The legal world is undergoing a seismic shift. Technological advancements and a changing social landscape force the legal profession to adapt, but are law schools keeping pace? In this episode, Jody Sanders and Todd Smith visit with Dean Robert B. Ahdieh of Texas A&M Law School about the state of modern legal education and more. Dean Ahdieh shares his journey from New York City to Fort Worth, detailing his fascinating experiences in Russia and his unexpected foray into legal academia. The conversation explores Texas A&M Law's impressive rise in national rankings, the school's innovative approach to legal education, and the influence of Aggie culture. Dean Ahdieh also discusses the future of legal education in the context of rapidly evolving technologies like AI.
Our guest is Dean Bobby Ahdieh of the Texas A&M Law School here in Fort Worth. Dean Ahdieh, thank you so much for joining us.
Thanks so much for having me. It's a great pleasure to be with you guys.
I think everyone is familiar with A&M but only a few of our Texas audiences are probably familiar with Texas A&M Law School. Tell us a little bit about yourself, who you are, your background, and how you got into law.
I was born and bred in New York City, far away from Fort Worth. Although I tell folks whenever a good Texan asks me after I've opened my mouth for 30 or 40 seconds, "Where are you from?" I will always immediately respond, "Texas." They look at me suspiciously and they ask, "Where in Texas?" I'd say, "Northeast Texas." After a long pause, I say, "Way northeast Texas, a little town called New York. A suburb of DFW is where I'm from."
I grew up in New York City to immigrants. My parents immigrated to the United States from Iran, actually for education, my mother for medical school, for her residency, and my father for college and then graduate school. I grew up there and lived in Philadelphia for a time. I studied high school there, and then spent the bulk of my life in the Northeast, between Washington, DC, and Connecticut. I did spend some time overseas, including, oddly enough, becoming an expert in Russian law along the way.
I spent a bunch of time living in Russia in the middle there, a little bit elsewhere in the United States, in San Francisco, and some other places. The bulk of my life was there until I went to Emory Law School in 2000 as a faculty member. I finished law school. I clerked out in San Francisco on the Ninth Circuit for a judge by the name of Jim Browning on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals and then I was a litigator in Washington, D.C.
I came to law slightly circuitously. I went through most of my life thinking I would be a math, engineering kind of guy. By the time I was finishing high school and entering college, I had become interested in law, interested in something that correlates to math. It was a system of logical reasoning, organization, and problem-solving. When I realized how isolating math was as a subject of study, it was mostly you sitting alone in a room with a blackboard because I'm old so it's chalkboards that we scribbled on. I realized that probably wasn't my calling. Made the flip over to the law and then went from there.
I do want to talk for a minute about the Soviet Union thing, I think it's super interesting. You met a few people whose names we may recognize. Do you want to talk about that experience a little bit?
The original base of it was in between high school and college. I knew that I would be in some version of the jobs that I have now, not to say a professor, but some professional sitting at a desk kind of thing. I thought, if there's ever a window of time to do something different, it's probably now. I'd also read my senior year of high school a book by a guy who had been the president of Haverford College in Pennsylvania. He was a labor economist and had a leave for a year while president.
He decided to spend the year spending three months working as a short order cook, three months working as a ditch digger, three months in some other manual, and two other manual jobs. Spent his twelve months on sabbatical. As president of the university, he's a PhD, a member of the Federal Reserve Bank Board, etc., doing these jobs. He wrote a book called Blue Collar Journal that talks about this audience of folks who would never work in those jobs, and what it was like.
I decided to go and volunteer as a janitor for that year. I spent a year between high school and college volunteering as a janitor in Israel. I'm a Baha'i, if you've ever heard of the religion we belong to as the Baha'i faith and world headquarters are in Northern Israel. I went and worked as a janitor. I always said, not a celebrity janitor. This was cleaning toilets. It wasn't fancy and on the tail end of that, it was right when the second wave and the larger wave of Refuseniks, Russian Jews who had been trapped in the Soviet Union, Gorbachev allowed them to leave.
