Darby Dickerson:
First, I really encourage schools to take smart business risk and not simply accept the status quo, especially in light of the coming demographic lift. Second, if you build programs that align with your mission and you plan wisely, it’s easier to get all of your stakeholders on board. And third, institutional commitment, support, and leadership are the most important factors for developing and maintaining quality programs, especially online programs. Because for a new program to succeed as a leader, you must provide appropriate funding for your faculty, your staff, things like training, professional development, equipment, so forth and so on. And you also have to cultivate a culture in which those innovative programs can thrive.
Joe Gottlieb:
That’s Darby Dickerson, President and Dean of Southwestern Law School. Having served as dean or president and Dean at four other law schools, some public, some private, some even merging, Dickerson was quick to notice upon arriving at Southwestern that markets were shifting and an adjustment in recruiting strategy was warranted. To make that adjustment, she revived a backburnered effort to develop an online version of Southwestern’s signature Law degree reimagined with an asynchronous instructional design and eliminating all residency requirements. This not only opened up the regional market in LA where two neighboring schools had recently given back their accreditations, but much broader markets across the US and beyond. Our conversation focused on the context and the keys to completing this major change in less than three years. I hope you enjoy it.
Joe Gottlieb:
Welcome to TRANSFORMED, a Higher Digital podcast, focused on the new why’s, the new what’s, and the new how’s in higher ed. In each episode, you will experience hosts and guests pulling for the resurgence of higher ed, while identifying and discussing the best practices needed to accomplish that resurgence. Culture, strategy and tactics, planning and execution, people, process, and technology. It’s all on the menu because that’s what’s required to truly transform. Hello, welcome and thanks for joining us for this special Presidential Series episode of TRANSFORMED. My name is Joe Gottlieb, president and CTO of Higher Digital, and today I am joined by Darby Dickerson, President and Dean of Southwestern Law School. Darby, welcome to TRANSFORMED.
Darby Dickerson:
Thanks, Joe. I’m happy to be here. What do you wanna talk about?
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, I want to talk about how you took your signature degree online at Southwestern Law School. But before we get into that fun topic, I’d love to hear a little bit about your personal journey and how it’s shaped the work that you do in higher ed.
Darby Dickerson:
Sounds great. I’m glad to be with you and your audience today. I knew in law school I wanted to be a law professor, so I practiced for a bit and moved to my first teaching job and quickly was pulled into administration because I love having a bigger impact on the school because you could touch all the students, not just those in your class. So I’ve been really honored over the last 21 years to be the dean or the president Dean at five different law schools across the country. Wow. I started at Stetson, which is a private, that’s part of a university. I was recruited over to Texas Tech, which is a public law school and part of a big public university and university system. I was then recruited up to Chicago where I was the CEO and dean of a school called the John Marshall Law School.
Darby Dickerson:
Very special school. It was a private independent that had been created as an evening program for working professionals, but my task was to merge that school into the University of Illinois Chicago to create Chicago’s first public law school. So that was really an amazing opportunity and we got that accomplished. And I was recruited to come out to LA to Southwestern Law School, which is another private standalone, very special law school. So I came here in 2021 and joined again, a wonderful school that had been created in 1911 as only the second law school in Southern California. And saw very quickly that this was a way to provide, um, continue providing a legal education to those more non-traditional students, which is why we were founded. We were founded so that people who had caregiving and working professionals could get a legal education. So this was very much, um, aligned with our mission.
Joe Gottlieb:
Wow. What a journey. And, you know, seems like you’ve encountered a bit of change in your lifetime across that career. Five different schools, lot of different organizational contexts, which I, I’m sure has served you very well. So let’s dive into this. I wanna like, I wanna start with, you know, why is this online law degree so cutting edge in this age where we seem to have online programs for virtually everything? Why, why was this sort of not so obvious in the legal field?
Darby Dickerson:
Right. A lot of people ask me that, it’s like, why is this special? Because they’re used to seeing everything being online. Well, law schools were very late to the online game, largely due to accreditation requirements. Our main accreditor in laws, the council for the section of legal admissions, um, I’m sorry, legal education and admissions to the bar of the American Bar Association. So let’s just call it the A BA. And for a long time, the ABA really drove schools to look a lot like each other. And their requirements meant that we weren’t that innovative. And for a long time they didn’t allow online degrees. And even for a long time, not even online courses, then they started inching, inching into it over a while. So it was really, really hard for law schools to try to move online because of those accreditation obstacles. And over time, uh, the rules were relaxed and then it got to the point where you could try to go for it. So when we went for it, uh, you still had to request a major change of program. But for an example, we filed our application in April of 2023 and received the approval in August, 2023. So that was great. Uh, we’re still behind some fields in that law schools must still have residential programs, you have to have a campus, although maybe that’s gonna change. We’re starting to discuss whether there could be an ABA approved law school, not just an online law degree, but a whole law school without a residential campus. So, exciting times.
