Is Your Law Degree Enough? Attorney Nelson Locke’s Battle with the Texas Bar

Transcript

A Lawyer Barred From Practicing

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Imagine completing law school, becoming a licensed attorney, moving to another state, and then being told that you cannot practice. Not because you failed the bar exam, but because of where you went to school. That’s exactly what happened to my guest today, attorney Nelson Locke. For decades, Texas required graduates via ABA accredited law schools to sit for the Texas bar. But recently, the Texas Supreme Court has ended its reliance on ABA accreditation, which means that the state will now determine its own standards for which law schools qualify graduates to practice law. Nelson graduated from Purdue Global Law School, a non-ABA accredited law school. And despite being a licensed attorney in California, when he applied to practice law in Texas, his application was initially denied because his degree did not meet the state’s requirements at the time. But Nelson did not stop there. Today we are going to walk through Nelson’s journey to becoming licensed in the Lone Star State and explain what this massive change, this ending of reliance on ABA accreditation, what that really means here in Texas. So I’m excited to break it down with Nelson Locke. Nelson, thank you so much for joining me today.

SPEAKER_00 1:12

Simone, I’m happy to be here.

Choosing A Non ABA Law School

SPEAKER_02 1:14

So let’s talk about that initial moment when you first realized that your law degree didn’t meet the requirements to practice here in Texas. What kind of thoughts were going through your head? What happened in that moment?

SPEAKER_00 1:28

Well, I’m not the kind of uh person who gets surprised by things like that. And when I opted to go to Purdue Global Law School back in 2005, I knew darn good and well that it wasn’t ABA approved. Uh I wasn’t really sure about Texas because Texas wasn’t really on my radar at that point in time. I was more focused on Florida, which is where I lived at the time. And um I knew it wasn’t ABA approved, but I thought to myself, I had two choices. The first choice was that I could uh uh take my shot, as they say in Hamilton, take my shot with a non-ABA school and hope to work out all the kinks later after I had graduated and was qualified as an attorney, or I could just give up on a dream I had had ever since I was 20 years old. I had actually gone to an ABA law school in San Diego in 1977 and 1978, part-time, but my my full-time job was in the retail management field, and I was transferred from California to uh Texas at that point in time, and and my degree, my credits didn’t transfer with me. So, so in other words, I had about a year and a half of ABA. I was doing all right, it was okay, and I liked it, and then I let 25 years go by, and then I decided, hey, if I’m gonna do this, which I’ve been dreaming about my entire life, I need to do it now. And that’s how I chose to be global. So I guess your your your thought about when did I realize my degree might be problematic? I knew that from the get-go because they were very clear on disclosure, but I wasn’t concerned about it because I knew that number one, things change over time. And number two, I knew that I was a pretty persuasive uh person and that I could fight this battle and probably win.

Building A Federal Law Strategy

SPEAKER_02 3:14

Yeah, well, it sounds like you were very persuasive. You did end up, you know, getting your degree and being able, I mean, getting your license here in Texas, being able to practice. When you first learned that Texas required graduation from an ABA accredited law school, you were licensed in California, you’ve moved to Texas. What did that mean for your ability to practice? And and how did this impact you personally?

