Dean Nick Allard Leaves Brooklyn in Best Place Ever

Goodbye, Nick Allard.

After six years serving as president and dean of Brooklyn Law School, Nicholas Allard is set to resign at the end of June, he announced to faculty and staff last week.

Sometimes in legal education, mercenary titans appear, sometimes outsiders, sometimes lifetime academics, only to boisterously make proclamations like a prophet or saint and then to vanish, leaving the life-long lawyers on a slightly better career trajectory by their gentle touch.

Let us remember, for example, Allard's Common Sense-style denouncement of the bar exam.  Or his celebration of the 4 p.m. faculty wine soiree. Or his more recent analysis of the "Trump bump."

Law schools can seize this moment and, like the generation inspired by Woodward and Bernstein to pursue careers in journalism, lead the renaissance in legal education that would revive a profession in need of an injection of youth, idealism, and high-tech savvy.

The good news is that law schools still can-do, even as Allard sails to his next port-of-winning, be that super-cool lobbying contracts or sipping beach bum cocktails in a homemade tiki bar.  As we can see from lawyers like Michael Cohen, the country desperately needs quality attorneys.

Consider, too, how Brooklyn has excelled.  For example, from 2012 to the present, Brooklyn's incoming LSAT scores have dropped 5 points at both the 25% and 75% intervals.  That's diversification, bub.  And only the last few years, tuition had actually decreased. While still over $50,000 a year, it's a fantastic bargain relative to the 2013 price.

So once more we shove a legal academic's career onto the pyre and watch solemnly as it roasts.  Allard has inspired us.  He hasn't been the only one.  There will be others.  But there has been only one Nick Allard.

Scam on and enjoy the ride, no matter how long the greats like Allard are leading the train.

Legal Practice Guide 11: What Went Wrong at Arizona Summit?

As Hall & Oates once crooned, what went wrong?!?!?

Indeed, that's what they're asking in Arizona atop the Summit of gory glory.

In the early 1990s, Donald Lively had a vision for a new type of law school.
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[H]e never envisioned that the for-profit model that made the schools possible would open the schools to such criticism and scrutiny, eventually threatening their very existence.

He always assumed people would just see his good intentions —  to fulfill the school's mission of student diversity.

Sometimes as a lawyer you have to give your client advice they don't want to hear.  You might - hypothetically! - have to say something like, "Donnie, your idea is fucking stupid."

Thankfully, that isn't the case here.  Arizona Summit was a brilliant idea.  As the article points out, Phoenix was starving for lawyers and the legal profession needed some variety in the bowl of vanilla ice cream.

Of course, as we know from the scambloggers' existence, there are always negative Nebby's wanting to rain on a cash parade:

Some in the legal community were skeptical of the schools' for-profit status. 

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The American Bar Association, the national accrediting body for law schools, put Arizona Summit on a two-year probation in March 2017 for being out of compliance with admissions policies and academic standards and for failing to maintain a rigorous program.

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First-year students typically take Torts and Civil Procedure as separate courses. But the Arizona school combined them. School officials would later find that students weren't getting enough instruction in either subject. 

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ASU typically takes the top 25 percent of Arizona Summit’s class each year.

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Arizona Summit officials acknowledged some of their graduates struggle to pass the bar exam. They've been encouraging students to take the exam in New Mexico, where they say it's easier to pass, and graduates had a 54-percent pass rate in February.

Fiends!  That's a veritable rogues gallery of people who simply don't want diversity in the legal profession.

What went wrong?  Nothing except the world turning against it.

Today's legal practice exercise is to pretend that you're Arizona Summit's lawyer.  What advice can you give them facing this parade of horribles?

1. Keep on truckin', bro', no need to make changes when yer the Summit.
2. Sue the ABA and/or Arizona State in federal court.
3. Thumb nose at the ABA: double-down on diversity and lowered admission standards, exponentially increase tuition to account for the risk the school takes in admitting less-qualified students.
4. Continue adjusting admissions standards and/or gimmicky bar passage efforts just barely enough to stay ahead of the ABA's mercilessly Tantalan chopping block and do little else.
5. Remodel the school with a mid-century western swing motif and affordable high-class dining options that superficially incorporate the uniqueness of Arizona's cultural heritage with otherwise standard items like delectable salads and ham sandwiches. Use avocado and ancho mayo.
6. Emphasize faculty publication rates, add to the library, and pay out the nose for top LSAT scorers to play the rankings game.
7. Rename yourself "Arizona State Summit."

There's really not much else to do here, right?  Sometimes as a counselor the best thing you can do is throw your hands up and say, "ScammerClient, you have the solution within."

Legal Practice Guide 10: Complaint Drafting and Rule 11

A masterclass in complaint drafting.

