THE FUTURE OF LEGAL EDUCATION: GAME-CHANGING ABA-APPROVED ONLINE LAW SCHOOLS MAKE BECOMING A LAWYER EASIER AND MORE AFFORDABLE.

• Author: Jaen, Ulysses

INTRODUCTION

Access to justice for everyone is part of our Catholic commandment to love one another as we love ourselves. Fairness is an intricate part of who we are, and helping our brothers and sisters get the opportunity to air their grievances and seek the protection of the law is a natural implication of our faith. Saint Thomas Aquinas explained that:

the good of any virtue, whether such virtue direct man in relation to himself, or in relation to certain other individual persons, is referable to the common good, to which justice directs: so that all acts of virtue can pertain to justice, insofar as it directs man to the common good. (1) As legal educators, our mission is to teach our students and assist our profession and our community with the intricacies of our justice system. We aim to teach students about the law and to help as many people as we can through them, because it is done for the common good. Becoming licensed attorneys is the best way that our students can make a difference in our society. Teaching as many students who want to help our communities face the challenges of today is limited by the current American Bar Association (ABA) standards that generally require in-person instruction. (2) We believe that the lessons learned during this terrible COVID-19 Pandemic add impetus to the creation of part-time programs as well as the expansion of fully online legal education offerings in the near future. (3)

The current legal education industry is overseen by the American Bar Association for the Department of Education. Students apply for federal student loans to pay for tuition and living expenses every year for three years. Law schools continue to face the increasing costs of buildings, equipment and personnel, and related costs that get passed down to the students and the consumers. We propose that allowing law schools to expand via part-time and full-time online programs will enable mission-oriented schools to assist students to complete their legal education at a fraction of the cost. Students will not incur as many living expenses when they can stay home, continue to work and help their families, borrow less money, and thus be able to assist their less privileged brethren in their communities. Pro bono work is hard for recent graduates saddled with high student loans to pay and often young families to provide for. Making online legal education available will let our students and recent graduates afford the time to help non-profit organizations that render legal aid.

Despite the interest from prospective students and law schools, legal education generally remains an in-person academic pursuit. There are few current ABA-approved Distance Education J.D. programs (4) in the United States, and non-ABA correspondence schools' graduates can only take the bar exam in California, Maine, Minnesota, New Mexico, Oregon, and Vermont, which allow individuals to take the bar exam upon graduation from law schools approved by state bodies but not accredited by the ABA. (5) "An ABA-approved law school may only grant up to one-third of the credit hours required for the Juris Doctorate (J.D.) degree for distance education courses." (6)

Standard 311. ACADEMIC PROGRAM AND ACADEMIC CALENDAR:

(a) A law school shall require, as a condition for graduation, successful completion of a course of study of not fewer than 83 credit hours. At least 64 of these credit hours shall be in courses that require attendance in regularly scheduled classroom sessions or direct faculty instruction.

(b) A law school shall require that the course of study for the J.D. degree be completed no earlier than 24 months and, except in extraordinary circumstances, no later than 84 months after a student has commenced law study at the law school or a law school from which the school has accepted transfer credit.

(c) A law school shall not permit a student to be enrolled at any time in coursework that exceeds 20 percent of the total credit hours required by that school for graduation.

(d) Credit for a J.D. degree shall only be given for course work taken after the student has matriculated in a law school's J.D. program of study, except for credit that may be granted pursuant to Standard 505. A law school may not grant credit toward the J.D. degree for work taken in a pre-admission program.

