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Wake Law School

wakelaw13 said:
Fuck. Now I need a new name.
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Im disappointed in the lack of hot bachelorette chick stories on here
 
Dear Wake Forest Law Alumni:

Greetings during spring break! Over the break I spent several days with alumni at an event I hope many of you will take part in if you haven't — being admitted to the U.S. Supreme Court bar. Every year we offer to sponsor a group of you for the swearing-in ceremony and invite the justices to join us at a post-ceremony reception. This year we presented 23 alumni for admission to the bar. Afterwards, Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor joined us to chat and to pose for pictures. At an event the night before the ceremony, the alumni shared with me what their Wake Forest degrees and their alumni friends have meant to them. They represented generations of Wake Forest Law alumni, attesting to the value of their Wake Forest Law experience in shaping successful careers and lives.

That pride in my own Wake Forest Law degree and my confidence in the excellence of the legal education we provide carried me through the next day when the U.S. News and World Report published its annual rankings. Those rankings placed Wake Forest Law at 47 among the 203 accredited law schools, down from the rankings of 36 and 31 the two years before. While we are far from complacent about the rankings, let me share some perspective.

Over the past 21 years for which we have USNWR records, our rankings have been in the 30s for 16 of those years. Our rankings bounced in and out of the 40s for five of those years. In recent years, students of the USNWR rankings know that across legal education, the rankings have been particularly unstable.

We have every reason to be confident that this bounce is temporary. We know that the bar exam and employment experience of the Class of 2013, on which the 2016 rankings were based, was aberrational. The USNWR heavily weighs employment 9 months after graduation. The Class of 2013 had an unusually low bar passage rate, which in turn, negatively impacted its employment at the 9-month mark. Only 62% of the Class of 2013 at 9 months had long-term employment in which a JD was required or preferred — our lowest employment rate ever. The Class of 2014 did better on the bar, and for that reason and others, the Class of 2014 has exceeded the percentage compared with the Class of 2013 by a margin that continues to grow as we finish our data collection on the class. The 2017 rankings will draw on this much-improved employment experience.

We take bar passage and preparation for employment very seriously. That's why we have created new courses that will give our students extra help in preparing for the bar. Also, on the employment side, two years ago we added a new 1L course that focuses on skills for securing employment.

I've experienced legal education at Wake Forest Law as a student, as a professor, and as interim dean. With a great deal of pride, I have watched how dedicated faculty, staff, and alumni have made a great law school even greater. From all those perspectives, I am confident that the school is stronger than ever — stronger even than the school the alumni were bragging about at the swearing-in ceremony.

Warm regards,

Suzanne Reynolds ('77)
Interim Dean
 
Reynolds droppin' bombs on 2013
 
Wake will throw alums under the bus at the drop of a Deacon's hat. Truly ugly stuff.
 
Hopefully Wake wasn't counting on any donations from the 2013 class.
 
I'm not sure that stating simple facts constitutes "throwing under the bus". Especially to the intended audience, lawyer-alumni who know what bar passage means and doesn't mean and what the employment market is like. When I read that I certainly didn't feel like they were betraying the class of 2013.
 
I honestly don't blame any law school for its bar passage rate. That exam is solely a measure of diligence.
 
TexasDeac10 said:
I honestly don't blame any law school for its bar passage rate. That exam is solely a measure of diligence.
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Well they picked the students that would be members of the class of 2013 and it seems like they picked very poorly for some reason. Whether this is an aberration or a policy of admitting less qualified students due to the pressures of the applicant pool shrinking, I don't know.
 
MysteryMen said:
Well they picked the students that would be members of the class of 2013 and it seems like they picked very poorly for some reason. Whether this is an aberration or a policy of admitting less qualified students due to the pressures of the applicant pool shrinking, I don't know.
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This is fair. I should have clarified that I don't blame a school for its bar passage rate as a function of quality of teaching or curriculum or something. Another way to put it is that schools add only marginally to a student's ability to pass the bar.

But yes, they should admit students that are diligent enough to pass the bar once they finish law school.
 
