Whittier Law School’s fight to lift a two-year probation on its accreditation has resulted in,you guessed it,a lawsuit.
The Costa Mesa school is suing the American Bar Association in Washington, D.C., after it refused to take Whittier Law School off probation earlier this year.
The bar association put the school on its watch list in 2005 because not enough Whittier graduates were passing the bar exam the first time around.
The probation is just months away from a review. But Whittier officials are pressing to have the probation lifted now and to have its accreditation left intact.
Officials from the bar association declined to comment.
Whittier and San Francisco’s Golden Gate University School of Law are the only two of 195 bar-accredited schools on probation.
Whittier is the county’s largest law school by students at 650. The school, which moved to Costa Mesa in 1997, trains students in family, business, intellectual property, criminal, health and public interest law.
The school’s main local competitor, Fullerton’s Western State University College of Law, has more than 500 students and focuses on criminal and business law.
Chapman University School of Law in Orange has about 200 students focusing on tax and real estate law. The University of California, Irvine, is working on plans for a law school.
Whittier’s probation should be lifted before its two-year mark since the school has improved its first-time bar exam pass rate, said Neil Cogan, Whittier’s vice president and dean.
The school’s first-time California bar passage rates stood at 40% in mid-2005. The rate was 59% last July.
Whittier has improved its programs to comply with the bar’s guidelines, Cogan said. The school has boosted study and exam-taking training, essay and writing skills and early bar preparation, he said.
The bar looks at several factors. It doesn’t have an official, published first-time bar passage rate target.
Cogan’s argument: The school’s gains should’ve prompted the bar to lift the probation at its meeting in February. The school decided to sue when it didn’t, he said.
The school is requesting a federal court judge in Los Angeles evaluate the bar’s standards for accreditation. It wants the court to remove its probation or prevent the bar from lifting its accreditation until the case is heard, according to the school’s attorney, Paul Kiesel of Kiesel, Boucher and Larson LLP in Beverly Hills.
Kiesel is a Whittier Law School graduate.
The school filed its suit in Los Angeles because its parent, Whittier College, is just over the county line in Whittier.
The school’s biggest challenge since undergoing probation has been to keep its image, Cogan said.
“The primary challenge was to show everyone within the community that we were doing all of the kinds of things that a school should be doing to prepare students for the practice of law and admission to the bar,” he said.
The school hasn’t seen a drop in enrollment in the past two years, Cogan said.
This year, the school expects to graduate 200 students. Nearly all are expected to practice law within six months, he said.
Whittier still could have its work cut out for it with the bar. In March, the bar issued proposed revisions to its accreditation standards. They state that if a school’s bar passage rates “frequently” fall below 70%, the bar likely would conclude the school is out of compliance with accreditation standards. n
