Archive for November, 2009

Who is Lawrence Boyle and what’s he got against Bristol County?

And even more to the point, what’s he got against the state of Massachusetts running an affordable public law school? Boyle, in case you’ve never heard of him, is a Milton lawyer and a graduate of both Suffolk University and UMass Boston. He’s sat on the five campus university system’s board of trustees since 2002.

Almost the entire time he’s been a trustee, Boyle has had bad heartburn about the prospect of the university opening a state law school at UMass Dartmouth.

He most recently railed about the law school proposal a couple of weeks ago when the UMass trustees’ Academic Affairs Committee met to debate a formal proposal on the idea. The university is not supposed to be about economic development, he intoned.

He was very serious.

“Our function is what’s the best for UMass from an overall standpoint,” he is quoted saying in a State House News Service story. Any concerns about Bristol County in that mission are incidental, he explained.

Given the current fiscal crisis, Boyle went on to very seriously say that the university has more pressing needs than a law school — like rebuilding the parking garage at UMass Boston.

[South Coast Today]

Concord Law School of Kaplan University today announced the launch of its new legal career website (www.legalcareerweb.com) featuring job-hunting tips, information about trends in legal job hiring and advice from legal career expert and Concord Professor Richard L. Hermann, the author of The Lawyer’s Guide to Finding Success in Any Job Market (Kaplan Publishing, 2009). In addition to posting a bi-weekly blog, Hermann will also host a series of monthly webinars, the first of which is “What’s Hot: Mainstream Practice Areas in the Great Recession,” which will launch Dec. 9 at 8:30 p.m. EST.
“Concord is the only law school, whether online or at a fixed facility, that offers a semester-long course on managing legal careers. This new site is open to anyone looking to transition into or out of traditional legal practice,” says Hermann, who developed and teaches Concord’s legal career management course, which averages 75 enrollments each semester. “Concord is committed to fostering the success of its graduates, who are transitioning into legal careers or using their legal education to augment their current careers. There are some tremendous opportunities out there that just require people to think creatively and bring other aspects of their backgrounds to the table.”

The website features Hermann’s blog “Future Interests,” Concord alumni success stories, links to a variety of career resources and monthly live webinars about a variety of career topics. In both the webinar and blog posts, Hermann will cover topics such as areas that tend to thrive regardless of economic conditions, opportunities to use a law degree in professions outside of legal practice, how to develop a business and marketing plan for solo practice, credentials and expertise that may impress future employers, and basic tips on job hunting, resume building and negotiating terms of employment.

[Earth Times]

You don’t normally hear “free” and “law school” back to back. But Georgetown University Law Center is looking to change that, with its new Loan Repayment Assistance Program.

The program dovetails with a new federal law, which allows people working a public service job to pay only 10 percent of their income toward their student loans. After 10 years, the entire debt is forgiven.

The Georgetown plan will cover that 10 percent for graduates earning less than $75,000 a year. Though third-year student Jill Pasquarella said she’ll be lucky to bring in $50,000 as a public defender.

“It’s difficult work,” she said of her chosen profession.

“It’s trying work. And debt is one of those things, in addition to the sort of emotional trials of this kind of work, that can really bring people down.”

If not make them avoid public service altogether. Professor Philip Schrag, who developed Georgetown’s loan repayment program, said many law students have hoped to do public service, “and then discovered they couldn’t really do what they’d come to law school to do, and ended up in a private law firm where they felt they weren’t themselves.”

Schrag said Berkeley Law is following Georgetown’s lead, and other schools are considering it — provided they can find the funds. Georgetown’s loan forgiveness budget is $1,000,000 a year — thanks to generous alumni donations.

[NBC Washington]

More than once, it would have been easy for Daryl Lowe to give up.

The mornings when he couldn’t wake his mom up in time to take him to school. The moves from shelter to shelter. Coming home to find the furniture had been sold for drug money.

College wasn’t even a faint option.

Today, however, the 23-year-old Mott Community College graduate is in law school.

