Saturday, November 5, 2016

Accredited Law Schools Go Green: Opt Not to Create Necessary Compliance Paperwork Until Audited

It is a truth universally acknowledged that convoluted, expensive regulatory systems are designed not to protect consumers or market fairness, but rather to ensure that the larger, more shrewd companies - those able to selectively shave compliance as close to the bone as possible or, better yet, ignore it altogether - will thrive over more honest ones.  Competition on price, quality, or convenience simply isn't enough; the Game needed a new twist, and that twist was to implant an obstacle course of regulation.

So it's no surprise that a few prestigious ABA schools flunked an audit of employment reporting.  Shit, we should be looking skeptically - or giving ludicrously high praise - to the half that achieved 95% compliance.  The whole point of an audit is that entities fail them.  Why else would one go looking except to find something?  You don't see me showing a pan in the river just to say the water's clean; no, I want some fucking gold.

And gold is this, my friends:
Just five out of 10 reviewed schools posted compliance rates of 95 percent or more. A sixth school missed the mark by a hair, posting a compliance rate of 94.8 percent. Two more came in at 86 percent, and a final two were found to have compliance rates in the mid-50 percent range. One of the lowest scorers appeared to have created supporting documentation after it was told it had been chosen for audit, the memo said.
That's not poor compliance.  That's flaunting.

Holy hand grenades, ABA, these places aren't IBM or Monsanto.  They're in one industry and deal with a few hundred lines on a spreadsheet for each class.  Most of them have been voluntarily keeping such records for years. 

On the menu of difficulty for institutional compliance, the ABA's regulations are saccharine baby food.  Considering that it's incredibly easy for most law schools to hire highly skilled professionals collecting that lifetime lottery premium, one would think they could handle compliance questions over an after-work beer and that someone just wouldn't fucking ignore creating supporting documentation until after the notice of audit shows up.

"So, Carl, this isn't, like, legal advice or anything, but, I mean, really, you don't have to create any of this stuff until they're going to audit you.  I mean, otherwise you're just wasting energy and paper - let's try and run a green law school, you know?  If the ABA really wants us to have this shit, they'll ask for it."
"But what if we get busted?"
"One of two things will happen.  Either everyone else does it, too, if they're smart like us - then it's an industry problem and nothing happens.  Or we're it, and then we fire the temp who already left, pretend that we were confused about what we were supposed to have, we're a footnote in a memo, and next time around we're bound to improve." 
"Thinking like this is why we're one of the top 150 law schools in America."

Plus, the ABA is going out of its way to assist in developing defense arguments:
“Our documentation requirements are quite specific and some think complex, so it is reasonable that in the first year of this review, there may be confusion over what we require,” Adams wrote. “The two schools that appear to have created their documentation after the fact raise more serious problems, but they may also be able to explain that what we perceive is not accurate.”
Imagine a federal prosecutor putting that disclaimer in its press release on a murder or massive RICO case.  You could throw a textbook in a law school and hit ten people who understand ejusdem generis.  But suddenly it's herculean to check the right boxes and keep a file?

And there, too, is the redoubtable Barry C., opining that the issues were mostly minor, the underlying data appears accurate, we've always been at war with Eastasia, they're not expanding the scope of audits, and - to this blog's understanding chagrin - names will not released.

So, sadly, we will never know the institution or institutions that apparently didn't even bother to have supporting paperwork until after they learned of the audit. 

But know this:  you, John Doe Law School, are an inspiration to us all.  May the ABA bless you and keep you, and make its face to shine upon you, and be gracious unto you, may it lift its countenance onto you, and grant you lemmings for all the days to come.

Amen, and scam on.

8 comments:

  1. According to that article, the schools were "randomly selected" for the audit. Yet non-compliance will not be distributed randomly among law schools. Where would you expect to find non-compliance: at a Harvard or at a Cooley?

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  2. Brilliant and hilarious write-up. As usual, your clever writing provoked some good laughs at a seriously non-funny situation.

    The ABA's Currier is the ex-dean of two lousy law schools, and he obviously has not betrayed his noble roots in legal education. The reason Currier can announce the "good news" that "the underlying information turns out to be accurate" is because:

    (1) A Level 1 Review (aka initial stage audit) consists solely of a review of all Graduate Employment Files. That is, no independent verification, only a review of files for completeness. Under the ABA protocol, a Level 1 is all that is required and all that has taken place so far. A Level 2 and Level 3 audit, which involves more serious scrutiny, only takes place at the ABA discretion.

    (2) According to the ABA protocol, documentation included in the employment files is presumed to be complete, accurate, and not misleading in the absence of credible evidence to the contrary.

    In other words, the reason why the underlying data appears to be accurate is because it is presumed to be accurate and, moreover, nobody is going to bother to check the underlying data for inaccuracy.

    I thought, stupidly, that ABA was beginning to take its oversight responsibilities more seriously in light of the audit and tightened bar passage standards. However, Currier's statement, and the protective confidentiality he has provided for the two schools that are obviously cheating even according to the ABA's weak audit, demonstrates that the employment results scamming continues, just like in the pre-survey era.

    Maybe a few years down the road, law schools will successfully argue in court that their deceptive and inflated employment numbers are not technical fraud because no sophisticated consumer could reasonably rely on alleged data subject to such an obviously phony-baloney auditing regime. The past as prologue.

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    1. Maybe a few years down the road, law schools will successfully argue in court that their deceptive and inflated employment numbers are not technical fraud because no sophisticated consumer could reasonably rely on alleged data subject to such an obviously phony-baloney auditing regime.

      At which point, the academy will be in the august company of used car dealers.

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    2. Already it makes used-car dealers look positively saintly.

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  3. In the final analysis, the law school pigs do not give one goddamn about compliance with anything resembling a random audit. The commodes were not identified. If they had been, you can bet your ass they would once again claim "harmless error." That's what the swine would chortle whenever they were caught lying about 98% of their TTT grads being employed within nine months of graduation. Even when U.S. $enator$ were reaming the law school pigs - all for public consumption only - the bitches and hags merely rolled out some verbal excrement in response. What an "honorable profession," huh?

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  4. "Our documentation requirements are quite specific and some think complex, so it is reasonable that in the first year of this review, there may be confusion over what we require..."

    Huh? If a law school full of higher degrees is in any way confused over the ABA's requirements, then it just simply demonstrates the lack of academic vigor (and intellectual worthlessness) for the JD and LLM. If you can't correctly assess a few ABA requirements, then how can anyone expect anyone in the building to provide an accurate legal analysis?

    And why don't they publish the names of the law schools? Isn't this in the public interest? No, this just proves that the ABA is in it for the faculty, not the students or OLs trying to make a decision concerning their legal education.

    Anyway, as Dybbuk explains above, this ABA Compliance is all just performance art.

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    Replies
    1. To the extent that they employ their own graduates to do this work, I fully believe that they may not be able to understand simple requirements. Or to tie their shoelaces.

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