Finally We Have U.S. News Law School Rankings... And They're Weird

Hello, welcome to another edition of Thinking Like a Lawyer. I'm Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I'm joined by my colleague Chris Williams. How are you? Pretty good. Pretty good. Yeah. So we are not joined by, I guess this is technically small talk. They're not joined by Katherine Rubino, who as she mentioned on last week's show was 39 and a half weeks pregnant. And if you can do math, it has worked out that she has had her baby and will, you know, not be with us for whatever maternity leave is in this state. So congratulations. And we will soldier on without her talking about the law and interesting things that have happened in the past week. So yeah, it has the other side of the world. It's world-ing. It's world-ing. Looking forward to, I have another trip coming up. It'll still be, it won't be affecting like the work schedule, but oh, India. Oh, well, there you go to India for a bit. Nice. Like a week. Calcutta. So I'm looking forward to that. I'm looking forward to street vendors cooking with their hands. I see videos of it. It looks so foreign. I'm like, oh my God, they're not wearing gloves. And like if they wash their hands function the same thing, you know, so I guess it's just like the culture shock of like, you know, either expectations. I was informed by a prominent lawyer of Indian descent that I should not try to eat any of the street food. He told me that once. He said, and he did not blame the sanitation on that front. He said that just the Western stomachs are not really prepared for the water differences. And you can get kind of messed up on the water that gets used. So that was just his, his advice. You can, you can brave it. I felt like he was pretty knowledgeable on the subject. So I took it to heart, but there you go. I mean, I have been in South Asia for like the last eight months. So that's true. I have some. That's true. So yeah, you built up a tolerance. Yeah. I had a member actually because of months ago, I mean, I remember I had told you I had like about a poison and that was just a, that was just an inoculation. So yeah, so you might be ready. Yeah. Once I actually once I come back to the States and I have a sandwich from Arby's, that's when it's going to happen. That's going to be the problem. All right. Well, so that seems appropriately small talked. So let's talk about the big news of the last week. And the biggest news of last week is that US news and world report, the news magazine that hasn't really been a news magazine in several years because it's really just a rankings company. I think ostensibly they do pretend to do news, but US news released after many delays, its law school rankings. What do you think it's safe to say that you guys need to be basic like MTV for the prestigious like MTV has been the music or television for years now, but the name's kind of stuck. Well, yeah, but did you see MTV news closed? That was last week. Really? Yeah, they shut down. Yeah, no, for elder millennials, it was a, it was real rough. It was a whole slice of their life disappearing. I don't know how you've been surviving it. Are you in that camp? No, I'm an exer. Okay. But, but I mean, as, as a young exer, I, I kind of overlap a lot with the elder millennial mindset. Anyway, well, I hope you're doing okay, Joe. I've survived. I haven't watched MTV news in a long time. I mean, I feel like it was really a thing for a bit. Like the Kurt loader tab at the Soren years, it was, it was really a thing. I feel like to the extent it exists, it has existed over the last few years. It's been kind of on the decline already, but it's sad because a lot of people got their start there. I thought the last time MTV news was relevant was when video killed, the radio star was still on pop hits. I mean, that was the first video on MTV. And no, MTV news was incredibly relevant, especially through, through the mid 90s, I would say, but yeah, like a lot of the coverage of the 92 election was huge. That was, that was probably their high water point. Yeah. Anyway, the US news, which is not that and is not shut down because it still makes a bunch of money off of these rankings has released its rankings after a lot of delays. There obviously has been a lot of controversy around it to the extent that multiple law schools, I believe the final tally was somewhere around 63 law schools refused to participate. Did not turn in their data to allow the rankings company to do an effective ranking. And then they were really upset with what the results looked like. So, you know, you get what you active look, look, look, look, it's the consequences of my own actions, as it were. And ultimately we also had some people not participate who we thought were. Cornell said that they were going to continue to participate, but when the numbers came out that it appears as though they changed their mind and just didn't tell anybody. So that was weird. What we ended up happening is we got a new top 14. They previewed the top 14, then they had to go in and change it because the same people who refused to hand over their data complained about the data. And it got rearranged not in a huge way. There's basically eight schools. There's eight places divided across the top 14 with a series of ties. It moved from having two three-way ties and a couple of two-way ties to having three two-way ties and one three-way tie. Well, whatever. At the end of the day, the same thing basically comes across, which is that Stanford joins Yale at the top. Chicago and Penn come after that. Harvard, NYU and Duke are all tied at five. And yeah, it goes on and down for there. Of real note is this is now the second year since the existence of the rankings that Georgetown did not make the top 14. A few years ago, there was a whole hubbub when