Mike: Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, and a little bit of everything. Today we're talking mostly about law school and law school admissions. I have the great pleasure to be with the very highly regarded—and I say that seriously—Dean Megan Carpenter of UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law. The reason I wanted to highlight the "highly regarded" is, when I mentioned that Dean Carpenter was going to be on our podcast to a number of faculty and fellow deans, everything I heard was raving in just how forward people were looking to this podcast.
We cover the joys and obstacles and challenges and opportunities of being a dean. We cover where legal education is heading, particularly with things like AI and how they're going to blend in not just in the classroom but in the practice of law. And then we end on, if I were applying to law school, or perhaps in your shoes if you're thinking about applying, why is it such a good time, what is going on in the world that makes the legal arena and the foundation of law so critically important, and why we're going to be leaning into it more now than ever before? And we end with my favorite topic, admissions advice for applicants. I'll save that for the last. I won't give away Megan's. Without further delay, here's me and Dean Carpenter.
Dean Carpenter, I know you've had a really busy morning already, and it's only 8 a.m. my time, so thanks for making time. Great to see you.
Dean Carpenter: It's great to see you too, Mike.
Mike: Should we jump right in?
Dean Carpenter: Absolutely. These are some of my favorite topics to talk about.
Mike: You've been a dean for a while now. How many years has it been?
Dean Carpenter: It's been seven and a half, but I think dean years are measured in dog years. So I think it's more like 50-some.
Mike: So, 50 years' decanal experience. I think, I don't know many—my friend Chris Guthrie at Vanderbilt might have you beat, but not many.
My postulation is it's always a tumultuous time to be a dean, and before you become a dean, you don't quite know that. But I feel like, maybe, I'm sensing from many of the deans I speak to, maybe now more so than ever. Is it true? And we can get to the reasons why, but in the seven and a half years, what's been the most rewarding part or pieces of being the dean of a law school?
Dean Carpenter: I am, I suppose, the counterpoint to what you read mostly these days, which—I believe that there's not a better time to be a leader in higher education, and there is not a day that I've been sorry, even on the really, really hard days, that I'm in this role. I guess I would say two things that are the most rewarding.
The first would be, I'm reflecting on the last week, and there was a moment some students set a time to come in and visit with me in my office. And so I was sitting there; I had meeting after meeting, and the inbox is filled with emails, and then all of a sudden these, you know I think it was about eight students, came in and sat, and they were coming from all over the world. They were from Vietnam and Taiwan and China and Korea and we had a student from Puerto Rico, and they were all sitting there, and they just talked about what brought them to seek a legal education, and we talked about their hopes and their dreams and what they wanted out of their education and where they wanted to see themselves in five years. And for me, that's the North Star. I mean, it is very easy when you're involved in administration to not have those touch points, but that's why I always teach some every year. And I also find those moments with students where we're reminded of what our North Star is, why we do what we do every single day. That, to me, was one of the most gratifying moments, not just of my week, but really orienting me as we start engaging in strategic planning for the coming year.
Mike: It's interesting, because when I founded Spivey Consulting, we started off, it was Spivey Consulting "Group," but it was just me, but now we're about 30 consultants. I thought my North Star, or my most meaningful moments, would be sharing in the victories of applicants. We help students with their applications, and getting that phone call, "I got into my dream school," is literally sharing in their success. But that's actually not it. To me, the most gratifying is seeing the people at our firm, like Anna Hicks-Jaco, who you just met, and many others, watching them grow, watching their success. Is this time with all the tumult and all the sort of ups and downs, is it harder to help other people grow, and is that part of your reward, seeing faculty, seeing administrators? Or is now the best time because of the craziness of the market?
Dean Carpenter: Yeah, I mentioned to you a few minutes ago that there were sort of two components or two moments that I think of when I think about what's most rewarding in my role, and the second really reflects on what you're talking about. You know, we as a law school for over 50 years now have been committed to innovation and to always thinking about what's next in legal education. There's a quote in our foyer from the founding dean that says, “The prospect of starting the law [school] struck me as a rare opportunity to stop talking about what’s wrong with legal education and start doing something about it.”
