ABA and Law-School Transparency: A Call for Reform

Early each Fall, law schools complete and send to the ABA the Annual Questionnaire, which gives the ABA comprehensive information about each law school.  The following Spring, the ABA sends law schools the "take-offs" with data for all law schools, organized by topic.  There are three problems with the take-offs. 

1. The take-offs do not include all the information reported on the Annual Questionnaire.
2. The take-offs are "confidential;" the data can  be used only for institutional purposes.
3. The data is just columns and columns of numbers on lots and lots of pieces of paper.  The ABA may provide averages at the end, but if you want to analyze the data, you have to key it into your own digital file, spreadsheet, or relational database.

Eventually, some of the information in the take-offs makes it into the ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools.  Starting a few years ago, the LSAC began putting up an online version of the Official Guide.  The online version does allow users to search the summary tables of the Official Guide, and does provide PDFs of the entries for each law school.  Again, all that data has to be re-keyed into a digital file.

One year, the ABA put two Excel (r) files with all the data for the 2008 Official Guide on its "Statistics" web-page.  Those file were on Statistics page for several years, but now have been taken off.

Re-keying--and checking--data involves a massive time commitment, and entry errors are inevitable.

If the ABA truly wants transparency, it needs to start making available on its web-site a digital file with at least the Official Guide information.  That file should go up when the Official Guide is published.  Yes, the ABA has an interest in selling the current edition, but I doubt that a massive spreadsheet would interest most prospective applicants.

The question is, does the ABA really want transparency, or does the ABA, instead, want the appearance of transparency.  Does the ABA like making it hard for people like me, John Nussbaumer (Cooley), Jeff Rensberger (South Texas), and  George Shepherd (Emory) to sift and study the data to get a better understanding of

• what's going on in the law schools, and
• how accreditation policy affects law schools? 

As an aside, with the 2008 data, there were too many columns for one Excel (r) spreadsheet, so the ABA broke the file into two parts.  One way to avoid that would be to put the file in CSV format.  CSV files can be read by Excel (r), as well as by dedicated statistics programs.

Comments

[Jack A. Guttenberg]

I could not agree more. I have been pestering the ABA for years to put its data in a more user friendly format even if it were pass word protected. It is absurd that in this day and age they are not willing to provide it electronically. When I was a dean this information was very useful in multiple ways, but required extensive time and energy on the part of my assistant to make it more useable.

[Gary Rosin]

I wonder how the data for the 2008 Official Guide ever got up in the first place. According to the date-stamp on the files that I have on my computer, I downloaded them in May 2007, so the files were made available at about the time of publication of the print version. The Section never added new files, but left the 2008 files up until they redesigned the Section web-site this Summer.

I'm not sure when the LSAC started the online version, but, until the 2012 edition became available, the LSAC archive had copies going back to the 2006 edition (now only back to 2007). Perhaps the Section thought that that was enough (it's not).

It might have cut into sales of the print edition, but not as much making so much of the online edition publicly available.