ABA, NALP wrangle over law grad data

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By Todd Etshman
Dolan Media Newswires

As American Bar Association President Stephen Zack said, those attending the ABA’s annual meeting in Toronto last week would earn an entire year’s worth of continuing education credit, network with leading professionals, examine a wide assortment of innovative legal products and services, see a beautiful city and more.

Hopefully, they also heard the end of the dispute between the National Association for Legal Career Professionals and the ABA over the collection, analysis and presentation of law school graduate employment data.

“This is crucial market information needed to facilitate to a competitive market for legal education, yet it is handed to the public in the form of a 10,000-piece jigsaw puzzle,” said William Henderson, Indiana University Maurer School of Law professor, in reference to the annual U.S. News & World Report law school rankings.

On Wednesday, NALP Executive Director James Leipold said he had been contacted by ABA representatives about meeting to resolve the issue at an open session of the ABA annual meeting on Friday in Toronto. Two weeks ago, in response to concerns voiced by members of Congress and others, the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions issued a statement indicating that it would require law schools to provide more detailed law school graduate employment information directly to the ABA instead of the NALP.

In the July 27 statement, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions said its objective was “to collect and provide correct data that will be sufficient to assist law school applicants in making decisions on whether to go to law school and which school to attend and to assist current law students and recent graduates in making employment decisions.”

But as Leipold explained, “(w)e’ve been doing this type of research for 37 years,” and the ABA’s new requirement undermines the NALP’s collection of law school data information, a task it did in collaboration with the ABA. Reporting to their accrediting agency, the ABA is mandatory for law schools but reporting to the NALP is not.

“We all want the same thing — more detailed information on job outcomes, we just disagree about how to do it,” Leipold said. “Folks have reached out to me to say how we can bring this to a resolution. We hope both organizations will use that time to move closer together on this issue.”

“If the ABA muscles NALP out of the data collection business, we will have less transparency on employment outcomes and the value proposition of legal education,” Henderson said in an essay he provided to The Daily Record. “(B)ecause NALP constituents include law students, law schools, and legal employers, it can be counted on to deliver honest numbers and place them in a broad historical context.”

Henderson said it is the NALP that is fulfilling the ABA’s responsibility to provide reliable data in a cost effective manner and due to a lack of resources and expertise, “the ABA would be a poor replacement.”

“They’re a policy organization. We are a research organization,” Leipold said. “We have a full time research staff on board. The ABA Section (of Legal Education and Admissions) is not set up to do the research we do.”

Henderson recommended a collaborative ABA/NALP survey be issued to law schools, a notion Leipold agrees with.

“Professor Henderson is spot on. His analysis is exactly right. He sees how high stakes this is,” Leipold said. “Hopefully, we’ll have an answer on Friday or shortly thereafter.”