Autumn leaves

Greetings from the Chair

This has been a time of challenge and great change—at law schools, LSAC, and nearly everywhere else. With the decline of the economy, budgets have tightened, applications have dropped, and candidates have faced increased financial uncertainty. LSAC has worked hard to keep the admission process humming and schools and candidates in communication. It has continued to subsidize school attendance at forums—in fact, it’s added a very successful Canadian forum—and helped ensure that admission officers can attend the annual meeting, probably the most important opportunity for professional development and education. Progress hasn’t been as smooth as hoped. Law school budgets are still under pressure, test numbers are down by double-digits, and LSAC itself has had to continue to dip into its reserves. Still, our dedicated and innovative volunteers have brought much energy and fresh ideas to our fast-changing field. Together with the hard-working staff at Newtown, they have implemented several new programs in a surprisingly short time and continued to press forward with many established initiatives. It’s amazing how much energy, smarts, and goodwill LSAC has to draw on. Evaluations was the first big new project. It aimed to complement and regularize some of the existing letter of recommendation process. By making it easier and less time-consuming both for evaluators to provide information and admission officers to see and understand it, it tried to bring more information about the candidate into the admission process. That information, it was hoped, would be largely different from what LSAC had provided before. It covers a wide range of candidate attributes, which admission officers told LSAC was important for legal education— attributes like honesty, integrity, leadership, and ability to work with others. The information, while not scored in any traditional way, is comparative, which facilitates judgments across a wide range of talents, hopefully leading to more diversity and vibrancy in the admitted class. Evaluations appeals primarily, of course, to those interested in looking beyond the “numbers” and to candidates who think they may bring to a class something the numbers themselves don’t well reflect. If that helps lessen today’s worrying over-reliance on test scores, so much the better. FlexApp ™ was the next. It allows a school to create its own electronic application by combining common and school-specific questions. The common questions are based on a thorough review by volunteers and staff of existing applications. They reflect those questions most schools already ask—ones about contact information, demographics, educational background, and employment, for example. Schools do not, of course, have to include any of these questions in their e-app, although most schools will want to include many of them. Using a common question on the e-app provides two advantages—the work has already been done for the school, and information will automatically flow to that school’s e-app if an applicant has already answered that particular question for another application. These advantages ease the gathering of information for both the school and the applicant. Schools may also create their own school-specific questions—as many as they wish. They can then customize the order of all their questions—both common and school- specific—to appear on their e-app in a specific order. (And each school can have up to nine different e-apps for different programs!) This current admissions year shows the great opportunity FlexApp has given schools to present themselves creatively and distinctively.

Dan Ortiz Chair, LSAC Board of Trustees (2009–2011) John Allen Love Professor of Law and Edward F. Howrey Professor of Law University of Virginia School of Law

BIENNIAL REPORT 2009–2011