Law schools in Silicon Valley add practical skills to help students compete

Let’s face it — it’s not the most advantageous time to be a second- or third-year law student. Big law firms are shedding associates, deferring recruits and shrinking the number of interns as they adjust to the mercurial economy.

Local law schools are responding to marketplace realities by developing curriculum better suited to law firm needs. Universities are retooling their curriculum and incorporating management, leadership and specialized disciplines.

“We realized that graduating students are going to have a hard time finding jobs, principally because of the restructuring of large law firms but because of the cascading affect,” said Fred Gonzalez, a Santa Clara University School of Law alum who now serves as general counsel at SonicWall Inc. “We’re trying to figure out how to make our students more attractive.”

California Western programs enrich law school experience, community

As a law school devoted to the big picture, California Western hosts a number of institutes, centers and programs that enrich students’ law school experience while enabling California Western to have a substantive impact on the broader society. Professors and students involved in the programs shape real-life legal events — whether freeing wrongfully convicted inmates in California or offering pro bono legal advice to the indigent and underserved in San Diego.

The California Innocence Project is a clinical program dedicated to the release of wrongfully convicted inmates and providing an outstanding educational experience for the students enrolled in the clinic. Founded in 1999 as a part of the national network of Innocence Projects, CIP reviews more than 2,000 claims of innocence from California inmates each year.

Co-directed by Justin Brooks and Jan Stiglitz, with assistance from Litigation Coordinator Alex Simpson, the program has secured the release of five men serving a total of 75 years behind bars for crimes they did not commit.

Students who participate in the year-long clinic work alongside CIP staff attorneys on cases where there is strong evidence of factual innocence. They assist in investigation and litigation by locating and re-interviewing witnesses, examining new evidence, filing motions, securing experts and providing support to attorneys during evidentiary hearings and trials.

The Community Law Project at California Western is part of a unique medical-legal pro bono initiative developed in partnership with UCSD and other organizations, including the Third Avenue Charitable Organization. This purpose of the law project is to provide basic legal advice, information and referral services for those without access to the justice system, who cannot afford private legal services, who have a small problem requiring prompt preventative care, or who would just benefit from a candid discussion with legal counsel. The project’s client base includes children, indigent individuals and families, immigrants, the working poor, the abused, the elderly, the disabled, those who do not speak English as their first language and the homeless.

Coordinated by professor Linda Morton and Executive Director Anaheeta Kolah, the Community Law Project operates in cooperation with its partners to provide social, medical and legal services each week at First Lutheran Church in downtown San Diego. Locating services in the same place at the same time is convenient for clients, whose problems tend to be interconnected. The project allows California Western law students and attorney volunteers to use their classroom learning and legal expertise to contribute to this integrated med-law delivery system.

To learn more about California Western School of Law and its programs, visit www.CaliforniaWestern.edu.

Law firms are even offering paid sabbaticals for mid-level associates so they can get lost for a year (I suspect the firms are gambling they never return) and help the firm’s bottom line. Even top graduates from excellent law schools are blowing their budget on resume paper and stamps, in the hopes that a blizzard of resumes sent across the fruited plain will land them a decent job. Those student loans will start coming due soon, after all.

Amidst all that desperation, some recent law school grads are evidently willing to take advice from Democrat Gray Davis, the only Governor to be successfully recalled in California state history. Getting run out of office in disgrace apparently isn’t enough for this guy. Proceed with caution, I suppose.

Read the whole article at The Sacramento Bee.

Gray Davis gives advice to law school graduates

Gray Davis…wants graduating law students to know that failure doesn’t mean the end.

Davis’ advice is contained in a commencement speech he delivered last month to the Columbia University Law School, his alma mater.

After recounting his personal and professional career – including a few pats on the back for himself for his gubernatorial accomplishments – Davis gave his account of being recalled in 2003 and replaced by actor Arnold Schwarzenegger, to wit:

“Ultimately, I lost the recall election. Let me say you haven’t lived until you’ve heard Arnold Schwarzenegger say, ‘Hasta La Vista, Baby.’

“That election brought a very abrupt end to my 31 years of public service. The next day I told my wife I was disappointed that we didn’t get to finish the work that we started, but we had accomplished much, and it was time for us to move on.

…

“Rest assured, all of you will experience failure at some point in your life, deserved or not. I believe I am uniquely qualified to convince you that there is no defeat, no matter how devastating, that you cannot overcome.

Read the whole article at The Los Angeles Times…

Laid-off lawyer in predicament she never imagined
By STEVE LOPEZ

“I can’t get a job anywhere.”

I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails that start like that. This one was from Ellie Trope of Mid-City in Los Angeles, near La Brea, who lost her job more than a year ago. She wrote me after reading my column two weeks ago about the endless mob scene at the employment office in Van Nuys.

Trope, 43, is an attorney with 15 years of experience, and she said lawyers are losing their jobs in droves.

