A little reaction
To the editor:
As the new chancellor of the LSU Law Center, I read with great interest the July 17 letter to the editor from our recent graduate, Hayley Bush Little. Ms. Little questions the current state of the job market for new lawyers in Louisiana and is critical of the efforts of our Career Services Office to assist students in finding less traditional jobs in this environment, especially in the public sector.
We appreciate the important issues Little has raised. We are always eager to improve the services we provide to our students and alumni. We welcome constructive criticism. We will do our best to take it to heart and to make concrete improvements in our services. All of these principles certainly apply to our Career Services Office, which is vital to students, alumni and a wide range of employers in the private and public sectors.
At the same time, readers of the Business Report should be aware that the Law Center has made profound improvements in its career services the past 10 years. The number of employers who recruit on our campus has more than tripled in this time period, and we expect this number to continue to increase through our marketing efforts. The Law Center has increased its counseling staff to three full-time counselors specifically to accommodate the individual job search needs of our students. During the past seven years, an average of 92% of our graduates have found employment within nine months after graduation.
Nevertheless, we are always looking for new ways to help our students find good jobs. The Law Center received national recognition for its 2006 “virtual” public interest job fair, to be highlighted in the August issue of the National Association of Law Placement Bulletin. The job fair included government agencies within the southern part of the United States that had not previously recruited at the Law Center. Also in a further effort to expose students to public interest job opportunities, the Law Center has funded 17 summer public interest fellowships in the past two years. These funds have allowed our students to work for such agencies as the Georgia Justice Project, Northwest Louisiana Pro Bono Project, Capital Area Legal Services Corporation, Baton Rouge Juvenile Court, the National Disability Rights Network and Acadiana Legal Services, to name a few.
Our Career Services Office certainly recognizes that there have been changes in the legal job market in Louisiana since hurricanes Katrina and Rita. We understand that our students need to explore new employment opportunities in this changed environment. We are planning an experimental “virtual alternative career fair,” and we will welcome members of the business and governmental sectors as well as law firms as participants in this endeavor. We also are one of the first and only law schools to offer a judicial clerkship preparatory program for state judicial clerkships. Our efforts to help our students and alumni get jobs outside of the traditional private law firm setting will be creative and unstinting.
The LSU Law Center has a bright future ahead, with ambitious goals. There is no higher priority for the Law Center than to serve its students and alumni in a way that comports with our tradition of excellence in all we do. We take great pride in our success at being a student-centered and student-friendly Law Center. No matter how well we have done before, however, or how well we think we are doing, we will always strive to do better. In that spirit, all of us at the Law Center thank Little for her thoughtful comments and suggestions.
Jack M. Weiss, chancellor
LSU’s Paul M. Hebert Law Center
About the Publisher’s View
To the publisher:
I read your column (“Publisher’s View,” July 17). Damn fine thinking, dude. Give ’em hell.
Denis Alan de Shon
Baton Rouge
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