they fell out. This year they did again UCLA makes it into the top 14 to the extent that 14 is a relevant marker of quality, which it really probably is not. My big takeaway from reading this is that now the top 14 has consulted it to the top eight. Maybe Washington will finally be top 14. I mean, that's not how ties work, but I love your enthusiasm. Yeah, no. Watch you. I did see where did end up. I can't remember. This is where you should know. This was like what you really should have been focusing on. Showed is the operative word here. Yeah. So showed up at 20th, 20th in a tie with Georgia. So I'm going to need the addresses of whoever made this ranking because I just want to have a nice polite conversation. Well, let's see how far are you place wise from there? Georgetown is at 15. There's a four-way tie at 16 and then wash you and Georgia. Oh, yeah. So that's like what? 11? Yeah. If you counted ties that way, which you should not. I'm reminding people it's not how ties get counted. Listen, we're a bunch of lawyers. It's not about how things ought to work. It's about how things work. Yeah. And how they work is the way that I'm describing. I don't know. Have you been following the Thomas situation? It's working. Yeah. That has nothing to do with ties. Anyway, the new rankings are out. Obviously, some people are still concerned about what happens and how the folks over at US News tried to resolve the boycott issue. They concocted new plans. They gave a lot of concessions to the boycotters. Some of those concessions had some perverse impacts we learned. Among them, we learned that the new push, you know, like what are the knocks on the US News rankings and in favor of the above the law rankings, which I will plug, was that the above the law is focused on outcomes, more the ability of the school to take somebody in and then get them to bar passage, get them to a job, you know, those sorts of things. The US News situation has always been based on inputs. What were the median grade point average of the undergrad grade point average of the applicants, what were their LSAT scores, et cetera? I did learn via social media, someone pointed out that Belmont jumped a series of places largely based on a massively good bar passage score, but it was a massively good bar passage score that did not take into account that they had massive attrition among their 1L classes. So a lot of people showed up, which was being counted by US News. And then those folks disappeared and the school got a giant, a high percentage bar passage and the formula appears to be counting it as though all the kids who showed up in the first instance passed the bar, which is not what happened since a lot of them worked. There was a lot of attrition there. So, you know, that creates kind of perverse incentives to bring in large classes and then drive people out. It's not good. And these are the sorts of problems that develop whenever you try to massively change a ranking system on a dime. Anyway, the other issue, of course, is the employment figures. The big complaint to the boycotters is that they wanted more credit for school-funded jobs. This of course is ridiculous because school-funded jobs, while a nice way of saying, hey, we have trusty, you know, we have all of these trustees' money and we can pay for people to do pro bono work. And isn't that great? Yeah, it sort of is, except the reason why the school is funding it. I mean, they're not funding it forever. And at the end of the day, these school-funded positions may be Yale isn't using it to pad its numbers, but the existence of these and the calculation of these within the rankings has always been a way in which law schools with bad employment records will throw a few bucks at somebody such that when the deadline comes around to prove that somebody who graduated got a real legal job, it counts that they're working as a TA or something like that. And then they get cut loose on the back end. The school looks artificially better at their job, placing people in work. And the student or the graduate at this point is actually no better off. The complaint of the elite schools that more of these jobs should count will absolutely cause this negative impact down through the rankings. So it makes those less reliable for anybody not relying and not looking to the rankings for the purpose of whether or not they want to go to Yale versus Harvard. So all around, bang up job, ruining one of the few things that is useful. And I can't even believe I'm defending the US news rankings. I mean, these things are terrible and have always been, but at least there was a plan. At least there was some, you know, you don't take them as gospel or anything, but there were markers of quality within the rankings that you could rely upon. You could assume, you know, a few good things based on what was in there. And now you just got nothing. As a lawyer, keeping up with developments in information security, cyber threats and e-discovery is a never-ending process. Fortunately, the Digital Detectives podcast does the hard work for you. I'm Sharon Nelson, and together with John Simick, we bring on industry experts to discuss the latest tech developments that help keep your data secure. Only on the Digital Detectives podcast. They say the best things in life are free, which either means the legal toolkit podcast is pretty awesome or we're totally committed to the wrong business model. You'll just have to tune in to find out which it is. I'm Jared Korea, and each episode I run the risk of making a total ass of myself so that you can have a laugh, learn something new, and why not, maybe even improve your law practice. Stop believing podcasts can't be both fun and helpful. Subscribe now to the legal toolkit. Go ahead. I'll wait. All right, so what's going on? You had a story about Ohio. Yes. So