Attorney Daniel Thies has been involved in law school accreditation for nearly 20 years and is chair of the Council of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar. Below, Thies details the importance and services of accreditors.
Daniel Thies
Chair, Council of the American Bar Association’s Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar
What would you say is the most important function of an accreditor?
Accreditors help ensure students receive a quality education. As the accreditor of law schools, the Council works first to make sure that law students are getting a valuable education in return for their tuition dollars. Each year, tens of thousands of law students and prospective law students rely on the Council’s “stamp of approval” when evaluating where to study law. Later, when these students become graduates, they will begin to serve clients.
At that stage, the Council’s accreditation helps the public looking to hire a lawyer. Think about the times when you may need legal assistance. Maybe you need to write a will, are fighting to keep custody of your children in the middle of a divorce, or have been injured in an accident and need advice. How do you know the attorney you are relying on was trained effectively to practice law? Or that the attorney will act ethically and in your best interests? Well, if your attorney graduated from a Council-accredited school, you know their education met certain minimum standards, aimed to ensure that the attorney can practice ethically and competently.
Since the states are responsible for licensing their own attorneys, why is there a national group involved in law school accreditation?
It is true that each state is responsible for licensing its own lawyers, usually through the state supreme court. But nearly all the states recognize that there is a benefit in relying on the same accreditor of law schools as part of the licensing process. For one thing, that means that states don’t have to pay for their own accreditation systems, saving the taxpayers in each state millions of dollars each year.
Even more important, having a single accreditor allows law students to graduate and move to any state in the country to practice. For example, a graduate of a Council-accredited law school in South Dakota can choose to take the bar exam in Illinois, because the Illinois Supreme Court has chosen to rely on the Council’s accreditation work. For young law students who may not know where they want to practice when they apply to law school, this flexibility is extremely important.
What other benefits does the Council provide to prospective law students?
As part of its work, the Council collects complete and accurate data about law schools and makes it available to the public. Admissions consultants, law school rankings systems, and pre-law advisors all rely on our data as the gold standard for evaluating law schools.
We also make our data available free online to anyone who wants to go to law school or just has an interest in legal education. The data track enrollment, scholarships, drop-out rates, first-time bar exam pass rates, and more. Because we work with law schools all over the country, we’re able to provide apples-to-apples comparisons across all of these data points.
What is your advice to prospective law students as they select their school?
Do your homework! Not just your college coursework, but also your due diligence to find a Council-accredited law school that’s a good fit for you. We have the privilege of accrediting schools with a variety of missions, educational approaches, costs, sizes, and locations, and you can get a quality legal education at any of them. The Council is committed to helping schools produce competent, ethical lawyers, and when you go to a Council-accredited school, you know you’re getting a top-quality legal education.
