ASU's efforts to employ law grads applauded

This summer, ASU’s Sandra Day O’Connor College of Law is launching a new venture: the ASU Alumni Law Group, a teaching law firm that will hire and mentor recent graduates of the school. While some have criticized the university’s plan as a ploy to improve the law school’s rankings by boosting its graduates’ employment rates, a July 7 op-ed by Mark Briggs, founder of the Briggs Law Group, praised the idea as “simply the right thing to do.”

The Alumni Law Group – a stand-alone, nonprofit firm – is a full-service, fee-based institution that will prepare new and recent graduates to move from the classroom to practice. It will provide legal services to a wide variety of clients, focusing on those who cannot afford to pay current market rates and using graduates supervised by experienced attorneys to deliver those services.

The op-ed mentions a few reasons why the Alumni Law Group is a good idea: first, ASU has a good track record of supervising inexperienced law students who are representing actual clients; second, this new venture fills a gap in legal education for students who want to practice law outside a courtroom; and third, hiring unemployed recent law graduates is a creative solution to providing them with a place to begin their careers.

Law school dean Douglas Sylvester commented, “In a market where many are calling for systemic legal reform, we at ASU are not waiting for others to change – we are changing how we educate and mentor lawyers right now, and are doing so in a way that makes sense for our graduates and for Arizona.”