Law School Accreditation: Shaping the Future of the Profession

Episode Notes

Transcript

Daniel Thies:

I’ve appointed an advisory committee, for example, that’s made up of State Supreme Court Justices and also deans from across the country with a specific goal of making sure that we are hearing from that constituency as we consider what our standards should be. And I’ve asked that group to embark on a project to examine our standards and really make sure that they are all in accordance with what we take to be our core principles and values. And so that project has just gotten off the ground. We’re now about two and a half months into it, and we’re already starting to see some fruit as we hear from a greater variety of justices around the country and from different regions and different types of states that I really think will benefit the process and help us to refine our standards and make sure that they’re effective for what we’d like them to do for us.

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Welcome to the award-winning podcast, Lawyer 2 Lawyer with J. Craig Williams, bringing you the latest legal news and observations with the leading experts in the legal profession. You’re listening to Legal Talk Network.

J. Craig Williams:

Welcome to Lawyer 2 Lawyer on the Legal Talk Network. I’m Craig Williams coming to you from Southern California. Law school accreditation is an essential component in the shaping the future of our legal profession. The Council of the American Bar Association section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar, which operates independently of the ABA is the only national accreditor of law schools, where they set the standards for curriculum, faculty, and facilities to ensure quality legal education. Today on Lawyer 2 Lawyer, we will spotlight law school accreditation. We’ll discuss misconceptions, accreditation at the state and federal levels right now, the value of a single national accreditor, and the impact on the legal profession. So without further ado, we’re joined by Daniel Thies. He is chair of the Council of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. Daniel is a practicing attorney at Weber & These PC in Champaign, Urbana, Illinois, where his practice focuses on litigation, insurance law, business representation, and estate planning.

Welcome to the show, Daniel.

Daniel Thies:

Good afternoon, Craig, and thank you for having me.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Daniel, what is it that the council does and how is it really separate from the ABA?

Daniel Thies:

Well, the council, as you said, is the only national accreditor of law schools, and really all accreditation is, is a stamp of approval. So we’re evaluating legal programs and law schools across the country and deciding whether or not they meet their standards. There are two sort of doors that our accreditation unlocks because of those who choose to listen to them. So the first door is access to federal student loan funding, and that door is unlocked because we are recognized by the Department of Education. And so when we decide that a law school is up to snuff, if you will, then that allows their students to access student loan funding. The second door that our accreditation unlocks is the opportunity for graduates of our accredited law schools to join the bar in all of the 50 states. So right now, if you graduate from an account accredited school, that qualifies you to then go become a lawyer, to take the bar exam or to pursue some other process to join the bar in each state.

As to how we are separate from the American Bar Association, so we are a section of the ABA, but we are separate because of requirements that the Department of Education puts on accreditors. And it’s part of the Higher Education Act that requires accreditors to be separate and independent. In practice, that means three things. One, our personnel, the officers and the members of the council are not chosen by the larger ABA. We instead have an internal process for choosing who serves with us. Secondly, our policymaking is entirely separate from the larger ABA. They don’t decide which schools get accredited. They also don’t get to have a final say on what the standards are. And then the third way in which we’re separate and independent is that our budget is entirely separate. So we decide what we spend money on. We don’t get any money from the larger ABA and we don’t send them any money.

So we run our own finances and that keeps us, again, separate and independent from what the larger ABA might be doing.

J. Craig Williams:

It kind of begs the question then, why even be part of the APA?

Daniel Thies:

Well, so what’s interesting is that there’s a long history of having a connection to the profession. And I think it is important actually to have a link between practicing lawyers and between the academy. So we wouldn’t necessarily want only law professors who don’t spend the majority of their time practicing law deciding what it is that lawyers need to know. As in law, so in all sorts of other professions, including medicine and several others, it’s very common for accreditors to have a link to the professional association for that profession. And that, as I said, allows everyone to understand better how education needs to change in order to meet the requirements of the profession.

