No doubt, we'll hear speeches meant to encourage and inspire us to do good works with our impending J.D. degrees. Use your education to help the working poor. Provide people with affordable legal representation. Enter government service and rewrite unjust statutes.

These are worthy causes, but the speakers should save their words. Three years of law school in the UC system have solidly indoctrinated too many of us into the moneyed life of corporate law.

Not everyone started out down that road.

Dust off the personal statements in our admission files. You will find compelling essays about how we planned to put our legal know-how to work for people who couldn't afford $300-an-hour fees. We'd help these clients write wills, hammer out child custody terms, or fight in court against some wrongful personal injury claim.

Many students I took classes with at UCLA sincerely held those aspirations and managed to hold onto their original goals. Or at least they did until the spring of our first year when hundreds of recruiters from major firms in L.A., San Francisco and New York began descending on campus.

For many, resistance was futile because the culture of most law schools today -- from course offerings to the focus of the career counseling office -- revolves around corporate legal jobs. Probably not a single new graduate of my school will hang up his or her shingle in solo practice. Instead, the vast majority of students end up working for big law firms or corporations. In fact, at UCLA three-quarters of the 1999 law graduates who entered private practice did so at national firms, ones with more than 500 attorneys.

The median starting salary was $125,000.

That's probably not what Californians had mind when they established four public law schools. Taxpayers chip in, on average, an astonishing $26,000 a year to train each student at those institutions.

Campus administrators spend too many of those dollars to offer business-related classes, at the expense of courses and programs that might direct students down paths that serve other social interests.

The result? These days just 2 percent -- or about six graduates at UCLA Law each year -- go into public interest law. Only a handful of others go to work in small law offices serving clients with moderate or low incomes.

You find similar statistics at the state-financed law schools in Berkeley, Davis and San Francisco.

But this dismal record didn't stop the state from paying $120,000 to study the need for a fifth school. The report isn't done, but already legislators and business leaders from the Inland Empire are aggressively lobbying to establish one at UC-Riverside. If they succeed, California taxpayers will spend millions of dollars more every year to train corporate lawyers.

What a waste. Instead of building more law schools, the UC regents need to address how they can do a better job with ones that already exist. This Sunday in the quad, instead of feel-good speeches, I'd like to hear one speaker challenge them to do just that.

Travis Armstrong is a Mercury News editorial writer.

© 2000 Mercury Center

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