BRIEFCASE: Ken Barlow and NZ's lawyer bubble

The arrest of Ken Barlow, or whatever his real life name is, creates an interesting parallel to the growing “lawyer bubble” here in New Zealand. 

Ken’s arrest signals the fact that a statistician could readily calculate a time when every remaining aged entertainer, talk show presenter, DJ and soap star of a certain age in the UK will soon be under arrest for some alleged sex-related misdeed. 

We can also plot the exact time when everyone in New Zealand will be a lawyer. It’s probably circa 2067 by my rough calculation and based on recently published Law Society figures which show almost 1000 admittances last year. 

Of the 12,005 practising certificates on issue, 925 were issued in the past 12 months, which compares with 216 in 1980. It’s not that demand for lawyers has risen so dramatically but rather that the academe is pouring graduates out at a steadily increasing rate.

The Law Society figures, published in Law Talk, also show the increased number of female admissions, which grew from 23% in 1980 to 61% last year. The growth rate in overall admissions is “ludicrous and unsustainable”, as one commentator said. 

It also retains New Zealand’s position as one of the most over-lawyered countries in the world, behind Israel, the United States and Brazil.

The brain-bleeding question now is what can they all do? Will the trend continue? We already export lawyers in fairly large quantities, but that only accounts for a percentage of the problem and, in any event, many of those experts rebound back, particularly when they find the legal market overseas as tight, or tighter than it is here.

Legal consultant Ashley Balls says that the combination of lawyer numbers and torpid economic growth means “you have many unhappy lawyers, high supply and low demand, which isn’t good for prices and lawyer pay”.  

In terms of the recent discussions over law school rankings, he says “it isn’t going to matter one wit who is best as demand will fall off a cliff. There is a massive oversupply of undergraduate places when contrasted with anticipated demand for lawyers in 2015”.

University rankings rankle

There have been continued rumblings of discontent over the law school rankings and the overall Tertiary Education Commission's performance-based research fund (PBRF) can of worms, which has drawn some heavy sighs and accusations of “rorts” and the like from some academics and observers. 

Victoria University took pride of place at the top of the PBRF heap and in terms of law school rankings VUW Law School dean commented that it was as a result of “an enormous amount of hard work”.

An examination of the stats in the law schools however shows that VUW’s law faculty, according to the “nominated academic unit” figure, has only one more staff member than Otago Law School despite teaching around 25% more students. 

But can VUW Law School have a much lower staff/student ratio than Otago? Or is the discrepancy because of manipulation undertaken by the universities, not just VUW? 

Serious questions

There are serious questions that can be raised about how the figures are calculated, although few on record comments from the academics were forthcoming. 

Looking at the overall VUW figures, it has 80% of its staff in the PBRF assessment and that looks impressive until you dig down and see the historic figures. 

They tell a different story because when the last PBRF figures were published in 2006 there were a further 200 staff and the VUW roll has significant increased, not decreased since that time. 

Otago, for instance, had twice as many staff assessed under the PBRF exercise than VUW, which has one assessed staff member for every 26 students, compared to one for every 20 at Auckland University and one for every 16 at Otago.

What happened to those VUW researchers?  Such a decline in staff numbers was not recorded by any other university.  For instance, AUT has 6% fewer students than VUW, but over 20% more staff than VUW who appear in the PBRF rankings. 

Otago University has 12% more full-time students and put forward twice as many staff as VUW for PBRF ranking.

In terms of how many students actually get taught by these top-quality researchers shows VUW in a much poorer light. I

There is little doubt that all the universities doubtless play cute with PBRF measurement data to a greater or lesser extent. But when it comes to law schools playing with such figures, it doesn’t set a great example in terms of what their researchers might call “empirical evidence”, let alone credibility.

John Bowie is publisher of LawFuel