Suddenly overnight, there were initially hundreds of thousands, and ultimately millions of Russians were suddenly in Israel while I was living there. They were an incredibly fascinating bunch of people. Well-read, erudite, artistically minded, historically minded, and hyper-educated. I became fascinated by Russia at the end of that year. I went and I spent three months traveling around what was then still the Soviet Union.
By the time I arrived back for college, I knew I wanted to study it. I started studying the language, history, and politics, and in particular, became interested in legal reform issues. The process by which the Soviet Union, and ultimately then the independent republics were reforming their constitution and their Securities Law Systems, their Civil Justice Systems, and the like.
I was back and forth during college between Russia and the US and university. I ultimately wrote my senior thesis, which was then published as a book on Russian constitutional transition but the content of that book, because at the time everything was happening in real time, would be almost as if you were writing a book about the founding of the United States and its constitution in the 1780s, what would you do? You'd say, "Alexander Hamilton, what do you think?"
You go to Thomas Jefferson and say, "Do you get Madison or whoever?" "Do you agree?" "Yes." My content was I interviewed initially and then ultimately worked for Gorbachev, interviewed Yeltsin, and interviewed various prime ministers and finance ministers. At the time, the leaders were in the privatization efforts. One funny story I'll quickly tell is about some time ago when I was just a student. I was living in a room in the home of the IMF representative in Moscow.
We were sitting at dinner and I said to the family, "Excuse me, I have to go make a phone call." I went into the kitchen, which is just near the dining room so they could hear me. I called up someone at home and I said, "Can I come see you tomorrow?" We set a time and whatever it was. I go back to the table and he says to me, "Wait, who did you just call?" I said, "You must know him. This is the Economic and Finance Minister that I just called at home.
He said, "How do you have his home phone number?" I said, "I met him at this conference and I said that I want to interview him for this research I'm doing on constitutional transition in Russia. He told me to call him tomorrow night and we'll set a time for the next day. That's why I called him." He said, "I've been trying to get in and see him for the last three weeks and he's not returning my call." I respond, "Do you want me to go and call him back?" He goes, "No, I represent the International Monetary Fund. I'm not going to let a nineteen-year-old kid call the finance minister and say, "I got the IMF guy here. Can he come to see you too?" That was how I got immersed myself in Russia.
What an experience as a college-age kid. That's incredible to live through history like that.
It was. There's the expression chance that favors the prepared mind. I had done the work of I was studying Russian. I had done the work. I understood some of the politics, some of the history, and some other things. I did the work of showing up at these things and engaging them. We can only tell so many war stories, even for a bunch of appellate lawyers.
The way that I would have worked for Gorbachev was I met him on several occasions and I knew the staff. If you think of all the pictures of Gorbachev meeting with Reagan, in every picture, there was a short bald man with a mustache. Gorbachev's translator, Pavel Palazhchenko. I am meeting him as well. I am in touch with him and others. This was after Gorbachev left office and is leading the Gorbachev Foundation.
I was in touch with him about coming to Moscow and doing my research while doing work for Gorbachev and the foundation as well. They keep saying, "Great, we'd love to have you, we'd love to have you." They need to send me an invitation letter but they're not taking the last step for me to be able to get a visa. I was at the time in college at Princeton, and I saw that Gorbachev was coming to speak at the University of Pennsylvania. I said, "I'll go meet him there and talk to him directly."
Again, this is my hubris and stupidity. He's speaking to 4,000 people. How exactly did I think I was going to be like, "Hi, Gorby, what's up?" I arrived there. It's in an auditorium at the University of Pennsylvania. That's a big round auditorium. You come to one end and the stage on the opposite end. I thought presumably he was backstage. I just have to go see him backstage. I ignore the people going to the auditorium.
I start to go down this hallway around the side and then I see a good Philly cop up ahead and I realize he's not going to let me stroll by. I picked up my pace and as I got close, I started saying, "Where's Pavel?" The guy goes, "What?" I said, "Where's Pavel?" He goes, "Who's Pavel?" I said, "His translator. We need to find him, where is he?" The cop replied, "I don't know where he is." I said, "Is he backstage?" He said, "I don't know." I said, "I need to check." He goes, "Go ahead."