And one of the things that we have done over the last six years is to pioneer a hybrid JD, a mostly non-residential JD, which is the country's first specialized law degree that has been approved by the ABA, which is a JD in Intellectual Property, Technology, and Information Law. And the process of working together as a team, staff and faculty and administration, to put forward this new program that was experimental and that had never existed before and to get approval and through the variance process through the ABA. And I can share, I don't know how many pages the application was, because I mailed them at the UPS store to the council, I know that two copies weighed 33 pounds.
And then to realize this vision throughout the years as we've grown and iterated and found things that worked and didn't work, and realizing that we're changing the lives of students who—getting them a top education where students perhaps may not have otherwise been able to go to law school. Doing that and working as part of a team to make that happen, and seeing faculty really grow in the online and hybrid teaching spaces, and stretching us all in new directions, and hearing the challenges, you know, as we debate different things among the faculty and staff and administration where people have different viewpoints, but always knowing that we’re committed to doing what's in the best interest of students in an innovative way and thinking outside the box. To me, that kind of collaboration and teamwork is one of the absolute most gratifying things of being a dean, and being able to facilitate the success and the work of others in that space has been just truly incredible.
Mike: And to click on something visceral from that awesome story, so you're the dean of the law school, you're in your car, you have 33 pounds of paper that's a variance just for your law school. If it's 33 pounds of paper, that's I'm guessing 600 or 1,000 pages, just for your law school to get a variance. The ABA product that they were being served when they got that package! But it was worth it to you. All that hard work helped you innovate. Innovate, to use your founding dean's message, away from the problems and to the solutions.
What are the challenges right now, and then we can morph towards what are some of the solutions for the future of legal education?
Dean Carpenter: First of all, I want to assure people that I'm not for destroying forests, despite the fact that we had a lot of paper involved in mailing. We hopefully have planted enough trees to overcome that.
The challenges facing law schools are many of the challenges that higher education is starting to face. I mean, we've been dealing with these challenges in legal education since the Great Recession and the steep decline in law school applications. The whole system of higher education is having a similar reckoning right now, and law school deans and leaders across the legal education landscape can help be a beacon for change and transformation in higher education generally.
So I think the challenges facing all of us involve resources. I'm talking sort of economic resources, to do what's in the best interest of students. But one of the challenges is it's also incredibly expensive. I mean, I was just doing some research this weekend into the cost of legal education in the U.S. compared with other countries, and our legal education is significantly more expensive than other countries', and our system of higher education generally is. So I think keeping costs down for students while maintaining our ability to continue providing those services.
And then, I think a big challenge that I have seen is that there are some institutions in the United States that are not necessarily fast-moving and innovative. They might be religion and the military, and certainly higher education is one of those institutions that is not known for being able to pivot really quickly. And I think that that's a challenge for those of us who want to approach things perhaps in a new way.
Mike: When I was in business school, I think of a case study where there was a Korean beer company, but they weren't a beer company; they made glass. This is a story of innovation. For whatever reason, the supply of glassmaking companies was increasing and demand was not, so they were struggling. They said, "Well, we can just cut the middle people out, and we can bottle our own beer. So let's become a beer company." That, to me, is innovation.
I hear the word "innovation" every day I sign on to my phone when I wake up, in respect to higher education. Is there something we need—and if you want to be as bold as saying, "Yeah, get rid of tenure," which I know you're not going to be that bold, I don't blame you—but as far as resource allocation, is there something with AI, the demographic cliff looming? Is there something that sparked your mind on some morning hike in New Hampshire, where you said, "This would be taking our glass and bottling it with beer and becoming a beer company"? Is there that for the law school, that spark?
Dean Carpenter: I aspire to take morning hikes, but I can never get up early enough for the morning hike.
Mike: I'll text you. I'm up at 3:30 if you want me to text you.