SPEAKER_00 3:40

Well, let’s let’s take it back to when I passed the California bar and was sworn into the California bar in 2013. I had a strategy, and and I think anybody who watches a show like this, a podcast like this, should think about this. If you don’t have a strategy about what you’re gonna do with your education, how you’re gonna plan it, how you’re gonna turn it, and how you’re gonna monetize it is really the key word. How you’re gonna monetize all this investment you have in your education, well, shame on you. Well, I had a strategy, okay? And my strategy was to take an area that I knew very, very well, which was the mortgage industry, which is a very complex area of rules and regulations and law and codes and so on and so forth. Plus, it’s an area that’s very important to the economy because our economy basically is driven by the housing industry. I mean, just think about all the interest rate uh arguments that you see in here, and about uh about the different things we see with Secretary Powell and so on and so forth. Okay, so the reality was I already knew that. So I thought, well, okay, I’ve been running a mortgage company for 25 years in Florida. I’m graduating from law school, I’ve just passed the bar, and what is my strongest area of expertise? I had 20-some years of retail management, which I just didn’t want to go back to, period. And then I had 25 years of running a full, full HUD Eagle mortgage banking firm. So at one point I even had taken it public. So I had exposure in the mortgage industry to just about everything you can think of from a state side or from the federal side, all that knowledge. And I thought, well, you know, people tend to do best in what they know. I think they used the phrase, stay in your wheelhouse. So I looked at that and I thought, and I said, I’m gonna stay in my wheelhouse. I’m gonna be a mortgage, a federal mortgage compliance attorney, because there weren’t too many. And there certainly were not too many, probably less than five nationally, that actually had run a mortgage company. So here I was with hands-on, boots on-the-ground experience, uh, and now a law degree and a bar license. And see, if you practice federal law, you don’t have to have a state license in any state in this country. You just are not allowed to practice state law. So that meant that when I was coming from, I was living in Florida at the time, I was going to practice federal law on the strength of my California bar license. And then in 2014, when I brought myself to Texas, I knew I could continue with my clients on a federal level while I was in Texas. But here was the thing. I got so many good clients. I mean, I have hundreds of clients. I mean, I’m very, very uh grateful for the practice that I’ve been able to build. But I’ve got so many of them, and they would call me, and they would call me with state-specific problems in Texas that I could not help them with. All I could do was find another attorney and make a referral and simply hope and pray and cross my fingers that the person that I was referring them to really did know something about the Truth in Lending Act, or RESPA, or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or the SAFE Act, or what was going on with Dodd Frank and why do we have it, or the Privacy Act. I could go on and on and on. I just had to like, I hope it works out.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

Right.

SPEAKER_00 7:07

These people, because that’s just the way it was. So you said, how did it impact my practice? It didn’t. Uh graduating from a non-ABA school didn’t impact it at all because I had a federal practice where I focused, and most state laws are derivatives of federal law anyway. I had a practice that was very helpful to these people, and I had 200 and when I got here in Texas, I think I had 230 after just three years, 200 client companies in 24 states.

SPEAKER_01 7:38

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 7:38

That’s what you can do if you that’s what you can do.

SPEAKER_02 7:43

Well, it sounds like the the citizens of Texas were missing out on what you could provide them with, on the help that you could provide them with, you know?

SPEAKER_00 7:52

Absolutely right. If you use the phrase legal desert, which we hear all the time, uh, yeah, there is a legal desert as it relates to mortgage regulatory law and having somebody that you can work with who actually does understand what it is that’s going on.

Texas Denial And Online Education Bias

SPEAKER_02 8:08

Your situation eventually made its way to the Texas Supreme Court. And we’ve previously talked, you mentioned that this was quite a battle. So can you talk to me about what happened during that process that did allow you to move forward and eventually become licensed here in Texas?

SPEAKER_00 8:24

I’ll give you the short snapshot of what I attempted to do. So I had all these Texas clients that I really wanted to help, the uh mortgage industry legal desperate, so to speak. And uh and I wanted to help them with foreclosures and things that were really controlled by state regulations, not federal regulations, and I didn’t want to create any impression of any unauthorized practice of law. I didn’t want to violate any of the code of professional regulations or any of the rules that I’m supposed to live by that the uh Texas uh Board of Law Examiners has promulgated. So I applied, and in my first application, which was in 2021, right during COVID, I had a really hard time, first of all, making any kind of personal contact with anybody on that board. But I guess that’s understandable because of COVID. But what happened was my application was treated very casually, and I was rejected probably within three months of when I had applied, and I was rejected for two reasons. Uh, and this was a surprise to me. I expected to be rejected for the non-ABA issue, and I thought I would have to argue that I already had, I think it was seven years of experience practicing as an attorney. But okay, so there was a work product, a body of work product that could be shown to Texas that indicated that I didn’t know how to conduct myself as a as an attorney. There was no question about that. So I expected that. But I didn’t expect that Texas would be ex would be fully closed-minded about online education. That was really, this was like a double whammy, two issues that they raised in that first uh hearing that they had to reject me within about 90 to 120 days. I found out later in the process, as I as I pushed to the matter, I found out that nobody had ever really even looked at my work performance. Nobody had looked at my paperwork. They basically looked at my application summary and it said non-ABA school and it said online education. They went, oh, well, we’re not going to allow that. Yeah. And that was the end of it. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 10:36

Just taking it at face value, it sounds like.