J. Craig Williams:

There has been some complaints about the monopolistic nature of this ABA accreditation and some movement toward, in fact, two states have taken control. Why aren’t the states in charge of this?

Daniel Thies:

Well, the states are in charge of this fundamentally. So as I said, lawyers are licensed at the state level. Each state Supreme Court decides what is required in order to join the bar in that state. And as of today, the Supreme Courts of all 50 states have decided that graduating from a council accredited school qualifies you to go through the process to join their bar. Now, there has been Texas and Florida, which you alluded to. Their orders have sort of reiterated that it’s the Supreme Courts that are in charge. We’ve never disputed that. However, the Texas order, it says, “We’re going to accredit our own law schools. Here’s the list that we’re going to accredit.” And their list matches ours exactly, so all the same schools. Similarly, in Florida, they have said the State Supreme Court are in charge, which again, we agree with and we think that’s an important principle.

But then it goes on to say that for part of our process in Florida, we will recognize any school that’s accredited by an agency that is recognized by the Department of Education. And again, right now, the council is the only agency recognized by the Department of Education to accredit the JD degree. And so effectively, Texas and Florida, along with all of the other states are still looking to council accreditation to decide who can join the bar in their state.

J. Craig Williams:

What’s the council’s position on California, for example, that allows both accredited and non-accredited schools to take the bar?

Daniel Thies:

Yeah. Well, the council thinks it’s a good thing when state Supreme Courts pay attention to accreditation. As you mentioned, California has been doing this for a long time, multiple decades where they have decided that as a state, they want to recognize additional schools on top of those that the council accredits. That can be a good way to innovate, to try different things out. Many of our critics like to talk about how if the council did not have the control that it has over law schools, there’d be a lot more innovation. Well, actually, California schools have had the freedom to do that kind of innovation for decades, as I said, and the results really speak for themselves. Graduates of council accredited schools pass the bar at a rate three times those of schools that are not accredited by the council, including primarily those in California. And so there’s sort of a proof of concept there that our critics who say, “Well, if the council would just change some of its rules, suddenly we’d have a golden era of legal education.” I don’t think that’s true.

And California has proven that there’s not necessarily a silver bullet that’s suddenly going to make dramatic improvements in legal education.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, California also takes the position that its schools, because they’re not accredited, have to take a baby bar. What does the council sense on that?

Daniel Thies:

Again, because the state Supreme Courts are in charge of legal education ultimately, and if who joins the profession, I should say. We obviously work adjacent to the bar admissions process, but the question of what should the bar exam be in each state and what, if any, other requirements should there be either in addition to or as an alternative to the bar exam, those are ultimately questions for the State Supreme Courts. So we want to stay in our lane on that. We focus on accrediting law schools and making sure that the education that they’re providing is as high quality as possible. But then what happens after that in terms of additional licensing requirements is up to the State Supreme Courts. And as I said, I think it’s good when there’s innovation and different ways of doing that. In addition to the babyBar in California, there’s other states that are considering alternative pathways like an admission by practice program in Oregon.

There’s another one in South Dakota. There are similar programs that are jumping up around the country, and those are all to the good. I think it’s great to see that innovation. And we like to innovate on our side in legal education just as we see the Supreme Courts innovating on the side of admission.

J. Craig Williams:

How does our model as lawyers in terms of accreditation and bars and so forth and discipline mirror or not mirror the medical profession?

Daniel Thies:

It’s very similar. I think the medical profession, they have various hurdles to get over to join the profession in each state. And graduating from an accredited school is part of their process just as it is for us. And then just as for law, they have requirements in addition to that after education before they can ultimately join their profession and begin practicing.

J. Craig Williams:

Does the council have any involvement in MCLE or discipline?