I passed policeman number one. I then broke into a little bit of a jog as I approached the next policeman, I started yelling, "Pavel, Pavel, where's Pavel?" He goes, "Maybe backstage." I said, "I'll go check." By the time I got backstage, it was dark as it was behind the curtain, and poor Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, the former President of the Soviet Union, was standing there by himself with a clipboard.
He's looking at his notes for the speech he is about to give. I ran up to him and I told him, "I want to work for you," in Russian. He's looking around thinking, "What kind of a country is this? No security, this random semi-terrorist-looking guy running up to me in broken Russian. He's muttering about wanting to work for me." I explained that I was a student.
He says, "Sure, I welcome you, just contact my staff." I said, "I do. I've been in touch with the staff, but they haven't sent me an invitation letter yet. Could you send me one?" He said, "Sure, just tell them." I said, "But they're not responding to that. Can you tell me your fax number?" Remember, this is a window into old age. There's no email. The fancy people have got a fax machine on their desk. I want that number. The poor guy looks around thinking, "He may do me harm if I don't." He wrote down his fax number. A week later, I got my invitation letter and went to work for him.
That's amazing. I'm picturing the nineteen-year-old you stepping up to world leaders like that. That is an amazing story.
It was an amazing time. I should say also, Jody, you may be too young. You were around, but it was amazing. Those who now say with the benefit of hindsight that they knew the Soviet Union was about to collapse, no one should fool themselves. No one had any idea that as quickly as it did, we would see this seismic transformation and the global order. It was an interesting time.
On the topic of seismic transformations and orders, let's talk about Texas A&M Law School because I think a lot of our audience who are here in Texas probably until recently didn't know Texas A&M had a law school. That's because it didn't exist. Can you give us a little history of the school and how things have gone over the last decade or so?
The law school originated quite some time ago. In the year 1989, it was established as DFW School of Law. Notably, I've never seen this in writing, but I've heard it from enough places that I think there's truth to it that in the lawyerly vein, they initially announced that they were establishing the North Texas School of Law and received very quickly a cease and desist letter from the University of North Texas explaining that you would not be establishing.
It became the DFW School of Law pretty quickly. I think for about 2 to 3 years, it lasted as a freestanding Texas Wesleyan University here in Fort Worth, then acquired the law school. It operates in many ways incredibly well. What I always say is, if I think about core values, as we call them at A&M, but the core values of A&M and then the fundamental orientation and values and priorities of Texas Wesleyan, it turns out it was a good fit.
Texas Wesleyan as a university thinks of itself as very much being about serving the needs of the community, connecting with the community, being organically intertwined with the local bench bar, etc. It turns out that's very much in line with A&M's perception of its land grant mission, which would say land, sea, and space grant mission to meet the needs of every Texan every day.
In many ways, it was a marriage notwithstanding very radically different institutions broadly, in some ways a very natural fit. It works very well at Texas Wesleyan Law School, although we then hit a point when after the great financial crisis, dramatic contraction in the number of law school applications, and much more pressure on scholarship students, it became financially an issue for Texas Wesleyan to sustain the law school.
It's also the case that Texas Wesleyan recognizes the time that it needs to invest in its campus and frankly, it needs to invest in the surroundings of its campus in a significant way. On the other side of the ledger, meanwhile, A&M had been interested in acquiring a law school for, as I can trace it back at least 40 years. My guess is it goes back even further than that. That union was initiated by a bunch of folks, but among them, D. Kelly Sr. makes the connection of Texas Wesleyan to think about what to do with this law school.
On the one side of the ledger and then A&M in this search for a law school and conversation started I think in 2012. Maybe even 2011, but 2012 probably more so. In 2013, the actual transition happened, it became the Texas A&M Law School. Now again, I talked about the parallels, but also super different. Texas Wesleyan Small Liberal Arts College, A&M massive tier-one research university depending on the year, second or third largest university in the country, and is heavily research-focused.
