Ribstein: "Law schools as borscht"

A recent report on the "lawyer surplus" has generated a lot of discussion on the blogosphere.  I think the most interesting commentary on this report is from Larry Ribstein:

The problem isn’t that we have too many law trained people and so should train fewer.  In fact, in our increasingly regulated economy, there is probably a gross undersupply of law-trained people. 

The problem is that regulation has fixed the nature of the product so it hasn’t adequately responded to shifts in demand.  The downward demand shifts have been produced by, most importantly, technology.  But demand is increasing for new kinds of law-trained people both at the low-cost end of service to the poor and middle class and the potentially high-profit end of producing new kinds of products and services (see Law’s Information Revolution).  Yet regulation has locked law schools into models that don’t serve these new needs.
In a real market, the supply side would change. As discussed in yesterday’s WSJ, if nobody’s buying borscht, make more horseradish.  

Read the whole post here. It seems that there is a never ending stream of articles on the need for law schools to innovate and adapt to changing markets.  Oak Brook College is a law school that thinks outside the box already and should be in a good place to respond to these developments.