Should Law Schools Interview Applicants?

Sam Kamin at MoneyLaw got me thinking about this question.  He asks whether law school admissions offices could employ measures other than GPA and LSAT scores to better predict the future success of applicants.

In my opinion, an under-utilized "statistic" in admissions is interpersonal skills.  A lawyer's success certainly turns on analytical skills, writing skills, etc.  But I think that lawyers -- like people in many fields -- end up "performing" better if they have a high emotional intelligence. 

Of course, there are some reasons to be wary of lawyers who care too much about the feelings of other people.  If a lawyer cares too much about being liked, she is probably not going to do a particularly good job.  But emotional intelligence is not about being liked.  It's about being able to "perceive, assess, and manage the emotions of ... others and of groups."  So arguably, a fierce advocate who also has a high emotional intelligence will end up being a better lawyer than a similarly fierce attorney with a low emotional intelligence.  For example, the lawyer with the higher emotional intelligence will have a better read on judges and juries, and she'll be better at prying information out of witnesses.  In the transactional context, she'll be better able to negotiate a deal and get a transaction to completion.  So I think that a high emotional intelligence probably leads to better lawyering. 

So if it's true that a high emotional intelligence can help lawyers get ahead in the law, how can a law school assess whether applicants are emotionally intelligent?  The easy answer is to interview all applicants who have the right GPA/LSAT numbers and assess their interpersonal skills. 

The problem is that interviews are loaded with biases and arbitrary variables, so interviews do not necessarily tell us about emotional intelligence.  But some measure of interpersonal skills would seem to be quite valuable.  The challenge is how it can be measured reliably.  Currently, some emotional IQ tests exist.  Should we add the results of those tests to LSAT scores and GPA?  Would a law school that admits students with an average LSAT of 160, an average GPA of 3.5, and high emotional intelligence scores "outperform" the students of another law school who have the same LSAT/GPA numbers and lower emotional intelligence scores?

Comments

[Sam Kamin]

Andrew --

Thanks for the interesting thoughts on my post. It's not surprising that you raise the possibility of interviewing applicants; many of the people that I have discussed admissions with stress the importance of a "holistic" approach to admissions, one that makes sure to look at the whole person rather than simply at the scores. I am sure that a school adopting a "holistic" approach would interview as many applicants as it could afford to.

For the reasons you suggest and others, I'm not sure that a policy of interviewing applicants would be a good idea. One of the things that Billy Beane emphasized when he took over the A's was not trusting intuition. Beane himself had been a gifted young player; he had all of the "tools" that scouts look for in a recruit. Although there was a consensus among scouts that he would be successful at the major league level, his career was relatively brief and unremarkable. When he became an executive after his playing days he successfully committed himself to not being swayed by intuition and consensus, relying instead on objective measures of talent.

I completely agree with you that LSAT measures only one kind of intelligence, and probably not the most relevant kind. However as you also point out, emotional intelligence is difficult if not impossible to measure. So until such a test develops I guess it comes down to what are you going to believe: LSATs or your lying eyes?

[S.cotus]

I say “no,” and here is why. Law schools already have too many people with high degrees of the kinds of “social skills” that law schools value. The kind of people that go to law school (which includes me) are good at impressing interviewers, anyway. We know how to glad-hand, suck-up, and tell people exactly what they want to hear.

As it stands now, the most socially-skilled get special accommodations via their “friends” on faculties, by convincing those friends that they really care about people. But, the only reasons that they want in to a certain school has little to do with “caring” about people, anyway.

Quite frankly, cutting DOWN the interpersonal interactions at law schools might actually help. There would be less incentive to use “social skills” to back-stab, and law students might be able to spend more time concentrating on studying, and less on what to wear and what platitudes to utter to impress people.