Don't get me wrong, I know there are alot of people that want a law degree to practice law. But there are other options that one can use the law degree for. We can agree that everyone goes to law school for a different reason.
Agreed. Like I said, an online degree can be the right choice for the right person. The trick is for the student to determine whether they are that type of person. As long as the student understands what they're doing, and is fully informed, they should be fine. If they're not informed, good luck.
2. Your point about many firms are snooty. All that I will say in regards to this comment is that when anyone says "many blah blah blah" that means that they don't have the research to back up what they are saying.
Well, can you provide an example to the contrary? A big or mid-sized firm that regularly hires online grads
as attorneys? Do any of the corporate counsel at your Fortune 500 company have unaccredited JDs?
If you think that many firms are
not snooty when it comes to academic pedigrees, then take a look at the firm profiles in Martindale-Hubble. At the big firms (especially in places like NYC, LA, WDC) you will hard pressed to find anything but T14. Check out federal agencies and Fortune 500 legal departments (not non-legal departments) and you'll see the same pattern. Can you find one or two examples to the contrary? Sure, but that does not refute my claim that many firms are prestige obsessed.
This isn't just my uninformed opinion, it's something that permeates the legal world. I spent several years working in the corporate world (consulting/accounting) before going to law school. I have experience in legal and non-legal jobs. In the corporate world it is very common for people to get hired with a BA, then later pick up an online MBA for advancement. Online degrees aren't necessarily looked down on.
This is not the case in law. You don't typically get hired with a BA, pick up a JD along the way, and get promoted to lawyer. In law,
the JD is what gets you hired in the first place, and many attorneys are highly suspicious of unaccredited degrees. They might wonder why the school is unaccredited in the first place (not an unreasonable question). I think part of the problem is that only CA and maybe a handful of other state allow non-ABA grads practice. Therefore, most attorneys haven't had any experience with online grads, and it's an unknown quantity.
Do you disagree that sooner or later there will be an online accredited ABA law school?
I don't know. It seems possible that eventually an online school will get ABA approval, but so far neither the ABA or CBE has made any indication that they're interested. Frankly, I'm not sure that many attorneys are interested either, and the ABA is, afterall, a memebership organization. I can't say what the ABA or CBE will do ten or twenty years from now, but it seems unlikely in the near future.
The thing is, it's not just a question of the ABA modifying its rules to accomodate online education. The online schools are going to have to improve their standards, too, if they want to be taken seriously. Before an online school could really pursue ABA approval it would have to require the LSAT for admission, raise bar pass rates, hire full time tenured faculty, and presumably provide access to some kind of online law library (which maybe they do, I'm not sure).