GW Law Field at Nationals Park?
How should law schools get their name out there into the public? Here’s one idea that is eye-catching, although I don’t intend to adopt it for GW. In what was described by Lansing, MI, Mayor Virg Bernero as a “grand slam home run for the City of Lansing, the Lugnuts and Cooley Law School,” Bernero and Thomas M. Cooley Law School President and Dean Don LeDuc announced on February 22 that the school had paid nearly $1.5 million to name a local minor league baseball stadium. The Lansing Lugnuts will play in Cooley Law School Stadium for the next 11 years.
Cooley’s decision to name a stadium may be an extreme case, but there’s no doubt that law schools have stepped up their game in terms of marketing in the last two decades. As recently as 15 years ago, GW Law was not unusual in publishing just one, relatively unsophisticated admissions brochure each for its J.D. and LL.M. programs. When I was applying to law school, the primary alternative means of getting specific information about a specific school beyond that found in the course catalog or admissions brochure was a phone call to the admissions office.
Today, that is very far from being the case here or at any other law school. A combination of factors, including the effect of information technology on consumers’ ability to obtain information and the advent of for-profit rankings vehicles such as U.S. News, has created the necessity for law schools and other institutions of higher learning to be skilled marketers. On the one hand, this is a good thing: Applicants certainly have more information on which to base their decision than they did in my day, and more information usually allows consumers to make better choices. I am impressed (and maybe amazed) by the level of information about our law school possessed by students who attend our events around the country for our admitted applicants. (In fact, I am sending this post from Ann Arbor.) On the other hand, whether they realize it or not, given the information age into which they were born, applicants may be inundated with too much information, much of which is bound to be biased in favor of its issuing institution.
Rankings appear to condense the vast array of available information about schools into one handy decision-making tool. Many law school deans and faculty members, however, are on record as opposing rankings on the basis of those instruments’ inability to measure important attributes of and differences among schools. So on what bases should an applicant make his or her decision about where to attend law school? In my view, our own Associate Dean Anne Richard got it just right in a recent interview with AdmissionsDean.com :
“Law school is not just a series of classes and, although all law schools are alike in many ways, we are all different in others. There are 200 accredited law schools in the U.S., all of which provide sound legal educations and opportunities. Each student has to investigate different aspects of the various law schools to determine which will be the best fit. Students should consider many factors, including: (1) size of the law school; (2) location of the law school; (3) curriculum and program offerings; (4) accessibility and engagement of the faculty; (5) opportunities available to students through journals, skills boards, externships, and clinics; (6) cost and financial aid; (7) size, strength and involvement of the alumni network; and (8) employment/placement prospects – in what sorts of practice areas and in what locations throughout the country and throughout the world does each law school typically place significant numbers of graduates? It is important to weigh all of these factors as one decides which law school will be the best choice.”
I don’t think that GW Law will be looking to buy the naming rights to a baseball stadium. In fact, I prefer the fact that at GW Law the people who own the baseball team just named (and endowed) the Lerner Family Associate Dean for Public Interest and Public Service. This is what gave us the opportunity to bring Alan Morrison to our Law School to enhance our public interest and public service programs. Now that’s my kind of naming opportunity.
