Valley Law College Studies How to Effect Continuance

Twenty-five years ago, a couple of Sun Valley Rotarians decided that what the San Fernando Valley needed was a law school. One was a lawyer who had attended night school, the other a public relations man.

Together they formed the San Fernando Valley College of Law, and it was an instant success. The ‘60s were boom times for law schools. Enrollment soared and tuitions poured in. The lawyer and the press agent were soon working at the school full-time.

Things are not quite so rosy nowadays.

Changing demographics, an increased supply of attorneys, and an ill-timed tightening of its standards in the late 1970s have left the Valley’s only law school with just 200 students, off 85% from about a decade ago.

A failed effort to win American Bar Assn. approval in the late 1970s placed the nonprofit Van Nuys institution in precarious condition financially, and without the ABA’s imprimatur, the school finds it tough to compete.

So do its graduates, who cannot take the bar exam in 47 states, who are less likely to pass in California than ABA graduates and who must settle for lesser jobs when they do pass, since top law firms insist on an ABA school.

Now San Fernando Valley must compete for an applicant pool that is shrinking in numbers and quality. The school says it is barely able to cover its $1-million 1986-1987 academic year budget.

To help ensure its survival, and possibly help with a second try for ABA approval, the school sought to affiliate with another institution.

“We talked to every private school in the area and as far north as San Francisco,” said Valley College of Law Dean John Huffer.

Finally, in 1983 San Fernando Valley affiliated with the University of La Verne, a small, 95-year-old institution 30 miles east of Los Angeles that also has a law school lacking ABA approval. La Verne now conducts some courses in the Valley law school building.

Although it lacks ABA sanction, San Fernando Valley does have accreditation from the State Bar of California.

To many, the biggest advantage of the San Fernando Valley College of Law is convenience. Situated near an Earl Scheib auto paint shop on Sepulveda Boulevard, it is the only law school between Glendale and Ventura, and its admissions policy is to accept anyone who might reasonably expect to succeed. A bachelor’s degree is not necessarily a prerequisite, and close to half of those enrolled drop out before finishing.

6 Full-Time Faculty

“We don’t compete with UCLA,” acknowledged Huffer, one of the school’s six full-time faculty members.

For all its difficulties, the school has opened doors for many students. About 1,700 of the college’s 2,500 graduates are now practicing law, most of them in the Valley, Huffer said.

“It afforded a lot of opportunity, especially to women,” said Joseph Peter Lamont, the public relations man who founded the school along with attorney Leo L. Mann.

Terri G. Lynch, for example, was attending the full-time-only UCLA Law School while rearing three children, and it was just too much. “I thought I was Wonder Woman, but I wasn’t,” she said.

So she switched to the San Fernando Valley College of Law and got her degree in four years--while teaching grade school full-time. That was 17 years ago. Now 47, she is a successful divorce lawyer in Van Nuys.

“It afforded me my ticket to practice,” she said. “It’s been so long nobody cares where I went to law school.”

Lynch and others also laud the school’s hungry students, most of whom hold down jobs while studying law. Huffer said 75% of the students are part-time, with the student body evenly divided between day and evening classes.

Varied Backgrounds

“There are people from virtually every occupational background--doctors, accountants, house painters,” he said.

The part-time faculty also seems to offer advantages. Jo Ann Stipkovich, a domestic relations lawyer in Woodland Hills, said her professors had more than an academic understanding of the subjects they taught.

But even the most enthusiastic alumni admit that the school has drawbacks. San Fernando Valley is one of 18 schools in California accredited by the State Bar, but not ABA approved.

State bar assessments are confidential, but one was conducted last year and Huffer said, “I’m not very happy with the report.” Nevertheless, the school remains accredited.

Huffer said that, eventually, the school would like to get ABA approval. But that hinges on many factors, including physical facilities, full-time faculty, library and admissions standards.

California does not require law schools to get ABA approval, but those without it have less stature and so do their graduates. Only California, Indiana and Montana allow Valley graduates to sit for the bar, for example.

Cheryl Newton, recruiting administrator at the big Los Angeles firm of O’Melveny & Myers, said she would not consider recruiting at a non-ABA school. Graduates of such schools are not often hired by top firms, she said.