Joe Gottlieb:
Super interesting. So let’s dive into some of the details of this degree that you took. I mean, this was your, you have one degree, it’s your jd right? This is your signature offering at Southwestern, and you, you took it online, um, all at once. So tell me a bit more about it.
Darby Dickerson:
Right. No, we took a big step forward in taking the entire JD program online and mainly asynchronous. So this is not Zoom you. We really reimagine the entire instructional design. And unlike some of the other schools that are along with us, having gone online recently or about to go online, we don’t have any residential requirement. The students never have to come to campus if that doesn’t work for them. So we’re not even low res like the other programs we’re, we’re actually no res. And a really exciting thing when I challenge our faculty, I said, don’t bring us a program that others have already created. Create something special. So we will be the first law school to offer this fully online program to full-time students that they can finish in three years. And that’s exciting. Um, we are maintaining the part-time program because that’s how we start.
Darby Dickerson:
We have a real dedication to that so students can do the full-time program in three years. The Part-Time program in four years, the full-time program was built for students who prefer online education and more people have that experience who have a certain level of care taking responsibilities, but enough flexibility and time to study full-time. And for individuals who want an a b, a accredited law degree, but don’t live near a law school and can’t or prefer not to move. And then again, for part-time students, it’s our traditional, uh, profile for our evening students. Are you working full-time? Do you have significant caretaking obligations? So those are largely adults who’ve had another career and wanna shift into law. Another great thing about this program is LA is an expensive city. So we’re, we’re being able to expand our footprint because people, maybe they wanna practice law in California at the end, but they don’t wanna commit to move to a more experienced area until they are close to getting that bar card. So in, in short, we became flexible where it made sense on the residency and the geographic and scheduling flexibility, but you still have to complete the program in three or four years absent something really extraordinary happening in your life. And we really kept the quality because our existing faculty will be teaching in this program.
Joe Gottlieb:
Interesting. And, and, and I know Southwestern really this fits with your overall, your history as being quite innovative. I mean, talk a little bit about how Southwestern got started.
Darby Dickerson:
Yeah, Joe, thanks for that. Southwestern has always been innovative. As I mentioned earlier, we were started as an evening school back in 1911. Innovation is actually a core value of this school. Our very first graduate in 1915 was a woman. Think about that. Well before women had the right to vote, and she went on to become the first woman public defender in the nation. Wow. We established the very first two year accelerated JD program in the nation. We had one of the first variances to go online back in 20 16, 20 17. But for a variety of reasons, we decided to go more incrementally and we switched our evening program to hybrid two nights on campus, two nights off. But we realized during the pandemic that online was gonna be the future of legal education. The accreditors started loosening up and we really wanted to protect our signature degree. We are a standalone law school with one accredited degree. We offered a variety of pathways two, three and four years. But with the demographic cliff coming, we knew we needed to look forward and with other schools going online, we started to see declines in the applications to our evening program. So this was really a way to advance our mission, but also to really advance ourselves in terms of being financially sustainable for hopefully decades and centuries to come.
Joe Gottlieb:
Interesting. So, you know, a lot of different, a lot of firsts that you’ve mentioned both in the history of Southwestern Law School, but also in the way that you tackled this, this particular, uh, part of the market with, um, an online degree that is clearly gonna be part of the way, as you point out the future of, of sort of law becomes more available. Law studies become more available to more, uh, folks that are interested. But, you know, I wanna, I wanna zoom in a little bit more on the investment you made in instructional design. How this really departs from some of the very traditional methods that we see in legal education. And from talking to you a little bit before, I know that this kinda like the accreditation thing was a bit tougher for law. Like this is a bit more of a departure. Talk about a bit about that.
Darby Dickerson:
It is. So for literally centuries, the signature pedagogy in law school has been the Socratic method, and we tend to use the case book method. So essentially students sit in a room, a professor, very sage on the stage in the front, peppering the student with question after question after question after question. It wasn’t a model where someone came in and gave a lecture and then moved into problem solving. Now, over time things loosened up and now we have more light Socratic. But the, the thinking was you had to have everyone in the same space at the same time and you needed to have the expert up there really driving everything. So we’re really rethinking that as you have to do for online. You just can’t take an, an residential program and mash it into an online format. So we have a variety of pedagogy. We’re using some lecture, but we’ve also used the instructional design techniques to make sure that every student is engaged in the Socratic classroom.
