The LACBA Student Lounge Blog

The Law School 100: iPhone Application

The Law School 100 is an iPhone application that includes general information about every American Bar Association approved law school in the country. The application will be especially useful to law students who are considering a transfer, pre-law students, prospective LLM students, law school administrators, law school career services staff and faculty. Essentially, if you want to get the most important information about any ABA law school in the country, The Law School 100 application could deliver the goods.

Features of the Law School 100 application:

Law school name and ranking
Law school mailing address
Law school phone number (with a link to call the law school using an iPhone)
Law school website (with a link)
Law school email address (with a link)
Law school accreditation status
Indication of whether the school is a public or private law school
Number of law students enrolled
Number of faculty
Annual tuition (including in-state and out of state for public schools)
Law degrees offered (post-JD degrees)
Religious affiliation, if any
Law schools can be sorted based an a two-tier system.

How exactly the application generates its ranking data isn't clear from the information that is immediately available, although the official description of the application notes that a qualitative approach is used, rather than a quantitative approach. Either way, the application does not use the popular and controversial US News & World Reports rankings.

Worried about the cost? The Law School 100 application wont break the bank at a .99 cents.

Compatibility: iPhone and iPod Touch.

The Law School 100 application can be found in the iTunes application store using your iPhone application search feature.

Get Ready for Another "Join this Class Action" Letter

This time, it's for the Kaplan LSAT preparation course you took.

A federal class action was filed recently against the test preparation giant, Kaplan. Relying on the recently settled Bar-Bri class action, which amounted to a settlement of $49M for students who took the Bar-Bri course between 1997 and 2006, the Kaplan class action alleges that there still is no meaningful competition in the LSAT preparation market. According to a courthousenews.com article, Kaplan's LSAT operations are three times the size of the next largest competitor, The Princeton Review.

Nepotism Increasing in Law School Admissions

By admitting honors students without an LSAT requirement, the University of Alabama is joining the likes of the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois College of Law in what is becoming an increasing trend to retain local talent.

This program, like the ones at Michigan and Illinois, are designed to keep local students local and drive up the the GPA of the incoming class. However, the program at Alabama will do even more than that:

"Through a public information request, the Tuscaloosa News obtained a letter that Claude Reeves, associate dean for admissions at the law school, sent to Honors College students in the fall. The letter stated that for Honors College students with a minimum 3.75 GPA, applications would not require LSAT scores, essays or recommendation letters, and that their admission decisions would be made within 24 hours."

If this trend continues, there could be more and more big name law schools providing incentives for their "top guns" to stick around a while longer. But this could have serious consequences for law schools that don't have a feeder school to begin with. For example, Loyola Law School of Los Angeles. This could mean that with a near-guaranteed entry, middle and lower-tier schools will have a more difficult time fighting to recruit top students from across the country. Especially if it is a school independent from any university.

A second consequence in this growing trend of nepotism is that it may prevent mobility of students who are above-average, but not honors. For instance, what if under the program at Alabama, Michigan or Illinois, the law school is able to fill its entire entering class with honors students alone? That means students from other schools who wanted to attend would be barred from entry merely because they came from a different school. As a good law student should think, this might be grounds for discrimination. However, the programs are new and experimental, so only time will tell if they actually create these consequences.

For more about the changes, click here.

Transfering After 1L: Letters of Recomendation

Virtually every 1L thinks about it. Some 0Ls even factor it in when making admission decisions. Some reasons why you might decide to transfer:

You rocked 1L and, frankly, you can scale to a higher ranking school.
You aren't thrilled about the weather in _________.
You'd like to be further away or closer to home.
You found a better deal ($$$).
You're just not feeling the culture at your law school.
You think you can get a better education somewhere else.
You can make it at a school that offers better career resources.
Etc.

Now, you're going to take the dive and go through the administrative process of transferring. You need a letter or letters of recommendation from a law professor at your current school. But why would a law professor want you to transfer? An interesting post at the Law School Academic Support Blog on how at least one law professor thinks about writing letters of recommendation for transferring law students.

Bar Preparation Loans Show Sings of Dwindling

Some financial aid officials have noted an increase in denials of bar preparation loans to recent law school graduates. Traditionally, these types of post-grad loans help recent graduates pay for costly bar preparation courses, bar exam fees and living expenses between graduation and passing the California State bar exam.

According to a recent Law.com article, the Access Group, a Delaware nonprofit graduate loan provider, noted that there are now only four lenders who have active "law residency" loan products and that this decreasing pool of lenders could be part of the recent increase in denied loan applications.