Dean Carpenter: [laughs]
One of the things that technology has brought us is the opportunity to engage students in new ways. And I'll share a little bit about our non-residential program in I.P. that I think starts to shift the dynamic. Our program uses technology to engage students in online learning, and the program strives to use technology to do the things we can do online really well and then to engage in-person learning in the ways that are uniquely interpersonal in a "sharing space with one another" way.
And I'll tell you sort of what that means in our terms. We're committed to not just teaching people to think like lawyers but also to be lawyers, and one of the challenges of universities, the way that universities have developed for a long time, and I think this has been the same for professional graduate education, has been, "If we're going to teach students to practice law, let's remove them from the world, and let's have them go somewhere for three years, and we'll isolate them, and we'll have them immerse themselves in book learning and hypotheticals, and we'll change the way that they think, and then we'll release them into the world, and they'll be great lawyers."
But law is all about context, and we don't want to treat people like they're in a monastery or a convent or sort of remove them from space. We want to embed them in space. In addition to our classroom learning, when we get together students in person, we take them all over the place. We call it "learn on location." When they're learning intellectual property strategies for the tech industry, they're doing it in Silicon Valley, and they're learning from the heads of IP at Google, Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, Lenovo, Uber, Intel, Dolby, etc. When we're teaching them policy, IP policy, we're doing it in D.C., where they're learning from law firms, legislators, judges, lobbyists. When we're teaching them, we're getting ready to take a group of students to Seattle in June where we're going to be studying the cloud and gaming and cannabis and wine. When we do patent litigation, we're taking them to Texas, where they're going to the second largest patent court in the country and they're watching a hearing, then they're talking to the judge, and they're talking to the lawyers about preparation.
The opportunity to engage students in contextual learning is something that I think we have not done enough of in legal education. We're starting to do more of it, as you said, kind of on an incremental basis. But I think there is enormous opportunity to advance the ball there in significant ways. I also think that what that does in addition is to bring professional networks. You're helping the students to build those professional networks while they're in school, which is really incumbent upon us in professional graduate education. It's not just a learning experience. It really should be a building experience for their professional identity and careers. And so I think we can accomplish both of those things by looking at legal education in a new way.
Mike: I love it. When I was at WashU, instead of having the mealy-mouthed, boring WashU administrators like me speak to the students on how to do this and that, why not bring in lawyers from all over the world—Venezuela, Brazil, Canada, Europe—and have them talk to them about how to find a job? You're also making the connections. You talk to the presenter after the hour presentation, you walk away with a business card, a year later you have a summer internship, and then you have a job. I love it. Do you think then maybe if we double down in your direction, having a medical school-like model where you almost have a residency your third year—there's long been this tension of, "Well, what's the third year for?" Do you see a school as innovative as yours or a dean as innovative as you going in that direction? Maybe the third year is a residency at an employer, not in a classroom.
Dean Carpenter: Yeah, we actually call our externships, we call them "residencies," really based on that model, and students can spend a semester or up to a full year practicing. And they can be residencies that are in-house and in law firms and, you know, in courts and nonprofits. And so I see that as a very valuable part of the educational experience. However, I'll also add the caveat that I think we need to be doing it earlier. I think we should make those experiential learning components, or contextual learning components, part of someone's education all the way through, not just in that third year of education. That sort of bifurcates it too much, but I think it really needs to be an integrated part of the educational experience.
Mike: This is helpful. We've talked about the fun stuff. Touchpoints with students, strategic thinking of law schools. On the challenges, what's new today that wasn't there five, six, seven years ago? And I can give you an example: artificial intelligence. About 70% of our school clients come to us for admissions help, whether it's undergraduate schools or law schools, you know, "How do we help our admissions?" And one of the challenges is now, are we even reading applications from human beings? Many law schools have said, certify, just like in a character and fitness, that you wrote this. There's a few law schools that have said you can, you know, wild west, free rein, take over the application process, which, by the way, for self-serving reasons I'm against, but I also have extreme bias against that because do you really want to incentivize an applicant to think, "I don't ever have to write anything on my own as a student or as a lawyer because they're letting me do this entire application through artificial intelligence"? Also, are you willing to fire your entire admissions staff? The best reader of AI would be AI. And they've surveyed applicants time and time again; applicants do not want artificial intelligence reading their applications. To me, that's just an example of a challenge to me, is how do we have law schools teach how to suss out a human-written essay or application versus artificial intelligence-written? Right now it's easy; it's going to get a lot more difficult within a year. Is that a good one, and what are some of the other frustrations, challenges, things that are confronting you now that weren't five years ago?
