Law schools — whether elite or inclusive — saw a significant decline in enrollment over the last few years, but one of Ventura County's two law colleges accredited by the California State Bar experienced some relief in first-year enrollment this fall.
The Ventura and Santa Barbara Colleges of Law — one school with two campuses — had a 9 percent increase in first-year student enrollment for Fall 2013 after several years of decline, President and Dean Heather Georgakis said.
Even with dropping enrollment, Georgakis said the school's focus on affordability and accessibility helped protect it from "the same negative impacts" faced by elite law schools accredited by the American Bar Association.
First-year enrollment at American Bar Association-accredited schools saw a 15.2 percent drop in Fall 2012 compared to the decade high of 52,500 students in 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council, a nonprofit organization.
From Fall 2010 to Fall 2013, the number of students applying to law schools accredited by the American Bar Association dropped by 32.4 percent, according to the Law School Admission Council.
Enrollment started dropping as newly graduated law students tried to find their way into the legal industry and were faced with an inundated labor force fighting over few available jobs — a situation worsened for those that attended an elite law school with a high price tag attached to earning a law degree.
The Ventura and Santa Barbara Colleges of Law — with 199 current students — is catered toward full-time employees and exclusively offers classes three nights per week. The school does not require prospective students to take the LSAT and has not sought accreditation from the American Bar Association.
Georgakis said the school did not alter selectivity or academic standards to account for a decline in applications. Rather, she said, the recent enrollment increase was caused by the economic turnaround, the school's new policy to lock-in a student's tuition rate to ensure it does not rise while the degree is completed, and a mandatory bar review program included with tuition costs to cover the approximately $4,000 needed to take the bar exam.
Students typically take four years to complete the program, which costs $48,000.
"Students graduating from our program do not incur that very high debt load that students at the ABA schools incur," Georgakis said. "They graduate with very little debt and that means they have options that students from those elite schools don't have. Students graduating from elite law schools leave with $200,000 to $250,000 in debt."
Despite the recent enrollment increase at the Colleges of Law, Ventura County's other law school is still on the decline.
The Southern California Institute of Law — also with campuses in Ventura and Santa Barbara — has higher student enrollment this fall compared to five years ago when it hit an all-time low, but overall enrollment is still down by 12 percent compared to its usual student body of 100 people, President and Dean Stanislaus Pulle said.
Both local law school deans, however, agreed their practical curriculums are ahead of new admission requirements for the California State Bar.
State makes changes
The California State Bar Board of Trustees adopted in mid-October new admissions reform recommendations that will require lawyers complete additional practical legal training before or shortly after being admitted.
The new requirements — to be implemented between 2015 and 2017 — include 10 hours of additional legal education courses for new lawyers, 50 hours of legal services devoted to pro-bono or "modest-means clients" supervised by a licensed legal practitioner, and taking at least 15 units of practice-based courses during law school or an apprenticeship after law school.
Georgakis said the State Bar is emphasizing that new lawyers and applicants have certain practical skills, including writing, oral advocacy and client counseling, which are "radical" changes for schools accredited by the American Bar Association but have been commonplace for the local law school.
"The idea is that new lawyers would be more well-prepared, not just with the abstract thinking and analytical skills that they need, but also the practical skills necessary to zealously represent a client," she said.
Local Industry
Wendy Cole Lascher has spent the last 40 years working as a Ventura-based lawyer — 37 of those years were consumed running her own law firm and she has worked the last three years as an attorney for the county's largest law firm, Ferguson Case Orr Paterson LLP. Lascher said she has seen many changes to the local legal industry since the recession — including more industry growth in the East County and less participation in the Ventura County Bar Association, but "the biggest thing that's happened locally in the last three years was the demise of Nordman Cormany" Hair and Compton. The firm, founded in 1939 and once the county's largest, closed its doors earlier this year.
But "the issue isn't local, it's the statewide influx of lawyers entering the system," Lascher said. "It had nothing to do with the local law schools. There's a glut of new lawyers on the market."
Even the top 20 percent of graduates from University of California Hastings College of the Law and UCLA School of Law were having a hard time getting jobs, Lascher said.
Lascher said some of the problems faced by the legal industry are due to law firms getting "too big" and "over-lawyering resulting in overbilling." Other contributing factors, she said, include consumers not wanting to spend money on litigation, mediation being an increasingly used alternative to legal action and larger corporations doing more in-house legal work.
But the Ventura County legal industry has not been as adversely affected because the largest local law firms would be considered small firms if they were located anywhere else, she added.
Small firms are able to change and move faster than the "big behemoth" law firm with hundreds of lawyers and multiple offices, Lascher said. "They have taken many more hits than small law firms."
Lascher, who served on the Ventura and Santa Barbara Colleges of Law board of directors for 10 years until summer 2012, said local law students "have a great advantage over people who come out of UCLA at age 22" because many are older, more mature, second-career students with community connections and "are better equipped — with some mentoring — to set up on their own."
"People focused on individual and family-business oriented law should not be concerned," she said. "There's a huge underserved percentage of the population who can't afford big law firm fees and can't afford big law firm representation."
Pursuing service
Jessica Jimenez, 32, started pursuing her law degree at the Ventura College of Law in August to hopefully achieve her dream of running her own law firm or working within another that assists the community, advocates for equal rights and works with juveniles.
"There's a need within the community to advocate for the youth, so I would like to be a conduit of change — if I can — to help with healthy institutions that benefit all of us in the long run," she said.
Jimenez works as a full-time human resources employee for the Ventura County Human Services Agency and drives down the street three times a week to attend three-hour law school after work.
"There was no other school that I considered that would meet my needs because I'm a full-time employee," she said. "It's nice that it's community-based here, it's right in Ventura. Many attorneys that I've heard that come here are members of the community and are helping out, so that's important to me."
The married Port Hueneme resident has been entrenched in the Ventura County community her entire life — she was born and raised in Oxnard, earned her bachelor's degree from California Lutheran University, previously worked at a local law office and both worked and volunteered for Ventura County Probation.
"It took me a while to realize that I wanted to go to law school to be an advocate, but I think being a woman and being a minority, we're at a disadvantage and it would benefit me to have a law degree to not only help myself and my community, but to fight for the things I believe in," Jimenez said.