Darby Dickerson:
Maybe the professor calls on two or three students during a class period. And our program, every student has to answer all of the questions presented. So they really are going to have to keep their brains on. You can’t be sitting there doing something else, checking your emails and being engaged because you’ve got to come up with the answer day in and day out. Another thing, um, that goes with online is that a lot of law schools have always been concerned about prestige. Again, our accreditation rules drove that everyone trying to look similar and trying to be like the Ivys. Traditionally most law schools were and continue to be full-time programs, schools like Southwestern and John Marshall where I I was where among the few law schools created as evening programs for working professionals. And often they were looked down upon. And then over the history of law schools, the part-time programs offered have really ebbed and flowed. So that’s another reason why these online programs took a little bit more time because not that many schools were offering part-time legal education, which is what people thought in their heads online had to be. But again, we’re breaking that ceiling too by offering our full-time program.
Joe Gottlieb:
Interesting. So I’m gonna make a quick departure here and, and we didn’t, uh, talk about this before, but does this evolution away from sage on the stage away from hard, heavy Socratic method in the age of ai, does it allow a different type of person to pursue a law degree that has a different sort of skillset? Maybe they, they lack some of the crazy memorization required of legal studies in the past and now that we have better access to legal case study available via tools, is there more opportunity for, uh, more abstract thinkers, problem solvers that can access the necessary case work, but but be be thinking on their feet about, about legal problem solving? Is that a thing or not a thing? Am I making that up?
Darby Dickerson:
Oh no, it’s definitely a thing. And unfortunately law schools have over the decades become more attuned to the fact that people have different learning styles. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> and we shouldn’t be using just, okay, so I’m catching up ji
Joe Gottlieb:
Yeah.
Darby Dickerson:
So most professors these days, even though the image is of Professor Kingsfield, um, from the paper chase up there asking question after question, the reality at most schools is that people, there’s a little lecture, there’s still that q and a, which is fundamental to the pedagogy. There’s problem solving, there’s group work and things like that. But I really do think having an online program, especially asynchronous, really gives some people who might have a, a more difficult time in today’s more traditional law school in a more difficult time. So, for example, people who are neurodiverse or have, uh, certain challenges absorbing and organizing data, they can go back, right? Right. They can press the back button, they can work a problem over and over until they hit something closer to, um, the model. There’s going to be a variety of other resources built into their program that if, like, if watching the video doesn’t work for them, they can click on the transcript and read the transcript.
Darby Dickerson:
So I do think that online asynchronous is going to be really great for some categories of students who might have struggled more in a traditional classroom. But you mentioned ai. Um, AI I think is a double edged sword in this type of setting. I’ve seen some amazing things already. One professor did a PowerPoint and she was worried about having to narrate her PowerPoint and make mistakes and rerecord and edit. And she typed the script and use an AI voice generator to narrate it. And it sounded just like her. I couldn’t tell the difference between the one she did herself and the one she used AI for. So that was amazing. There are opportunities to personalize, like if you’re missing this type of answer over and over, you can generate more questions with ai. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> on the other hand, one thing we’re struggling with is, uh, there are a lot of quizzes in this program. Well, what if they cut and paste the quizzes in the chat GPT? Yeah. They, they’re not doing the work themselves. They can short circuit some of it, meaning they’re they’re skipping the learning. Yeah. So dealing with some of those challenges.
Joe Gottlieb:
Interesting. Well, I’m sure they’re that just when you, you went to do instructional design, you got to asynchronous, that was a heavy lift. But then re-imagining some of the things in the AI era so that instead of like, okay, a basic quiz where you could evade the learning exercise, um, making it more interactive or prompted, coached, um, that would be yet again another step. But I’m sure you guys will get there. So let’s talk a little bit about the sequence of events here. So when and how did this program development start, uh, for the big change?
Darby Dickerson:
Well, Southwestern started planning for an online program around 2015 and was actually approved for it under a much more stringent process back around 20 16, 20 17. But then we experiences some challenges with that and the pandemic hit then it got put on hold. Um, meanwhile I was over in Chicago at John Marshall UIC and during this time I had been president of the Association of American Law School. So I got to see a lot and I got to see what people were thinking about. And based on everything I was seeing at my current school, my past schools, other schools, I became convinced that online was going to have to be a part of the future of legal education. So I started a very similar process of planning an online program at my former law school. And we were stopped in our tracks by covid because we had to go online, but in an emergency fashion.