Dean Carpenter: Oh, they're not frustrations; they're just opportunities. So with artificial intelligence, I think that's a great example, and it stretches across admissions. And we've actually taken two different approaches within our admissions team. One is with the JD, and the other one is with our graduate master's program, which it's kind of a moving target for us. But for our JD admissions, we are doing what a lot of schools are doing now, as you mentioned, which is essentially kind of a character and fitness, having someone attest that they have not used AI, GPT or otherwise, in the creation of their application. In the graduate master's program, we're taking a different approach, which is essentially, we're asking students to write it substantially on their own, but if you are using GPT or another artificial gen[erative] AI tool, let us know how you used it, what were your prompts, tell us more about that and disclose everything.
One of the challenges with our international students in particular is, we want to make sure that their English ability is sufficient to engage in an all-English program of legal education. So we're engaged in deep conversations with our admissions team all the time around this, because it's really important that—the truth is the students are going to be using gen AI in the practice of law. Gen AI is just going to be a huge part of our lives in so many ways, and if we are an innovative school, we don't want to ignore the fact that it exists. Yet, we also need to make sure that students have the analytical ability, the writing ability, themselves, to succeed in law school. So, we're adaptable, and we also want to make sure that students can use these tools in a responsible way. It's a real challenge, and it's something that doesn't just stretch in the admission space but also in the educational space.
So I'll give you a real-world example that is challenging us right now. For our non-residential, mostly online program, one of the things that we have students do historically has been to engage the students in discussion posts. And I've loved these discussion posts, because when I'm teaching in a residential classroom, I'll ask a hypothetical to the class and then I'll call on maybe three students. And if those three students all get it right, I am then imputing that knowledge onto the rest of the classroom. I'm just assuming everybody knows the right analysis and we move on. But that may not be the case. And in a residential classroom, it can be easy for someone to fall through the cracks and not have a level of understanding, and for me not to know of their lack of understanding. In the online teaching program, I can ask a hypothetical and every single one of those students in the class will answer that hypothetical. And once they've answered the question, then they can see the answers of all of the other students in the class. And then we ask them to engage in conversation multiple times with multiple peers of, what do you agree with? What do you not agree with? And I have loved that as a pedagogical tool, because I feel like when I'm teaching in this online space, I have a pretty good sense of the analytical abilities and the understanding of everybody in the class. It's very democratic in that way and inclusive. However, if students now with gen AI and if students use gen AI to answer some of those discussion posts, it is no longer a reflection of what they know or their analytical ability. And that can be a serious problem. Also, where students are graded relative to each other, that compounds the issue. So in some ways, gen AI is also asking us or requiring us to rethink the way we teach at some fundamental levels.
Mike: And there's so many ripple effects from your example. Having been doing what I’ve been doing for 25, 26 years, about 80% of my friends are lawyers. I would posit—you can correct me; you know more than me—if you were to give a hypothetical to even three lawyers, you're going to get a nuanced, different answer from all three. It's not going to be the same. You throw gen AI in the mix, and if gen AI is coming up with the same exact thing for all three, you're in big trouble if you can't suss out—and this is what you're getting at as a law dean.
I just read an article from Harvard Law School's website about a professor predicting the future of legal education and the practice of law. Same example: a law firm was having their associates use gen AI, and they were citing all these great former cases that aligned with their position, except 70% weren't real. And the problem is, these law students, if the associate isn't taught how to think like a lawyer, you're not going to be able to see, "Hey, this is a made-up citation." You're not going to be able to see that. When I read a generative AI personal statement, you say it's not frustrating, but for me, it is, and you're maybe a lot calmer than me. It's frustrating when I see a personal statement, and then a week later, the exact same personal statement. And I say, these two poor applicants are turning in to 15 law schools, some of which are going to overlap maybe, the same writing. And they're both going to be denied. And they might get reported to LSAC for misconduct because they didn't write it. I do find that frustrating.