“It’s been my dream since I was 15 years old,” said Lowe, who is in his first semester of Southern New England School of Law in Dartmouth, Mass. “I had a lot of problems at home when I was younger. I had very low self esteem. I didn’t like myself. I didn’t think I was the smartest or could do anything.

“But I got help. Now I have no choice. I can’t give up now.”

Lowe, who also holds a degree from the prestigious Southern institution Morehouse College said he was both intimidated and inspired by the high caliber students at Morehouse.

“I was a young black man and I needed to surround myself with other young black men who were doing well,” said Lowe whose legal guardians were a white couple who took him in as a teen because of his single mom’s heavy drug addiction.

“When you step onto the Morehouse campus there is a sense that you’re not stepping onto any campus because it’s where Martin Luther King Jr. graduated from,” Lowe said of the historically black college for men where he launched a student Republican club.

And the persistence that got him past his troubled childhood helped when applying to law school — he was rejected by 11 other law schools.

[M-Live]

The latest census data estimated there are 1.01 million lawyers in the United States — more lawyers per person than any other country and more than the nation’s 877,000 doctors.

Some say there’s an oversupply of lawyers, and declining market conditions — such as layoffs, firm closures and mergers and fewer trials — mean a tough job market for all except the best students from top schools.

In an atmosphere such as this, why did Nashville’s Belmont University decide to launch a new $25 million law school?

The school’s answer could be boiled down to two words: Tennessee’s different.

Belmont leaders said that although there may be a lot of law schools nationally — and a glut of lawyers in some areas of the country — Tennessee is a patchwork of skills and services. They sense opportunity for specialization and a need for innovation in law education rather than simply feeding an oversupplied market.

When Belmont opens in 2011, it will become the state’s sixth law school.

[Nashville Business Journal]

Why waste time weighing factors like faculty size and bar passage rates when choosing a law school when you can simply look at one factor — the number of Super Lawyers among the alumni?

At least that’s what Law & Politics, the publisher of Super Lawyers magazine, thinks.

Last week, the publication known for bestowing honors on attorneys unleashed its first ever law school rankings. And yes, the criteria are that simple. The No. 1 rated school, Harvard, has 2,354 graduates who have morphed into Super Lawyers, the most of any institution.

A pair of officials at Connecticut law schools that didn’t rank quite that high seemed skeptical of the new ranking system. But while quick to point out its flaws, they stopped short of dismissing it altogether.

Jeremy Paul, dean of the University of Connecticut’s School of Law, and Brad Saxton, dean of Quinnipiac University School of Law, provided similar analogies to bolster arguments that the biggest, rather than the best, law schools have an advantage.

“If you have one school that had 500 graduates and another that had 50, and there are three [Super Lawyers] in 500 or two in 50, which is better?” asked Paul. “According to their calculation, three are better because it’s more.”

[Law.com]

The fight for a University of Massachusetts law school in Dartmouth involves battling against elitist attitudes, school officials say, and area delegates now say they are struggling against regional bias, too.

Two weeks before the UMass trustees are scheduled to vote on the law school proposal, one trustee, Lawrence Boyle, caught the attention of state representatives from southeastern Massachusetts when he said “I do not think it is the board’s responsibility to stimulate the economy of Bristol County.”

Nine Bristol County state representatives sent Boyle a letter this week saying they were “shocked and dismayed” at his comment, made at a hearing of the UMass committee on academic and student affairs on Nov. 18. “For you to publicly say that UMass should turn a blind eye to the economic fortunes of the South Coast is appalling and hideous,” they wrote.

“You are apparently unaware that the UMass Dartmouth mission calls on the campus to serve as an ‘intellectual catalyst for regional, economic, social and cultural development’” in the area, the representatives wrote. The letter was signed by Kevin Aguiar, Antonio Cabral, Stephen Canessa, James Fagan, Patricia Haddad, Robert Koczera, John Quinn, Michael Rodrigues and David Sullivan, all Democrats.

[Herald News]