This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon: Have you heard the one about the small town that had a hard time supporting one lawyer but had no trouble supporting two?
That joke drew a big laugh from Mike Wolff, the new dean of the Saint Louis University law school. At the end of a strife-filled year that hasn’t provided much even to smile about, Wolff is pushing to put the past behind him and the school and plot a future that includes a new building, a new push to integrate the school and the community and new ways to prepare future lawyers for careers that will require a range of professional skills beyond simply waging pitched battles in court.
And, he said in a far-reaching interview with the Beacon, the headlines out of the school over the past several months haven’t had much of an effect on the work that is going on there.
“We have really terrific faculty,” he said in an office whose pervasive clutter belied the short time he has spent as dean. “Fundamentals are sound. If Warren Buffett were buying law schools, he should buy this one. It’s an asset that is going to appreciate quickly.”
The turmoil that has punctuated the school year at the SLU campus overall has been played out on a smaller scale at the law school. Last August, Annette Clark resigned her position as dean after just one year, lobbing grenades at the Rev. Lawrence Biondi, the president of the university, and his administration, which she said had failed to live up to the ideals of “common decency, collegiality, professionalism and integrity.”
In a recent law journal article, she got in a parting shot, saying:
“The law school’s and university’s reputations have been damaged, as has mine, and I am left to regret that I ever took the position in the first place. Surely no one wanted this outcome, although those in the best position to avoid it, the university leadership, seemed oblivious to the likely consequences of their actions until it was too late (and despite my repeated attempts over the course of the year to help them understand).”
For his part, Biondi said that he was about to fire Clark, but she issued her resignation letter instead of showing up for an appointment with him.
In her place, Biondi named as interim dean Tom Keefe, a high-profile Metro East defense attorney who was also a big donor to the university and a member of the SLU board of trustees. He maintained his law practice while serving as dean.
But Keefe’s tenure was cut short last month over inappropriate remarks he made, creating a situation in which he said that if he was in charge of SLU, he would have fired himself. To replace him, the law school truncated its search for a permanent dean and announced the appointment of Wolff, who had remained a candidate as the search proceeded.
Biondi said of Wolff’s appointment:
“With his distinguished career and his outstanding reputation in the legal community and beyond, he will be an excellent ambassador for the law school as it moves forward into a new era of excellence.”
Before being named to the Missouri Supreme Court in 1998, Wolff had been on the SLU law faculty for 23 years. After his tenure on the court, which included a stint as chief justice, he returned to the law school in 2011 and served as the inaugural director for the newly established Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Law and Advocacy.
In the interview, Wolff said his earlier experience running a legal services program had shown him what it was like to be an administrator and he had never really aspired to be a dean, though the chance was offered him when he began teaching at SLU in the 1970s.
“The assistant dean didn’t want to be the assistant dean,” he said, “and he asked me if I wanted to be one. I said no. I didn’t want to be an administrator. I wanted to do the other things that professors do.”
Now, though, Wolff said the time is right for him to take up post.
“I saw the challenge,” he said. “I’m devoted to the institution and I think I can make a difference.”
New building, new collaboration
One of the more immediate parts of the challenge faced by the new dean is the move of the law school from its longtime home on the SLU campus to a building downtown, at 100 N. Tucker Blvd. Wolff, who has helped shepherd the process, said the move is scheduled to start June 1 and be finished by July 31.
“I’ve been involved in building a number of things,” Wolff said, “and I have to tell you this is unusual: We’re on schedule. A month or two ago, we were ahead of schedule.”
He said that money had been raised to expand the school’s presence at the Grand Center campus, but he thinks the new site will be better for several reasons – physical as well as educational.
“We’ll be closer together in a vertical space,” he said of the 12-story structure that will include a number of interior stairwells. “I think we’ll see a lot more of each other.
“When you’re moving to a new location, and the people who are here have seen what you are doing and what you are planning, they get very excited about it. I think we’ll do much better in terms of attractiveness to prospective students when they actually see what we are doing. Right now, it’s more of a hypothetical.”
What won’t be hypothetical, Wolff added, is how being closer to the court buildings downtown – and the lawyers who work in them – will give SLU law students a deeper relationship with and understanding of the legal community. He said lawyers and judges have already let him know their willingness to get more involved in the law school.
As a result, Wolff said, the students will be able to see firsthand the variety of spheres in which lawyers can operate, and the skills they need to succeed in them. He ticked off a few – intellectual and analytical ability, communication skills, gathering and understanding facts, planning, time management, networking and knowing how business operates.
Many of those, he added, have often been downplayed, at least in the public’s mind, to the more typical lawyerly image of one against one battles in the courtroom – the kind of business that helps keep two small-town attorneys afloat even if one can’t make a living.
