Anyone know anything about this school. They emailed me a good luck email for the lsat today but, I cant find out anything about them on LSAC, or access the application. Anyone know what GPA/ LSAT's they are looking for?

A pulse is all that is required.

well judging on how well I feel I did today, I may need to look into it then!

Don't go under any circumstances.

I being pessimistic because I took the LSAt today. I was just curiuous to be honest because I would like to go to school in Indiana, is the reason its not on LSAC because its not ABA approved yet?

I think so. Indiana has too many law schools as it is. Go to Notre Dame, IU-B, maybe IUPUI if in-state, or don't go at all.

IUPUI is actually my first choice

For those of you who are wondering about Indiana Tech Law School, I am the Founding Dean. Perhaps I can answer some of your questions. We are located in Fort Wayne and we open next August. We are enrolling only 100 students in our Charter Class.

We intend to be a new and different kind of law school, one that intentionally blends theory and practice and one that focuses on ethics from the very start of school.

We will require all students to complete a professionalism course in the first-year curriculum and two ethics courses, one of which will also be taught in the very first year of law school. This is an innovation that sorely needed in legal education although very few law schools offer an ethics course until much later in a law student’s career. We will also require students to perform 30 hours of pro bono volunteer hours, as an additional condition of graduation, to benefit the public and to instill in the students the inherent value in the legal profession helping those members of society who are in need. A wide variety of opportunities will be developed so that students will be able to complete the 30-hour requirement from the very beginning of their law school careers.

In addition to the curricular innovations, we will give students the option to specialize their education by concentrating their upper-level electives in a particular area. Concentrations are much like undergraduate “majors” and, at Indiana Tech, students will be able to receive a notation on their transcripts that they concentrated their studies in one of four areas if they choose: Advocacy/Dispute Resolution, Intellectual Property/Technology Law, Transactional Law, and Global Law and Leadership. In order to complete the requirements to receive a concentration, students must not only enroll in a certain number of hours of coursework, they must also actually practice law either in a law school clinic or in a full-time, 40-hours-per-week “semester-in-practice” internship with a member of the profession whose expertise is in that same area.

In at least half of our courses, and all of our first-year courses, students will also be given opportunities to hone their lawyering skills by engaging in “experiential learning exercises.” Professors will give up some class hours so that a judge or lawyer from our area can take over the class and bring in real life examples of the theory and history that the students will have been studying. The students will write client letters, draft wills, prepare court documents, etc. and the hope is that our graduates will be viewed as more “practice-ready” than other law school grads when they interview for jobs. We firmly believe that the intentional blending of theory and practice skills will make them better professionals.

Regarding GPA and LSAT medians, we don't have any history so we can't set them; however, we would like to open in third place among the five Indiana law schools so that would place our medians at approximately 156 for the LSAT and 3.5 for the GPA. Our tuition is $29,500 per year and we have academic scholarships available.

For more information, please visit our web-site at http://www.indianatech.edu/law or email me at PCAlexander@indianatech.edu.

Peter Alexander
Dean and Professor of Law

Practical experience is something law students definitely need and want, but I'd be genuinely interested to hear what your plan is to get your students jobs which will pay off that debt from a brand new school in a market that already has too many schools.

Thanks for the info, is the school ABA approved though? Beating IUPUI for third is going to be tough, especially with that sticker price. Good Luck!

For those of you trying to find our school at LSAC.org, you have to go to the "non-member schools" tab and use our code: 1329. Until we are ABA-accredited, we will be listed as a "non-member school" and the ABA does not permit a new school to apply for accreditation until it has been open for one year with students.

If anyone has any other individual questions, please feel free to email me at PCAlexander@indianatech.edu.

Yours truly,

Peter Alexander
Dean and Professor of Law

Hey, the dean is here! That's kinda cool, right?

Can you please explain to everyone the difference between an accredited and a non-accredited law school? What are the advantages and disadvantages of attending a non-accredited law school? The only thing I know about non-accredited schools is that My Cousin Vinny went to one in Brooklyn.

Thanks and good luck!

ithink hes saying it will be accredited after the first year, as the school requires an active class in order to get accredited.

How many of the 100 students do you expect to pay sticker price? And what do you think is the over / under on how many will be employed full-time as an attorney within a year of graduating?

No way are they going to be able to get better stats than McKinney. McKinney is one of the better Tier 2's in the country and they do pretty well in Indy. There are simply not enough jobs in Fort Wayne to require a law school- not to mention the 2 IUs have a huge alumni presence in Indy, so much so that another school with no reputation and no alumni base would have a real tough time breaking in there.