When people in banking and the mortgage industry were getting the heave-ho, it came as no surprise. In fact, on Friday I spoke to a banking executive with 20,000 employees under him who got fired in December after 21 years on the job. But I would have thought anyone with a law degree would be able to talk their way out of a layoff, file for an injunction, whatever.

Not so. Trope told me it’s gotten much worse of late, and when I made some phone calls and checked on the Internet, I found that law firms in California and throughout the nation have been handing out pink slips by the dozens and the hundreds.

“Job cuts in U.S. legal sector hit 1,300 for January,” said a headline at Legalweek.com.

“Today isn’t over, but it already has a name: Black Thursday,” said a Los Angeles County Bar Assn. blog this week, making reference to hundreds of layoffs in the legal biz that were announced around the world the other day.

Trope sounded weary when I spoke to her by phone. The financial pressure of losing her job took a huge toll on her marriage, she told me, and she and her husband are now living separately. They share custody of their two children, and despite the financial strain, Trope hasn’t wanted to put the nanny on the bricks too, so she’s shuttling back and forth between households with the kids.

…

[S]he reluctantly decided to lower her expectations and began applying for jobs as a contract administrator, an office administrator and a paralegal. But she struck out there too, in part because other lawyers were trying the same thing.

“After a while with the paralegal jobs, the listings said, ‘No attorneys.’ I think it’s because they figured attorneys would leave as soon as they found work as lawyers.”

In mid-January she got a temporary lawyer job for hourly pay, and this week she’s switching to another temporary arrangement, hoping this one turns into a long-term job.

“In my life, things were always way too easy to get,” Trope said. “I put my head in the sand and never thought about the worst that might happen. It was way too easy to not have a backup plan, and I didn’t worry. I did a great job at work and I thought that was enough, and it’s not anymore.”

Read this interesting editorial in The Los Angeles Times…

Affirmative action and the bar exam
A California professor studying affirmative action should have access to law school performance statistics.

Americans have been debating the fairness and efficacy of racial preferences in college and graduate school admissions for more than 30 years. Now a UCLA professor is seeking to test his hypothesis that affirmative action programs actually hurt the career prospects of minority law school graduates. But he has been hampered in his research by the indefensible failure of the State Bar of California to provide the statistics he needs.

The professor, Richard H. Sander, has requested data about the performance of white and minority law school graduates on the bar examination, along with information about the schools they attended and their grades. In resisting his request, bar officials cite the need to protect the privacy of test takers and to honor an agreement that test material will remain confidential. At the same time, some defenders of affirmative action have argued against releasing the data because they think Sander’s project could have only one purpose: to discredit the idea of racial preferences.

The privacy and legal arguments strike us as spurious, a view shared by the executive director of the California First Amendment Coalition, which has joined Sander and his colleagues in asking the state Supreme Court to order the release of the information. Sander has promised that no individual student would be identified by the statistics, which would break down performance by law school.

It’s also unfair to accuse Sander of seeking to dismantle racial preferences. True, his hypothesis is that affirmative action students are disserved because they derive less benefit from an elite law school than students who meet the usual admission standards. This is the “mismatch” theory, which suggests that students who are weaker than their classmates will often do better academically — and on the bar exam — if they attend a less-competitive school.

The mismatch theory may be mistaken. But suppose it were found to be valid? That wouldn’t necessarily lead to the abolition of racial preferences. Another result might be the strengthening of mentorship and other programs to help less-well-prepared students achieve at higher levels.

An additional objection to Sander’s project is that good marks on the bar exam don’t guarantee success in the practice of law. Perhaps so. If the exam does a poor job of measuring the credentials of lawyers, it ought to be revised. But that has no bearing on Sander’s request.

…

Regardless of what we think of Sander’s hypothesis, he should be given the data he seeks. Defenders of affirmative action should not fear a serious examination of how well it’s working.

Bingham Associate Leaves With Hopes of Movie Making
by Zusha Elinson

Cupcake Brown is ready to write the next chapter in her life.

The former prostitute and junkie-turned-lawyer left Bingham McCutchen earlier this month to work on a movie script for her widely acclaimed memoir, “A Piece of Cake.”

“I enjoyed the practice of law, but I want to help people,” Brown said. “I’ve just been inundated with speaking requests, but it’s hard to do when you’ve got billable hours and lots of responsibilities.”

She said she may eventually return to the profession as a public interest lawyer, but doesn’t know yet.

After surviving rape and abuse as a child at the hands of her foster families, Brown joined a violent gang in Los Angeles as a teen. Her life spiraled into heavy drug use until she nearly died on the streets of San Diego after a four-day crack binge.

She eventually kicked her habit and went on to graduate from law school at age 37, in 2001. Since then, she had worked as a litigation associate in Bingham McCutchen’s San Francisco office.

…

She doesn’t have a movie deal yet, but Brown said she’s already chatted with actresses Regina King (“Friday,” “Jerry Maguire”), Kerry Washington (“Ray”) and Nia Long (“Big Momma’s House”). The lead role in the movie she hopes to make will be a difficult one, Brown noted: “There’s the street Cup, and then there’s the professional Cup, and you have to be able to play both.”