Legal education reform proposals abound. One frequent recommendation is that lawyers and law firms should have greater involvement in training lawyers and in shaping curriculum. These recommendations, however, have had limited impact, so the calls continue for the profession to have more involvement and influence in educating lawyers. The question then arises of how greater involvement and influence can be achieved. This note offers one such approach.
Consider first that, in recent years, some law schools have established law firms or similar entities, such as incubators. The motivations vary but generally relate to career development. One motivation is rooted in the example of a medical school owning (or otherwise closely associating with) a hospital; the law firm or incubator analogously seeks to help law students or recent graduates develop practical skills and client experience. Another motivation is assisting graduates to move into solo or small law firm practice, under the guidance of experienced attorneys.
These firm and incubator structures can clearly benefit students, recent graduates, and the school. They provide a close connection between law schools and law practice organizations. But what about the reciprocal structure? What about law schools owned by law firms? I believe such a business model can facilitate meaningful involvement of lawyers and firms in law schools, and yield other benefits to firms, schools, students, and legal education as a whole.
Large-Scale Benefits
A significant benefit of the firm-owned law school structure is that it can reduce impediments to efficiency and innovation in legal education.
In the early days of school-based legal education, there was an implicit allocation of responsibility between schools and firms. Law schools taught the doctrinal and analytical parts of legal education, while firms taught (after graduation) the skills needed in practice. This arrangement eventually broke down, mainly as a result of changes in the economics of law firms. Firms became less willing to invest in new lawyer training. As a result, the profession increasingly called on law schools to provide skills training and produce graduates immediately ready to practice. These changes in turn led to the reduced involvement of firms in legal education. This, as noted, is a state of affairs that reform proposals continually seek to change.
An integration of law firms and law schools based on firm ownership could provide a continuing venue for collaborative and effective lawyer and firm engagement in legal education. It could, in the words of the Report of the Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, enable the profession to “recapture its former substantial role in the education of new lawyers.” In particular, it could promote several key recommendations of the Report regarding the improvement of law school education. These recommendations include:
- Focus on value to students. Law schools are in the business of delivering legal education services. This requires careful attention to value promised and value delivered. As the Report recommends, there should be greater emphasis by law schools on value to students and accountability for its delivery. A firm-owned school could be well positioned to achieve this. And that emphasis could help bridge gaps, particularly those between academic and business perspectives, and correlatively between faculty and administrators.
- Recognition that law schools exist to develop competencies. Although law schools have taken on more responsibility for developing practice-related competencies, students and members of the profession continue to call for more. A tight integration between a law firm and a law school could orient that school’s programs and services to developing practice competencies. And, because law schools learn from each other, this in turn could influence programs and services of other law schools that operate under a more traditional model.
- Change in faculty culture and work. Law faculty culture is conservative and rooted in a view that law school is primarily an academic enterprise. This has contributed to misallocation of resources, increased costs, and resistance to change. A close integration of a law school with a law firm could bring about a different type of culture in a law school, one that might include, for example, new approaches to accountability, responsibilities, and interdependence.
Firm ownership of law schools could contribute to innovation and efficiency in yet another way. Over the past two decades, law schools approved by the American Bar Association have experimented with for-profit business models. The reasons for using this model include better access to capital, increased responsiveness to markets, and ability to bring business expertise and methods to law school operations. They also include the opportunities for improvement identified above, such as focus on value, competency development, and faculty culture. However, the success of this model has been hindered, in part by widespread skepticism of for-profit law schools as interested, if not exclusively, in profit, rather than students and the public interest.
This skepticism is not inevitable. Consider by contrast law firms, which are usually for-profit. They are well understood to have a double bottom line. They are understood to have not only a core goal of making a profit, but also the core goal of serving clients and the public. It is accepted that these core goals are consistent.
A key reason that for-profit law firms and for-profit law schools are viewed differently is that in the higher education domain, but not in the law firm domain, non-profit status constitutes a positive signal, specifically that the school is in fact structured to serve student and public interests, in addition to the financial interest of the organization. Thus, in the domain of law schools, for-profit status involves the absence of such a positive signal. Law firms, by contrast, intrinsically signal their broader public interest. Accordingly, a firm’s ownership of a for-profit law school could provide the signal otherwise missing and validate the school’s bona fide commitment to students and the public interest. It can thus mitigate the skepticism and other impediments to realizing the benefits of a for-profit structure.
Firm- and School-Specific Benefits
In addition to promoting systemic improvement in legal education, firm ownership of a school could enable operational and resource benefits on a case-by-case basis. These benefits fall into three categories: benefits to the firm, benefits to the school, and synergies. Not all are relevant to every possible firm-school pair. These benefits may include the following:
- Benefits to Firm. Owning a law school could aid the work of the firm. One benefit could be the creation of a pipeline of new attorneys. These attorneys, in fact, may have been educated under an educational program that the firm helped develop in light of the firm’s approaches and needs. Another benefit could be a pipeline for firm diversity, something with which firms continue to struggle. Ownership of a school could also create a new source of revenue for the firm. And over time, as the school develops an alumni network, that network could be a source of firm clients.
- Benefits to School. Being owned by a firm could advance the career-related goals some schools now pursue in establishing their own firms or other legal services organizations. Thus, the firm-school structure could provide a path to entry-level (and other) jobs for graduates, as well as internships for current students. It could also provide students and alumni with access to firm clients, who might be another source of internships or jobs. The firm-school relationship could also provide a source of faculty, particularly ones who understand the school’s curriculum and culture, and who could step in as adjuncts or full-time faculty quickly. The relationship could also immediately provide a strong brand for the school. If the Smith & Jones firm is a well-known and respected firm, the Smith & Jones School of Law would instantly benefit from the firm’s brand halo.
- Shared Services and Synergies. The relationship between the firm and the school could create opportunities for efficiencies and cost savings. These could come in areas such as library, human resources, information technology, finance, and facilities management.
Conclusion
The proposal that law firms own law schools is not an “outside the box” idea. Rather, it simply takes structures and operations already existing in higher education and reassembles them to solve problems and achieve improvements in a new way. The proposal here can also be extended to ownership of a school by a consortium of firms. As we all continue to work to improve legal education—and higher education generally—we should explore opportunities arising from new models and new ways of doing business.