Reapplying And Hitting A Dead End

SPEAKER_00 10:38

Exactly. It was a tremendous, actually, I would, I would call it a bias. I would say that it wasn’t necessarily a bias as it related to ABA or non-ABA, but it was definitely a bias as it related to learning the law via an alternative delivery system. Okay. They had, they even have language in their rules or had language in their rules here in Texas that talked about correspondence and distance. And those are old-time words that don’t really mean anything anymore. Because online education is very interactive, it’s very personal. Uh there are study groups, there are professors, there are classrooms, there are questions and answers going on. There’s a lot of interaction, okay, Socratic method interaction, that I think people here in Texas were just assuming doesn’t occur. But it does occur. Okay, but they didn’t ask. They didn’t want to know. So what I did was after I was rejected out of hand so quickly, I just filed a lawsuit. And I filed a lawsuit and I made all of the silly arguments that uh new lawyers make about constitutional violations and you know equal rights and all that other stuff as it related to education and to them discriminating against me. And I didn’t get very far. Okay. I didn’t get uh my uh my case was rejected on what is called Rucker Feldman grounds, which were jurisdictional plus an argument that the Texas Board of Law Examiners made that what I was trying to do was to use a court in the state of Texas to overturn a decision of an administrative agency. And that’s not allowed under Rucker Feldman. You’re supposed to go back and appeal to the agency, and the agency is supposed to try to work it out with you. Well, there was a problem with that. I’m gonna tell you what it was because this is how I got to the Supreme Court. Uh I decided when that happened, I was going to slow down, back up a little bit, get some good legal advice to help me with my thinking, and come up with a slightly different strategy. No more court. I could see that that wasn’t going to work. So I said, let’s do another application and let’s do the most perfect job a human being could ever do over client. Let’s answer every single question exactly correctly. Let’s not ever overlook anything. Let’s think, let I don’t have any skeletons in my closet. I like to say I don’t even have closets. But I was thinking about it, okay? Like, what did I forget? What happened in 1980? What happened in 1965? I’m going back and I’m trying to remember everything. So there was absolutely nothing that they could do or say about the quality of my application. So I submitted an absolutely perfect application. Well, it took them about six months this time. But they finally came back to me and they treated me a little differently because they knew that we had been litigants and they understood that. And they led me to believe that first that they would agree that Purdue Global Law School was sufficient and that even though it was online, I really was a good lawyer. Okay. So they could probably overlook that. But then they went off on the issue of the ABA and they spent time on that. What they would do is they would they would tell me that they were comfortable with the online part, but they were uncomfortable with the ABA. And they and then they said, but we need more time to look at your work product because, you know, uh we really haven’t really dug into it because we had these rules and we didn’t think we would even be at this point. So can we have another month or two? And I said, sure, of course. Go ahead. So they tore into all my work product, and then the issue shifted from the online school to my work product. Was my work product acceptable to text?

SPEAKER_02 14:34

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 14:34

Okay. Yeah, this is really quite a story. And and I ran into problems because there was uh literal readings of some of the rules about um having to have an exclusively federal practice if you wanted to use your federal practice as your work product for the state. And I had kept some clients in California where I was state approved and state licensed, and I had those clients via virtual relationship, just like you and I are having right now. And it works extremely well, just like online law school did. But you see, Texas couldn’t wrap its brain around that. So Texas came back with an argument that my practice wasn’t exclusively federal, because I had these, you know, 10 or 12 clients that I was still taking care of from when I when I had my when I first got established as an attorney. So they rejected me again. And they told me in that rejection that there was no way for me to appeal unless their decision was based on poor moral character. I think I already told you I I don’t have any skeletons in my closet. So there was no way somebody’s going to say that Nelson Locke had poor moral character. Okay. I have great moral character. So that meant there was no way I could appeal their decision. And I surely somebody, surely, even the voters, somebody must supervise the Texas Board of Law Examiners. Well, they’re an agency of the Texas Supreme Court, okay, and they’re created by the Texas Supreme Court, and they serve at the pleasure of the Texas Supreme Court. Only they didn’t know that. So the argument they put forked to me was you’ve got nowhere to go. And I said, Oh, come on. This is America. In America, everybody has a chance to fix if there’s a deficiency. What’s the cure? That’s the way we talk about these things in law. And they went, Well, yeah, there is a cure for you, Mr. Law. I said, Why don’t you go back to an ABA law school and get a new three-year degree? And we’ll accept. Now, Simone, I don’t like to talk about this, but at that point in time I’m 73 years old. Okay. I’d like to think of myself still as 50. Let’s call me 45, 50, something like that. I do young men’s stuff, okay? The reality of it was though, I was 73. And for me to go back to law school, I want you to think about how ridiculous this is. Go back to law school at 73. That means 76. Then take the Texas bar, and that’s maybe another year. That’s 77. I would have been 78 if if all of my cylinders had been firing properly and I had done absolutely everything right. Is that fundamentally fair to me? The answer would be no.