There then ensues this substantial, unprecedented, probably the more accurate statement, investment initially in acquiring the law school, acquiring those, which I always described from the Fort Worth perspective as a massive win, win, win. Win for A&M in the sense that they got a law school. Win for Wesleyan in that they got these resources they then invested to great effect. You have to give them credit. Fred Slabach, former President, and now Emily Messer as President investing wisely in their campus, and in the surroundings in huge ways.
Huge win for Fort Worth and Tarrant County and the Metroplex generally in terms of the presence of this big pure one research university and what we're seeing now with this campus they're building. The last one I'll say is in case there are any horned frogs in the room. I think a win for TCU as well. There had been a brief window of time when there was talk of TCU acquiring the law school for a variety of reasons, which we can talk about if you're interested, but it didn't happen.
What I have been publicly on record as saying is that had there been a TCU law school, I expect there would be no TCU medical school. I'm not sure where there would be a TCU stadium renovation. One way to think about it as well. We can walk and chew gum at the same time. I think that gravely underestimates how much A&M has invested in the law school to get it where it is. There was the initial acquisition, but not just the initial acquisition.
There was then a massive faculty hiring that we've done in the last ten years. We've hired more than 40 faculty to the law school. We will hire another 25 to 30, I expect, over the next 3, 4, or 5 years. That alone is a massive expense. We've also contracted the size of the student body to right-size it, to recognize that here's what we think the market can absorb, at least for now.
We've invested heavily in programs and have become a leader in intellectual property, ADR, and a few other areas. A&M invested massively in law school, and then that has brought incredible results. We went from an unranked law school to now number two in the state of Texas, and frankly, number two by a pretty wide margin.
Number three is a good clip behind us, although the Longhorns don't like to hear it. We're continuing to close the gap in that ranking. It also shows up in the underlying measures of the highest bar passage rate in Texas, the highest at any law school in the last decade in Texas, highest employment rate the year before last in the country. This year, we fell to number two in the country in terms of the employment rate of the graduates.
Highest and incoming GPA of the students coming in. I give A&M credit for this in their almost monomaniacal focus. Now we have a law school, we want to make it a great school. They've been prepared to invest heavily in it and have built by every measure. The quality of students, quality of faculty, quality of staff, and quality of programs have built this law school. It's created by Texas, but frankly, we're 26 in the country now, and that will continue to rise. I expect we'll be in the top 25 next year and we'll continue from there. We will have here in Fort Worth a top 20 national law school within a few years. In Texas, we'll have another one alongside you too.
That is an amazing art. I remember the days when A&M was attempting to work out a deal with South Texas College of Law in Houston, and that got torpedoed. Logistically and geographically, maybe it made a little more sense because of the proximity of College Station to Houston but as a native of Fort Worth and a TCU graduate, I've been very impressed with what I've seen. We're seeing applicants in our firm here in Austin from A&M who are presenting themselves very well. You can't help but notice as a lawyer, you watch the school climb in the rankings and the performance on the bar exam and so forth. It is extremely impressive.
I know it's devil's talk here in Texas because I wasn't born here, I haven't internalized the idea that because your football team beat my football team 42 years ago, I hate you. I still can't wrap my head around that. What I tell folks is that I don't think of myself or the school as competing with any other law school in Texas. We're competing with the state of California. Why? Of the top ten law schools in the country, California has two and Texas has zero.
Top 20, California has 4 schools and Texas has 1. In the top 40, I think it is, California has 5 or 6 and we've got 2. That's a problem. Long-term, if we are to feed the need of your firm, of Jody's firm, of other firms in Texas, of the bench, in Texas, it is the case that a big and fast-growing state needs more. From my vantage, UT Law should get better and A&M Law will get better because we're budgeting for it, but SMU, Baylor, Houston, Texas Tech, South Texas and so on should all get better as well.
That's what's good for the state of Texas. I can make a joke about a T-sip just as well as anybody because my contract says I have to make it at least once a day. If I'm being honest, the reality is that this is an exercise in adding value to the legal profession and the business community in Texas as a whole.
