Law School Transparency

Law School Transparency

2020 – 2024See archive
Steve on X

Law School Transparency helps prelaw students make strategic choices about where to attend law school, using the data schools would rather you didn't look at too closely. I led the Product & Engineering team, working directly with founder Kyle McEntee, and consulted on various strategies at LSAC.

I managed Trisha Lim, my subcontractor, who led the front end and design. Between us we wrote over 3,000 commits, until LSAC folded the site into LawHub in 2024.

Law School Transparency

Three sites, one app

LST had grown into three sites: lawschooltransparency.com, LST Reports and the PreLaw Platform. I merged them into one Laravel app, with redirects so every old link kept working, then cut the features nobody used.

LST Reports
LST Reports, one of the three sites
The PreLaw Platform
The PreLaw Platform

Every school, laid bare

Every ABA school gets a profile: jobs, admissions, salaries, bar passage, costs, environment and part-time programs, each charted over a decade. Trisha redesigned the profiles, overview cards and schools landing; I built the controllers and data model underneath. Students compare up to four schools side by side, or browse by state.

Harvard University on Law School Transparency
A school profile
Harvard University's employment outcomes
Where a school's graduates end up
Harvard University's cost of attendance and debt projection
What a school really costs, with a debt projection

A report built around you

Students enter their LSAT, GPA, where they want to work, how much debt they'll take on and what matters to them, and get a personal list of schools: admission chances on a five-step scale, a job score, and what the degree will really cost. I built the original report and the admission-chance model; Trisha redesigned the onboarding and the budget and debt views.

A new year of data, every year

Each December the ABA's new numbers come out. I imported them and rebuilt every derived table (scores, comparisons, reports, states) from SQL views with one command, which CI runs too. Trisha added a salaries page from College Scorecard data.

National data on enrollment, tuition, debt and legal jobs going back to 1985. I brought it in from the old data site; Trisha made its sections configurable and moved its charts to Vue. Later I moved it onto LawHub, where it's still live today, still served by our app.

Law school tuition in the United States since 1985
Tuition since 1985

Signing in with LSAC

I built the sign-in, sign-up and sign-out flows on LSAC's single sign-on, then a LawHub-branded theme with its header and footer from Contentful, routed through LawHub's own front end.

Podcasts with an AI producer

LSAC's podcasts, I Am the Law, Women in the Law and Keeping Up to Data, run on our app. Episodes are imported from RSS, GPT picks each episode's guest, playlists and tags, and there's an embeddable player. It's still live at LawHub.

The I Am the Law podcast
I Am the Law

Built to keep shipping

  • Upgrades to Laravel 9 and 10

  • Trisha's move from Bootstrap and jQuery to Tailwind and Vue 3

  • Pest tests and Playwright end-to-end tests in CI

  • Paid career assessments, with Stripe and Avalara

  • Dark mode

References

Kyle McEntee, Senior Director for Prelaw Engagement at LSAC

Steve and I have worked for nearly four years together. As technical lead, he took a great set of websites, integrated them, and brought them to a completely different level – from how the sites are engineered and architected to the UI/UX and SEO. I trusted him to look at the big picture of what we were trying to achieve and solve problems with that understanding. With Steve, you get a partner. He’s part product manager, part solutions architect, and part full-stack engineer – and excels at each. His vast experience across different technical disciplines and organizations shines through. He pushes back when appropriate, concedes when appropriate, and leaves projects significantly better than when he started. He is also great at spotting and developing talent. I watched him firsthand coach a junior developer from someone with promise to someone who did truly excellent work.

Kyle McEntee, Senior Director for Prelaw Engagement at LSAC

Trisha Lim, Frontend Engineer

Steve is your one-man team - jack of all trades, master of.. all trades. I've learned so much working for him, from design to frontend development, backend and making decisions by myself to push the business forward.

He has high standards, and will tell you upfront if something's not right. It's challenging to meet those standards, but the product and everyone he works with is better for it. If you have a chance to work with him, don't miss it!

Trisha Lim, Frontend Engineer