“I think that the adversarial qualities of persuasion, the argumentation, has had a significant emphasis,” Wolff said. “The other kinds of transactional pieces haven’t been significant in people’s thinking about legal education. The reality is that we’ve been doing this all along, but we should overtly look at what lawyers do and what the needs of the legal profession are and prepare people for them.
“People think of the law as being an adversarial business, but I think you’ll see people understanding that’s just one part. We also teach people how to collaborate, how to work together to build things, how to plan.”
Too many lawyers
Such an approach is especially important now, he said, because law schools have often been turning out more graduates than society needs or can afford to pay. In response, Wolff said, SLU’s law school has been getting smaller on purpose down to about 600 students from a high of 875.
He said that when the American Bar Association loosened up in terms of its accreditation standards several years ago, the number of law schools grew as well. A huge pool of qualified students who wanted to come to law school applied, and schools accepted them.
“A lot of law schools were producing more graduates than the market can accommodate,” he said.
Law schools are going through a cooling-off cycle now, but Wolff expects they will soon be hot again.
“It’s partly demographics,” he said, “partly follow-the-leader in terms of public opinion and partly because law schools will adapt, as we certainly have, to preparing our students for a career that can take fairly different shapes over time.”
The days of joining a law firm as a junior associate, then working your way up to partner and staying until retirement are over, he said.
“People expect lawyers to be civic leaders,” Wolff said, “and we do have lots of activities around here that encourage that. I also would like to see as many of our students as want to work in our legal clinics, and there will be a much higher program for that downtown.
“That’s really the social justice mission of a Jesuit institution. I think that’s extremely important, to be of service to others, but equally important is to be giving people a feel for what the legal needs of a community are. Legal resources tend to go toward serving people with money. Of course, it’s a capitalist society. But we have an obligation to think about how to serve those who don’t have money as well.”
Too much debt
In recent years, a lot of attention has been paid to financial plight of another group – recent law graduates who might not be able to find a job that pays enough to retire their student debt. Keefe focused on the topic, and Wolff emphasized it as well.
“We raise a lot of money for scholarships,” he said, “and we give a lot of scholarships, but that’s not the whole answer. There are a number of things we are approaching people on to get people thinking about how much it takes for someone to become a lawyer, and can we make it a more efficient enterprise. We haven’t gotten to it all yet. Stay tuned.”
Is part of the answer shortening the time it takes to get a law degree to two years, from the current three, as some have suggested? With all of the things that law schools have to cover these days, Wolff isn’t sure that an abbreviated course of study would be a good idea.
What would help ease students’ financial burden, he said, would be revamping the student loan program. He recalled his days at the University of Minnesota law school, when he paid $450 a year. Now, he says, many students take on so much debt, they are in effect buying a second home.
“When you and I were in school,” he said, “we lived pretty modestly. But there has been an arms race among institutions, to make sure students can live as comfortably as their parents do, and I think that has pushed the costs up.
“We’ve massively disinvested in public higher education, and that’s been enabled by the student loan program. I’m not against the student loan program. Without it, many people would be missing the opportunity for higher education. But in the public sector, we have allowed legislatures to push the costs of higher education onto families, where it used to be more on the states.”
One way to ease the financial burden – and maybe end up with better lawyers – is for prospective attorneys to take a year or two after earning a bachelor’s degree before enrolling in law school. A former journalist who says he still thinks of himself as a recovering reporter, Wolff said the time off might help people see things differently, in a lot of ways.
“I encourage people not to jump right into law school,” he said. “Some people do. They know it’s what they want to do. But I think it’s a good idea to go off for a couple of years and do something else. People like that have a lot more life experience to bring to us, and that sometimes evens out the debt situation.”
What’s next for SLU law
Through all of the turmoil of recent months, at the law school and on the SLU campus in general, Wolff said the school’s alumni have been tremendously positive – a situation that has benefited students and professors as well.
That support, he said, was one of the reasons he agreed to be included in the search process for the dean’s job. The exercise has helped the school sharpen its focus on what it is and what it wants to become, Wolff said.
Where will the school be in five years?
“I think it will really be a center of activity,” he said. “I think we will be really well integrated with the profession. We will have people on a regular basis coming in and sharing with us the needs of the profession and the needs of the community. So I think we will be a vibrant and vital force and a place that produces terrific lawyers.”
And, he says, his view of the administration is different from that of many other veteran faculty members throughout the university.
“Father Biondi and the board of trustees are making a multimillion-dollar investment in the law school,” Wolff said. “I have a much different outlook than some of the arts and sciences folks, in part because I was here for quite a few years before Father Biondi ever came to this place. He has been a transformative presence, and he has taken an interest in the law school that has been very positive.”
Would he like to see Biondi remain as president?
“I would.”
Does he think Biondi will stay in office?
“I think so, and from my own perspective, I hope so. He has an interest in seeing us thrive.”