Daniel Thies:

Not directly, no. That’s not been traditionally our bailowick. Again, we focus on the accrediting of law schools. If you dig back into the history and look into our archives a little bit, you will see that the section commented on the whole continuing legal education movement when it first got going a number of decades ago. And so leaders of the section have certainly been prominent in that movement, but as of today, we don’t actually play a direct role in the CLE programs or otherwise. Now you mentioned

J. Craig Williams:

History, and that’s a good thing to kind of talk about for a moment. How did accreditation get started? Law schools get started in this whole process of becoming a lawyer get all integrated into the ABA? Well,

Daniel Thies:

If you go back really to the dawn of our country, we had a model that was basically based on apprenticeship. So you had those who wanted to become lawyers would read law with practitioners who were already practicing law. When they felt that they were ready, they’d go before a judge and be examined. Literally, the bar exam term comes from standing in front of the bar with a judge questioning you to see whether or not you’re ready to practice law. After the Civil War, as our society started to industrialize and the economy started to grow, westward expansion had completed and there was a demand for many, many, many more lawyers. And that apprenticeship model became hard to sustain simply because of the demand for education and the difficulty in standardizing those apprenticeships to make sure that everybody who passed through was getting a quality education. And so about that time is when the American Bar Association was started in 1878 in New York.

And that one of the very early concerns of the American Bar Association was making sure that those who joined the bar had received a sufficient quality education to make sure that they could serve the public. So fast forward from that a few decades, and in the 19s, there was a leader of the American Bar Association and then of the section and the council by the name of Elahu Root, who had been Secretary of War and also Secretary of State in the Roosevelt administration. He was a senator from New York. And as president of the American Bar Association, he made it one of his priorities to begin a system of accrediting law schools. That finally got up and running after a report from a group called the Root Commission that Elahu Root put together. By 1921, they were ready to kind of put it into operation.

And in that year, the council began accrediting law schools. It began doing the site visits to law schools, which we still continue today to evaluate the quality of their program. And for the first time that year, they published a list of the schools that were accredited. And over the 20 or 30 years after 1921, as that system became more and more entrenched, eventually all of the State Supreme Courts in the country, as I said, recognized that process as effective for identifying which schools they wanted to recognize. And so by the 1950s, the American Bar Association Council really was the sole national accreditor of Law Schools, and that recognition was sort of formalized in 1952 when the Department of Education recognized the council for the first time as an accreditor of the JD degree.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Daniel, at this time, we’re going to take a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back. And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m joined by Daniel Theis. He is chair of the Council of the American Bar Association Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. And right before the break, we were talking about how the history of accreditation. Since the Department of Education has given that accreditation right to the council, there have been a couple consent agreements. Can you talk about those?

Daniel Thies:

Well, so I think you’re referring to in 1995, the Department of Justice opened an antitrust investigation into the council. And at the time, the concerns are actually the opposite of some of the concerns you hear today, because the concerns then were that the council was doing too much to protect law professors rather than law students and the public. And so there was an investigation in 95. It culminated fairly quickly in a consent decree in 1996, where the council didn’t admit that it had done anything wrong, of course, but it agreed to make some changes to the process in order to make sure that law schools were not overrepresented in the accreditation process. So for example, the council has 21 members. Part of the consent decree was that no more than half of them, so a maximum of 10 could be professors or deans at law schools.

The others had to be practicing lawyers or judges, and then also public members, so non-lawyers who come from other walks of life. And there were a handful of other sort of restrictions like that that were aimed again at making sure that the profession had a say in how lawyers are trained and that it wasn’t just the province of the academy. So that consent decree was in effect for a decade, for 10 years after that. And since then, the council has by and large voluntarily agreed to continue some of those practices. We still have the same structure of the council, for example, no more than 10 members being employed by a law school. Since that time, there have been no concerns about antitrust as in no enforcement actions, no violations found. We continue obviously to be aware of the antitrust laws and we take steps every year to make sure that we are continuing to comply with those laws.

