding JD employment numbers pre-2012.

“The lack of data tells you something,” says Brian Tamanaha, a professor at Washington University in St. Louis and author of the book Failing Law Schools. “Certainly if they were paying off quite well, schools would be advertising that.” Despite the lack of data, critics are quick to question the value of an LLM—“LLM stands for Lawyer Losing Money,” says University of Colorado-Boulder professor and frequent law school critic Paul Campos. Even tax, often considered an exception to the bad-LLM rule, may be losing its luster in a weak job market flooded with more and more LLM grads every year. “It’s almost a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of attitude,” says Caron, an expert in tax law who has co-authored guides for selecting a LLM program in tax. “It’s a shame there’s not more information available.”