Posted by wlansden |
Filed under general, commentary, law school, law student, recruiting
By James Bowden
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, of course. Patrick Lynch and Kyle McEntee, both law students at Vanderbilt University Law School, have started Law School Transparency, a not-for-profit organization devoted to providing potential law school students with the information they need to make a fully-informed decision as to what law school they should attend. And by “fully-informed,” Law School Transparency means providing prospective law students with the nitty-gritty of who pays law school grads and how much.
But are there places the sun shouldn’t shine? Redacting the name of the graduate won’t do much to protect a graduate’s identity when the graduate’s law school, graduation year, and employer are listed. After all, attorneys practicing in law firms generally have public profile pages. I don’t mind people knowing where I am and what I am doing, and with NALPdirectory.com, a curious person would probably have an idea as to what my paycheck looks like, but I don’t think that everyone would like that kind of scrutiny. In any case, a law school that places a large number of graduates in lower-paying public interest jobs may not be doing anything wrong; they may in fact be doing everything right.
My suggestion: I think that incoming students would be better served by focusing the spotlight not on the graduates, but on the employers. The best way to do this – track which employers recruit at which schools, and for which markets they recruit. This would focus less on the individual graduates, and more on the efficacy of the law school’s placement services. It would also be a little bit less subject to volatile fluctuations in the economy and inexplicable recruiting anomalies.
[In the interest of full disclosure, I am a proud Vanderbilt University Law School Graduate, and Patrick and Kyle were classmates of mine. They are good guys doing good work, and Patrick plays a mean harmonica.]
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