SPEAKER_01 17:24

No.

Getting The Texas Supreme Court To Listen

SPEAKER_00 17:25

So I thought the real problem here is how do you get the Supreme Court to pay attention to Nelson Law? I’m just one guy. And furthermore, this is probably not too popular of an issue. ABA, online, I mean, that’s all pretty strange stuff for these older, more established attorneys to wrap their brains around. So at any rate, uh I sat down with legal counsel and we thought about how are we going to do this. And thought, well, you know, we’re going to go to the Supreme Court and we’re going to, first of all, educate them about what has been going on with Nelson Locke and the TBLE. And then we’re going to point out to them that the TBLE doesn’t think that that they have to answer to anybody. And we don’t agree with that argument because we believe the Supreme Court has direct supervisory authority over the TBLE. And and we crafted, and then we thought, well, if we’re going to craft like a petition or a writ of mandamus, and we look at the statistics, in Texas, for example, if you file a writ of mandamus in Texas, you have perhaps a four to six percent chance of that even being accepted for review. And then if if you are so lucky that they’ve accepted it for review, you have probably a 2% chance of paying. So the statistics were telling me, and and my lawyer friends, including one who was working for me, said you can’t prevail. These numbers are just not going to work for you. This is a great word. So I kept thinking, looking like I thought, well, what about a legal mechanism appealing these decisions that the Supreme Court has to answer and can’t say no to? So we bifurcated our argument. What we did is we created an argument called a petition for administrative review. And then right on the back of it, we put, or in the alternative, a wit of mandates. So now the Supreme Court could choose. Were they going to review the decision? Okay, the petition for, or were they going to grant the mandamus? Well, what they did was they declined the mandamus, but accepted the petition.

SPEAKER_01 19:45

Oh wow.

SPEAKER_00 19:47

So this is a real learning point for, I think, for students or younger lawyers that I learned the hard way through experience. If you’re gonna go to the Supreme Court, give them something they can’t say no to. Okay? And the petition that we put forth to the Supreme Court laid out the entire, all the entire ugly facts of my experience here. And it laid out my work product and it laid out my professional accomplishments and my reputation. And it took a year and two or three months, something like that. And I saw a lot of back and forth pleading going on. It’s a lot of uh pleading and rebuttals and pleading and rebuttals and a lot of answers coming out of the Texas Attorney General’s office that went something like this. Yeah, he’s just trying to do Rookerfeld. It’s an end run. You know, the Supreme Court shouldn’t fall for this and all that kind of stuff. That got them absolutely nowhere. And after the Supreme Court had fully briefed it, um, I got up one day and I got an email from uh a guy that works for us in Brownsville. He’s our immigration guy for my firm. And he says, Nelson, have you looked at your email? And I said, No. And he said, You won. What a great day.

SPEAKER_02 21:08

I bet, yeah. A long time coming.

Texas Reconsiders ABA Gatekeeping

SPEAKER_00 21:12

Absolutely. So it took it took three and a half years, I think. And what the Supreme Court did was in a very page and a half ruling in order, they wrote an administrative order which is published uh, I think it’s number 25-9024, something like that. And what they did is they they recited the facts first. You know, this comes to us because of this. Uh, here’s what the state uh Texas Board of Law Examiners have said. Now let’s look at Mr. Locke. And they went through Mr. Locke and they they went through my education, they went through my work product, they went through Purdue Global, they went through the fact that Purdue Global wasn’t ABA approved, but was state accredited. And wasn’t that kind of the same thing? And they went through all these nice logical arguments, which I had been hoping all along I would get, and I did. Get. And then at the very bottom they go, so it’s our decision that uh that Mr. Locke has shown do has shown good cause to be admitted immediately to the Texas Bar, and we would like to remand this whole thing back to the Texas Board of Law Examiners and let them look at it again. Really nice way of telling them to get over this, which I I liked. I really liked that. I thought that was great work. And then a couple of days later, the Texas Supreme Court issued another order, and in that order, they said, you know, we’ve been thinking about this whole ABA thing. Now I’m thinking to myself, well, that’s pretty coincidental, isn’t it? And they go, we’ve been thinking about this whole ABA thing, and why are we, the state of Texas, smart as we all are, why are we letting the ABA tell us what schools are good and what schools are not? And why aren’t we looking at the schools and looking at the performance and their reputation and how their graduates are functioning and so on and so forth? And so they said, you know, we’re gonna open this up for public comment, and we want to report back from the TBLE, and we’d like to hear from anybody interested. What would you think if we just cut the ties with the ABA and reasserted ourselves as the Supreme Court of Texas in the position of supervision over bar admissions and approval of schools? And I I just I’m gonna tell you something, it was like Christmas. Very Christmas because that was what I had been wanting all along. And I knew that this was a long time coming, and I knew it needed to come because let’s face it, Simone, online education is not uh an untested concept. There are a tremendous amount of us, and you’re talking to one who are pretty good lawyers who did it all that way. And the reality of it is there are also other professions. There are CPAs, there are nurses. I can go through a whole bunch of fields where people are getting their degrees online. This isn’t something new, but in Texas, they acted as if it was some kind of aberration that you had to back away from out of fear because wow, we’ll run amok and we’ll we’ll wreck the legal profession. Okay. So I was happy to see the Supreme Court stepping up and actually taking a position.

