Greg Toppo, USA Today

June 28, 2017

Whittier Law School in California is closing its doors for good next spring, and students and faculty are stunned. It is, after all, a shocking milestone – to be the first ever accredited law school to shut down.

“We were completely caught off guard,” Kristopher Escobedo, a second-year student and incoming student body president at the Costa Mesa, Calif., school, told the Los Angeles Times. “It was almost like an ambush.”

Future lawyers, heed this. Whittier’s demise could be a sign of things to come.

Even with its difficulties, Whittier is “not an isolated case,” said Michael Horn of the Clayton Christensen Institute, a business think tank that focuses on innovation. “A lot of non-elite law schools are in this situation.”

Like many schools hovering below the top tier, he said, “They’re hunkering down just long enough until it thins down at the bottom.”