Your example hits admissions, law students, and the practice of law very well. You talked about the demographic cliff and under-resourcement. Oh, there was one more thing you said, because most of our listeners are college students. They're applying to law school. When you say, "When I give a hypothetical to the classroom," do you want to just give me one? 85% of our listeners aren't going to know what you even mean by that.
Dean Carpenter: Okay, I'm going to teach your listeners my very favorite. One of the things in law school that you will learn that will infuriate your friends and family is a bunch of Latin phrases. And my favorite Latin phrase is res ipsa loquitur. It means sort of "the thing speaks for itself." So you're walking down the street, and you see some moving trucks, and there's some boxes on the street, and people sort of taking a piano, seeing it hoisted up by ropes up into this really large window on the third story. And you're walking, and you're so fascinated by this process and the moving truck that you stop and look for a while, and all of a sudden you get crushed by a piano. And no one's there to see it, there's no particular sort of evidence either way, but if you have been crushed by a piano and then there's a moving truck and there's some levers and some pulleys, you can deduce this thing must have happened. It must have fallen. Even though there's no direct evidence of what happened. The same thing—a hypothetical would be if you've had surgery and then, months later, they discover a sponge inside your chest cavity, you don't know how it got there. Perhaps you absorbed it somehow. But because of res ipsa loquitur—the thing speaks for itself—odds are you had surgery a few months ago and someone left that sponge inside your chest cavity. So it means, maybe there's not a lot of direct evidence leading you to a certain conclusion, but all of the circumstances lead themselves to say, res ipsa loquitur, the thing tends to speak for itself. So that would be a hypothetical, if you're setting out a scenario and then you're asking students to deduce any legal principle or analyze a situation.
Mike: We've given a preview of what a law school class looks like, so thank you.
Let's go now, flipping directions, to someone considering law school. You and I, we have a common friend, and they said, "Mike Spivey is a college senior or two years out from college, and he's thinking about law school," what would the conversation look like? How would you pro/con whether I should go, to me, and then what kind of schools should I look for? And then if we have enough time at the very end, what admissions advice you could give me, or maybe I could play devil's advocate and bounce them back at you.
Dean Carpenter: Mike, I’m conscious of the fact that you probably answer this question for prospective students all the time, so I’m really curious as to what you say in this situation. But, as I think about how I approach this issue, I do not believe that there would be a better time to go to law school than right now. As we think about the grand challenges we face as a society, whether they are cultural and political or social, whether they are ones of environmental and climate change, whether they are financial and based in global trade or global relationships, questions around privacy and data—there are so many issues we're struggling with. AI, you brought up, and emerging technologies and their impact on our daily lives. Legal frameworks are at the core of every single one of those issues.
And whatever someone has majored in in college, I have to confess a little bit of a prejudice where, there are so many requirements that people have to take in universities, but for me, it would be a no-brainer for everyone to be required to take a legal class, because whatever your major—whether you're from sociology to business to engineering, life sciences—there are legal frameworks within which you operate every single day. And an understanding of the law and an understanding of legal instruments as tools of strategy really help advance your career, no matter what you want to do for your ultimate career.
I also think that where we're seeing the biggest growth in jobs is in JD-Advantage jobs. And we use that as kind of a term of art, but what that really means is just jobs where it's not your classic law firm job, but it is a job where you will be better, you will have more opportunity if you have a JD, and that will give you an advantage in the workplace. So I believe strongly that a legal education is a benefit no matter what an individual's career goals are. And that right now in our society, right now, is an incredible time to engage that subject.
We are also seeing constitutionally there's a lot of fluctuation in the courts, and things are morphing and changing, and so, intellectually speaking, for people who like to contemplate hard questions, it is an absolute joy and an incredible, maddening frustration at times. But the intellectual exercise of legal education is something that is really incomparable.