(e) A law school may grant up to 10 credit hours required for the J.D. degree for distance education courses during the first one-third of a student's program of legal education. (7)

"If a law school wishes to grant more than one-third of the credit hours required for the J.D. degree for distance education courses, it must apply for a substantive change under Standard 105 and Rule 24." (8) Some law schools have designed hybrid curricula that provide the maximum amount of online education with some in-person component for a few days during the year to complete the two-thirds in person and one-third online requirements. The ABA warns students that "[e]arning an education completely via distance education may limit your ability to sit for the bar in many states." (9)

Dozens of schools have been meeting the pent-up demand for online legal education by providing master's in legal studies programs, and paralegal, or public notary courses completely online. However, these programs do not provide a path towards the actual practice of law. These programs are marketed as an option for working professionals seeking the legal education that they believe can get them jobs and promotions. These alternative legal education programs have resulted in an explosion of unauthorized practice of law (10) in fields such as real estate and immigration law. (11)

Some ABA-approved hybrid programs that mix combinations of weekend courses or residency requirements to stay within the current ABA rules. (12) Further, as of April 2022, there are only a few ABA-approved Distance Education J.D. programs. (13) Unfortunately, the high cost of obtaining a law degree under current rules require people to relocate and dedicate themselves to three years of investment with a high degree of risk when it comes to obtaining a job that will compensate the expense. Even those that obtain J.D. degrees from highly ranked law schools face severe challenges finding jobs that will compensate them for their investments. A recent article from the Wall Street Journal analyzed federal data on earnings for students who graduated in 2015 and 2016, citing information from Law School Transparency, which reports that average annual tuition at private law schools nearly tripled to $49,000, adjusted for inflation, between 1985 and 2019. Median pay a year after graduation for 2019 law graduates was only $72,500 the following year, the article said, citing information from the National Association for Law Placement. (14)

On the other hand, Michael Simkovic of the University of Southern California Gould School of Law insists that it is the result of national economic downturns, not the value of legal education that is to blame. He explains: "During this time period [2010 through 2013], law graduates continued to perform relatively well compared to their same-age cohorts facing the same economy. Law graduates were less likely to be unemployed, were more likely to be employed, earned significantly more money, and had lower student loan default rates." (15)

The legal industry has experienced major changes in the last several months clearly due to the ongoing pandemic, but also because of trends that were taking place even before the COVID-19 Pandemic. These changes include the growth of non-attorney competition, (16) the spread of virtual lawyering and online meetings as the accepted form of communications between clients and counselors, and the generational nature of contemporary practitioners and clients getting used to the technology that they have been forced to learn in the last eighteen months.

Law school admission applications have also increased, and the profile of the incoming student has as well.

The LSAT [Law School Admission Test] scores of those being accepted to law school are going up. Between fall 2016 and fall 2019, the percentage of matriculants with scores above 150 increased each year. Between 2018 and 2019, the median LSAT score rose from 155.9 to 156.4, and the percentage of matriculants with scores above 160 reached 36%. (17) As compared to Fall 2019, Fall 2021 applications were up 30.5% from 360,122 applicants. As compared to Fall 2018, Fall 2021 applications are up 27.2% from 369,239 applicants. As of June 3, 2021, there were 469,795 applications submitted by 68,086 applicants for the 2021 enrollment year. (18) According to the Department of Labor,

[e]mployment of lawyers is projected to grow 9 percent from 2020 to 2030, about as fast as the average for all occupations. About 46,000 openings for lawyers are projected each year, on average, over the decade. Many of those openings are expected to result from the need to replace workers who transfer to different occupations or exit the labor force, such as to retire. (19) It seems like only a few years ago when the reverse was true. (20) Even before the decline in jobs due to the COVID-19 Pandemic, the best years on record were around 30,000 jobs and that was consistent for more than twenty years. Law schools are currently at 38,000 first year (1L) enrollment with the most recent Law School Admission Council (LSAC) data. Despite the surplus, more than 90% of 2019 law school graduates landed jobs after finishing school, according to preliminary findings by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), which collected data from 196 schools in mid-March of 2020. That percentage of employed graduates was the highest recorded by NALP in the twelve years since the Great Recession. It seems that many attorneys have branched out into other occupations such as real estate, entrepreneurship, teaching, or other areas after suffering from the...