SPEAKER_02 24:21

I bet. I bet that was just amazing.

SPEAKER_00 24:24

It was an incredible feeling. Now, they they did say in my order where they where they requested, they requested that the TBLE take a good close look at my application because the Supreme Court believed that there was good cause to waive me in. Okay. Uh, so that was basically a really good moment. But when I saw that they were also going after the idea of addressing online and addressing ABA, I felt like that’s a complete victory. Now, the Texas Supreme Court did say in my order that my order was case-specific and not to be considered as a binding on the TBLE, a binding order. But if if if anybody’s listening’s got a little bit of experience in law, they know how Supreme Court decisions in different states apply. And like a Supreme Court decision in the state of Texas, it applies in Texas, period. And if it applied to somebody that was in Indiana trying to accomplish what I did, it would be persuasive. Okay. So I was just totally happy with that. I didn’t care that it was case specific. Worst case, it was persuasive. And that’s what we do as lawyers. We persuade. Exactly. But persuasive, Supreme Court decision. So anyway, uh you now know that that went a little bit further, and and the Supreme Court did decide to just take back the authority over school approvals, and now they’re in the process of trying to put some of those rules together uh so that they can implement these changes. Now there was something that that I think is worth pointing out. When they asked for the public comments, they did get comments from ten ABA-approved law schools here in Texas. Uh, I don’t know if you’ve seen that or not.

SPEAKER_02 26:11

I haven’t, no.

SPEAKER_00 26:12

There were 10 law schools in Texas that wrote responses. Nine of the ten argued for the ABA. So, in other words, the establishment reared its ugly head and said, you know, listen, we’re not looking to the left, we’re not good to the right, we’re gonna stick with what we know. So it’s OBA. And they wrote these persuasive, big, long white papers, and the Supreme Court read them all. And one dean, one dean, other than the Dean of Purdue Global Law School, who also wrote an anarchist brief for uh the Texas Supreme Court and for my case, I’m very honored. Um, the dean of UT wrote a letter back and said, I’ll just paraphrase it. He said, you know, you know, this is probably a good idea. So here we go. We have nine deans that said, oh no, people are gonna run them up. This will wreck everything, right? I’m paraphrasing. But then the dean of UT says, well, maybe we should take a deeper look at this. Maybe there’s something going on here that we could do, and we because we’re in Texas and because we know Texas, maybe we can serve Texas consumers better. Well, that was the whole argument. So I loved it.

SPEAKER_02 27:27

No, I’m sure that was in one ear at one at the other for some, unfortunately. I knew I loved being a longhorn. Um, but no, I think that’s, you know, absolutely that uh just because it’s different, uh, just because you haven’t done it before, doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to create neg negative results. Um, you know, I mean, look at where we’re at. We’re at the age in which everything is new. The things that we’ve previously done um have now been innovated and are completely different from how they were 10 years ago. So we have to be looking.

