In the wake of hard-hitting stories in The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, sens. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) have begun a very public correspondence with ABA President Stephen Zack. But several months before these headlines, the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar had already begun the painful process of creating a better, more transparent system for tracking employment outcomes. Last week, the ABA section announced its new plan. Although it is a giant leap forward in terms of solid, school-level employment data, the new plan will have the secondary effect of undermining the National Association for Law Placement’s ability to collect, analyze and publish industry-level data — a task NALP has performed for nearly four decades. This is a giant step backward that will deny policymakers the very information they need to make hard decisions.
The problem is created by a proposed massive duplication of efforts. NALP already collects virtually all of the school-level data sought by the ABA Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. Indeed, NALP’s expertise in classification and data collection was relied upon extensively by the ABA Questionnaire Committee, which the section created more than a year ago to generate a solution to the lack of law school transparency. Although NALP already has school-level data, it cannot publish this information due to the terms of its licenses with law schools. The Questionnaire Committee thus recommended that the ABA work with NALP to reduce the data-collection burden and generate meaningfully comparative data based on law school geography, a task NALP can perform with great accuracy and efficiency.
