The law professor Noah Feldman writes in Bloomberg about the problem of marginally qualified law school graduates who fail to pass the bar exam and find themselves saddled with a huge amount of student loan debt. Since the financial crisis, there has been a cottage industry of articles and blog posts (and even more online comments to those pieces) arguing that if you can’t get into a top law school, you’re essentially throwing away your money by going to a less competitive one. Feldman rightly notes that it’s paternalistic to urge less competitive law schools not to admit people who, statistically, are less likely to succeed based on LSAT scores. As long as students have a clear-eyed sense of the risks involved, then a law school shouldn’t be telling an ambitious kid with a 148 LSAT score to try another career.

The problem, however, which I don’t think Feldman sufficiently addresses, is that many prospective law students in fact don’t have an accurate sense of the risks involved. You don’t have to be overly cynical to acknowledge that law schools have an incentive to make it seem as if their graduates have a bright future and will downplay these risks, so as to collect three years of tuition. One example is the statistic about percentage of graduates employed after graduation, which affects the law school’s rankings. Following the financial crisis and decline in available entry-level legal jobs, many schools took steps to place their not-yet-employed graduates in non-profit and government positions as a bridge to eventual private sector employment. While these temporary positions may end up being valuable experiences for the graduates, it isn’t the outcome they necessarily expected entering law school. Put another way, when a prospective student sees that a law school has a post-graduation employment rate of, say, 90%, which sounds good, they are not necessarily aware that some significant portion of those employed are not employed in the career path the student is hoping to take.

So, while I don’t think it’s reasonable to tell a less-competitive law school that they should refuse to admit students below a certain LSAT cut-off, or who are otherwise statistically likely to find it difficult to make it in a competitive law marketplace, I do think they have an obligation to ensure that their students have a clear sense of what they’re getting into before they write their first tuition check or sign onto a student loan arrangement. If the schools are not able to meet this obligation, it should be imposed on them, either via regulation or the widespread adoption of a third party assessment of the post-graduate performance of each school that tells the true story of what a student could expect and isn’t as subject to gaming as the current rankings.

This Slate.com article profiles an experiment undertaken at the electronics retailer Best Buy, where “knowledge workers” (i.e., not the sales associates that deal directly with the public) were managed under a Results-Only Work Environment, or ROWE.  There are details in the article, but essentially the workers were granted complete autonomy on how they did their jobs – whether they worked in the office or from home, whether or not they attended meetings, etc. – and they were judged purely on results, such as an increase of sales, or whatever metric is appropriate for the particular worker.

Although there are good and bad ways to implement such a plan, I broadly agree with the proposition that improving employees’ sense of autonomy will maximize performance (as well as happiness).  However, I don’t believe that most of my former large law firm colleagues share that view.  Unless there has been a sea change in attitudes over the four years since I left that world, that particular workplace is likely to be highly resistant to ROWE-like initiatives.

Even though the majority of work that a typical large firm attorney does (even the litigators) can be done anywhere – emails, phone calls and drafting/writing – there is a culture of judging attorneys based on their physical presence at the office at particular times, i.e., an emphasis on face time.  And this has remained the case long after technology has made it possible to work remotely.  An oddity of the New York law firm version of face time is that far more attention is paid to the hour at which an attorney leaves than when he or she arrives, so whether you arrive at 7am or 10am is far less important than whether you leave at 7pm or 10pm.  I recall many interviews at firms in which the interviewer would say things like “Oh, there’s no face time here.  People can leave at 7pm.”  Contrary to the interviewer’s statement, there is very much face time judgment involved at such a firm: if you left the office at 4pm to get home for your kid’s little league game, and then caught up on work at home from 7pm to 10pm, you’re a slacker.  Again, I hope for the sake of those currently working at large firms that there has been some change along with how society has evolved generally, but it wouldn’t surprise me if big law remains a big holdout on these issues.

In the depths of the recent recession, it became de rigueur among lawyers and non-lawyers alike to advise recent college graduates against attending law school, with much news coverage about the levels of student loan debt incurred and the inability of law graduates to be able to obtain gainful employment that could service that debt.  Whether this advice is sound depends on whether the undeniably large downturn in demand for legal services was primarily based on structural or cyclical factors.  …

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