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Penn Law dean looks back as he prepares for new challenge

When Michael Fitts was appointed dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2000, legal education, like the profession itself, was at the beginning of a years-long boom.

Michael Fitts, Dean of The University of Pennsylvania Law School, in his office during an interview Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012.   ( CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer )
Michael Fitts, Dean of The University of Pennsylvania Law School, in his office during an interview Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2012. ( CLEM MURRAY / Staff Photographer )Read more

When Michael Fitts was appointed dean of the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 2000, legal education, like the profession itself, was at the beginning of a years-long boom.

Hiring at firms exploded and pay at the most sought-after law firms reached stratospheric levels - starting salaries of $145,000 a year in Philadelphia, and higher in New York, Washington, and Los Angeles. Firms made fortunes charging out young, inexperienced lawyers at rates that fueled burgeoning profits. Law schools, flooded with applications, became profit centers for universities.

The financial market collapse of 2008 put an end to all that, and many schools, under pressure to maintain pools of quality applicants and bolster finances hit hard by declining enrollment, are still recovering. Yet as Fitts prepares to leave Penn to take over as president of Tulane University on July 1, the law school at Penn by any number of measures - from applications to postgraduate employment to faculty recruitment - is healthier than ever.

"I think he has absolutely transformed the law school," said Marcy Engel, chief operating officer of Eton Park Capital Management, a Penn law grad, and member of the school's board of overseers.

Fitts, she said, "made it a school you had to apply to."

The man many at Penn - and many outside the university - give credit for transforming a school that for a time seemed stuck in neutral and maybe on its way to slipping into reverse seems more adept at fending off attention than directing it at himself. But there is little arguing with employment data for Penn graduates of the last few years. Harvard may be larger and Yale more august, but Penn is overshadowing competitors when it comes to job offers from big firms.

About 65 percent of the graduating class in 2012 was hired by firms with 250 or more lawyers, the nation's largest and best-paying firms. In June, the influential legal website Above the Law ranked Penn No. 1 among law schools for its graduates obtaining employment, ahead of Stanford University, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley.

In December, Pepperdine University law professor Derek Muller published his own analysis of employment data for the Class of 2012, finding Penn was the nation's top law school in terms of "elite employment outcomes," including federal judicial clerkships.

Some 75 percent of Penn's graduating class landed top legal jobs, Muller reported, ahead of Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Chicago, and Yale.

All that makes Penn Law enormously attractive to aspiring lawyers. The school received 5,283 applications for 251 spots in the class that began in the fall.

"We have totally outperformed under his leadership," Penn law professor Tom Baker said of Fitts. "Before, the faculty was divided and the school was going down in the rankings. He didn't snap a magic wand, he just worked incredibly hard and saw around corners."

Fitts also has won credit for focusing on increasing the number of Penn law grads who get judicial clerkships, a form of advanced, postgraduate training highly desirable to employers.

"He has dramatically expanded how many Penn Law grads have clerkships," said Perry Golkin, chair of the board of overseers, who said Fitts' genial manner helped build consensus for many of the changes at the law school.

Fitts, 60, also spent much of his tenure expanding the law school's interdisciplinary programs. That enables law students to, for example, attend Wharton or the engineering school or any number of other programs at the university, all in an effort to link legal education with other fields at the heart of industries comprising future clients.

This year, two-thirds of the graduating class will leave the university with joint degrees or certificates in a subject other than law, training that Fitts maintains helps graduating students better understand and work with corporate clients.

"I think Penn has great strengths and the fact that we have offered a curriculum that in one sense is as traditional as it can be but also expanding that to teach a lot of the leadership skills . . . has been very important in placing our students," said Fitts. "It is very attractive to law firms."

Leaving for Tulane marks a major change for Fitts. He is a lifelong Philadelphian except for the time he spent as a Harvard undergraduate, a law student at Yale, and a young Justice Department lawyer. He is married with two adult children and lives in Center City.

But the allure of helping to shape the future of Tulane, a 14,000-student university in New Orleans, a city with vibrancy and zest that he says compares well with Philadelphia, was too great to resist.

"The attraction of a school like Tulane is that it is large enough to have a rich group of schools that cover virtually every significant area of teaching and research in higher ed, but is small and intimate enough to permit cooperation," Fitts said.

Tulane, like Penn, has focused on interdisciplinary programs. It also is like Penn in that its campus is contained and its programs easily reachable by students and faculty.

Fitts said that his time at Penn Law was enormously satisfying and that he would miss the city. But, he added, it also was time to go.

"I have been here for 14 years [as dean], and in higher education, that is a long time," Fitts said. "I have accomplished really everything I set out to do.

"You get to a point where you say, what is the next challenge? What are the areas I really want to make a difference in?"