Law School May Expand to Irvine

Western State University College of Law is making plans to open a satellite campus here in hopes of becoming the first established law school in the burgeoning South County area, its president said Thursday.

Western State, already the largest law school in California, hopes to have as many as 200 students in Irvine by the 1990 fall semester, with the possibility of expanding to 1,000 students within four or five years.

The expansion is aimed at both attracting new students and accommodating the current ones, President Jack Monks said in an interview.

Noting that 70% of his students are part time, Monks said: “Our students are spending a huge amount of time on the road, unproductive and frustrating time . . . trying to sandwich in their legal education” between family and professional responsibilities.

The school, with campuses in Fullerton and San Diego, does not have accreditation from the American Bar Assn. but is seen as a “second chance” for some older and non-traditional students.

Officials at UC Irvine have been considering opening a law school and are expected to make a recommendation this spring. UCI spokeswoman Colleen Bentley-Adler said those officials seem to be leaning in favor of the idea.

But both she and Western State officials asserted that they see little conflict between the two schools because they would appeal to different students.

“They’re not a threat,” Bentley-Adler said. “If anything, we might be considered a threat to them if we opened a law school because a public school would be less expensive.”

Western State settled on Irvine for the new campus after faculty members polled their students informally and the city emerged as their top choice, Monks said.

“If that area isn’t the center of the universe yet, it’s destined to become that, and we want to be there,” he said.

Western State, one of the few large, for-profit law schools in the country, is currently looking at three unspecified sites for its Irvine campus, Monks said. He estimated the start-up cost in the first few years could be about $6 million to $7 million.

South County has had some small, unaccredited and short-lived law schools in its history, Monks and other Western State officials said, but never a well-established university.

Western State’s Fullerton campus has 1,300 students and the San Diego campus has about 500.

“We’re all full in Fullerton,” Monks said. “Applications and admissions are up, and we’re not very anxious to try and jam people into the closet and see if we can make the walls stretch.”

The school generally relies on attracting older students, many of whom are considering career switches and who may not have the time or the grades to go to a full-time law school with ABA accreditation.

For years, Western State fought to gain ABA accreditation, but school officials have now given up that quest, deciding instead to concentrate on the school’s original mission of appealing to a different type of student.

Lack of accreditation could hurt the school as it attempts to make a name for itself in South County, according to some in the local legal establishment.

“I would much rather see an ABA-accredited school down in South County,” said one leading local attorney who requested anonymity. “The market will have to establish whether we need another Western State in that area.”

But Jennifer King, new president of the Orange County Bar Assn., said she expects her organization to welcome the Western State expansion.

While agreeing that South County could support an ABA school, she added: “I think they can both exist. . . . There’s a need for a convenient school like Western State, and I know a lot of very good lawyers who have gone there.”