Access Group pulled the plug on bar prep loans last April. "We don't have the funding to be able to offer these loans, due to the market conditions," Curry said. But as a membership organization serving ABA-accredited law schools, Access Group has been leading a charge to help students gain access to federally guaranteed loans for more expenses tied to bar prep until financial markets correct.

Southwestern Law School Intros Two New JD Programs

Southwestern Law School has established two new JD programs in cooperation with California State University, Dominguez Hills (CSUDH): a joint J.D./M.A. Program, and a 3+3 Program through which students can earn their B.A. and J.D. degrees in six years. The Joint J.D./M.A. Program enables graduate students to complete a J.D. degree at Southwestern while concurrently earning an M.A. degree in Negotiation, Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding from CSUDH. The 3+3 Option Program allows selected CSUDH students who meet program requirements to enter law school at Southwestern after completing just three years of undergraduate study at CSUDH.

More information on these new Southwestern Law School programs here.

Loyola Law School's Early Admittance Program

Especially ambitious pre-law college students can skip their Sr. year in college and begin a J.D. program at Loyola Law School.

According to a Maroon article:

It is called the Early Admittance Program and it is offered to undergraduate students that have completed three-fourths of their degree requirements and are studious enough to get a better grade point average and score on the LSAT than most other Loyola Law applicants.

The American Bar Association allows law schools to admit undergraduates with at least three-fourths of their degree requirements so long as they are “from an institution that is accredited by an accrediting agency recognized by the Department of Education.” The ABA three-fourths ruling is an often overlooked ‘shortcut’ that appeals to ambitious students.

These over achieving college students must have at least a 155 on the LSAT to qualify and a GPA of 3.4. The LSAC reported that in 2007, less than 2% of applicants were under the age of 21, so although you could be sitting next to a teenager in Civ Pro, it's not likely.

Conditional Law School Admission: 1L Rockstars

If you're like most law students, you applied to at least one law school that you didn't get into. Enter an all new hybrid letter response to your application. It goes something like this:

Congratulations! You have been conditionally admitted to A Better Law School. Although we are not able to offer admission to A Better Law School at this time, so long as your academic performance at the law school you decide to attend meets a certain criteria throughout your first year of law school there, you are guaranteed a spot at A Better Law School for the remainder of your J.D. program....

Since virtually everything related to admissions has a ranking consideration, the naysayers believe this is just another creative way to circumvent the rankings, this time by scooping up some good talent in advance without having to live with lower LSAT or GPA stats. Of course, there's nothing new about transferring after 1L, so maybe it's just a more convenient way to go about it. Or maybe, someone thought that there just wasn't enough stress in going to law school in the first place, so putting a carrot on a stick would push some to excel even further.

According to the WSJ Law Blog, Northwestern Law sends out 15-25 of these deferred conditional acceptances each year.

UCI School of Law: Free Tuition for the Entire Class of 2009

When the UCI law school opens its doors next year, all entering students will get a free ride. The law school reports that the number of students in the class will be 60. According the National Law Journal:

Originally, the school, which will focus on public interest law, had planned to offer full tuition scholarships to about half that class; but, in an effort to lure high-quality students and compete with other top 20 law schools, UC Irvine School of Law has expanded that program, he said. While the law school has not yet determined the cost of its tuition, each scholarship is anticipated to be about $100,000, given an estimated rate of about $33,000 per year, Cannon said.

The law school is attempting to raise funds to cover the cost of the promotion, which will amount to about $6 million. So far, it has been reported that they are a third of the way there and the applications started rolling in about a month ago.

High GPA = No LSAT (Update 1): University of IL College of Law

Kicking up some dust in the law school admissions game, the University of Michigan School of Law announced recently that University of Michigan undergraduates with a GPA of 3.8 or better would be admitted to the law school at the university without taking the LSAT. Look here for more information on this.

After an array of criticism, including the allegation that the new policy was an effort to enhance the US News ranking of the law school by increasing the average GPA without affecting the average LSAT, the law school announced that the benefit would only apply to 5-10 new admits (out of over 300 new 1Ls).

More importantly, another law school has followed suit. The University of Illinois College of Law has now adopted the similar policy. This time, the benefit goes to undergraduate juniors of the same university. The idea is that if juniors apply and are admitted without having to take the LSAT, they will be less likely to consider other law schools. University officials said that the number of 1Ls admitted under this program would be about 10.

Any bets on which law school is next? So far, none in California.