This year the average passage rate for the public schools in Texas is 87.4%. (Houston, Texas Tech, Texas, and Texas Southern). The average bar passage rate for private schools was 90.1%.

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Examinees who passed the July 2009 Texas Bar Exam

1. Be sure to select someone knows you well and is familiar with your work.
2. Ask the potential recommender if they are willing, and have time, to complete a letter of recommendation for you. Understand that your potential recommender is busy, so be sure to approach the potential recommender as early as possible.
3. Follow up with the initial conversation to provide the recommender with specific information about the requested letter, including who the letter should be addressed to, when the letter is due, and what qualities the selection committee or recipient is looking for.
4. Provide the recommender with a copy of your resume.
5. Let the recommender know, in a couple of sentences, why you are an ideal candidate for the position or award you are applying for. You need to be able to articulate this before you expect your recommender to.
6. Include a list of items that you have worked on that the recommender has reviewed so the recommender can comment on specific tasks that you have completed.
7. Consider providing the recommender a copy of your transcript, especially if the recommender is a professor or will be addressing your potential for academic success.
8. If the letter needs to be mailed, provide the recommender with a stamped, self-addressed envelope. This ensures the letter will be mailed without delay. If the letter needs to be uploaded, faxed, or sent electronically, provide clear instructions to do so.
9. If the letter is not made out to a specific individual or group, consider asking for more than one undated, original copy of the letter. This allows you to have an original letter of recommendation on file that you can use at a future date. Be sure to get the recommender’s permission before you use any additional copies of the letter.
10. Finally, send a letter thanking your recommender for taking the time to write you the letter of recommendation. Let the recommender know if your application was successful so that they know their letter was beneficial to you.

Donald J. Guter served as dean of the Duquesne University School of Law in Pittsburgh between 2005 and 2008. Prior to his service there, he served as Judge Advocate General in the Navy, leading a group of 1,800 lawyers in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. By comparison, in 2007 South Texas College of Law had 1,252 students enrolled. The school, located in Houston, is known for its trial advocacy program.  The only other Texas law school currently searching for a dean is Texas Tech.  Dean Walter Huffman, who is currently the dean of the law school at Texas Tech, will be retiring at the end of the semester.

1. Download and complete the Third Year Bard Card Application. (Word, PDF)

• Review pages 1-5.
• Complete the student information section of page 6. Page 6 will need to be signed and notarized.
• Complete page 7. Page 7 will need to be signed by one of the law school deans.
• Page 8 requires information on the student and supervising attorney. Tip: You can find pre-fill most of the requested information for your supervising attorney by searching the Texas Bar Directory. Page 8 will also need to be signed by the supervising attorney.
• Complete page 10-12, and have the supervising attorney sign pages 11 and 12. Page 12 will need to be notarized.

2. Download and complete the Authorization and Release (Word, PDF) with the supervising attorney’s information. This will need to be signed by the attorney and notarized.

3. Mail pages 6-8 and 9-12 of the Bar Card Application, along with the Authorization and Release form and a check for $10 made out to the State Bar of Texas to the following address:

The State Bar of Texas

Membership Department

P. O. Box 12487

Austin, TX 78711

4. The turnaround time for third year bar card applications is anywhere from two to five weeks, so make sure you apply early.

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The Paper Chase

Professor Kingsfield was right; law school changes the way you read, the way you think, and the way you analyze. Not unlike boot camp, this three-year odyssey is meant to break you and then remake you into something better than you were before. There are a number of things that you can do to ensure you come out on top when all the making and breaking is done:

1. Get advice from 2Ls and 3Ls who are successful in the areas you want to be successful in. There are a number of ways to be successful in law school. You can make the highest grades, become an acclaimed advocate, or become an editor for a law review or law journal. An important key to being successful in law school is getting advice from students who are already successful in the areas you want to be successful in. Every law student wants to make good grades, and high grades, more than anything else, are rewarded upon graduation. Find students who are at the top of their class and find what worked for them, how they managed their time, and how they prepared for their finals. Find students who have had the professors you are taking to get an idea of what to expect and what the professor expects of you. If you want to focus on honing your litigation skills, seek out a mentor who has been on a national mock trial or moot court team. If you want to become an editor on law review or a law journal, focus on improving your writing skills, pay attention to detail, and find someone who already is on a journal to learn about what it is like being on a journal and tips on effectively managing your time.

2. How you do on the final is much more important than how you answer a question in class.
The Socratic Method strikes fear in the hearts of 1Ls across the nation every year, and it is easy to be caught up in just reading for class to make sure you can answer the question when the professor calls on you. However, knowing the minutiae of every case is not what is going to get you the best grades, you need to be able to step back and see the big picture, so don’t sweat it if you get an answer wrong in class, but make sure you understand why you missed it, and focus on preparing for the final.

3. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
Every year brave young law students start their outlines from scratch. While there is utility in analyzing cases and creating your own outlines, especially when you first start studying the law, the time you have available to you in law school is limited. Make the best use of your time by using existing outlines as a starting point, which you can then tweak and make your own. Conversely, you will never want to rely solely on someone else’s outline. Make sure you agree with their conclusions and summary of the law. When in doubt, consult with your professor.

4. Get to know your professors.
Law schools pride themselves on low student to professor ratios and as a result most law school professors have the opportunity to get to know their students. However, it is up to the students to take advantage of this opportunity. Take the time to meet with professors when questions in during the semester, rather than waiting till the end of the semester to approach them. There are students who never set foot in a professor’s office do very well on their exams. Just because they haven’t been in the professor’s office doesn’t mean they haven’t spent the semester getting to know the professor. Successful students seek out prior exams or model exams that the professor has made available, and contemplates questions that could arise while they study, so that they know what to expect on test day.

5. Get to know your law librarians.
Law librarians are a great resource. They know how to use online resources like Westlaw and Lexis, as well as print resources better than probably anyone else in the law school. They are also there to help you find what you are looking for. There are numerous databases and resources that are often overlooked by even experienced researchers or lawyers that law librarians are familiar with. They can also assist you in forming good Boolean searches, give you search tips, and point you to the best starting point for your topic.

6. Find time for yourself.
Law school will likely be the most challenging endeavor you will have undertaken at this point in your life. It is important, now more than ever, to maintain a healthy lifestyle. Regular sleep patterns and exercise may seem hard to fit into your schedule, but are even more important now that it seems like you don’t have time for either.

7. Use technology wisely.
The smaller the laptop, the better. You law school books are going to take up a lot of space and the last thing you need is a 17 inch laptop to lug around every day. Back up your work religiously. Email yourself documents that you are working on at the end of each day. On the weekends, back your laptop up to external drives or at the very least to a thumb drive. Finally, use a free service like Mozy to back up your documents on a regular basis.

8. Master the law school exam.
Your entire grade for a law school class is often based on a single final exam. Master the law school exam process: http://www.leews.com/ and Getting To Maybe: How to Excel on Law School Exams.
At the very least, pick up old exams and do practice questions under timed conditions. Also, be aware that very often commercial outlines go into areas of law not covered by your professor, so to maximize your study time, seek out old exams or practice questions from the professor, the law school library, or other students. Law school exams usually consist of a long fact pattern followed by a series of questions. There are often no right or wrong answers. You are getting graded on spotting issues and them analyzing the potential outcomes. The facts usually come down somewhere in between two or more cases you looked at in your reading so you will have to compare the facts presented with fact patterns you came across in your reading and then predict how the court will come out. The prediction isn’t what you are graded on; it is the analysis of the facts and law that leads to your prediction that is graded. If you don’t correctly spot the issue, you lose the opportunity to get points for either the analysis. A very simple way to think of a law school answer is set forth by the IRAC Method: Issue, Rule of Law, Analysis, and Conclusion.

9. Consider joining a study group.
Going over the material with another person or a small group of people will help you hash out concepts, and ensure a thorough overview of the subject. Study groups sessions should be secondary to extensive individual study, so as a group you can focus on practice questions, clarifying issues, and making sure you have hit all the main concepts.

10. Don’t underestimate the value of after-class review or overestimate the value of reading for class.
After-class review is as important, if not more important than reading for class. Reviewing after class ensures that you completely understand the material. It should be the third time you are covering the material, the first being when you read before class, and the second being when you went over it in class. After-class review also allows you the opportunity to take any questions you still have on a topic to your professor for clarification. After class review sessions are also the perfect time to review and make notes to your outline.

Good luck to all of you starting class here in the next few weeks. I wish you all the best, and look forward  to seeing additional tips posted in the comments.

Although the publication rate per professor is a useful tool to compare one aspect of a law school’s ranking, the measure is subject to a number of limitations. First, it does not take into account how many times the published articles were cited, a measure that focuses more on the quality of articles written rather than the quantity. Second, the publication rates per professor measure do not reflect how many professors were actually published in a given time frame. Professors who publish a large number of articles increase the overall publication rate for the whole school. For example over the last year, Antonio Gidi of University of Houston published ten articles and Bernard Black at the University of Texas published fourteen articles.

The findings are subject to the limitations of the source data. The data for the number of papers published comes from the Social Science Research Network. While the SSRN has a majority of the scholarly works published, SSRN only publishes those articles made available by the authors for publication through SSRN. SSRN data also reflects the year in which the article was first made available through SSRN, not the year which the paper was first published. For the sake of consistency, the numbers used in the full-time faculty column were based on the numbers most recently published by the ABA through lsac.org.

One final note, while the publication rates are often referred to and are commonly used as one measure in deriving law school rankings, it is important to note that at least one in depth study concluded that there is little correlation between publication or citation rates and effective teaching.

