Legal Profession
A Law School For the Northeast?
Wilkes considers critiques of legal education in start-up study
By Peter Hall
Of the Law Weekly
peter.hall@incisivemedia.com
Wilkes University is examining the feasibility of starting a law school in northeastern Pennsylvania that would stand out among the Keystone State's seven legal institutions by placing emphasis on mentoring and setting out to address recent criticism of traditional legal education.
The fast-growing private university in Wilkes-Barre began studying the prospect in 2004 and this spring its board of trustees appointed Loren D. "Chip" Prescott Jr. dean for the Wilkes University Law School Planning Initiative. Prescott is spearheading a study of market demand and other factors and plans to make a recommendation to the board in April.
If the recommendation is to move forward with the plan, Wilkes University could launch its law school in fall 2009 and would enroll between 80 and 100 first-year students a year later, university officials say.
University leaders say the school's locale, Luzerne County -- about two hours or more from Harrisburg, New York, Philadelphia or State College -- lacks a viable option for area residents who want to commute to a law school. And northeast Pennsylvania, which includes the cities of Wilkes-Barre and Scranton, is poised for economic growth, school officials say.
Wilkes University President Joseph "Tim" Gilmour said the school's board of trustees recognizes the challenges inherent in attracting faculty and students to an unaccredited school. In response to those challenges, Wilkes' leaders envision an innovative program tailored to suit the demand for lawyers in the region.
"I think we're going to attract the students who are interested in practicing in small to medium sized practices in small to medium sized cities, and those are the ones that are having trouble attracting strong lawyers," Gilmour said. "The initial soundings that we have from the ABA accrediting group is that they would be very receptive to that kind of a program."
Anthony L. Liuzzo, a professor of business and economics and director of Wilkes' MBA program, said faculty and other stakeholders are highly supportive of the plan and want to ensure the law school would be closely integrated into the university as a whole.
"The one thing that we want to be certain of is the university has a paradigm of mentorship, we've carried that program over to the graduate program as well and we want the law school to continue the tradition of mentoring," said Liuzzo, who is an attorney himself and served on the search committee for the dean of the law school planning initiative.
By continuing the tradition of mentoring that has succeeded in Wilkes' pharmacy, business and nursing programs, the law school would fit into the university's overall model of teaching, Gilmour said.
"I think there are wonderful opportunities for legal mentoring," he said.
But the focus of the Wilkes University law school's effort to establish a distinctive style of legal education is a desire to address the findings of critiques that find law schools across North America fail to prepare new lawyers for the real world.
"Law schools are teaching the law well, but they're not teaching them to be lawyers," Gilmour said. "Our sense is that we could -- and it's presumptuous -- make a contribution to legal education by founding a small law school that really attempts to address the concerns in those critiques."
Poised for Growth
Wilkes University was founded in 1933 as a junior college affiliated with Bucknell University in Lewisburg, Pa. The college became an independent four-year college in 1947 with programs in the arts, sciences and professional fields.
Wilkes College became Wilkes University in 1990 and six years later established its school of pharmacy, named for benefactor Geraldine Nesbitt Orr. In 2004, the school established the Jay S. Sidhu School of Business & Leadership.
As one leg of support for Wilkes' law school initiative, Gilmour points to an atmosphere of optimism in Wilkes-Barre and Scranton. The twin cities are engaged in a decades-long process of reinventing themselves from hard scrabble coal mining communities to business friendly second cities to New York and Philadelphia.
In the long-term, northeast Pennsylvania stands to benefit from an energy boom to echo the anthracite rush of the late 19th and early 20th centuries responsible for the region's initial growth. A massive geologic feature known as the Marcellus Shale Formation beneath much of Pennsylvania is being explored for natural gas production.
"Given the energy situation, its just a matter of time before it is tapped and there will be growth, significantly," Gilmour said.
Leaders in the area have already recognized the need for a medical school and founded the independent Commonwealth Medical College in Scranton.
"The region will need a law school too," Gilmour said.
The Planner
When the Wilkes board of trustees decided to launch a detailed feasibility study in 2007, the first step was to find a legal academician with the experience to assess all of the factors that would influence the board's final decision from the demand for law school seats to the cost of establishing a legal library.