J. Craig Williams:

That kind of brings us to essentially what’s a federalism versus state question and the democratic aspect of the state’s involvement in it. How do you balance the council’s structure against the argument that states are making that we should be the ones accrediting our own schools because that gives everyone in our state a voice in this, where the bar has basically, and the Department of Justice has restricted it to a certain group and type of people.

Daniel Thies:

Yeah. Well, there are some significant downsides to having a state by state accreditation system. So just by example, our annual budget is about $5 million. We have 17 employees who work with the council in order to do what we do, and we have a bench of hundreds of volunteers who go on our site visits, judges, practitioners, professors. That entire apparatus, if every state were to accredit all of the 197 law schools in the country, every state would have to recreate their own apparatus, a similar scope and cost in order to recreate what they do. So that’s one obstacle. Of course, states could decide to try to develop some sort of reciprocity system so that if I graduate from an Indiana accredited law school, I can still go sit for the bar in Oregon, for example. It’s not obvious that that would easily develop around the country though.

I worry about some of the divisions in our society and that we’d end up with a fragmented accreditation system, which really would be a disservice to law students who would have to do a lot more homework to know that if I go to law school X in Illinois, that if I want to practice in Ohio, I’ll be able to do that. The big benefit of the system we have now of council accreditation is that students don’t have to worry about that. They know that if they go to a council accredited law school, after they graduate, they can go to any of the 50 states. And so there are challenges for the states. At the same time, as I said, we recognize that the state Supreme Courts are in charge and we’re taking steps to make sure that we are listening to their input. So I think over the last five years, we’ve seen a resurgence of interest among the state Supreme Courts.

Texas and Florida that you mentioned earlier are probably the headline examples of that, but it’s true in other states as well. And we are taking steps to incorporate more of their feedback into our process. So I’ve appointed an advisory committee, for example, that’s made up of state Supreme Court justices and also deans from across the country with a specific goal of making sure that we are hearing from that constituency as we consider what our standards should be. And I’ve asked that group to embark on a project to examine our standards and really make sure that they are all in accordance with what we take to be our core principles and values. And so that project has just gotten off the ground. We’re now about two and a half months into it, and we’re already starting to see some fruit as we hear from a greater variety of justices around the country and from different regions and different types of states that I really think will benefit the process and help us to refine our standards and make sure that they’re effective for what we’d like them to do for us.

J. Craig Williams:

What do you think the most justified criticism of the council is?

Daniel Thies:

I think we can do a better job of listening to all constituencies ultimately. I mean, and there’s sort of a tension here because there are different constituencies from law students to podium professors, to clinical faculty, to legal writing instructors, to deans, to state Supreme Court justices, and they all have an interest in what we do, rightly so. And we appreciate that they all pay attention to us, but sometimes when they’re all lobbying different viewpoints our direction, it can be kind of challenging to sort it all out and to make sure that we’re making the best decision. And so I think we need to continue to think about mechanisms for listening to all of those different groups and meaningful ways to incorporate their feedback without becoming captured by any one of them. We want to deliberate and make our own best decision, considering the input that we’ve heard from others and then acting on it in the best way.

J. Craig Williams:

There’s a debate right now. There’s this countrywide debate about DEI, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and there’s been some challenges. We’re currently seeing some Supreme Court cases where four or five law firms are challenging the administration’s attempts to kind of muzzle what they’re saying. And there’s some similar actions going on in front of the council. What’s the council’s response to the issue of diversity, equity, and inclusion in terms of the current administration’s desire to put a squelch on that? And the other side, which is, as you alluded to in what you just said, there’s competing interests. How do you balance those?

Daniel Thies:

Well, I’ll start with an overriding principle, which is number one, the council never requires law schools to violate the law to keep their accreditation. So that’s a bedrock principle that we apply across our standards. So in recent months and years, as you’ve alluded to, there have been additional question rates raised about whether various things that might be labeled DEI initiatives are legal under state or federal law. Because of that debate and the discussions that are going on about that, the council has decided that in its view, it’s really not appropriate for the council to keep what we took as our diversity and inclusion standard, which was standard 206. And not because we think 206 violated the law, but rather because of that confusion that’s out there, we don’t want to put law schools in a position where they might feel like they have to violate the law in order to comply with our standards.

