Out of Crisis Came Opportunity – The Impact of AccessLex Grant Programs

I began my legal education career almost 25 years ago. At that time, law schools were popular landing spots for bright college graduates seeking a stable, respected career. As a law school admission officer, I witnessed legal education’s popularity up close. The schools at which I worked regularly received more than 10 applications for every one seat in their entering classes. This popularity was fueled by a robust job market for new lawyers, with salaries that balanced well with the tuition rates and student debt levels of the day. Law school was a hot ticket. But good ol’ days don’t last forever. And law schools eventually faced a reckoning.

By 2011, legal education was in the early throes of an unprecedented softening in demand for a law degree. In just four admission cycles, the number of applicants declined more than one third and enrollments declined more than one quarter. The latter drop was the equivalent of about 50 average-sized law schools. Thousands of college graduates who normally would have sought law school admission opted to pursue other professional paths. Driving these trends was a post-Great Recession legal employment market that had contracted both in terms of jobs and salaries. 77% of law graduates in the class of 2007 secured jobs that required a law license. This proportion fell to 64% for the class of 2013. The 2013 grads also yielded a lower average salary – $82,408 versus $86,350 six years earlier.

The challenges facing the legal job market became fodder for extensive media coverage questioning the relevance of legal education and the value of a law degree. Provocative stories about law grads working as baristas and waiters and in other forms of underemployment were commonplace. These negative stories became pervasive, feeding the historic declines in applications and enrollments. The distressing climate prompted or, more accurately, forced legal education to engage in the type of long overdue self-reflection unheard of during the boom times. The purpose and value of a law degree was no longer self-evident. And we legal educators, for the first time, had to lean into some uncomfortable soul searching. This was the climate in which the AccessLex grants programs were born.

The purpose of the grant programs is to support rigorous empirical research into the form, function, and effects of legal education. We seek to encourage a robust culture of inquiry into questions of legal education access, affordability, and value. Our philosophy of inquiry can be summed up with three questions: What are we doing? Why are we doing it this way? Is there a better way to do it? The crisis of more than a decade ago provided an imperative for legal educators to turn these questions on themselves. AccessLex grants have helped convert this urgency into opportunity.

Ten years after our first grant, we have become the largest funder of empirical research into legal education, awarding more than $24.5 million across 362 grant programs since 2014. And we are seeing the beneficial impacts of these investments on legal education innovation and reform. One of our earliest grants was made to Mitchell Hamline School of Law for them to assess the impacts of their groundbreaking hybrid J.D. program. The results aided their efforts to design an increasingly effective course of study. Today, largely due to Mitchell Hamline’s proof of concept, distance learning is no longer novel in legal education. The emerging trend of adoption has increased access among talented aspiring lawyers unable to undertake a traditional in-person program. More recently, we have supported efforts in a number of states to assess their bar admission processes. These efforts have resulted in beneficial, evidence-based reforms in California, Delaware, Nevada, and other states. Overall, our grants have embodied our commitment to supporting aspiring lawyers from admission to law school through admission to the bar.

Legal education has come out of the post-Great Recession crisis and is much improved overall. But there is still much work to be done. The disruptive onset of COVID-19 has triggered another spurt of reform efforts. No matter what challenges arise, AccessLex will continue to support rigorous inquiry that yields tangibly useful insights. As we enter the next 10 years, we are excited by the possibilities.

Learn more about AccessLex Institute’s grant programs.