before this story, there was a story where there was a pro-sc- is it pro-scour? Pro-scour, how do you say it? Pro-scour. Pro-scour. Yes. Okay. I've never heard somebody say it in conversation. It's always... Yeah, yeah. Pro-scour. It's always been in text or like say, oh, this firm, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but you know, me and my friends don't talk about pro-scour, we talk more about it. I like here at Cravath. Cravath is a big name. Oh, for God's sake. All right. Go. I'm probably saying that wrong too. Yes. Anyway, big law firm. There was a counsel who was dealing with the case and he's... Life happened. I'm probably never dealing with the pregnancy. He said to his opposing counsel, hey, basically need a bit of time just to get life in order. Counseling decided this is a good prime opportunity to negotiate about the terms of what was happening in the case. There was a judge. He was like, this is horrible. Where's he even decency? blah, blah, blah. Got it. Great. Props to the judge. Ohio. Not the same, though. So there was a woman who was basically the head of the case and she then found out that because of some medical situation, she was going to be out of... She needed to be in the hospital for a bit of time. So she's like, hey, can I get an extra bit to recover or what have you? When I come back, it'll still be within the statutorily accepted period, which justice can be served, it'll still be timely. Supreme Court justice of Ohio, five to two is like, nah. Which is horrible one because the person that will be left to operate in her place is not the head attorney there. And she wouldn't be able to really have any input on what was happening. And it was kind of a shitty situation for somebody to have to deal with. Yeah. So there were other issues involved here, too, because the only person who was available to take over this case, if they did go forward with it without the lead lawyer who was supposed to be on bed rest, is hard of hearing. So even though they understand all the issues involved, running the trial presents some degree of obstacles. So look, with all of these sorts of situations, you always have to wonder if you've got a situation where you have speedy trial issues in criminal cases and such like so on. And there is some reason to say that firms should be working around these sorts of, especially when they're somewhat predictable. They should be working around these to make sure that a criminal defendant is not put into trouble. But the weird thing is that as I was reading through your story, it seems as though the only argument anyone was making against this continuous request was some kind of victim's rights argument, which I don't even understand why a victim has any rights in this sort of situation. I mean, this is very much about whether or not the poor defendant has to keep going with this looming over their head, right? Yeah. I didn't understand it either. There was lip service about like the right to a speedy trial. Yeah. The council was like, this is still within the statutory acceptor. I'm here. Yeah, which seems like the basic, right? Yeah. I mean, if they're going to have rules, you know, like we should at least go all the way to the rules. I mean, we had this issue. This is a weird overarching issue with civility in the profession. We had a lot of people complaining when Morgan and Morgan made their stance in reaction to Florida's new, we're going to screw over slip and fall victims law. And Morgan and Morgan said, look, we're done giving out any, you know, courtesy extensions. We will do what we are required to by the law, but we're not going to give you any more than that if you're going to, if you insurance carriers are going to spend all of your money trying to pass laws like this that make it impossible for us to do our jobs. People complained about this and how this was violating the spirit of how collegiality works. At the end of the day, if you have, it's nice if everyone's nicer to each other, but we also have legal limits for a reason. And so long as you have statutory deadlines, you should at least be able to push people to those, right? You think? Yeah. Anyway. Today's legal news is rarely as straightforward as the headlines that accompany them. On lawyer or lawyer, we provide the legal perspective you need to better understand the current events that shape our society, join me, Craig Williams, and a wide variety of industry experts as we break down the top stories. Follow lawyer to lawyer on the Legal Talk Network or wherever you subscribe to podcasts. Are you looking for a podcast that was created for new solos? Then join me, Adriana Lanares, each month on the new solo podcast. Don't talk to lawyers who have built their own successful practices and share their insights to help you grow yours. You can find new solo on the Legal Talk Network or anywhere you get your podcasts. All right. So now moving to the final big news of the week. Lay off. Don't talk about lay off. You kidding me? Lay off. So we've got more lay off news, unfortunately. This time, Deckert is laying off around 5% of their workforce. Obviously, Deckert is a large firm. And so this 5% is not exactly putting them in a position where they're completely going out of business or anything. But it is problematic to see more lay offs, especially as the economic news has continued to be favorable. And we continue to see more hiring. We've seen inflation stabilize now for, I think, 10 months. Deal activity seems to be percolating back. Why is it that these firms are continuing to lay people off given that scenario and given that there's every reason to believe that the second half of the year is going to see a pickup in deal activity is really, really problematic. But yeah, but, you know, I mean, we saw this a little bit with, like, with