You see that when I think about what A&M's presence does as much about the broader campus that A&M is building now in downtown Fort Worth as the law school. When I think about that, what I see is the opportunity to establish DFW as a hub for higher education. That's not one institution. Even if you think of Boston, sure, you think of Harvard first, but it turns out if Harvard didn't have MIT, Boston University, Boston College, Suffolk, Northeastern, and Tufts. I can keep going. There wouldn't be Harvard.
From my vantage, what I hope we see is that we make DFW this real Mecca, whatever you want to call it, for higher ed, so that companies all over the country say again, with all due respect to Austin, we're going to go to DFW because we know that into perpetuity, whether it's the line worker or it's the double PhD. We can readily find the people that we need there in that community.
For any of our non-Texan audience, a charitable way to describe A&M is that it has a strong culture. Its hub is in College Station, which is about three-plus hours from Fort Worth. How do you bring and meld that strong A&M culture into Fort Worth and a campus that's very far removed?
I like that. I want to note for the record as your lawyer, that was charitable. I'll give a stronger version of it. Some universities have a sense of identity and even a physical place. A&M is not alone in that. Notre Dame has that. Few other universities have this strong sense of connection to the physical place that's there. The way I'll frame it is when I walked into the law school for the first time, this is now a little more than six years ago, to interview, I got slightly freaked out because I described it to someone shortly thereafter for A&M to accomplish what it wanted from the law school, it will be necessary to recruit as many Longhorns, Horned Frogs, Baylor Bears, and so on.
Harvard grads and UCLA grads as it does Aggies. Far more proportionately. The A&M undergrads represent a small minority of our students. I worried that they would walk into this building and say, "My God, it is a shrine to the color maroon. These people are crazy. There's no way I'm going to go to school here." It turns out I was completely wrong. Not slightly wrong, completely wrong. The students who are most keen about that are the non-AGI undergrads. It's the Longhorns, the Mustangs, the Bears, and the Horned Frog.
Why? They know that one of the benefits, there are other benefits too, but one of the benefits of plugging into the Aggie machine is, this Aggie network that you call someone and say, "I'm a fellow Aggie, I want a job." They said, "Do you want a kidney with it?' They worry that here we are 170 miles away from the mothership, graduate school rather than an undergrad, and no football stadium, at least an A&M football stadium in sight.
It's law school. Am I going to get that same plugging into the network? They come into the building and they say, "These people are all in." There were maybe 1 or 2 semesters over the last few years when we call the uptake of rings. The percentage of students who are eligible to get an Aggie ring was higher among law students than it was among undergraduates. That was a fluke. It's not normal. Normally, it's close, but it's not higher normally.
What we managed to do is we've managed to maintain that connection by physical place and by connectivity. That matters partially for the network piece. If I'm being honest, it matters as much because again, as I mentioned earlier, these core values of A&M are respect, excellence, loyalty, leadership, integrity, and selfless service.
If I have to describe the characteristics of the guy or a woman that I want to hire as my lawyer, that's a pretty damn good list. We have the students during orientation. They sign a 12th man jersey, all the incoming students. The idea is that they are making a contract with the core values of the university, but also those of the legal profession.
For me, the connectivity is we want them to be part of the Aggie network, but partially it's we want to instill in them this idea that fundamentally, the law is a service profession. That's the way we should, whether we are doing M&A work or we're working in rural legal aid, the way we're a service profession and those values of loyalty to your clients, to your employer.
Excellence in the work you do, playing a role of leadership, integrity in your values, your morals, your ethics, your sense of responsibility, and then a commitment to service. Those things are central to who our graduates are. It turns out that because A&M wears all that on their sleeve it helps to have that connection there.
You mentioned law school rankings and A&M's rise in that. It's been a long time since I shopped for law schools. As a legal employer, I'm generally familiar with them but when I'm looking at law school rankings, what's it telling me? When you jump up ten spots, as a legal employer, what am I getting from that?
The first thing to say is that there's the camp that says rankings are the bane of human existence. We should end them so and so forth. I say that you can find rankings of sofas. If we feel the need to rank sofas, I'm pretty sure we're going to continue to ranking. I say, every Sunday, every good God-fearing Texan, Sunday afternoon goes online to figure out what a bunch of reporters around the country think about their football team.
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