Bierman Completes Groundbreaking Tenure As Dean of Elon University School of Law

Luke Bierman completed his service as dean of the Elon University School of Law in December following commencement exercises for the Class of 2021. Senior Associate Dean Alan D. Woodlief Jr. will serve as interim dean through May 31 as the university conducts a national search for its fourth dean. Following a sabbatical, Bierman will return to the faculty of Elon Law, where his deanship of 7.5 years is the longest tenure in the law school’s history. Under Bierman’s leadership, the law school transitioned into a highly experiential, 2.5 year, seven-trimester program, which he discusses in the following interview for North Carolina Lawyer magazine.

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Congratulations on your remarkable tenure as dean of Elon Law. Why did you choose to step down at this time?

There is a lot more art than science to these decisions. It seemed like the right time in light of what we’ve accomplished, where I thought we were with COVID, and our accreditation being completed, so a whole lot of things came together. The average tenure now for a law school dean is about three-and-a-half years, and I blew way past that, so it seemed like the right time. It’s been seven-and-a-half years – almost eight years to the day Elon offered me the job.

Early on in your tenure, the law school took the monumental step of implementing the 2.5-year program. What was the thought process behind this decision?

I think what we tried to accomplish was to address aspects of legal education, and maybe higher education more generally, that were unappealing to prospective students. School was perceived as “too long,” “too expensive,” and “too disconnected from the profession” – what I and maybe some others identified as the “dirty little secrets” of law school. When I was at Northeastern before I came to Elon, I wrote several pieces about those issues. I also brought together a group of law professors from over 100 law schools from around the country to talk about experiential education. We talked about those kinds of issues. And around 2013, President Obama talked about a two-year law school – “why isn’t it two years?” – and that generated a whole lot of conversation.

Putting all of that together, when I was interviewing at Elon and the academy was still in the depths of its decline in the interest in legal education, we asked as a community and as a faculty at Elon Law what we could do to address some of those issues. We had some very positive conversations … some very tough conversations.

The business model of legal education is built around the three-year program. The business model for legal education is built around the traditional way of doing things. And we decided that we really wanted to show there could be another model and another way that could be successful.

Where did you even begin to formulate such a plan?

Thinking about a redesign with an active imagination, we started with what we wanted to accomplish, and that was to do what the ABA standards have at their core, and that is to prepare students to pass the bar exam and find success in the profession. We worked backward from that – “what would it take?” We identified competencies and skills and knowledge and built a 2.5-year program that logically advances from Day One to graduation, and we were able to do that in two and a half years. Frankly, I think you can do it in two years.

But two and a half years seemed about right, certainly as a first step to address those “dirty little secrets.” We made our program shorter, we made it more affordable, and we reduced our student debt by a third, which is a substantial step forward for a private institution. We connected with the profession, part of which is working with the Bar Association, but also by working with lawyers and judges around the state and around the country and, indeed, around the world through our residency program.

What do you foresee as some of the challenges for law schools in the future?

I am a third-generation lawyer, and over the weekend I pulled out the diplomas that someone in the family had sent me. My grandfather graduated from NYU Law School and was admitted to practice in 1921 – Arthur Vanderbilt, a towering figure in 20th-century law, literally signed his license. My father graduated from law school in 1952. And I graduated from law school in 1982. So it’s a century across three careers, and my grandfather would too easily recognize law school today if he popped in, and that’s just wrong, 100 years later.

I think that contextualizes what we were trying to do to modernize and update the program of legal education. We were absolutely aware that students have not been all that crazy about going to law school in the last decade. Sitting in a classroom for three years was just not inspiring. And the numbers are going to get worse. We know there’s a big enrollment dip for colleges coming in 2025 – the number of 18-year-olds born amid the financial crisis is much smaller than earlier by about 15 percent. And the birth rates since the financial crisis are significantly lower, which will lead to declines in the number of college-age students out to 2040. Those declines are our declines in legal education four years later. These are real problems and challenges, and they are not just for the educational institutions, not just for the law schools. There will be fewer lawyers solving more complex problems, protecting more vulnerable rights. This is the cusp of an existential crisis.

In your reports to the NCBA Board of Governors, and elsewhere when you have spoken about Elon Law, the residency program is often mentioned as a prominent component of your program. Why is it so important?

There are really three core elements to the Elon Law program of legal education. One is the required residency-in-practice program that puts students in the shoes of a lawyer with a practice certificate. Then there’s the 2.5-year component, which is a value issue and makes it more affordable and opens it up to students who might otherwise not have thought about coming to law school. And then there is the logical progression of learning. We design every step the students take to be part of a progression of preparation for the bar exam and for practice and success. Those are the three core components that distinguish what we at Elon Law did, and we engaged in very candid, difficult conversations to accomplish this approach. We were upending 150 years of tradition. And the results speak for themselves.