Who can concentrate on schoolwork when you got Andi Dorfman walkin around?
 
Knight said:
Where's the "our bad. We should have worked harder"? Instead it's "man, BUS O' TARDS in 2013! Nothing we could do with virtually random USNWR rankings!"
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What would you have them do? Serious question. I think you can question the admission policies at a time of decreased applications and whether standards were dropped (and if so, whether they were dropped too low), but once they were in, how should they have been working harder? Career services was and will be a mess for as long as a particular person has a job, but in a really poor market where 20% of the class didn't pass the bar, I just don't know what the school can do.

Deacon923 said:
I'm not sure that stating simple facts constitutes "throwing under the bus". Especially to the intended audience, lawyer-alumni who know what bar passage means and doesn't mean and what the employment market is like. When I read that I certainly didn't feel like they were betraying the class of 2013.
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This.
 
As a member of the class of 2013, I don't have any problem with what Dean Reynolds said.

You know who is to blame for the low bar-passage rate in 2013? The kids in my class who didn't pass the bar exam. I personally busted my ass to make sure I would never have to take it again, and make sure I didn't lose out on job opportunities I desperately needed. 99% of the kids who get in a law school like Wake are smart enough that they should absolutely pass the bar. That doesn't mean we should have a 99% pass rate, sometimes you just have a bad day, I get that. But Wake should be hovering at 90%. For it to be at 80% means that a bunch of kids didn't take it seriously enough. I guess if I could rely on my parents to support me and tell me I'm awesome no matter what, I wouldn't have taken it as seriously either. I know a few people I consider downright dumb who passed the bar on their first try. So if anyone in the class of 2013 feels like they are being picked on because they didn't pass the bar, and its Wake's fault because our administration didn't hold their hand enough, I would be glad to speak to them, because they let down our law school.
 
wakelaw13 said:
As a member of the class of 2013, I don't have any problem with what Dean Reynolds said.

You know who is to blame for the low bar-passage rate in 2013? The kids in my class who didn't pass the bar exam. I personally busted my ass to make sure I would never have to take it again, and make sure I didn't lose out on job opportunities I desperately needed. 99% of the kids who get in a law school like Wake are smart enough that they should absolutely pass the bar. That doesn't mean we should have a 99% pass rate, sometimes you just have a bad day, I get that. But Wake should be hovering at 90%. For it to be at 80% means that a bunch of kids didn't take it seriously enough. I guess if I could rely on my parents to support me and tell me I'm awesome no matter what, I wouldn't have taken it as seriously either. I know a few people I consider downright dumb who passed the bar on their first try. So if anyone in the class of 2013 feels like they are being picked on because they didn't pass the bar, and its Wake's fault because our administration didn't hold their hand enough, I would be glad to speak to them, because they let down our law school.
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TRUTH BOMBS!
 
From talking to professors regarding the 2014 NC bar there was a direct correlation between your class rank and how you well you did on the Bar. Those that did not put in the work preparing for the Bar, just as they did not put in the work while in school, were the ones that (for the most part) failed the exam. I know for a fact that a number of my classmates that failed did not adequately prepare and were busy doing other things, such as going on extended vacations in the month leading up to the test. The Bar is passable... all it takes is some effort in preparation. Full disclosure: I did not do well in school... But I knew that it was time to get my shit in order and make this the only time I take the test. There is really no excuse, especially if you got in to Wake in the first place. I do not think that Dean Reynolds threw the class of 2013 under the bus in that email but even if she had, I would agree with that completely. As a recent grad, rankings do matter in the grand scheme of things and their inability to put in the effort in passing a test that is routinely passed by students from the Appalachian School of Law is indefensible.
 
Weren't the 2013 passage rates way down in NC across the board? For some reason, I thought someone said it was an all-time low percentage that passed. Probably doesn't explain the whole thing, but seems relevant to the discussions as to how god-awful the 2013 class turned out to be.

As an aside, by and large, I think lawyers are a fairly unintelligent, lazy bunch of people. Particularly young lawyers. I wish the bar passage rate was less than 50%. OK, back to my trial prep work...
 
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