Meera E. Deo
LSSSE Director
The Honorable Vaino Spencer Professor of Law
Southwestern Law School

Administrators, scholars, and advocates agree that LSSSE is an invaluable tool for learning about law students. Our annual nationwide survey gathers data on the law student experience, covering everything from how much time students spend preparing for class to the quality and frequency of their interactions with others. For twenty years, our findings have focused solely on students, though similar national longitudinal data on the experiences of others key players in legal education also could be critically important.

That all changed this year.

What is the SELFS Study?

In 2024, LSSSE received a generous grant to significantly expand the scope of the project by creating and administering two new surveys: one gathering data from law faculty, the other from law school staff. The goal of the Survey on the Engagement of Law Faculty and Staff (SELFS) Study is to identify and address challenges and opportunities facing faculty and student-facing staff so we can collectively improve legal education. Due to the SELFS Study, individual law schools can use empirical data to better understand their own unique communities in order to foster a more inclusive campus climate. Additionally, researchers nationwide will for the first time be able to access aggregate interactive law school data from one source—including perspectives from students, faculty, and staff—to identify trends and best practices in legal education.

The SELFS survey questions focus on four key areas:

  • Perceptions of contemporary issues in legal education;
  • Opportunities for and experiences with professional development;
  • Teaching methods, curricular decisions, and pedagogical approaches; and
  • Engagement-related behaviors, including interactions with students.

When the two SELFS Study surveys are used in conjunction with the core LSSSE survey, the combined results provide a more holistic picture of legal education. This expansion benefits individual law schools drawing on school-specific data as well as those using aggregate data to enhance legal education nationwide.

Where Are We Now?

Twenty law schools participated in the SELFS Study in spring 2025—the maximum number envisioned for our pilot year of data collection. These twenty schools represent a diverse range of institutions across numerous metrics, including geography (all regions of the U.S.), ranking (elite through access-oriented schools), size (from fewer than 500 to over 1000 students at each institution), and affiliation (both public and private law schools). The survey was open at all participating law schools for roughly six weeks. After significant recruiting efforts during that time, the first SELFS survey administration closed earlier this month, boasting an impressive 60% overall response rate, including 60% (N = 521) for faculty and 61% (N = 444) for staff. This high level of participation is almost unheard of with full population sampling.

How Did We Get Here?

It has been an exciting and eventful year for LSSSE staff and our partners working on the SELFS Study! In spring 2024, we brought on two consultants. Jennifer Espinola, Associate Dean for Student Affairs and Law School Dean of Students at the University of Oregon School of Law, has been a vital member of the team with a primary focus on spearheading content for the staff survey and recruiting law schools and staff members to participate. Similarly, Indiana University-Bloomington Associate Research Scientist Allison BrckaLorenz has been indispensable—helping to draft the faculty survey instrument, facilitate data collection, recommend graduate student assistants, discuss data dissemination, and more. IU graduate students Ronald Davis and Steven Feldman have also gone above and beyond, completing every requested study-related mission with enthusiasm and expertise.

SELFS Co-Principal Investigators Chad Christensen, Meera E. Deo, and Jacquelyn Petzold lead the team and share responsibility for all aspects of the project. Initially, our tasks revolved around creating and testing both surveys, readying the online survey tool, drafting coding schemes for data analysis, and crafting a marketing and outreach plan. Next, we moved on to recruiting the twenty law schools that would comprise this first year of data collection—ensuring they maintained diverse representation across the various domains listed above. Once the deans of these twenty law schools were on board and had registered their institutions for the SELFS Study, we shifted our attention to recruiting faculty and staff at each school to participate. After all, without robust participation of individual faculty and staff, we have no data to share!

How did we convince 965 individuals to complete the SELFS surveys? We emailed our own personal faculty and staff contacts at each of the twenty participating law schools, urging them to send their own messages to colleagues to complete the survey. We worked with the dean at every school to maximize recruitment, suggesting they make announcements about the SELFS surveys at faculty and staff meetings, foster healthy competition between faculty and staff to participate, and otherwise find creative methods to achieve robust participation. When the survey closed on May 7, we were thrilled to see we had surpassed even our own lofty goals and managed a remarkable 60% response rate overall.

What’s Next?

Now that we have the data in hand, it’s time to clean it and then analyze it. Next, we will take those analyses and share them with others. We will disseminate school-specific data to each of the twenty participating law schools through individual reports during summer 2025. These reports will share responses for each of the questions on both the faculty and staff surveys, providing each institution with a broad picture of their overall law school community—and matching them with student analyses from the LSSSE Survey when appropriate. We also will begin making national aggregate data available to researchers and others who seek to better understand legal education, whether they want to insert our findings into their own scholarship or use our data to reach conclusions of their own. And we will begin sharing findings ourselves through presentations at national conferences and publications in law reviews and peer-review journals.

We will also make slight adjustments, as needed, to both SELFS survey instruments based on our initial administration. Because come fall 2025, the whole recruiting and survey administration process begins again for year two of the SELFS Study! We have schools lined up already and are open to more. Feel free to get in touch for more info about participating, using SELFS Survey data, or otherwise drawing from and supporting our work in legal education.