We’re going to report an almost 90 percent ultimate bar pass rate for our graduates in 2019, and for 2020 graduates we’re already ahead of that, over 90 percent. Our post-graduate job placement rate now hovers at 90 percent. Those outcomes are competitive with anywhere in the country. The students don’t seem to have lost anything in those six months; indeed, I think they’ve gained important professional maturation by us requiring them to act as lawyers.

One of the deans I’ve worked with has said that you really wouldn’t want to get into a cab or Uber with somebody who just read about driving, as opposed to actually driving. And I think he is right. We know it takes approximately 10 years of experience to become an expert at something, so why don’t we start early? Clinics are great but they’re classes – they’re not full-time. We decided that having full-time residency experience for the students was essential. And we tie the residency to their classwork and grant academic credit for it so that students take it seriously and really know that there is something important being accomplished.

And the results have been positive?

What we see is when students come back – they go out on residency in their second year, during what are the fifth and sixth trimesters for us – is that they start out as students and return as lawyers-in-waiting. Our students learn by doing, which is at the core of what we do, and that is what we see in the outcomes. We’re pleased with our bar exam results, though we will always aim for our ultimate bar pass rate to be 100 percent, and we’re increasingly pleased that our students are graduating into jobs that are competitive.

Judicial clerkships are something that we have focused on and we are seeing some success there, and I think that is through the residency program, which really does provide the students an opportunity to interview and audition in a sense and show what they can do. Again, it’s a comprehensive, holistic approach. It is all of the things that we’re doing that contribute to student success. But the fact that it is successful opens the door to rethink preparation for the profession, to ask, ‘Is there another way to do this?’

Do you believe “finding another way” will help increase diversity?

We’re the worst profession for diversity among all of the professions. If we make our professional preparation less expensive, would that make a difference? If it is shorter in time, would that make it more attractive? If it offers more value? I don’t know the answers to those questions, but I do know we have been able to enhance our diversity both on the faculty and among students. We’ve been able to not just improve at matriculation through recruitment but also at graduation. Those are significant achievements. We like to think that may be a model for the profession, if we’re really serious about diversity and want to do more. Considering the demographic trends that we know are occurring in the country, we definitely need to be more serious about it.

That’s not to denigrate what people are doing – the programs are important – but we need to have substantive changes in terms of doctrinal law and also in terms of the curriculum that attracts students into our profession. We need to be really attentive to that. I think some of the things we’re pioneering here at Elon Law really do suggest that there are other ways to do this. We talk about pipelines – we’ve talked about pipelines for 40 years – but what we need to do is change the way we educate and prepare to make it a more attractive experience for students. Learning by doing clearly is attractive to this generation of doers.

Given your experience with the ABA, and your active participation in the North Carolina Bar Association, why do you believe these relationships are important?

We just had the ABA president-elect give our commencement address to the Class of 2021. I spent almost 10 years working at the ABA, working with the presidents of the ABA, working with the judges at the ABA. I learned about the value – there’s a camaraderie, there’s a learning experience, there’s a professionalism aspect to bar association participation. Bar associations are where lawyers meet lawyers. That’s an important aspect of our profession.

Our professional reputations are very important, and that means we need to work together, and bar associations are where that happens. We can be adversarial without being antagonistic toward one another. Those are things that are learned, and in this day and age, they need to be reinforced. Bar associations are a place to do that.

We knew that our students needed to have that exposure just like they needed to have exposure to the professional environment in their residency – that networking experience, the learning that comes from that. Those are all part of the holistic approach in accomplishing what the ABA requires law schools to do, which is to prepare students for success on the bar exam and in the profession. To do that they need to be with lawyers.

Of course, not only lawyers have things to teach us, for us to learn from. This year medical schools had their largest enrollments in history, and I think legal educators would love to be in that position for our profession. And they also had the most diverse set of applicants and enrollees. We have a lot to learn from others, but bar associations are a place where we can learn from each other. Bar associations are also a place where change occurs, such as California thinking about nonlawyer ownership. That’s generated in the state bar and in bar associations. For our students to get that exposure early is a vision to the future, and you really have to keep one eye on the future.

It would be impossible to discuss your tenure without mentioning COVID-19. What has that experience been like for you and the law school?

It is exhausting. On March 12, 2020, I took a “red-eye” back from a meeting in Sacramento, California, and arrived back at school on the 13th to learn that a local state of emergency was declared, and we were shutting down on our last day of Winter Term classes and we needed to turn exams into online exams over a weekend. That is how this started, and it hasn’t let up since. It has been a challenge – no doubt about it.

Everyone has pitched in – it has been a lot of work by a lot of people. We believe there has been no transmission on our campus in Greensboro. That is because we have been consistent in our rules, consistent in our communications, consistent in our treatment of everyone so that we could adhere to three goals that we set out very early on: keep everybody well, keep students on schedule for graduation, and keep one eye on admissions because without students there’s not much we can do. Those three goals really guided every decision we made.