Darby Dickerson:
The thing that was really good for me about the online emergency that Covid caused is that the provost at my former school partnered with one of, uh, the other schools in the, the University of Illinois system that had already produced training and certificate programs on teaching online and online leadership. And I took one of those courses ’cause I thought, I need to know what my professors and my students are experiencing in this new world. And I got hooked and I learned more about what was involved in the program and I went on to earn two certificates that really gave me an understanding of what a quality online program meant. So I came to Southwestern and they were at the place where they wanted to start thinking about it again. And I came with that background. So it was perfect match at the perfect time when I showed up in 2021 for us to start thinking about it.
Joe Gottlieb:
Wow. That is quite fortuitous. And, um, and interesting how you, you initially just were maybe doing a little diligence and like I said, you got hooked and before you knew it, you were picking up certificates. Good for you. Um, beginner’s mind and
Darby Dickerson:
Actually teaching. I built my own asynchronous course and yeah. Offered it.
Joe Gottlieb:
That’s great. Okay, so now I wanna dive into the meat of how to get such a a, a colossal change like this done. Where did, where did you start? How did you orchestrate this significant change?
Darby Dickerson:
Sure. Well, I came into Southwestern, and again, it’s a standalone private school. We have about 950 students and we have one accredited degree. And when I saw the financials we’re in good shape, but we’re tuition dependent on that one degree, I was focused on the demographic cliff. Like a lot of us are. I all of a sudden lived in Los Angeles and realized how expensive it was. I saw the trend in our evening program that the numbers of applicants were declining. I also was looking around that the fact that two other ABA approved law schools in our neighborhood gave back their ABA accreditation. Um, they, they weren’t gonna continue. So we all of a sudden had geographic holes nearby where, um, people weren’t being served and we’re a school of innovation. And I found a lot of people, including our most senior faculty members, were really hoping that we would pick back up this project of online.
Darby Dickerson:
Hmm. So when you put all of those factors together, it became more like not why to do it, but why wouldn’t we do it? Because we needed to take this risk now. We didn’t take the risk now and do something innovative. Other schools were gonna come into the market and that was going to degrade our signature degree, the JD degree. And so we wanted to protect it. So first step was getting the, the faculty on board. And as I said, some of our most senior faculty members had always been been interested in experimenting in different types of online education. So they got on board. I appointed a great committee led by a talent administrator and a very experienced professor who’s an opinion leader. I challenged them to do something new. They developed it, they presented to the faculty, they got their peers on board. Everyone was so excited because this aligned just perfectly with our mission of providing a legal education to those who otherwise might not be able to access it.
Darby Dickerson:
Uh, because I have been at a lot of schools and had leadership positions, I was able to find a great consultant who had deep experience in doing this. And it’s a relatively new field. So he turned out to be available right when we needed him. We’ve set a timeline and that one administrator kept us on it. I was also fortunate in that our board of directors also saw what I did. <laugh>, we have one degree, we’ve gotta protect it. We made this investment and a lot of online resources during covid, how are we going to use it and get more return from that investment? They also saw the issues in la if you’ve ever tried to drive in la you know, traffic means that the driving distances, uh, are hard. Yeah. So you could live 10 miles away, but you can’t get here two times a week at 6:00 PM very easily.
Darby Dickerson:
So when they saw the plan, saw the port, they were very excited and supported. Then we went through the accreditation process as we talked about. And, um, we always were taking a little risk. We were always working ahead. So even before we got the final final sign off, we started to build a new online education department. We’re not working with a partner. We knew that a financial model where we shared 40 to 50% of our net revenue wasn’t gonna work for us. So we hired a very experienced associate dean. We’ve hired very experienced instructional designers. We’ve hired an animator, other media specialists. We hired, uh, an administrator who had worked in other online programs. And we hired someone to help with admissions, externships and job strategy, particularly for those who are going to, uh, pursue a career in law outside of Southern California. We also, were very particular about who we put into the initial cohort of teachers. We only took volunteers. We did not force anyone to do this. And as I mentioned earlier, we used our regular faculty, we gave them training, we sent them to those courses that I took. We matched them with the talented instructors and got started very early on. We also offered financial incentives and course relief so that they could really focus on this. Um, and we’ll continue to do what we need to really provide resources to this program at a high level. We’re not trying to do this on a shoestring.
