NALP Clashes with the ABA
Wednesday, August 3, 2011 at 04:22PM The symbiotic relationship formed by the American Bar Association (ABA) and the National Association for Law Professionals (NALP) has come to an abrupt end this week according to a law.com article.
In the initial partnership, NALP would have been responsible for reformatting their original questionnaire and collecting more specific detailed data from law schools. The NALP data was going to aid the ABA in its effort to collect more complete and accurate postgraduate employment data from law schools.
But last week, the executive committee of the ABA’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar decided to require law schools to report the more detailed information directly to the ABA, dismissing NALP from the reporting process. James Leipold, NALP's executive director, believes NALP’s transparency on the state of the legal job market is the reason why the ABA has retracted their collaboration offer. He further elaborates, “I believe their intent is to recapture their ability to control the message to the public about the status of the job market. There’s a conflict of interest here.”
The ABA insists that they must get the data themselves since they will use it to accredit law schools
This poses a problem for NALP since its similar questionnaire is not mandatory like the ABA's, so many schools may provide data only to the ABA. NALP has hinted at aking legal action since the ABA appears to be using the same research and survey process that NALP developed over the past 37 years.
Bill Henderson, a professor at Indiana University Mauer School of Law- Bloomington shares, “I think what’s happening is a total disaster. Everything that we know about the industry on a systemic level is from NALP. The ABA won’t crunch industry data the way NALP does. They won’t have the will or the capacity.”
Despite the dispute between NALP and the ABA, do you think more accurate post-graduate employement data will actually be collected and reported? Please share your thoughts in the comments section below.
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