Tonight is one of those nights, the third this week in fact. In that spirit, he's a shot and chaser - pick whichever you want to be one or the other, nothing matters any longer. We're focusing on Maine tonight, so let's call this cocktail a, uh, Bloody Maine-y?
1. Rural Area Lawyer Shortage Alert!
The Bangor Daily [phrasing?] News reports a dire situation for prospective exploitative legal billing in the partly inhabited part of Maine.
There are 30 lawyers per 10,000 residents in the Pine Tree State, compared with the national average of 40 lawyers per 10,000 residents, according to the Maine School of Law. Those numbers are sharply skewed to the southern part of the state, with more than half of all Maine lawyers living or practicing in Cumberland County.If this isn't reversed immediately, and technology forgets its efforts to make the law efficient, and there's an unexpected increase in legal work, Maine faces a dire lawyer shortage about 20 years from now.
That situation is expected to worsen over the next decade because of the average age of attorneys in Maine. As of 2017, about 1,000 of the 3,700 practicing lawyers in Maine were 60 or older. In rural parts of the state, 65 percent of lawyers are older than 50.
There's only one solution for this problem: the U. of Maine needs to pump out many more lawyers, particularly minorities who can bring diversity to upstate Maine AND do ace legal work.
MEANWHILE:
2. The U. of Maine is in the Red
Law school isn't expensive for students. It's expensive for schools.
From 2011 to 2018, the number of applications in Maine dropped from 988 to 574 – a 40 percent decrease. To stay competitive, the law school has increased the amount of money it spends on grants and scholarships.This business has a monopoly on legal education in the state and still can't turn a profit charging what some fasci-communists would say is "too much."
In 2011, the school reported only a third of the student body got assistance on tuition, and that money almost always covered less than half of tuition. In 2018, two-thirds of students received financial aid from the school, and a quarter of them got half to full tuition. Tuition for this year is $22,290 for Maine residents and $33,360 for non-residents.
As a result, the law school has been in the red for several years, despite cuts to other spending.
I think it's proof positive that it's not enough in tuition. Maine obviously needs more lawyers and is even subsidizing their deployment to rural areas. And still, Maine Law is broke. The solution for businesses in this situation is obvious: raise prices and threaten/beg the government for crony handouts. Thanks to federal loan dollars being funneled to law school coffers through nominally high tuition rates, the solution in this case is straightforward: drastically increase the price.
After all, since there's really a demand for more lawyers in rural Maine, the financial rewards should more than cover it.
And when that happens, my friends, it's like grade A maple syrup dripping on hot buttery pancakes.
The "rural shortage" scam joins forces with the "retiring baby boomers" scam.
ReplyDeleteDemand for lawyers comes not so much from "residents" as from wealthy residents and corporations, which are concentrated in urban areas. Maine, being mostly rural, unsurprisingly has relatively few lawyers.
My favorite feature of this genre is that they're typically written with anecdotes phrased on the small town or county level, which makes perfect sense if we conveniently forget that lawyers can purchase and use automobiles and regularly cover multiple places.
DeleteSkowhegan is a county seat (so it probably needs some who actually live there) but there's numerous towns around there that may have a lawyer or two. Fairfield is 16 miles away, has only a slightly smaller population, and is on a damned interstate.
For that matter, Augusta is 45 minutes away and Bangor is only an hour drive away, which is less than lawyers travel for good work in every large metropolitan area.
There is nothing new under the Sun. Abe Lincoln and his contemporaries "rode the circuit" through several counties which did not have sufficient work to sustain a full-time judge or more than a lawyer or two. Illinois courts (except for Chicago's Cook County) are still organized into multi-county "Circuit Courts."
DeleteSkowhegan has only 8k people—and several lawyers, not counting the lawyers in other towns who serve Skowhegan. The whole of Somerset County, which covers a lot of area, has only 50k people.
DeleteThe good people of Somerset County, like other residents of small towns and rural areas, know that their facilities are limited. Their population simply cannot support a university, an opera company, a rich variety of restaurants, a full offering of specialized medical services, or an airport with direct flights to Paris and Tokyo. They are well aware of that, and they frequently have to have their needs filled from Augusta, Portland, Boston, maybe Montréal. They don't expect to have the entire world at their doorstep.
Likewise, a specialist such as a lawyer might struggle to make a living in an area with few people and a low average income.
The increasingly common struggles of state-sponsored law schools are the result of three inter-related factors. First, there is a perceived need, as a partially-taxpayer funded school, to offer a lower in-state tuition. Second, most of these schools reserve a set percentage of seats for in-state students, further crimping the cash flow. Third, the Deans, Profs and other assorted hangers on at state schools are just as greedy as those at private schools and expect the same kind of compensation.
ReplyDeleteIt would not surprise me if any state school gave fewer discounts than an equally-rated private school. The state school already has heavy discounts hard-wired into their business model.
Fourth, a state with a small population may struggle to draw in enough students to sustain a law school:
ReplyDeletehttps://outsidethelawschoolscam.blogspot.com/2019/05/why-tiny-law-schools-cannot-surviveand.html
It simply isn't the case that every state needs a law school. The metropolitan area of Charlotte, North Carolina, has almost twice the population of Maine but no law school (since the closure of the eponymous InfiLaw über-toilet). Hell, entire countries have no law school. Yet every little Maine and every little Shreveport allegedly needs an über-toilet to call its own.
You are right about state schools and discounts. Some state schools give discounts to almost everyone (New Hampshire is one of these), but many others dispense their discounts with an eyedropper. At Maine, for instance, a third of the students get no discount, and most of the rest get only a few thousand dollars off. At North Dakota, two-thirds of the students pay full fare, and again most of the rest get only a tiny discount.