So we first suspended standard 206, and then just at our most recent meeting in February, the council has voted to actually repeal it. That proposal is now out for notice and comment, which is part of our process. Whenever we revise a standard, we have to send it out to the public and ask them what they think. We’ll get those comments and reconsider them in May at our next meeting. And I expect at that point, likely, the repeal of standard 206 will go forward.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, Daniel, we’re going to take another quick break to hear a word from our sponsors. We’ll be right back. And welcome back to Lawyer 2 Lawyer. I’m back with Daniel Thies. He’s chair of the council of the American Association and Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. And you’ve been handling some pretty tough questions here, I think. And thank you very much for those responses. But let’s turn around for a moment and take a forward look. What do you see as the next challenge that the council faces and what’s the biggest change that you anticipate moving forward?

Daniel Thies:

To a large degree, the challenges to the council, I think are also challenges to legal education. So one of the things that we’ve been watching is starting this July one, there’s going to be a cap on federal student loans available to graduate programs. So a cap of $50,000 per year or a maximum of $200,000. And that’s going to, I think, challenge a lot of law schools, right? And some of them even in ways that might threaten their accreditation because it threatens their revenue streams. And so law schools have to be innovative. And if forward thinking and trying to figure out how to adapt to this new environment, you can throw on top of that the challenges presented by artificial intelligence AI, which I think is sharpening the demands of law school because they no longer just have to produce first year associates who can draft research memos because that’s something that AI is going to be able to do for you.

So how do you sort of educate law students to get them further down the pathway towards becoming experienced lawyers? That’s a real challenge that law schools have. So for the council then, we want to be thinking ahead and making sure that we’re giving law schools the flexibility they need to meet those challenges so that we’re not imposing unnecessary burdens on the law schools that might make it harder for them to serve their students and then ultimately to serve the public. So that’s another focus of our advisory committee and our core principals review as I’ve asked that group to go through the standards and tell us, where are the pressure points? What do you think are the things that need to be changed or where we need more flexibility? One of the kind of high points of that is we’re looking at our variance process. So law schools right now, if they think they have an innovative idea, a better way to deliver legal education that may not be allowed by the standards, they’re allowed to apply for variance and tell us why they think this new idea is going to be effective.

And the council looks at those, but really grants them very liberally because we want law schools to have that flexibility. So I foresee a period, particularly with AI and the federal student lending caps that I mentioned, I think law schools are going to need that flexibility over the next decade and the council needs to continue to deliver it to them while still making sure that we’ve got our baselines of quality met so that we’re fulfilling our role as an accreditor.

J. Craig Williams:

I’m going to ask a, for instance, question here. Let’s start with, I’m ready to start up a new law school. I want to get my school accredited. I’m going to do a virtual law school or something like that, or perhaps a brick and mortar school. How long is this process going to take me and what do I have to have to get accredited?

Daniel Thies:

Yeah, so it starts with an application to us, and there’s a baseline requirement that you have to have been in operation for a year before you can apply for accreditation. When you apply, you’re basically compiling information, answering questions with respect to each standard to show how you’re going to comply with that standard. And so you send us the application. That will result in a site visit where the council will send in a team of six people to take a look to talk to people at the law school, talk to students, talk to professors, verify all the information that you submitted. If that application is successful, you then become what’s called provisionally approved. And a provisionally approved law school does not have to show 100% that it’s in compliance with all standards, but it does have to show that it is substantially in compliance with all the standards, and then it has to have a plan for coming into compliance with the standards within three to five years.

So once that three years has passed, when you’re in that period three to five years after you’re provisionally approved, the law school can apply for full approval. And at that point, that triggers another application and another site visit, another review by the council. And if as part of that process, the school can show that it is now fully in compliance with the standards, then it will become a fully accredited law school.

