Res Ipsa Blog

Texas law students who have completed 60 credit hours and are not on academic probation may apply for a third-year bar card. The temporary trial card allows the student to “participate in the trial of cases in Texas under the supervision of a licensed attorney.” Students who wish to apply for a third year bar card outside of a clinical program should take the following steps:

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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One factor that is often considered in determining a law school’s ranking is the number of scholarly articles published per year by the school’s faculty. Since larger schools have an advantage in this regard, a more equitable measure of publication rates is a comparison based on the number of papers published per full-time faculty member.  This offers a better measure of how often professors are being published. For example, under the traditional measure the University of Texas would come out ahead in terms of the number of papers published, whereas University of Houston professors actually publish papers more frequently on a per capita basis.

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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University of Texas law students, on average, get the most bang for their law school buck. There are only two other schools in Texas where students make more in their first year than they spend in law school: the University of Houston and Texas Tech. At the other end of the spectrum, Baylor and Texas Wesleyan graduates have to work for nearly two years before they can recoup their law school expenses.

The cost/earnings ratio (C/E ratio) reflects how much every dollar earned by a first-year associate cost the associate over the course of their law school career. Since C/E ratios reflect the cost of going to law school, the lower the C/E ratio is, the better. The Return Ratio is the inverse of the C/E ratio, and it reflects the how much each dollar expended in law school is worth on graduation.

While these numbers don’t reflect opportunity costs, the time value of money, or the cost of borrowing the money, they do offer an interesting glimpse into the economics of attending law school, and help in determining which schools offer the “best deals.”

Interestingly, higher cost/earnings ratios don’t translate directly to higher debt/earnings ratio. The D/E ratios, which I will discuss later this week, provide a better sense of the average cost of attending law school for students who use student loans to finance their education.

Sources and Assumptions: All the data used reflects 2007 figures, since that is the most recent year that a complete data set was available. Data sources include the school websites, Princeton Review, and U.S. News and World Reports.

Continuing on the theme of whether going to law school is worth it, here is a look at the average starting salaries for Texas law school graduates, as originally published by The Princeton Review Best 170 Law Schools, 2008 Edition. (The average starting salary for Texas Southern graduates was not included in the article.)

(Click for full-size image.)

Nationally, Columbia topped the list with an average starting salary of $145,000. Duke, Michigan, Northwestern, and Chicago rounded out the top five schools, each coming in at $135,000.

To put the Texas salaries into perspective, making $75,000 in Austin is comparable to making $160,000 in Manhattan.