the Goodwin layoffs, their argument at least, was that they were over-invested in practice areas that weren't particularly productive going forward. And they, and, you know, it might not have been a great look for them to lay everybody off and then, uh, announce a massive lateral hiring move the next day, which they did. But they did that for a reason. They laid off people in a bunch of practice areas that they thought were cooling and then they brought in a massive team in order to shore up a area that they thought was going to be booming. So we don't know exactly what was going on with Deckard. If this is a, this is an over-investment that they made or whether or not this is something more, you know, systemic within the Deckard system. But it is another unfortunate layoff story at the, at a time when things look like they were going to get a little bit better. And yeah, they, uh, they're going to, I keep saying, and this was part of my coverage, uh, dating clear back to the Goodwin issue, part of the issue I fear is that they don't have the work to justify these salaries and pay these bills now. But they're going to find themselves in a situation where they're over-burdened with all this stuff by the end of the year. Now what happens when you end up there, right? Like now you've, now you've jettisoned all of the talent and expertise who's prepared to handle that sort of work. And now you, do you scramble in the lateral market, try and get those folks back? You've burned a lot of bridges with the specific ones. So you're probably not going to get them. You're probably going to get new people, which requires new training. Just seems very short-sighted. I understand clients don't want to pay more in billable hours, but the argument could easily be you didn't give us any work for the first half of the year. And we kept these people on. And the reason why we have the expertise to help you now in the second half of the year is that those people, we had to, we had to cover their bills out of pocket for the whole first half of the year. So you're, you're damn right. You're going to pay us an elevated hourly fee. But who knows if that's how any of these folks are going to deal with this. So that's, that's where we sit. So is there anything else on any of these stories? I just think the cycle of this happening is it is really odd. It's one of those things where like the consequences happen to scene. It just makes you wonder why people don't want it from their mistakes. Yeah, because we did the, we've done this before. Now granted, the great recession, things were, things were bad for a while. So they, they, but they did ultimately have a situation where they found themselves with an expertise gap that they had to rapidly close. Now granted that maybe the argument was that in that instance, having keeping people around for two or three years was not feasible. And so it was better to fill that gap on the back end. I mean, I think we all, we all have some doubts about whether or not the Federal Reserve is going to get its act together on this, but assuming, and, and we also have a debt ceiling vote that could cause a bunch of economic chaos, but assuming things worked rationally based on indicators, then we're, we're not talking about keeping people on and under billing for two or three years. We're talking about doing it for two or three months, but it is something like you said, where you would think folks had learned from their mistakes. Oh, well. So thanks everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show to get new episodes when they come out. You should give reviews, stars, right things. It always helps. You should be listening to other shows on the legal talk network. I'm also the guest on the legal talk week journalist round table. I would put in a pitch for the Jibot, but my assumption is that there's not going to be many new episodes of that for the next few weeks for the same reasons that we don't have Catherine. So we'll push right by that one. You should read above the law to get those new episodes, you know, get those, these and other stories before we talk about them. You should follow us on social media. We're still over at Twitter for now. The publication is at a TL blog. We also have at Joseph Patrice and at rights for rent, which is rights that W like, like you're writing on a pen with pen and paper. I also am Joe Patrice at Blue Sky now. I don't know. Do you, do you, have you been playing with any of the alternatives? Not yet. Not yet. Yeah. Say I created a mastodon, but I couldn't really get into it because I, I really feel like until there's a tweet deck equivalent, I can't really use any of these other things. Not that there is for Blue Sky yet, but Blue Sky, when you get over there, it is, it is questionably intellectual property issues. The user interface doesn't just look like Twitter. It is Twitter from like three years ago. So with that, I don't know how that's going to work, but it does suggest that if it is allowed to move forward, that tweet deck is something that somebody could easily build. So anyway, yeah. So I think that's everything. We will talk to you later. Peace. If you're a lawyer running a solo or small firm and you're looking for other lawyers to talk through issues you're currently facing in your practice, join the Unbillable Hours Community Roundtable, a free virtual event on the third Thursday of every month. Lawyers from all over the country come together and meet with me, lawyer and law firm management consultant Christopher T. Anderson, to discuss best practices on topics such as marketing, client acquisition, hiring and firing, and time management. The conversation is free to join, but requires a simple reservation. The link to RSVP can be found on the Unbillable Hour page at legaltalknetwork.com. We'll see you there.