Tuesday, June 26, 2007 7:52 AM
Hat tip to Brian Leiter for pointing out a fascinating Journal article in his post Wall Street Journal Article on Law School Rankings Besides US News.
In the article, Law Schools Also Ranked By Blogs Now, Wall Street Journal reporter Amir Efrati wrote about the growing prominence weblogs are playing in informing students about law schools.
Before deciding which law school to attend this fall, Eric Singer flipped through the latest U.S. News & World Report law-school rankings. He eventually chose the University of Chicago over New York University, even though NYU is ranked higher overall.
Instead of relying on U.S. News, Mr. Singer scanned independent online sites and research papers and concluded that Chicago has "better clerkship placement, better placement into academia, better national-firm placement, and a stronger faculty," says the 25-year-old teacher in Ann Arbor, Mich. "Law school is a large purchase; you have to be a more informed consumer," he adds.
And, it appears that weblogs are a growing part of the online sources that potential students are checking.
In the last two years, at least a dozen upstart Web sites, academic papers and blogs have stepped in with surveys of their own to feed the hunger for information on everything from the quality of the faculty to what a school's diploma might be worth to future employers.
Last year, a blogger and Notre Dame Law School graduate who goes by the name "law firm addict" began trolling message boards frequented by law students. The blogger invited students to share figures on school representation in law firms' summer-associate programs (one finding: Columbia is the perennial winner in New York), as well as where federal appeals clerks went to school. (This year's winner is Stanford by number of clerks as a percentage of its class.) The information is posted on lawfirmaddict.blogspot.com and lawclerkaddict.blogspot.com.
The blogs "tell you more useful information...than the percent-employed-after-graduation numbers that schools report to U.S. News," says William Rothwell, a third-year student at the University of Chicago Law School. Mr. Rothwell, who contributed figures made available by his school to the clerkship blog, says he trusts the law-firm blog because it has been accurate about summer associates at two offices where he has worked.
The article continues, highlighting other emerging sources of law school rankings and the potential impact of online sources. It is a worthwhile read and you can check out the article in its entirety here, Law Schools Also Ranked By Blogs Now (it appears to be part of the free Journal for now).
Reading between the lines, the reality of easy-to-use software tools like weblogs is that anyone with an interest can build credibility and an audience on the web. Especially within the under-25 set, which has significantly less fear of technology; indeed, it expects just about anything and everything can be found online.
In the end, all it takes is quality content. Good stuff.