We had good support from our university. We worked with some folks here in Greensboro, with Cone Health and our university health advisors. We paid attention and followed the guidance that was provided, even though it changed at times and occasionally was inconsistent. We had a real team effort and worked really, really hard through the various phases of the pandemic. When we had to be online, the faculty and staff rose to the occasion. We made some changes in our technology. We learned how to do online teaching. We learned what worked and what didn’t work. We adapted. We pivoted. We changed. But through all of that our students were passing the bar at strong rates and getting jobs at strong rates. We’ve been able to maintain the residency program, which again is a tribute to the commitment to our profession by practicing lawyers and judges of North Carolina and the other places that we sent students. And of course, our students shouldered on across many disruptions, hardships, tragedies and surprises. They have done just great.

It also has been reassuring to know that the profession has stepped up to figure out how to accommodate so many uncertainties throughout this awful experience, just exhaustingly awful.

We at Elon Law have had record numbers of students and applications. I think all of that is a testament to the work of this community here in Greensboro – our law school community and the community at large – doing all the things that we needed to do to keep it going. But man, it is exhausting! Nobody signed up for this kind of work, the adaptations we’ve had to make, the creativity to make it work. I do think consistency and clarity in our communications, in our rules, and in our goals, have really helped us get through this.

What have you learned about online education, and how might those things impact legal education in the future?

Several years ago I served on the ABA Commission on Financing Legal Education, and what we learned are two things: one, we really don’t know enough about how this enterprise of legal education works, but two, what we do know is almost 80 percent of the law schools are dependent on enrollment for their revenue. It’s a numbers game – it’s math. So does online education really provide us with an opportunity to think about making this more accessible both in terms of cost and in terms of distance – geography?

We now know that online education can work if done well and we’re beginning to understand better what online education should look like. I think there’s a real future for the school that can figure out how to meld together classroom instruction, experiential opportunities and online learning. How can you play around with those three things to make an effective and helpful educational experience for the student? Ultimately, it is all about the student and preparing the student for the profession.

We now have a generation of students who are used to this approach. They’re adept at technology in ways that even the 35-year-olds are not. What that means is that there must be some serious, serious thought about what the future looks like, particularly when you overlay those demographic changes, which are not theoretical. They are going to happen over the next 20 years, and for the 40-year-old faculty member or staff member, those should be very sobering prospects. And they ought to be really serious issues for the profession – the Bar Association, the State Bar, the courts – there ought to be some very serious thought, and I’d like to think that Elon provides at least some level of a model for what this might look like in the future.

What might some of those options be?

Just off the top of my head, is there a five-year J.D. degree that ought to be thought about? Pharmacists do something comparable. Are there a lot more online and experiential things that can be done? Why can’t schools partner in ways that we haven’t even thought about yet to offer educational experiences across campuses and across institutions? What role do the courts play in all of this? The courts are understaffed – can our student workers do something that would be helpful? Why do we continue to focus our admissions on standardized tests when the rest of higher education is moving away from them? Is the bar exam still an appropriate mechanism to test minimum competency? In other words, how can we make legal education more relevant and appealing to more prospective students? I think there are a lot of unexplored questions like those that would be timely for some serious thought.

Over the last 10 years with the ABA, I served on that financing legal education committee, and there was a futures committee before that – I think they have had some five committees in the last 10 years dealing with some aspect of legal education, and quite frankly we’re returning more or less to the same things we’ve done before: maybe some more clinics for more experiential opportunities but still with three years of high expense. Some law schools are even pretty close to being $100,000 a year. That’s got to be off-putting. If we’re serious about serving the legal needs of the American public, then cost and accessibility should be heading in the other direction, and I just don’t see that happening in any significant way, if at all. I think there needs to be some serious thought into what we can take away from all of this to solve some of the problems that we acknowledge but then don’t seem to address at root levels.

Are you excited about returning to the classroom?

I am trained as both a political scientist and a lawyer, so I have taught undergraduates, I have taught graduate students, I have taught law students. My career has not really been linear – I did not start as an assistant professor and move neatly up the ranks. I have done other things, kind of like what we ask our students to do … meander a little bit, try and retry, always learning. I started teaching law while I was working on my Ph.D., which was around 1990. Off and on for 30 years I have been in and out of the classroom, and certainly have a different perspective from having served in this dean role about this new generation of learners, their connections to technology, their expectations, their frames of reference are very different.

The 22-year-old, which is generally who we are interviewing for admission in our next class, was born right around 9/11, grew up in a financial crisis, lived through a pandemic, and went through an insurrection at The Capitol. Those are touchstones that are comparable to a generation that grew up with Pearl Harbor and World War II. It’s a very different experience from what recent law students had. It’s a generation that’s much more attuned to questions of inclusive excellence, it’s a generation that’s much more attuned to technology, to issues of value. Those things frame how we have to educate them, and that will be a learning experience for me as well.

Closing thoughts?

I appreciate all the support from the NCBA and the work that you all do. We are proud partners in helping our students be really good lawyers, and we thank you for that.

Photos courtesy of Elon University School of Law.