Welcome back to Ahead of the Curve. I'm Karen Sloan, legal education editor at Law.com, and I'll be your host for this weekly look at innovation and notable developments in legal education.

In honor of Veterans Day, this week I'm checking in on William and Mary Law School's Military Mondays program, where veterans can get benefits assistance at the local Starbucks. Next up is a look at the fully online Concord Law School on the occasion of the ground-breaking school's 20th anniversary. And finally we'll visit the highs and lows of the July 2018 Texas bar exam. 

Please share your thoughts and feedback with me at [email protected] or on Twitter:@KarenSloanNLJ

Answering the Call…In A Coffee Shop

Regular readers of this newsletter know that I like to spotlight new law school programs that I think are particularly interesting or innovative. In honor of today's holiday, I'm checking in with one such program that I first wrote about three years ago when it debuted—Military Mondays—where veterans can get free legal help with some java on the side. 

Here's the background: the College of William and Mary Marshall-Wythe School of Law's Lewis B. Puller Jr. Veterans Benefits Clinic launched Military Mondays in the summer of 2015 in partnership with Starbucks. The idea is pretty ingenious. Students and clinic staff meet with veterans at a Starbucks location in Williamsburg, Va., on designated days to help them apply for benefits through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. I especially love how the program got its start. Clinic director Patricia Roberts cold-called former Starbucks CEO Howard Shultz after reading an article about the company's commitment to veterans to pitch the partnership. The coffee behemoth quickly agreed.

Military Mondays was in a pilot phase when I first got interested. In fact, William and Mary had held only one session when I first reached out. So how's it going now? It has been an unqualified success and is still going strong, according to Caleb Stone, an Equal Justice Works fellow who has been running the program from the past two years. Thus far, Military Mondays has helped 369 veterans with benefit claims, with five or six sessions each semester. It has become more comprehensive as well. A representative from the Virginia Department of Veterans Servicestypically attends now, meaning veterans can often file benefit claims on the spot. The state veterans services workers can also look through a veterans' file to find necessary information, Stone told me.

“It has gone really well,” he said. “It has not only helped a lot of veterans, but it has provided students a great educational experience by allowing them to meet face-to-face with veterans. A lot of our practice happens on paper, so it's good for them to get that interactive experience.”

So Military Mondays is going great at William and Mary, but what about elsewhere? Roberts told me three years ago that she hoped Military Mondays would expand to other organizations and Starbucks locations. And there has been progress on that front. At least 26 organizations have held Military Mondays around the country, including 10 law schools, Stone said. (He qualified that not all of those programs are still running.) But William and Mary has been working to spread the word and make it simple for other veterans clinics and organizations to follow suit. Stone created a Military Mondays playbook that lays out the logistics of the program that's available to any interested group.

I was curious whether Stone thinks the informal nature of meeting at a coffee shop makes veterans more comfortable or willing to participate than they would be if they had to come to the law school campus to get help. The answer is yes, for the most part.

“Sometimes there is certainly a comfort level with it,” Stone told me. “It depends on the personality of the veteran. There are some more formal veterans who I think say, 'Well, this is a little strange, meeting at a coffee shop.' But I think the majority are a little more willing to discuss their issues because we're out there in the community, going where veterans would be anyway.”

Stone noted that the clinic schedules private meetings on campus for veterans with sensitive matters to address, such as sexual assault.

My thoughts: What's not to like (besides those cloyingly sweet yet head scratchingly popular pumpkin spice lattes)? You've got veterans getting help, law students getting experience, and the support from a high-profile company. More than anything, I like how this all got started because a law professor thought outside the box in terms of reaching the clients who need help. Obviously most law school clinics can't operate out of a coffee shop. (Client confidentiality, yadda, yadda, yadda.) But it's the spirit and creativity of what William and Mary has done that impressed me. So on this Veteran's Day, I'm saluting the clinic for its service.

An Online Law School? You Cannot Be Serious!

Speaking of outside the box, can you image how crazy it probably sounded when Concord Law School launched as the nation's first online law school, 20 years ago? Yes, the school, now called the Concord Law School at Purdue University Global Purdue, is celebrating its 20-year anniversary.  Let's think about this: The Internet was still relatively new in 1998. I mean, it wasn't actually all that new. The origins of the Internet date back to the 1960s. (Sorry, Al Gore.) But a quick Google search led me to data from the Pew Research Center that said 41 percent of adults went online in 1998. So you can assume a smaller percent actually had Internet access in their homes. Hence, it probably sounded a bit wild to lots of people when Concord launched a J.D. program. Here's what dean Martin Pritikin had to say in a press release noting the milestone.

“Twenty years ago, we set out to challenge the legal education system by revolutionizing the way students can obtain a law degree by making it both affordable and flexible. Today our mission continues through the development of innovative programs that have affected the lives of thousands of graduates.”

In addition to developing new ways to deliver legal education online, the school has recently revised its curriculum to incorporate more practical skills components.

So good for Concord for lasting two decades—a feat I'm sure many skeptics would not have predicted in 1998. But I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some of the challenges the online school still faces, the most obvious being that it can't be accredited by the American Bar Association and graduates can't take the bar anywhere other than California. State rules still require online students to take and pass the so-called “baby bar,” officially known as the First-Year Law Students' Examination. (Just 27 percent of the 44 Concord students who took the baby bar in June passed.)

The takeaway: I think it probably takes a certain kind of highly motivated student to succeed in fully online programs like Concord. (As confirmed in this story I wrote about Concord many moons ago.) At the same time, I like that people who don't really have the option to drop their lives for three years to attend a traditional J.D. program have an avenue to pursue their legal aspirations. I think the key is for online students to have a clear picture of the challenges they face and the tough odds of success in terms of passing the bar exam. Caveat Emptor.

A Tale of Two Texas Law Schools

My colleague Brenda Sapino Jeffreys has been keeping a close watch on the July bar exam results in the Lone Star State. Bar examiners gave everyone a Halloween trick when they released results on Oct. 31 showing that the first-time pass rate fell more than three percent from the previous year, landing at 76.6 percent. She followed up with a story on Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall Schoolof Law's dismal 44.5 percent first-time pass rate—the lowest among the state's 10 law campuses. Officials at the Houston law school have launched an investigation to determine why the pass rate was so low. But it wasn't all bad news. Baylor University School of Law posted the highest first-time pass rate in Texas, at nearly 93 percent. And to add icing to the cake, the top three scorers on the July exam each hailed from Baylor—an apparent first. Yee haw!

Extra Credit Reading

Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law is trimming clinical and lecture positions due to a budget shortfall.

So are other elite law schools next? Deans and experts weigh in on the likelihood that other top law schools will announced cuts.

Some law professors are headed to public office, having prevailed at the polls last week. Others lost their challenges to Congressional incumbents.

The Law School Admission Council must pony up $480,000 in legal fees to the California agency that successfully got the LSAT maker held in civil contempt earlier this year for violating a consent decree regarding disability accommodations for LSAT takers.

Thanks for reading Ahead of the Curve. I'll be back next week with more news and updates on the future of legal education. Until then, keep in touch at [email protected]