J. Craig Williams:

You have to have a certain library size, a certain number of students, a certain number of professors paid a particular amount. What are those kind of basic standards?

Daniel Thies:

So no, it’s not a numbers game. And in fact, this is one of the most common misconceptions about the council and the criticisms we get thrown at us that how dare you require a certain number of volumes in the library. That has not been part of the standards for decades. And in fact, the library standards today basically say just that your library has to have sufficient resources to support your program of legal education, and those resources can be either in print or online. So a lot of schools satisfy that standard with their online subscriptions to various databases. So the library standards have transformed significantly. And similarly, others have. There used to be a standard now more than a decade ago that talked about student faculty ratios. That’s been in the dustbin for a while. And similarly, there’s no requirements about how much money you spend or a specific number of faculty.

You just have to have enough faculty to show that you’re supporting your program of legal education. By and large, the number standards have been gone for a long time and are increasingly, more and more of them are going away. In their place, there’s more of a focus on what I would call outcomes. So our primary outcome standard is that schools have to show that 75% of each graduating cohort has passed the bar within two years of graduation. That’s a bright line rule that we think a reasonable one because if you are a school that’s taking money from students for three years and then not giving them a realistic chance of passing the bar and becoming a lawyer, we think that’s a problem and students need to know that if you can’t do that as a school, you shouldn’t have our stamp of approval. But there’s also other outcome standards throughout the standards where we ask law schools to think hard about what skills and competencies do they want their graduates to have, and then to be able to demonstrate that they’re measuring those skills and competencies and can show that the students have them upon graduation.

So that’s a common trend in accreditation more broadly in education, and it’s come a little bit late to the legal profession, but it is here now, and it’s part of our standard. So we’re focusing a lot more on those outcomes and a lot less on the numbers, inputs that you were describing.

J. Craig Williams:

Right. There’s been, I think, some responses in the law schools, at least from what I’ve seen. I was involved with the University of California at Irvine’s Law School. Dean Irwin Chemarinski developed some very innovative programs to teach students practical things as you mentioned. And what’s your thought? What’s this council’s thought about these types of programs that law schools come up with in order to kind of better students’ skills?

Daniel Thies:

Yeah, we are in favor of them. I think skills education has been a trend even longer than the learning outcomes I was talking about. And you think about the clinical legal education movement back in the 70s and the 80s that really put these kind of programs front and center. And again, if you look back at the history, some of the council’s leaders were prominent in that clinical legal education movement. And you think of things like Bob McCrate and the McCrate Report that came out in 1992, which was a report done by the section, Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. And it talked about how important it was to give law students not only knowledge about what the law is, but also skills and other competencies. And that report has been enormously influential. And we applaud when schools continue to innovate in that area.

I think, as I mentioned before, the challenges coming from AI actually put a premium on those sort of higher level skills about exercising judgment and practical wisdom in concrete real situations with real clients. The McCrate Report and others have really talked about how that’s central to developing your identity and your capabilities as a lawyer. And so if that process can start in law school with sort of live client interaction or other means of training law students to act like lawyers, that’s a wonderful thing. And again, we want to make sure that our standards have the flexibility necessary to make sure law schools can innovate in those ways.

J. Craig Williams:

How does the school go about losing its accreditation?

Daniel Thies:

Well, so most recently there was a string of law schools during the aftermath of the Great Recession where this really became an issue. And for your listeners, if they’ll remember that period, what happened is that there was a couple years after the recession ended, a sharp decline in the number of applications to law school. And it sort of coincided with, I think, a realization among the public that there was not a never-ending supply of good paying jobs for lawyers. And that if you weren’t able to get one of those good paying jobs, you didn’t want to be saddled with the student loan That might come. So as a result, applications plummeted and law schools had to react. Some of them reacted. They said, “Well, we don’t want to cut our budgets, so we’re going to admit more students, including a lot of students near the bottom of the class.” And so by the middle of that period in 2014, I think there were 10 schools that had median LSAT scores for their admitted students below 142.