124. The ABA, in failing to enforce and ensure that [Charlotte School of Law] was in compliance with the Standards failed to act as a reasonable accreditor, recognized by the DOE for purposes of ensuring compliance with Title IV of the HEA. 

125. The ABA was the direct cause of Love’s damages because Love opted to enroll at CSOL based upon the ABA’s certification to prospective law students that CSOL had achieved and was in full compliance with the Standards when, in fact, CSOL was not in full compliance or substantial compliance with the Standards when Love enrolled at CSOL.

Good fuckin' luck with that.  If you want another masterclass, Infilaw's got you covered:

Florida Coastal School of Law filed suit in federal court Thursday against the American Bar Association alleging that the ABA violated due process in its accreditation review process.

The good news, justice warriors, is that Rule 11 simply doesn't apply when you're chest-out justice fightin'.

Scam on.

Legal Practice Guide 9: Texas-Style Fraud and Exempt Employees under the FLSA

From The Texas Tribune (no, I don't know what it is, either):

A former director at the University of Texas at Austin's law school was arrested Thursday for claiming he was showing up for work while he was actually galavanting in tourist hot spots like Cozumel, Las Vegas and the U.S. Virgin Islands, according to court documents and local law enforcement authorities.
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During multiple pay periods, Shoumaker logged regular 8-hour days with the university while he was actually cavorting out of state, according to the affidavit. 

"Cavorting" and "galavanting" sound like actionable offenses, but are they?  As a director of facilities, Shoumaker was almost certainly an exempt employee.  You may have heard the term used pejoratively when people say things like "lawyers are exempt - no overtime for Saturday morning lashings!" But it also applies in the positive sense.  If you're good enough at your job, you're exempt from showing up on strict "8-hour days."  People often criticize law professors for working like three days a week half-assedly, but all they're doing is taking advantage of their full rights under the FLSA.

Should we really be punishing law professors for exercising their rights?

But back to Mr. Shoumaker.  It seems most likely that he was working remotely from those locations.  Supposedly damning - naive journalists and prosecutors - are credit card charges for various restaurants including Hooters and an $81.00 massage.

The massage is obvious: the poor man was stressed from his job.  And Hooters?  Come now - what man of class goes to a hot tourist spot and eats at motherfuckin' Hooters?  In Las Vegas, there's no reason to eat middle class with half-dressed women unless you're there on boring law school administrative business.

So while at first blush this may seem like a man who just said fuck it and did whatever he wanted following the example of Larry Sager's forgivable loan, it's likely not wrong at all, but rather a shining example that you can do law school work even while sipping on glamorous drinks with attractive people taking honest vacations.

Legal Practice Guide 8: Qui Tam and Google.com

Qui Tam.  It's a Latin phrase, an abbreviation of a much longer Latin phrase, meaning to sue on behalf of the King because someone else broke the law and now gimme gimme gimme a piece of that succulent monetary penalty.  Daddy's vacation condo needs a new bathroom.  In other words: whistleblowers!  People who have inside information that someone's cheating Uncle Sam. 

There are multiple elements to a good Qui Tam case - try Westlaw, it's great - but if one of these discontents stumbles into your office or makes a nervous phone call, you definitely should make sure that it's actually inside information they're wanting to squeal about and not something that's publicly disclosed.  Because if everyone knows about it, it ain't fraud and no one's blowin' any dabgum whistles.

Like with Charlotte Law, the gorgeous murdered slut of North Carolina:

Judge Roy Dalton Jr. of the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Florida on Monday granted InfiLaw’s motion to dismiss the qui tam suit filed in 2016 by former Charlotte School of Law professor Barbara Bernier, who alleges the school and its corporate owners defrauded the federal government of more than $285 million by admitting unqualified students in order to pocket their government-issued loans. Dalton ruled that InfiLaw’s myriad problems had already been publicly disclosed in news stories and posts written on law faculty blogs before Bernier file her suit.

Cue the sad trumpet of a federal court butt-kicking.

The judge's opinion may be scathing against Infilaw and rely on an assumption that Charlotte Law was committing a massive fraud, but the point is that it was obvious and everyone knew.  The newsmedia, that fantastic fourth estate, did its job perfectly.  No million dollar paydays, here!

This of course fits nicely with the idea of the sophisticated consumer.  If - IF! - law schools were committing fraud, everyone knew it, student and third-tier professor alike.  Tweet it like Trump: No fraud! - particularly since people kept buying the product.

Bernier has time to amend the complaint, so we'll see what gets pulled out of litigation's back-alley dumpster to reserve a judge who obviously was reading the papers and knew the score.  But in the meantime, it's essential to find people who know real secrets to bring a whistleblower action. 

Law schools weren't scamming anyone, but it was widely known that they were.