Mike: I would agree 100%. Society, front and center, is going to be focused on the framework of the law, or we're going to watch society front and center crumble around us. So never before—I hate to say ever, because I've only been on this planet for 52 years—but never before in my 52 years has the importance been so prominent and right in front of us.
On the flip side, to play devil's advocate: Are there going to be fewer and fewer opportunities because technology, and also, I don't know how to break this to our listeners or you; I think America is going to lose its hegemonic sort of place in higher education over the next 5 to 10 years. So if you're looking at going to an American law school, are you looking at all this opportunity for societal reasons, but is it being offset by technology and maybe opportunities for more lawyers foreign-educated to practice law? You can practice law in India for an American law firm, and you can do it at hours that American law firms would like you doing it at—from 1 a.m. till 8 a.m.—and be a 24/7 law firm.
Dean Carpenter: Two things. I mean, one, I think, reflects back on what you were asking earlier about then, the second step is, how do you decide what law schools to choose? And how do you pick a path? What are the pros and cons? And I think it's really important that students look at law schools that help advance their career goals in very practical ways, not just teaching people to think like lawyers but also teaching people to apply the law in whatever field of interest or setting that drives the applicant to begin with. I think looking at opportunities that are very experiential opportunities, looking at job placement, I think all of that, and the support that you have in a career services office to really help an applicant with his or her individual interests and paths, not putting everybody into the same group, but thinking about what are your unique skills and how can you leverage those throughout your career? I think that's a really important skill and something that applicants don't maybe look enough at as they're going through the process.
But I do research and writing and speaking in the AI space, so I bring that perspective, I think, to this conversation, but I believe it's going to do so much for the legal profession, that it's going to open up access to justice in a way that we just have not experienced before. And it will enable the legal services profession to be perhaps more multifaceted. When you look at the Bureau of Labor statistics for medical professions, you'll see 15, 18 different professions in the medical field. If you look at the legal professions, you don't see the same statistics. It's essentially kind of lawyer, paralegal, alternative licensed provider. And lawyers have kept the practice of law precious, and I think we need to expand that, and AI will help us do that. And we'll see technologists coming into the legal services profession, data analysts. There are so many different opportunities, I think, in the legal profession that we've kept tight for a long time. So I look at it as a little bit of the opposite, where it's going to provide more opportunity for clients that haven't had access to lawyers to have more access to justice, and then it will also open up opportunities in the legal services industry for a variety of different professions and broaden variety for all of us.
Mike: You know, it's the great to-be-determined question of our day. I think that the IMF has speculated up to 40% of legal jobs might go away. On the flip side, I think so many decisions are going to be—to your point about JD Advantage—by the way, you mentioned you send people to Amazon and GE or whomever. Spivey Consulting would probably count as JD Advantage, so if you have any great students that need some immersion in what we do...
Dean Carpenter: I will send them your way! But just a caveat on that statistic. I think it's 44% of legal jobs could be done by gen AI; I think what that means is that it presents an opportunity for us to take that work and then build on it. It’s going to make us more efficient and more productive, and so I don't think it's as much of a replacement as it is an enhancement of our own abilities and productivity and opportunity to be creative.
Mike: When they're giving that statistic—that book "How to Lie with Statistics" should be formative reading for everyone—they're not giving the other statistic, how many jobs are going to be created, new legal jobs? So these do offset for sure.
Dean Carpenter: I might even say that, you know, if you were saying people who are doing accounting work or financial analysis, if you bring in a calculator, like you could say the calculator could be doing 44% or 80% of what these financial analysts do. But what that does is the calculator actually enables those people to do more of the strategic work that they might enjoy.
Mike: You talked to a college president right before we got on the phone. I talked to a law dean. I had to explain very advanced mathematical modeling for scholarshipping in human terms. So I had the model that was not done by me. It was done by Python software, but I had to put it in human terms. Same thing.