SPEAKER_00 28:04

You have to think about that. Think about electric cars, which is not I’ll never own one, but the reality is they’re good and they serve a purpose. Now take a look at take a look at the space flights we see. Do you remember the space flight where there were the six people, including Captain Kirk, inside the module and they were floating around up there for about 20 minutes or so? Do you know that that spaceship took off, flew in space, and landed without any pilots? I mean, that was just all automated. Who would have thought? Okay. Exactly. So what you what we what you saw and what you did see, and I don’t think you see it to any great degree anymore, what you did see was you saw a concept called contempt prior to investigation. Have you ever heard that? Okay, that’s that’s a strong concept. And whenever I whenever I get hit with arguments that are totally illogical and are irrelevant and are timeline-based, but in the past, that’s what I always look at. I I’m dealing with somebody who does not want to open up their mind. And today, success and growth and and good performance demands that you do that. You have to have an open mind. You have to look at all the options. Well, I think my case caused the Texas board wide channel to look at all the options. And I think that’s one of the results.

What This Means For Future Students

SPEAKER_02 29:29

It certainly sounds like it, yeah. Well, as we continue to look to the future, Nelson, with you know, Texas recently ending, this is a very recent, I think it’s only been what, about a year or two now. Um, what does this decision mean for future law students? And what should they be paying attention to as things continue to develop?

SPEAKER_00 29:53

Well, just like all schools are not equal. Like for, for example, the worst law school in the country, I’m not gonna name it, but it’s an ABA-approved law school. It’s the worst law school in the country. Some of the best law schools in the country include Purdue Global Law School, my alma mater, uh, which frequently has bar passage rates which are higher than its ABA peers in the state of California. So you gotta, you gotta, you really have to think about things. Things have really changed. So, so what do I think uh it’s going to mean? I think, first of all, for the delivery of legal services, this is a good thing. Because there are a lot of legal deserts in all over the United States. Indiana, for example, just recently approved non-ABA online schools to sit for the Indiana Bar because they had counties, whole counties in Indiana that had not even one lawyer.

SPEAKER_01 30:44

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 30:44

And you see, if you had to drive from the southern end of Indiana, I used to live in Indianapolis, I know this. Southern end of Indiana up to Indianapolis to go to IUPUI or law school there, okay, or maybe up to um some of the schools that are up in the northern part of the state, the reality of it is you’d be in a car three or four hours or five hours a day. You’ve got to have a job if you’re in if you’re an adult, you’ve got to have some form of income. How are you gonna go to law school?

SPEAKER_01 31:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:15

But if you can maintain your job and go home and log in at 6:30 at night and study law until 10, four, or five nights a week, which is what it takes, it’s a lot of hard work. Okay? It takes a lot of hard work. But if you can do that, you can have your job, support your family, be a member of your community, and get your law degree, and then ultimately it all comes together because now you’re a licensed lawyer under these changes in a community that otherwise wouldn’t have one. So that’s one very, very important argument. Here’s another I earned back my entire four years of law school, plus all my bar exam expenses, plus the baby bar expenses, plus the cost of flying from Florida to California for all these different things. I earned it back in six months once I was licensed.

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 32:08

Now, why did that happen? Let me tell you why. It’s not that I was that great of a lawyer. I mean, I’m pretty good. But back then I was brand new. I was starting to build. Little tiny bits, you know, it builds, it builds. The difference was my entire investment in getting a law degree in passing the car was under$75,000.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 32:29

Now, today, if you go to a brick and mortar law school, I believe, I I don’t want to name any law schools, but I can tell you that the ranges I’ve seen are anywhere from a minimum of$30,000 to$40,000 a year to a maximum of maybe$50,000 to$70,000 a year. A law degree without even considering the barge act could cost you as much as$200,000. That’s the truth. That’s the way it is today. So so here you are, you want to go to law school. What do you do? Do you pay$75? Or do you pay$200,000? Okay. And it’s online.

SPEAKER_01 33:11

Right.

SPEAKER_00 33:13

Are there some bad online schools? There are some that are weak. I happen to have gone to the gold standard. Dean Pritiken is a Harvard graduate at Purdue Global Law School. And he is just an incredibly brilliant man. And that’s who’s leading our organization. And he, I mean, you couldn’t put yourself in better hands. So if you have the discipline to study, and if you have the discipline to want to go to law school four nights a week until you finish for four years, because that’s their program, okay, if you can do that, you’re gonna end up and you’re gonna have the same opportunities I had as long as you work with it. Okay. I don’t know. Does that answer your question?

SPEAKER_02 33:56

Absolutely, yeah. I mean, it sounds like really what they should be paying attention to is looking at at the specifics, the details, and the school, looking at the the um reviews, you know, looking at what their peers might be saying. Because, like you said, you know, just because you go to the most expensive does not mean that you are going to get the best education.