Prescott said he believes he stood out as a candidate to lead the effort because of his extensive administrative experience at Widener University School of Law in Harrisburg.
Prescott was a full-time faculty member at Widener for 18 years including two as dean of students and eight years as vice dean. He also lists experience as a CPA, a background teaching federal taxation and taxation exemption for charitable organizations.
Before teaching at Widener, Prescott also taught at the University of Florida school of law. He earned his law degree from Willamette University College of Law in Salem, Ore., and a master of laws in taxation from the University of Florida College of Law. He is also a doctoral candidate in public administration at Penn State.
Prescott said he followed in his father's footsteps, first practicing accounting, then becoming a lawyer.
"It was sort of natural that with his background I wound up studying accounting and then law and found my way into a practice that did that kind of work," he said.
But after four years of practice, Prescott discovered that his true passion was teaching. He said his experience as an administrator at Widener puts him in a unique position to lead and create a new institution. He added that his PhD work at Penn State will be a useful asset to Wilkes' planning effort.
Among the main tasks in the planning effort is to establish a market for law school seats and to make a connection between the process of training future lawyers and the demand for legal services.
"The relationships between the interest prospective students have in studying the law and the job market is a little looser than people would have us believe," Prescott said.
In his experience at Widener, a large percentage of students entered law school with the belief that it would advance their careers or allow them to begin a new career. But the reality is that a sizable percentage of law school graduates don't get the pay off they anticipate.
"My guess is there is a significant percentage of people who study law with the goal of going into law practice without really understanding the kind of work they will do and the lifestyle they will lead," Prescott said.
William Henderson, associate professor at the Indiana University School of Law in Bloomington, Ind., has studied the economics of legal education and too often students fail to consider the indebtedness and the opportunity cost inherent in the decision to attend law school. Furthermore, the increase in median salary for new lawyers has failed to keep pace with the increase in tuition since the early 1990s, Henderson says.
"There's really no effective feedback that allows prospective law students to assess the risk-benefit analysis of going to law schools," Henderson said.
The problem is compounded at a start-up law school where accreditation is provisional.
"Wilkes-Barre is not going to be graduating the kind of lawyers who will go into the big corporate law firms," Henderson said.
An extensive study of the legal education system by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching titled "Educating Lawyers: Preparation for the Profession of Law" addresses some of those issues.
While the study finds that law schools succeed in teaching legal thinking, they rely too heavily on one method and often fail to give students the skills to employ legal thinking in the complex world of actual practice.
"My intention is to address some of the criticisms that are found in the Carnegie report and as a result try to be part of the trend that is starting to develop and be a true 21st century law school," Prescott said.
Part of the effort will be the adaptation of Wilkes' mentoring program, which Prescott said he envisions as similar to the preceptorship programs employed to expose new lawyers in Pennsylvania to a variety of practice areas and situations.
"That's what we're going to try to recapture in the mentoring program at Wilkes," he said.
Prescott said legal education should also be taking cues from the medical training establishment.
"The clinical experience that every medical student gets is something that is not found in the legal profession," he said.
In that respect, Pennsylvania's newest law school will provide a useful model. Drexel University College of Law enrolled its first class in 2006 with an emphasis on real-world experience.
"Drexel University has a long history with its co-op program and the law school has adopted that co-op program," Prescott said. "It ensures that every student who graduates will have some field experience -- some clinical experience -- and that's not something that a lot of law schools can say."
Carl "Tobey" Oxholm III, general counsel of Drexel University, oversaw the planning of the college of law and said the inclusion of the co-op program in the legal curriculum helps to set it apart.
"Look around and look at how many co-op law schools there are around the country," he said.
Oxholm said Drexel's goal in starting a law school was to serve the region's burgeoning medical, business and creative economies.
While Wilkes' leaders say part of their goal is to prepare the university to serve its community, Henderson cautions against starting a law school for the wrong reasons.
"The business case for the university is different from the business case of the students," Henderson said.
"There's room for innovation in legal education and if that's going to be their mission, there may be room for them at the table," he said. •
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