‘Difficult to Get Jobs’

With the increasing number of lawyers on the market, “It’s difficult for people in the center and bottom of these ABA schools to get jobs,” much less most graduates of non-ABA schools, she said.

There is also the issue of reputation. Two years ago, San Fernando Valley even folded its law review. Said Stipkovich, “You always feel like you’re not going to a first-rate school.”

Indeed, its students this year had average Law School Admissions Test scores of 22, contrasted with a national average of 29.5. And 47% of the school’s graduates taking the bar exam for the first time passed the California test in July, contrasted with 65% for graduates of ABA schools.

The problem facing Dean Huffer and his law school is maintaining a steady stream of qualified applicants while keeping afloat financially. The Law School Admission Council, which administers the LSATs, says the number of law school applicants nationwide peaked at 73,000 in 1981-82, and by 1984-85 had fallen to 60,000.

The dean, a friendly, low-key man whose vinyl office chair is frayed in several places, said the school accepted 118 of 189 applicants for the current academic year, about the same ratio as 10 years ago.

‘Pool Slipped a Little’

“But probably the overall quality of the applicant pool we are exposed to has slipped a little,” he admitted.

In some ways the school is still recovering from what Huffer calls its “nearly disastrous” attempt to gain ABA approval in the late 1970s. In trying for the approval, it imposed tougher admission standards and spent more than $1.5 million on its law library, which now has 70,000 volumes and costs $85,000 a year to maintain.

But the tougher standards cut enrollment just as expenditures were being raised, and the resulting budget crunch boosted tuition. The school dropped its ABA bid in 1979.

Tuition this year is $195 a credit, or about $3,000 per semester for full-time students. By contrast, UCLA costs only $693 per semester for state residents. But San Fernando is cheaper than many private schools. One established institution that Huffer considers his chief competition, Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, costs $297 per credit, or about $4,500 per semester.

Southwestern is ABA approved, and Huffer said such ABA schools with part-time programs are increasingly siphoning off applicants who once turned to San Fernando Valley.

Similar Assessment

“The applicant pool is being cut back, no question about it,” agreed Dean Seymour Greitzer of Glendale University College of Law, a for-profit, non-ABA institution celebrating its 20th birthday this year.

He said his school, which is owned by a Greitzer family trust, is in much the same straits as San Fernando Valley. “It’s a very hard struggle,” he said.

To compete, Huffer said, San Fernando Valley is restructuring its curriculum. The first two years (or equivalent for part-timers) will consist of traditional core courses covering various areas of legal studies.

The fifth semester will be devoted to courses in client counseling, negotiating, discovery, trial advocacy and other practical matters. And in the final semester, students will have, among other options, the choice of entering a supervised legal clinic where they actually perform the work of lawyers.

Competing for students is a relatively new problem for San Fernando and other American law schools, and some critics say the shrinking applicant pool is a healthy manifestation of a glut of lawyers that has arisen in the past 20 years.

“Law was a natural field of graduate study for the vast numbers of young people finishing college with only vaguely defined career goals,” wrote Charles R. Morris in his history of the period, “A Time of Passion: America 1960-1980.”

90,000 in California

There are now about 90,000 practicing lawyers in California. That’s roughly one for every 300 residents, compared to one for every 450 a decade ago.

The San Fernando Valley College of Law, of course, benefited from that trend.

“We started with 52 students that first year,” Mann says of autumn, 1962. “By the time we had reached the peak in the mid- and late ‘70s, the enrollment of the school was well above 1,300.”

Mann and Lamont benefited too.

“I was the dean originally and then I was president,” Mann said, although he insists he could have made more money concentrating on his law practice. “Mr. Lamont was originally president and then he became admissions director.”

Both men dissociated themselves from the school in 1977 after the ABA raised questions about whether they had “a de facto proprietary interest in the corporation,” Huffer said.

But that is in the past, he insisted. Now the school is putting its energy on developing alumni fund raising and its new clinical program as ways to survive and improve. For all its difficulties, Huffer said, “People have always gotten a good education at the school.”