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On a related note, my thanks to Bryan Jepson for getting me a signed copy of Justice Scalia’s new book during my visit to D.C. last month.

While the City of Dallas and the University of North Texas prepare to open the doors of the new law school in 2010, the proposal for the new law school has yet to receive legislative approval. In April 2007, the Texas Senate approved Senate Bill 105 authorizing the creation of the school, but the measure has yet to be approved by the House. A similar measure died in the House in 2005.

The announcement comes just days after the Associated Press reported on the growth of new law schools outpacing the number of jobs available to law students. A debate hosted by Robert Ambrogi and J. Craig Williams between Dean Chemerinsky (of Duke, who heading to the new UC Irvine) and Dean Guernsey (of Albany) on the issue of whether the nation has too many law schools can be found here.

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In 2007, the College Cost Reduction and Access Act (CCRAA) was signed into law by President Bush. (Public Law 110-084). The CCRAA provides for the forgiveness of federal student loans after i) 10 years of public service work, or ii) 25 years. One of the notable aspects of the CCRAA is that the ten years of public service work does not have to be continuous. Students clerking for a judge for a year or two before entering private practice can apply those years of service towards the ten-year requirement if they later chose to accept another government position or work for a 501(c)3 organization.

Qualifying for Public Service Debt Forgiveness:
To qualify for Public Service Debt Forgiveness, the borrower must:
A) make 120 payments after October 1, 2007, based on one of the following programs:
i) IBR – Income Based Repayment (available after July 2009)
ii) ICR – Income Contingent Repayment (borrowers must have Federal Direct Loans or consolidate under a Federal Direct Consolidation). The one noteworthy difference IBR and ICR, for the extent of this discussion, is that the IBR program allows students to pay a smaller percentage of their discretionary income as a qualified monthly student loan payment.
iii) 10 Year Standard Repayment
B) be employed in “public service”
C) consolidate any federally-backed private student loans with a Direct Consolidation Loan directly from the Department of Education. (http://www.loanconsolidation.ed.gov/)

In the above example, a student graduating with $100,000 in eligible debt, entering a public service position for 10 years, will pay $430 per month instead of $1,150.80, and have $86,496.00 in outstanding interest and principal forgiven. I’ve made the spreadsheet available here, so that users can calculate their own IBR repayment terms by changing the variables highlighted in yellow.

Public Service Defined:
The CCRAA defines a “public service job” broadly. The definition includes full-time jobs in any government position, public interest law services (including prosecution or public defense or legal advocacy in low-income communities at a nonprofit organization), military, public education, and positions with 501(c)3 non-profit organizations. The Department of Education is expected to provide more guidance on what jobs qualify as public service jobs.

Loans Eligible for Federal Direct Consolidation:
Stafford Loans
Grad PLUS
Certain Perkins Loans.
Ineligible Loans:
Parent PLUS Loans
Private loans that are not backed by the government.

Potential Tax Liability Arising from the CCRAA:
One of the initial problems identified with the CCRAA was the potential “marriage penalty” since qualification for loan forgiveness and the repayment terms are based on the adjusted gross income from the taxpayer’s income tax return. Commendably, the House and Senate both recognized marriage penalty and passed an amendment to prevent this from becoming an issue. On December 21, 2007, S. 2371 was signed into law allowing married borrowers to file separate tax returns and calculate each spouse’s AGI and income-based repayment separately for purposes of the CCRAA.

However, there still remains the issue of whether the CCRAA loan forgiveness will trigger tax liability. Traditionally, forgiven loans are treated as taxable income. Despite this, section 108(f) of the Internal Revenue Code provides that the forgiveness of certain loans made by the federal government to facilitate higher education does not constitute income “if the individual worked for a certain period of time in certain professions for any of a broad class of employers.” However, it is unclear whether the Direct Consolidation Loan will qualify under 108(f) because the consolidation loan is made after the borrower graduates, rather than beforehand to “facilitate” the education. Given the Congressional amendment addressing the marriage penalty, an amendment favorable to borrower’s pursuing public interest work can be expected.

Students who are interested in working for the government or pursuing other public interest work on graduation should utilize Federal Stafford and Grad Plus loans while avoiding private loans that are not backed by the federal government. Upon graduation, students interested in taking advantage of the CCRAA provisions should consolidate their loans through a Direct Consolidation Loan. Students who do not remain in public service work for a period of ten years, but have consolidated under a Direct Consolidation Loan, will have their loan balance forgiven after twenty-five years from the date of consolidation.

Sources and additional reading:
http://www.abanet.org/lsd/legislation/
http://www.nasfaa.org/publications/2008/negloans011608.html
Schrag, Philip G., “Federal Student Loan Repayment Assistance for Public Interest Lawyers and Other Employees of Governments and Nonprofit Organizations” 36 Hofstra L. Rev. 27 (2007), available at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1014622.

Thanks to Stuart Rees at http://stus.com for use of his cartoon.