April 24, 2003

Observer Q & A: David Van Zandt

This is the seventh in a series of interviews with the deans of the schools and colleges of Northwestern. David E. Van Zandt, dean of the School of Law, met with Pat Vaughan Tremmel of the Department of University Relations to discuss the school’s agenda.

A. The world has become far more competitive in the last 20 years, and when I took over as dean we decided to figure out what was happening in the legal profession and to address those changes internally. The increasingly competitive nature of our economy has made the legal service business much more competitive, and most of our students no longer go to one law firm and stay there for their whole careers. Today, our students pursue multi-job careers; they spend on average about two years in the first position learning and assessing their abilities, interests and opportunities before moving on. The challenge was clear: to better prepare our students to deal with these challenges and manage their own multi-job careers.

Q. What did you do at the law school to address the changing legal landscape?

A. Traditionally, the basic concept of a law school education is to run very smart students through classroom courses and assume they will come out as good lawyers. But, based on the changes I was seeing in the law and business world, we created a strategic plan to do things somewhat differently. Admissions, faculty, community and curriculum are at the core of our strategic plan.

Q. What’s different about admissions under your leadership?

A. We are the only major law school that strives to interview all applicants in the admissions process and that has a strong policy of seeking substantial post-college work experience. We have not yet interviewed 100 percent of our students, but any student coming straight from college has to be interviewed or have the interview waived by the admissions team. We are seeking students who are mature and who have strong interpersonal skills. Law is a service business, and that means working with people all the time. Law graduates used to have three years to grow up on a job, but today an important decision about them may be made in six months. We are intent upon recruiting students who have the necessary skills to be successful immediately, and we put a lot of effort in nurturing those skills throughout their time here.

Q. Why is work experience so important to your admissions strategy?

A. We think that if after college you have worked for a couple of years you will bring a lot more into the classroom and have a positive influence on the teaching environment, both on the faculty and fellow students. Eighty-six percent of last fall’s entering class had at least one year of work experience; and 63 percent had worked two years or more. Students who have worked have a much better idea, through their own and friends’ experiences, of what they can do in the world. They are giving up a salary, probably a decent lifestyle, and perhaps an apartment in an urban environment. In exchange, they often take on considerable debt. That type of commitment shows. On average, the students who have been out for a few years do better academically in the law school and place better in terms of their first job after law school.

Q. How have the changes in admissions affected academic measures?

A. We expected our traditional measures, such as GPA and median LSAT scores, to go down initially until our model caught on, but they actually started to go up right away. Our median LSAT went from 164 to 168, and, notably, the lower quartile of the class moved from 159 to 165. In other words, LSAT scores for the law school’s entering class have increased from the 81st percentile in 1996 to the 94th percentile in 2002. And the scores, which used to be far more dispersed, are now compacted and dramatically higher.

Q. You talk about the importance of geographical diversity and spreading the word about the law school globally.

A. In 1996, 54 percent of our class was from the Midwest, compared to 36 percent this year. We have worked hard to recruit students in a broader geographic sense. One of the reasons is to boost our reputation nationwide. Now at least half of our alumni are in the Chicago area. We are a small school with a great product, and we need ambassadors throughout the nation. In fact we are looking at the whole world as a pool of potential students and we keep improving our international strategy. We have increased the size of the LLM program that offers outstanding graduates of foreign law schools a Master of Laws degree in American law; created a new joint LLM degree with Kellogg that allows students to study law and business at two of America’s leading schools; and launched a new LLM program that for the first time is being taught in another country, in Seoul, Korea. The faculty also just approved the “Two-Year JD,” which is designed for international students who have a first degree in law and who have practiced for a few years. I see this two-year JD as a wave of the future for lawyers practicing in the global economy.

Q. Faculty, of course, play a key role in any law school’s success.

A. We have hired quite a few scholars who are doing research that’s going to make a difference and at the same time who take teaching seriously. We even have a student on our appointments committee, which, I believe, is unique among major law schools and whose evaluations tend to focus on teaching. Many of our faculty are doing empirical research and are trained in disciplines such as psychology, economics, sociology and political science. Percentage wise, we have the largest number of faculty members with Ph.D.s relative to other law schools. It used to be that law professors simply did what lawyers do, which is analyze case law, but to do research in law today, good disciplinary training is very helpful. We believe that we ought to be doing research that the average lawyer is not in a position to do.

Q. How has the law school’s curriculum changed?

A. As with any good law school, we still teach basic legal reasoning and analysis, but we also put great emphasis on developing our students’ teamwork skills. Most of our graduates aren’t going to be solo practitioners. They will work in teams with other lawyers, within or outside of law firms, and with non-lawyers as part of a client’s team to achieve the client’s goals. Our students need to know right from the get-go how to do that. So our coursework increasingly reflects a team’s output, rather than just an individual’s contribution. As soon as our students get here, they participate in a mandatory team building diversity-training session. Our first-years work in teams in our revamped legal writing program, “Communication and Legal Reasoning,” whether preparing a research project or a memo or a presentation. And by their third year, students may participate in the International Team Project, a course designed by faculty and students that takes them to places such as Vietnam, Cuba, Russia, Singapore and Tanzania, where they do field work and collaborate on serious research projects.

Q. You also have greatly enhanced the law school’s relationship with Kellogg.

A. We make every effort to cross train students in business. Our students take basic Kellogg accounting and finance classes, and Kellogg students take our basic corporation classes. And we offer a three-year, rather than four-year, JD/MBA program that allows students to graduate early and start their careers. Lawyers need to have a good understanding of what their clients’ business is about, and they need to understand how MBA students think. Likewise, MBA students need to know something about law and how lawyers think in today’s world. The law and business students come together in classes that stress teamwork and strategies to succeed in a marketplace that rewards cooperation as well as competition.

Q. What are you most proud of?

A. Northwestern law traditionally has had a relatively supportive community, but we have put a lot of effort into building upon that strength. Changing the culture is one of the things that I’m most proud of. The faculty has done a tremendous job of adjusting to a new model that is based on teaching more mature students with more work experience; and our students are very proud of the community and the leadership they exercise. Just like in a law firm or a business, the students are very competitive externally and very cooperative internally.

Q. Did you always want to be dean of a law school?

A. When Bob Bennett decided to step down as dean, I really wasn’t thinking about becoming dean, but at that point in my career, I was ready for a new challenge. If I hadn’t pursued this, I would have done something else, perhaps in the private sector and in New York. Who knows? Like with many people, my career has been sort of serendipitous. I grew up in a period in which lawyers were very effective in terms of social change, during the Civil Rights period and then Vietnam. I wanted to be a lawyer, but I didn’t really know what that meant. And when I went off to college, I got very interested in the sociology of religion. That led to the London School of Economics where I did my Ph.D. and wrote my book, “Living In the Children of God.” By then, I was focused on an academic career, and when I got to law school I wanted to be a law professor. The truth is that I could have ended up doing just about anything from age 18 to 30, a time which is very much a growing phase for most people. That’s what I tell applicants right out of college. My gut feeling is that nobody with the types of options I had should rush off to some place like law school. I tell them, ‘Regardless of what you end up doing, and whether we admit you or not, I strongly urge you to do something else for two or three years.’