You mentioned how to choose a law school. What I would click on is, I would much rather—because you were gracious enough to say that we do have this conversation a lot—I would say to a prospective student, I would rather you cold call a career services officer, a professor, and a student than visit on admitted students day. Because on admitted students' day—I've been in charge of these—the school is putting their best teacher up front and center, their happiest students. To get a real perspective, I'd rather you be talking to the Career Services Office. "How do you help students find jobs?" But ideally visit, if you can, if you have the resources or if the schools help out with travel resources. Don't visit on admitted students' day—and law schools are going to hate that I'm saying this—visit on a random Tuesday, and don't talk to the people they put in front of you. Be extroverted, even if you're an introvert by nature, and talk to people, and ask them what their experience is. And that's the best way to sort of get a feel for what the best-fit law school is for you. Seems like you would agree, even though you put on great admitted students programs.
Dean Carpenter: Yeah. Can I say to do both?
Mike: Yeah, do both, do both. I know how much time is being spent on putting together these great programs. I've done them, so please do both. I want students to go to the admitted students' programs too. Also, the advantage of the admitted student program, just to help with that—you're going to meet a lot of people that are going to be your future classmates at that school. So you get a feel—right.
Then the final question would be, now that we're on admission, if I were applying to law school and didn't know what's all in my head for the last—my entire adult life in admissions—I'm certain you've read applications in your career, probably many. What would stand out for me as an applicant? What advice would you give to make my application as strong as possible? Or about the process as far as timing and anxiety and all the things that go with this process?
Dean Carpenter: I'll take the latter part first. So, I think it depends on the type of program that you're applying to, but I would just say it's inversely proportionate. There's sort of a, it gets tighter and tighter the more you get into those late spring months.
But when it comes to advice on applications, I would say—and this is in some ways, I think, related to a lot of what we've talked about so far today, which is—I would say, be authentic. In an application, I want to see your own voice coming through, and I'll share a little bit of a story. Often I'll get calls from friends and kids of friends who will say—I had a cousin that was applying to school, and she said, "I'm trying to write my personal statement, and I have really lived a fairly ordinary life. I haven't overcome hardships. I'm not sure what to say." And we started talking, and she loves horses, and she had done horseback riding throughout her life, and so we started talking more about that. And she talked about training a very difficult horse and sort of went through, and she really was able to, by speaking to something that she was passionate about, able to show her grit and resiliency in a way that was truly authentically hers. And so for applicants that are applying to school, it may be difficult for you to come up with that personal statement, but what I want you to really think about is just your own voice—things that are important to you, and experiences that you've had—and be yourself. Don't try to be someone else. And that will really shine through in your application.
Mike: That's a hundred percent right. I think if you were to take all of our podcasts from our firm and try to find the most commonly used word from us, it would be "authentic." It doesn't have to be—and this really double-clicks on authenticity—I had a client many years ago who started an elephant refugee camp in Afghanistan. I had a client speak at the U.N. General Assembly. What's just as good would be my passion, particularly when I was younger and less injury-prone, which is 5 a.m. when the sun comes up, high-altitude trail running on remote trails in the mountains. You don't have to have this home run differentiated; it just has to be what your passion is. And then tie it into, ideally, "this is the kind of lawyer I want to be and why I'm applying to law school." So I think everyone has that home run application in them. I've yet to meet, I think, Dean Carpenter, in 25 years of doing this, someone who doesn't have a great personal statement in them. It's when they think that they have to write for an audience of fancy deans in a room weighing in on them, when really they should be writing for themselves, and there's their A+ application.
Dean Carpenter: Yes, I could not agree with you more. And that shines through. When you hear someone's true voice, that's the moment that it really stands out.
Mike: So, us agreeing is a good note to end on. We agree on many things in this conversation. I agree that this is a great time to be making decisions for society within the context of a legal framework, and the better trained these students are to make these decisions as lawyers, the better. So thank you for your innovation. Thank you for your time on a Monday morning on a holiday week, and we'll hopefully have you back in a year or so.
Dean Carpenter: I would love that. Thank you so much, Mike, for a great conversation.
Mike: Thanks, Megan.
Dean Carpenter: Take care.
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