And for those who don’t have the LSAT sort of scale in front of you, that’s a very low LSAT score. And so what was happening is these students would go through three years of law school, they’d pay all their tuition to the schools, and then they wouldn’t be able to pass the bar exam. And so the council took that very seriously because it becomes a consumer protection issue. You don’t want students to pay all that money thinking they can become a lawyer if they really have a very small chance to do so. And so in that decade, the 2010s, the council did a number of enforcement actions against schools who were playing that game. Ultimately, nine of them ended up closing either because they lost their accreditation or because they closed because they couldn’t comply with the accreditation standards and still continue to do well by their students.

And so that era is actually one that I like to point back to as showing why what we do is important because that was a very clear consumer protection issue that arose and the council acted to address it. And I think legal education and the public continue to bear the benefits of that today because there is not that same outcry about law school being a scam or ripping people off. And largely it’s because the council helped to act to get rid of that lower tier of law schools that was abusing students.

J. Craig Williams:

Well, let us in here on the inside secret. What is the minimum LSAT score needed to gain accreditation?

Daniel Thies:

Well, there’s no minimum. So the standard, it’s our standard 501. It says you have to admit students who are appear capable of satisfactorily completing the program of legal education and being admitted to the bar. And so it’s not just a number. And actually, if I could just draw a line at a 144 LSAT or a 145 LSAT and say, “If you’re below that, you’re not going to pass the bar. And if you’re above that, you will.” That’d be great, but things aren’t that simple. Truth be told, there are some students with a score below 145 on the LSAT who can pass the bar and there are some who can’t. The trick is identifying who they are. And so law schools have been, again, very innovative in this space and trying to come up with different ways of evaluating that cohort with low LSAT scores and figuring out which ones are most likely to be successful.

Again, the variance process. There’s several dozen schools that have a variance that allows them to use an admissions test called the JD Next program. And we’re right in the middle of that variance. There’s a lot of schools using that. What it is, is that rather than taking a test like an LSAT, you’ll go to a program, say a three or four week mini module of a contracts course. And then at the end of that three to four weeks, you take a test that’s much like a midterm or a mini final in a law school course. And then the law school can decide whether or not to admit you to law school based on that score. So that’s going on all around the country, as I said at a few dozen law schools. Part of the variance process requires schools to collect data. And so I think we’re going to see from that JD next program and other variances we’ve granted around admissions, we’re going to evaluate that data and see what really is effective.

And I hope some schools will find things that are innovative and that have not been done before. And so that maybe they can admit students with those low LSATs because they’ve identified these other markers that show that they’re likely to succeed. So that’s kind of a mini example of how the variance process can work and how the council can help encourage the kind of innovation that I think legal education’s going to need over the next couple decades.

J. Craig Williams:

What role does law school rankingsOuts and external involvement, like say, for example, as you mentioned in the legal clinic, Law Review, Moot Court, Student Bar, clerking for judges, what role does that play in accreditation?

Daniel Thies:

What role does a law school rankings play in accreditation? Zero is the answer. We don’t care what any ranker of law school says about how good a school is. We have our own metrics and we actually send in site teams, real people, real experts to evaluate whether or not they’re met. The rankings, and of course US News and World Report is sort of a prominent one among them. Obviously, they don’t do that. They don’t send people to law schools. And in fact, US News relies almost entirely on our data, which is an interesting thing a few years ago when some of the top law schools said, “Hey, we’re no longer going to send our data directly to US news.” US News kind of shrugged and said, “Well, okay, we won’t use that data anymore. We’ll just change our criteria and rely on the data that the council puts out.