SPEAKER_00 34:22

Listen, I I represent uh budget plaintiffs in a uh series of class action lawsuits right now. On the other side, the defendant. I work is about it’s about 58% defendants, 42% plaintiffs, I believe. But these are all plaintiffs’ cases I’m referring to. Uh the other side, as an expert they use, that uh has one of those Ivy League college degrees and we’ll win it.

SPEAKER_02 34:50

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 34:52

Here’s one of the key things. People that brag too much about where they got their degree, you have to look past where they got their degree and look at what they’ve done with it. It’s all about performance, it’s about passing the bar and performance. And I will tell you, and I would I would like it if people ask me this question now, but they don’t. Um none of my clients ever say, and where did you get your degree from?

SPEAKER_02 35:15

Yeah, right.

SPEAKER_00 35:16

No, that’s so true. What they do, all they want to know is, what have I done with it? Right, what’s my performance? Where have I been admitted? And so on and so forth. You know, I just for the heck of it, I’ll throw this in. You know, I’m gonna take the Florida bar in July at 75.

SPEAKER_01 35:33

That’s awesome.

SPEAKER_00 35:34

I’m probably gonna be the oldest guy in the room. I don’t know how that’s gonna feel. But you know what? I’m gonna I’m gonna finish high and finish strong, and that’s gonna be in the end of July. I’m taking the MPRE because Florida wants me to update those scores because mine are 12 or 13 years old. And I already know that I’m gonna come in with a great score next week when I take that exam. Yeah, you know, you can’t you can’t stop a person with the right mindset. And I don’t know, there’s something special about online people, they’re unique. Usually, I would say largely, they’re a little bit older, they have careers, they usually have families, and they usually have wanted to practice law for a long time, but have not found a way to do so. What I think my action and other actions have created is a path. I think they’ve opened some doors. Like there’s still some unanswered questions, but before the door was slammed and nailed shut.

SPEAKER_02 36:32

Yeah, no one was knocking.

SPEAKER_00 36:34

It’s open now.

unknown 36:35

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:36

And I think people are at least looking through it and thinking, hmm, this might work. And that’s what my objective was.

SPEAKER_02 36:42

Well, fantastic. It sounds like you’ve achieved it. And I look forward to congratulating you in July when you pass the Florida bar.

SPEAKER_00 36:50

Well, uh they won’t tell me until probably November.

SPEAKER_02 36:53

Oh, okay. Gotcha. Yeah, a little bit of time.

SPEAKER_00 36:56

They like to take four months to read every word and make sure that they didn’t miss anything.

SPEAKER_02 37:01

Wheels of justice, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:03

Exactly. But you know what? Uh I’m I’m going to I’m going to do fine. I’m looking forward to it. And then I have right now well over a hundred clients in the state of Florida alone that are all federal, that have been coming to me for years now saying, Could you please help me with some of these? And I mean, I am so tired of referring to people that I don’t know, and I I don’t I don’t feel like that’s in the client’s best interest. So that’s why I decided I would do Florida. I think after I do Florida, I’ll probably stop because the only other huge state that we have a lot of clients in is New York. And I am tired to go through that experience. So I’ll have California, Texas, Florida for state, and then nationally for federal. And that should keep me busy.

SPEAKER_02 37:55

Yeah, it’s quite a feat. Absolutely. Well, Nelson, thank you so much for joining me this afternoon and sharing your journey with me. Professional licensing rules they shape how and who, who and how you can enter into a profession. But really, your personal journey shows us that being involved with your regulator, understanding that process of what it takes to become licensed, striving for change and innovation can help shape those rules and ultimately spark a change if that’s what you’re looking to do.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

You’re absolutely right. And I’ll leave you with one comment. You’re absolutely right. But don’t ever believe that just because the rules are written a certain way, that that’s going to be the end of your story. Don’t ever believe that. Everything is negotiable. Okay?

SPEAKER_02 38:49

Thank you so much, Nelson.

unknown 38:51

Welcome.

SPEAKER_02 38:51

Professional licensing rules shape who enters a profession and how, but your personal journey has shown us that becoming involved with your regulator, striving for change and innovation, can help shape those rules themselves and ultimately create change if that’s what you’re looking to do. Listeners, if you’d like to learn more about Nelson Locke and his work, you can visit the link below in our description. And until next week, stay inspired and continue engaging with your regulatory agency.