Ignore everything the dean said. Nothing about this school's approach is innovative, as demonstrated by his point on teaching ethics earlier. Ethics is an insufferable class that everyone eventually takes at all or nearly all American law schools. The students think it's a joke because you learn the model rules of professional conduct which are loose to the point of being silly. The faculty hate teaching it, and it's regularly assigned to the newest/least productive faculty members. Think of it like hazing or punishment for all parties involved. Teaching a worthless course a year earlier won't matter to you, and it won't matter to employers who aren't going to be impressed that you were forced to take a required course a year early.

Law school is an exercise in signaling. The school takes your money and in return provides you with a credential you can then take to employers for some kind of value. I don't know what you'd pay here, but I'm willing to bet that when you add in what you'll lose by not working for 3 years, the price is well over $200k. The degree you'll get in return won't get you a job worth that even if you do quite well. Notre Dame has 40% of their class unemployed and a substantial percentage underemployed. They're the best law school in the state and you still shouldn't go there. This new school will be the newest school in the state, and employers like to hire for the most prestigious schools possible. Do I really have to spell out what that will mean for your ability to get a job, when almost half the kids at Notre Dame paid hundreds of thousands to end up with nothing?

But don't take my word for it, here's a law school professor:

"Indiana, which contains 2% of the US population, already has four ABA-accredited law schools, including two "top 30" institutions, both of which feature legal unemployment rates for their grads of around 40%, and which are currently placing only 20% to 25% of their graduates in firms of more than ten attorneys.

Chutzpah has been defined as murdering your parents and then pleading for mercy because you're an orphan. How about setting up another legal diploma mill in a hyper-saturated market, while claiming that what will set your school apart is its emphasis on "ethics" and "professionalism?"

Of course none of this is going to keep the ABA Section of Legal Education from accrediting this absurdity after the requisite site visits and other bureaucratic hoop-jumping. And until something changes nothing is going to stop the school from trolling the internet for victims future lawyers paying customers, who will fund this latest foray into professional school carnival barking via a combination of the generosity of the U.S. taxpayer and their endlessly naive willingness to believe people like Peter Alexander, Dean and Professor of Law."

http://insidethelawschoolscam.blogspot. ... -week.html

Edit: with tuition at 30k a year for the first year and typical increases of 2k a year while you're in school, you'll pay 96k in tuition and say 60k in living expenses. You'll lose out on say 90k in income lost over three years by not working and the fees and interest you'll pay on your loans will total to around 15k while you're in school. That's a total cost to you of $255,000 give or take 20k.

I think it is telling that the school offers a 50% discount on applications if you decide to do early decision.

Why would someone apply early decision to this school to begin with if it is not even ABA accredited? 1/2 off application price blows when compared to most ABA-accredited schools in less saturated markets that will give students fee waivers if they have a decent shot at getting in. The least a new school can do is offer fee waivers (not "discounts") and to not make these waivers conditional on applying early decision.

The dean is poorly mistaken if he thinks he can spin his school in a favorable light on TLS forums.

Yep. Do a forum search for MPRE + study. The ethics examination is mandatory if you want to take the bar and treated as a joke by law students. At my school it was like a game of chicken- everyone studied as little as possible and tried to see who could get the score closest to passing.

These "concentrations" he talks about- let me break them down for you.

Advocacy/Dispute Resolution- Advocacy = litigation? If so, the entire law school curriculum at any school is geared towards it. Most law schools offer clinical work, trial practice simulations, etc. ADR is a term for mediation and arbitration which are practiced by experienced lawyers and judges usually working on their own. Their are no jobs in this field for entry-levels.
IP- Biglaw. If they aren't hiring from ND or any of the other Indy schools, they aren't hiring from IT Law.
Transactions- Biglaw. If they aren't hiring from ND or any of the other Indy schools, they aren't hiring from IT Law.
Global Law and Leadership- I read international law- a field that for your purposes does not exist or exists at all as derivative of biglaw, which you are unlikely to get from ANY Indy school.

It's just not smart to attend an unaccredited school. There is no benefit to "act now and get in on the ground floor." This is a huge decision that, at 30K per year +15K living expenses, could be life ruinous.

there's an argument to be made that IUI is better than IU-B.

This new school is not a great idea; it might be OK if it were trying the innovative approach of costing 10K per year, but as it stands, there are way to many unemployed grads at the other three (not to mention Valpololol).

“Soon our doors will open and lives will be changed,” said Peter C. Alexander, dean of Indiana Tech Law School.

Does Indiana Tech LS take GMAT scores? I didn't have time to study for the LSAT yet.

Yeah, in Indy I think that IU-I is at worst equal to Bloomington. There are tons of IU-I alums in Indy. In raw employment numbers, IU-I and Bloomington are not that far apart- surprising to see them so far apart in most rankings and perceptions.

anecdotally, I have heard that Indy firms don't really prefer IUB kids over IUI kids. Add in the tuition difference, and...

To be fair, he didn't say that they'd be changed for the better.

Right. I was trying to set someone up for a witty caption. Burying in debt or something like that... I guess I could be more explicit.

CAPTION CONTEST.