” And so they’ve now changed their rankings in order to rely on our work really. And I think that is a whole other topic for maybe a different podcast if we talk about the effects of the rankings on legal education. But for this purpose, I think it does illustrate that actually as the national accreditor of law schools, we’re in a unique position to be able to collect data from all of the law schools that we accredit. And if you had a system of different states accrediting different law schools themselves, one of the many problems that would come from that is that they would all collect data in different formats. They’d all ask different questions and it would be much harder to compare all law schools across the entire country. So again, there’s sort of a natural benefit that arises from having one clearinghouse for gathering this data about legal education.

J. Craig Williams:

If I were to go on the American Bar Association’s website and look up the council, would I be able to find who’s on the council and what their qualifications are?

Daniel Thies:

Yeah, the list is on the website. We are judges, practitioners, professors from law schools around the country, several current and former deans, and then three public members, including a former president of a liberal arts college, a representative from the architecture profession, someone involved with accreditation of architecture programs, and then also someone in higher education, consulting and administration. So it’s a wide variety of folks, and also a law student, I should mention. And actually, that’s how I got involved in the council first as I was a law student representative back in 2008 to 2010. So all the names of those folks are up there on the website, and I think they’re a wonderful group of people as I’ve gotten to know them all, very knowledgeable, very insightful and deliberative, and I really enjoy working with them. So I would encourage all your listeners to go take a look.

J. Craig Williams:

Great. Well, Daniel, we’ve just about reached the end of our program time to wrap up and get your final thoughts and perhaps cover some things that I didn’t ask you about that you feel are need to discuss.

Daniel Thies:

Yeah. So I would say in closing that the council does recognize sort of how central accreditation of law schools can be to our system of legal education. We know how important it is to serve law students, making sure they know where the quality law schools are and that they can make decisions that are best for them as they’re considering where to go to law school, but also ultimately how important the work is to the public to make sure that the lawyers who are out there are qualified to provide services. And so we know this is a great privilege. It’s not something we take lightly. There are lots of critics out there. Some of the criticisms are unfounded, others we’re trying to take to heart and to improve our processes, but we realize that regardless, it’s an honor to do what we do and we don’t take it for granted.

And so I appreciate, to the extent folks who are listening, pay attention to this. I appreciate you giving us your attention and working to understand more about what we do, and we’ll try to repay the favor with continuing to work diligently for the improvement of legal education.

J. Craig Williams:

Great. Thank you very much. Well, and as we wrap up, I’d like to thank Daniel Thies for being with us today. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show.

Daniel Thies:

Thank you, Craig. It’s been a pleasure speaking to you as well, and I really appreciate the opportunity.

J. Craig Williams:

I’ll hear a few of my thoughts about today’s topic. Accreditation is a good idea. And I think accreditation is helpful probably largely because I went to an accredited law school, but it helps. It sets a standard and I believe the nationwide accreditation is perhaps better than a statewide accreditation because the state laws vary and the states can determine individually which set of laws it wants to go. For example, in Louisiana, they largely deal on Napoleonic laws, so they have to have a different type of a bar than the rest of the states, but that doesn’t differ in terms of education. You need to be taught as a lawyer how to think critically, how to do research, how to write, and be able to speak if you’re going to go into court. So those kinds of things are enhanced, I think, by a standard of accreditation enhanced on a nationwide basis, because there’s also been a movement among states and among lawyers to be able to have nationwide admission.

I mean, our laws are different in each state, yes, and we’re obligated to learn those things. But after you’ve been in practice for five years, most states will allow you to simply enter in on a waiver, assuming that they’re going to take the effort to learn that state’s particular laws. So that argument really doesn’t hold a whole lot of water. Anyway, that’s my thought about today’s topic. Let me know what you think. If you like what you heard today, please let us know on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcasting app. You can also visit us at thelegaltalknetwork.com where you can sign up for our newsletter. I’m Craig Williams. Thanks for listening. Please join us next time for another great legal topic. Remember, when you want legal, think Lawyer 2 Lawyer.

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