Joe Gottlieb:
Right. There’s a lot of points there. And, uh, and that was, you know, we could probably go at length that the next level of detail, but a great summary of the investments you needed to make and the, the approach you took. So really appreciate that. So now that you’ve got this, I know the first term hasn’t started yet, it’s imminent, but in terms of applicants relative to prior years, what’s your outlook so far? Well,
Darby Dickerson:
Right now our overall applications are up more than 25%. We’re about halfway through our admission cycle. So we’ve got about half the application, which we expect. That increase we can tell, is due largely to the online program. And this is in a year when applications to law schools nationally are down. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>, another really great fact is that the part-time applicants in this program, we think are gonna look very much like the applicants to our evening program that we’ve had since 1911, looking at same time last year. We have 75% more applicants to our part-time online program than we did to our evening program. So it looks like we made a good business decision on that. So right now we’re poised to beat our proforma business case by a pretty good margin. And the other great thing is that the applicant profile is comparable to our full-time pool and to the prior evening pool.
Darby Dickerson:
So we’re excited about that. Another great thing is that our current students in the residential programs are very excited about this program too. And they’re already asking, when can I take some of these online classes as part of our degree? And that’s gonna be possible. And we’ve developed an FAQ and programming to, to share that information with them. And another great thing is that our alums are really excited about this as well. I was a little worried about the alums from the evening program, but again, they saw what they, that we saw. It is impossible in this complicated era to be at a specific place at a specific time, multiple days a week for most people. So they wanted us to continue making our law degree available to talented people who might have obstacles. And this program does that.
Joe Gottlieb:
Well, it’s a great story. We’re gonna continue to, to root for you on the sidelines, but, but we’re not quite done. So, so now that you’ve got this thing under your belt, um, you know, how are you leveraging the associated capabilities that you’ve accumulated in this heavy lift that you’ve got? You’re just about to roll this puppy out. Um, how do you see yourself branching into new markets or, or aiming your new capabilities into other directions?
Darby Dickerson:
Certainly we’re also in the process of seeking another level of credit accreditation beyond the ABA that would allow us to offer other accredited degrees and therefore financial aid to those in those degree programs. So once we get that accreditation, we’re going to use the infrastructure we built in our expertise. So we’re, we’re thinking about things like taking our entertainment law LLM, which we have but isn’t accredited on a national level and putting that online. Hmm. We’re also thinking about a new degree that we would call either a master of legal studies or a master of jurisprudence that would be on a full-time basis, a one year degree or a part-time basis, a two year degree for someone who wants to have a background in law to be able to do better in their current job. So our first idea, again is a master of legal studies for those in the entertainment industry who might need to know more about how to negotiate, review, um, draft entertainment contracts, know about the guild system, things like that. And we’re also going to go into microcredentials of various sorts so that people can get what they need in smaller bites, whether that’s, uh, a course on the basics of criminal law or again, maybe a micro-credential related to entertainment. So we’ll, we’ll leverage infrastructure expertise and what we’re already good at to draw in more students into more degree programs and non-degree programs.
Joe Gottlieb:
Super exciting stuff. Alright, let’s summarize. Let’s come up with three takeaways. We can offer our listeners on this topic of literally transforming a law school by taking a, a signature program online.
Darby Dickerson:
Sure. Well, first I really encourage schools to take smart business risk and not simply accept the status quo, especially in light of the coming demographic lift. Second, if you build programs that align with your mission and you plan wisely, it’s easier to get all of your stakeholders on board. And third, institutional commitment, support, and leadership are the most important factors for developing and maintaining quality programs, especially online programs. Because for a new program to succeed as a leader, you must provide appropriate funding for your faculty, your staff, things like training, professional development equipment, so forth and so on. And you also have to cultivate a culture in which those innovative programs can thrive.
Joe Gottlieb:
Great stuff. Darby, thank you so much for joining me today.
Darby Dickerson:
Thank you. This has been a, a great experience. I’m glad to have had time to talk to you
Joe Gottlieb:
And thanks to our guests for joining us as well. I hope you have a great day and we’ll look forward to hosting you again on the next episode of TRANSFORMED.
Joe Gottlieb:
Yo, stop the music. Hey, listeners have transformed. I hope you enjoyed that episode and whether you did or not, I hope that it made you stop and think about the role that you are playing in your organization’s ability to change in the digital era. And if it made you stop and think, perhaps you would be willing to share your thoughts, suggestions, alternative perspectives, or even criticisms related to this or any other episode, I would love to hear from you. So send me an email at info@Higher.Digital or Joe@Higher.Digital and if you have friends or colleagues that you think might enjoy it, please share our podcast with them as you and they can easily find TRANSFORMED is available wherever you get your podcasts.
