So far, 2015 has been the year of law firm mergers. According to Altman Weil MergerLine, the first six months of 2015 saw the most half-year mergers ever, with 48. One of these mergers was the biggest ever, as global law firm Dentons merged with China’s largest law firm Dacheng to form the largest law firm in the world by attorney head count, with more than 6,500 lawyers in 50 countries.

Even so, law is one of the few industries in which the market is not monopolized by a few top firms. Last year, the 200 highest-grossing law firms in the world earned $115.2 billion, according to data collected by ALM Legal Intelligence, but the global law market is roughly a $600 billion industry. By comparison, the Big Four audit firms Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG audit 99 percent of the companies in the FTSE 100, and 96 percent of the companies in the FTSE 250 Index. As of December 2014, the top four wireless telecommunications carriers in the U.S. controlled approximately 70 percent of the market based on service revenues. The top 25 health insurance companies account for nearly two-thirds of market share.

Restrictive conflict of interest laws, coupled with the notion that law is a national, not international practice, have prevented the legal market from consolidating to the extreme degree of other industries. Furthermore, law firms do not benefit from economies of scale the way firms in other industries do. In fact, bigger firms spend more, not less, on overhead on a per lawyer basis, according to Altman Weil. Law firm strategist Alan Hodgart said that consolidation is happening around types of legal work, rather than across the industry as a whole. For example, only a select few firms can handle the largest M&A deals, but that group cannot get much smaller because eight firms are needed for every major transaction, he said.

When it comes to law firm mergers, bigger is not always better. Altman Weil outlines two questions every law firm should ask itself before considering a merger: first, will the economics of the combined firm be substantially better than the economics of each firm currently? Second, will the firm’s financial indicators improve?

Of the 200 top law firms Altman Weil surveyed in 2005, almost two thirds had merged within the previous two years, and 90 percent of firms indicated that their experience with the merger was “very successful,” or “successful.” So then, law firm mergers are a proven business technique to improve revenues. The challenge is in finding the right fit.

Dentons and Dacheng are still working out the kinks of their merger. Six months after the announcement, Dentons and Dacheng have yet to roll out a joint-name or a combined website. Some of the problems are straightforward: things like translating and standardizing over 4,000 Chinese lawyers’ biographies. Other problems are deeper, stemming from the incorporation of two vastly different legal cultures, which could prove harder than combining teams of engineers, scientists, or doctors. Then there are the radically different rules governing protection of client information and regulations in various industries. It will be interesting to see how the merger turns out, and whether it will positively or negatively affect the recent trend of law firm mergers.

Hyunjae Ham

Hyunjae Ham is a member of the University of Maryland Class of 2015 and a Law Street Media Fellow for the Summer of 2015. Contact Hyunjae at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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There are a lot of factors that go into choosing the right law school. When considering where to apply, we look at things like prestige, specialty areas, and affordability to help us guide our decisions. But according to a study done at the University of Minnesota, another thing that we should be considering is a law school’s proximity to major law firms.

Researchers at the University of Minnesota found that a law school’s proximity to major law firms can affect its students’ future employment prospects. They found that students who are earning their law degrees in areas with many major legal firms are entering communities with better retention for young lawyers. This longevity is something uniquely found in these areas, as many of the firms are looking to hire students from the nearby law schools.

The study explored 33,000 law partners from the biggest and top-earning 115 law firms across the country. They then determined what law school each of those partners attended, and ranked the law schools. The official report with all of the numerical findings and rankings is set to be published this May. So, if working for a big firm after graduation is your goal, it may be a good idea to check out that report and aim for a law school in one of those locations.

Maggie Gloyeske, the director of lawyer and consultant recruiting at Faegre Baker Daniels, has stressed that her firm likes to hire from local law schools in Minnesota. She said: “lawyers who come to work for us, who have a connection to our community, tend to stay longer and think of this as a career move versus just a job.”

While this finding isn’t anything new or shocking, it is often something that is overlooked by students when they are considering where to apply. Many students rely heavily on the rankings put out each year by the U.S. News and World Report or other outlets. While these rankings are certainly a useful tool when first starting the law school search, as they give a broad overview of the law schools on the list, they omit several important factors like the number of graduates that go on to work in local law firms.

This may be because those rankings put significant weight on surveys completed by lawyers, law professors, and judges. According to Samuel Engel, one of the co-authors of the study, these professionals are likely to give law schools the same ranking each year, regardless of any changes that the schools may make. Engel stated that “it’s hard for [USNWR] to get these trends because they’re asking people who haven’t been in law school for a generation to rank law schools.”

While the USNWR rankings focused on a school’s reputation, immediate employment placement, and LSAT scores, the study done by the University of Minnesota based its evaluations on the school sizes and the number of graduates who went on to work at major law firms in their area. As a result, that list looked quite different.

This is not the first time that someone has taken a different approach to ranking  law schools. This past summer, we at Law Street Media put out a set of law school rankings by speciality area. These rankings took into account things such as class offerings, alumni relations, and extracurricular programs. Additionally, like the University of Minnersota’s rankings, our rankings included law school proximity to major law firms. The goal of these rankings was to offer a qualitative and more comprehnsive approach to something that is often quantitative.

While each of these sets of rankings has something unique to offer, none of them are exhaustive. When considering what law schools to apply to, my advice would be to do as much research as possible while using the rankings as a starting point. While law school rankings are a useful tool, law schools have so much more to offer than just a place on a list.

Brittany Alzfan

Brittany Alzfan is a student at the George Washington University majoring in Criminal Justice. She was a member of Law Street’s founding Law School Rankings team during the summer of 2014. Contact Brittany at staff@LawStreetMedia.com.

