Bringing LawReady to Campus: Prelaw Advisor POV

By Kyle McEntee

LawReady has generated an exciting buzz from the prelaw advising community. An innovative approach to prelaw education from LSAC, LawReady helps undergraduate students decide whether to pursue a legal education, while simultaneously preparing them through coursework and interactions with their prelaw advisor and other students who share their interests. With excitement, however, comes a natural thirst for details about program structure, logistics, and value. Our November webinar answered many common questions and provided a platform for advisors to ask even more.

(Prelaw advisors can log in to access a full recording and transcription of the webinar on the prelaw advisor dashboard.)

As advisors contemplate how to bring LawReady to campus, we can draw many lessons from the experiences of the first undergraduate institutions that began to offer LawReady on campus this fall, like the University of Michigan – Flint. At any university, there’s more to new programs than a good idea – innovators must overcome faculty politics, administrative bureaucracy, and cost concerns. We were fortunate to have Kimberly Saks, the prelaw advisor at the University of Michigan-Flint, join our webinar to discuss her experience implementing LawReady. Her efforts and candidness will pave the way to encourage other advisors to innovate. Here’s a particularly useful excerpt that’s been edited for clarity and length:

Kyle McEntee - Kim, what motivated you to bring LawReady to your campus?

Kim Saks - I heard about LawReady right before last year’s MAPLA, and I thought it would be a really great program for our students who have limited access to information about the legal profession and also lack access to information about preparation for the LSAT and preparation for law school. Quite often, I don’t get them until the end of their academic career, and I’m playing catch up with them. And so this felt like one way in which we could help that problem. It also, to me, seemed like a way where we could embed some LSAT prep into the curriculum. We have a lot of first-generation students, a lot of students who are low-middle class or otherwise financially strapped. And being able to get them to a point where they don’t have to spend as much on LSAT prep or maybe even can engage in just self-study because they’ve had certain classes and certain prep along the way felt like a really important thing for us to include in our curriculum.

Kyle McEntee - So to make sure people understand what you’re getting at there, basically we start with the premise that the LSAT itself is a skills test. It’s a skills assessment that, by pushing them through the LawReady program, you’re anticipating and improving the skills that we’re measuring with the test. And, therefore, when it comes time for them to prepare, they’ll have an easier time, maybe spend less time and hopefully less money.

Kim Saks - Yeah, and also what I was hearing from a lot of students is they didn’t know how to prepare, and so sometimes, especially if I didn’t get ahold of them in time, they would go in somewhat blind into the process or at least into studying for the LSAT. And I wouldn’t get them until they took it the first time and then came to me and said, “What did I do wrong?”
 
Kyle McEntee - So they’re studying the tests rather than improving the skills that we’re measuring, right?

Kim Saks - Exactly. So I had been trying different ways to do this — about how to set up your gen ed so that it would help you build towards the LSAT. But we also have a lot of transfer students, and so some of them come in with all of their gen eds. And so that wasn’t always feasible for them to do either.  

So, LawReady is a way for us to integrate into the curriculum a way that they could capture those skills, hone those skills. And as you mentioned too, even if they end up choosing not to go to law school, it’s still a set of skills that they can use, and it’s also a good way for them to explore whether they want to go to law school. I see my job as a prelaw advisor to not just get them into law school but to get them through the decision-making process of whether law school is right for them.

And so, to me a success is not just, I got someone into a great law school, and they have a great financial aid package, although that is a success. But it’s also, I sat down with this student and dispelled a lot of myths about what law school is and a legal career is, and now they’ve thought twice about it because that’s not what they were thinking at all, right? And so, this is one way in which they can broaden their horizons, they can gain skills, it’s a low-risk environment, and they can come out of the other side ready to do whatever it is that they want to do.

Kyle McEntee - So who ultimately was the decision maker when it came to bringing LawReady to campus or decision makers?

Kim Saks - It was a series of people. So, I was the one who spearheaded it, but it was kind of fortuitous at the time that I had a colleague from philosophy who really thought we should be doing more about prelaw. And we just worked together to figure these things out.

But we are trying to get university-level support for it, and part of doing that is speaking the language above us. It’s not how I would think about this necessarily, but it is how administrators think about this, which is how are we going to market this? How is this going to grow enrollments? How is this going to help with retention and graduation?

And this is, for me, a big retention activity because students who are engaged in this kind of activity are more likely to come back, are more likely to persist towards graduation in a timely fashion. Because we don’t cohort students, but this is more a cohorted feeling if you’re in something where you feel like you belong. So this gives us the ability to do that, and I think that has made a lot of sense to the people up above.

We’re paying for it out of the college’s budget, not out of the university’s budget yet, but we are kind of petitioning for it to come out of the university’s budget as a whole starting next year. But for us at the college level, it was not an undoable number. It made a lot of sense, and it made a lot of sense for us because it was also not just for one major or the other, right? It was to benefit a group of majors within the college, and also across the university, but there are a lot of majors that are within our college that tend to be the feeder majors into prelaw. And so, it was justifiable for us to be the home for it.

Kyle McEntee - Kim, are you planning to use this as a tool to identify people earlier who need your services?

Kim Saks - Yeah, so that is one thing that ever since I took over prelaw I’ve been trying to do is identify people earlier and earlier. Advertising a program like this gets them into a system where I can find them, and they can get the advising that they need, and they can get on track.

Kyle McEntee - All right. So, we’re almost ready to wrap up here. Kim, do you have any final thoughts?

Kim Saks - If this is something you’re interested in bringing to your campus, start having discussions, and I would start with fellow faculty first. Because they’re ultimately going to be the ones along with you that are implementing this. And so, you don’t want to start going up the chain without the support around you because otherwise, it’s going to feel like a top-down thing. And, also understand that this is, I think, one of the things people are often scared about is that this is going to come in from the outside and implement some new curriculum. And it’s not, I mean, there are standards, but I was just looking at the rubrics the other day, and they are standards that would align with any, like the argumentative writing ones would align with any good paper that you’re assessing. So, in that sense, it’s the work you’re already doing on your campus, and it’s just organizing it in a way that makes sense for students that are examining a path to law school.