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Somehow, I only recently encountered Adam Liptak’s scornful treatise of American law reviews in the New York Times (and, I must confess, my Law Street Media colleague Peter Davidson’s indignant response to it). Frankly, I agree with the criticisms of many judges and attorneys and even some law professors: law reviews really do produce far too much intellectual masturbation with precious little useful application in legal practice. It is rather odd that law reviews, unlike journals in other professional fields, are compiled and edited by relatively untutored, inexperienced students rather than by seasoned practitioners. I would add that much of the content of the average law review is—like so much else in the legal field—unconscionably dull. I remember having an easy time deciding whether to try out for a journal or Moot Court as a 1L: all I had to do was peek inside back copies of my school’s various journals and see how long it took for them to put my lights out.

Yet I see all of those complaints as reasons for law students to think twice before trying to claw their way onto Law Review, not reasons for journals not to exist (or to be edited by students) at all. Ultimately, in my mind, those flaws take a backseat to different questions. I fear that law review membership does too little to prepare students for legal practice, and that law firms are too preoccupied with journal membership as an indicator of student applicants’ potential to be great lawyers.

What, after all, do students on law reviews do? Not having touched a journal with a ten-foot pole myself, I have only secondhand familiarity with this question; but I’m confident that research and interaction with schoolmates who were on journals have led me to the right answer. Typically, journal members edit and cite-check articles that the editors have decided to publish, ensuring that references actually provide proper support for authors’ claims and that footnotes are properly Bluebooked. They also write “notes” or “comments” of their own that may end up being published in the journal alongside law professor’s contributions. The journal editors generally review submitted articles and select them for publication and supervise the editing and note-writing processes.

Perhaps such endeavors would help make real lawyers out of law students if either the content of law review articles or the process of writing and editing them bore much resemblance to what most attorneys do on the job. Unfortunately, that resemblance is scant at best. The system gives professors no incentive to write articles — and gives student editors no incentive to publish pieces — that are consistently relevant to real-world legal practice or useful to real-world practitioners. For professors, law reviews serve primarily as expositions of academic mettle in the quest for adjunct and tenured professorships. For students, journals serve mainly as signaling mechanisms to law firms, padding their resumes with credentials that they know employers want to see.

Therein lies the problem. It makes no sense for law firms to put as high a premium on journal membership as they do, especially in these times, with competition so stiff and clients demanding so much more — and more experienced — bang for their bucks. Firms seem to view the challenging process of making law review as an effective way of separating the academic wheat from the chaff, and the research, writing and editing that journal members do as critical to their development into lawyers. Yet this view is largely mistaken, if only because it doesn’t apply to all journal members. 1Ls in the top five, ten or 15 percent of their classes who grade on to law review do so due to their skill at spotting and analyzing issues in turgid and fanciful exam fact patterns, not because they are skilled at doing the kind of research, writing or editing that academia and legal practice require.

More importantly, although law review editing definitely hones students’ proofreading, Bluebooking and cite-checking skills, in terms of formatting and content, it is a far cry from the kind of day-to-day work attorneys do. Editing treatises of groan-inducing intellectual abstractions — such as “the influence of Immanuel Kant on evidentiary approaches in 18th-century Bulgaria, or something,” as Chief Justice John Roberts once wittily put it — bears little or no resemblance to performing pretrial discovery, negotiating plea bargains, drawing up contracts or doing real estate closings. Perhaps law firms themselves deserve much of the blame for the unpreparedness of so many law school graduates for actual lawyering. What do they expect, when they so strongly incentivize students to participate in a painstaking and time-consuming extracurricular activity that does precious little to teach them how to practice law?

Law firms would be wise to look further and wider for extracurricular experience in their prospective law student hires. Any number of other activities available to law students would inculcate real lawyering skills in them far better than editing law reviews’ tedious treacle would. I’ve already written in this blog about how my Moot Court experience disabused me with the idea of practicing law, but those misgivings were due to my own skills, interests and idiosyncrasies. Anyone who decides, for the right reasons, to become an attorney — and particularly a litigator — should eagerly welcome the opportunity to learn the vagaries of brief-writing and oral argument. Certainly no law review teaches how to format and structure briefs for maximum persuasive effect, how to give straightforward answers to judges’ questions, or how to keep one’s cool when being bombarded with hostile questions from a “hot bench” (or, for that matter, how to fill up 15 minutes of allotted speaking time in front of a quiet, “cold” bench).

Nor does any law journal editor learn experientially how to negotiate deals and mediate disputes or how to exonerate wrongfully convicted prison inmates and secure their release. Yet a number of my classmates were able to do so, through bar association competitions and clinics like Cardozo Law School’s Innocence Project. These tournaments provide the opportunity to be judged by experienced lawyers and judges and to win accolades, and clinics like the Innocence Project involve providing support in real-life cases. Such advantages only makes these activities even more deserving of prioritization over the glorified grunt work one is relegated to doing on even the most prestigious law reviews.

The moral of the story is that many extracurricular activities can prove far more valuable to a law student’s training as an attorney than journal membership. Law firms and other employers ought to take note. In this jarring period of change and adjustment, it’s not only law schools that need to think outside of the box.

Featured image courtesy of [Nic McPhee via Flickr]

Akil Alleyne

Akil Alleyne, a native of Montreal, is a graduate of Princeton University and the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. His major areas of study are constitutional and international law, with focus on federalism, foreign policy, separation of powers and property rights. Akil is also a member of Young Voices Advocates, which connects students and young professionals with media outlets worldwide to facilitate youth participation in political and social discourse. Contact Akil at Staff@LawStreetMedia.com

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