Brian Kennedy was 27 when he rejected his acceptance letter to St. Paul’s William Mitchell College of Law.
“I was accepted to this law school in 1982,” said Kennedy, now 62, “and life got in the way. I had to support a family.”
Since then, life has been pretty good to Kennedy, who grew up in North St. Paul and Maplewood. For the past 20 years, he’s been chief executive of the El Paso Sports Commission, a sports tourism and concert facility in west Texas, as well as a security consultant for music and sporting events.
“I reached a point where I said, ‘What haven’t I done?'” he said. “I’ve lived a really full life. I’ve lived my life saying yes to things.”
A few years ago, he and his wife as well as children and grandchildren agreed: It was time for him to fulfill his dream of law school.
At 59, Kennedy became one of the first students to enroll in Mitchell-Hamline School of Law’s first-in-the-country “hybrid” juris doctor program.
Now entering its fourth year, the fully accredited program enrolls more than 80 students per year to complete law school through “e-learning,” on top of one or two weeks of on-campus coursework per semester.
The part-time program takes about four years, though Kennedy and 10 other students will receive their degrees in January, having wrapped up classes a year early.
“For me, without the hybrid program, I couldn’t go to law school,” he said. “It just wasn’t going to happen.”
When he walks across the graduation stage, he’ll be joined by Briana Al Taqatqa, a 29-year-old analyst for a charter school management company.
Al Taqatqa spent five years teaching English in the Persian Gulf island city of Abu Dhabi before returning to Bloomington, in 2014 to have her daughter, now 3. Somehow, between a busy home and work life, she also completed the hybrid program in three years.
“I just read (Supreme Court Justice) Ruther Bader Ginsburg’s book, and she had kids when she went to law school, and she talks about how it actually helps to balance your life … because law school is so all-consuming,” Al Taqatqa said. “By the day, I’m an analyst, and I can’t focus on law school. Later in the evening, I’m a mom and a wife. And at night, I’m in law school.”
400 APPLICATIONS
For students, distance learning cuts out some of the biggest expenses and time drains of law school.
And at a time when law school enrollments nationally have hit a 42-year-low, Mark Gordon, president and dean of Mitchell-Hamline, sees new types of enrollment offerings geared toward nontraditional students — from night and weekend classes to an “executive JD” program for working professionals — as essential to the school’s future.
“It has expanded access to legal education to populations that have not been able to pursue it before,” Gordon said. “It has been incredibly successful. We had between 400 and 500 applications for 96 slots in the hybrid program.”
Some prospective students may worry they’ll lack community or rigorous class discussion plugging into a computer.
Others worry how employers will react after realizing their school was mostly virtual.
Kennedy and Al Taqatqa said things have worked out well for them.
Kennedy has already turned down an offer to be an in-house lawyer at a Las Vegas casino and accepted a contract position he sees as more rewarding. Al Taqatqa was offered a position at the Minneapolis law firm of Dorsey & Whitney next year after she takes the Minnesota bar exam.
As for fostering a sense of community, weekly online discussion boards allowed the students to react to readings or issues in the news. In addition to weeklong capstone courses on campus each semester, most interactions took place mostly through Facebook.
“We’ve all lived enough life prior to law school,” Al Taqatqa said. “Those conversations would be much more surface-level in a traditional law school program, because traditional law school students are 23 years old. Most people have already had another career, or two or three careers, and bring so much diversity to discussions.”
But was the school academically rigorous?
“You’d better be dedicated to go to law school,” Kennedy said. “It’s not something you just float through. I couldn’t just step away from my job … but there’s a lot of things you have to say no to, a lot of family time stuff. (In a sense,) the whole family goes, not just me. Even my dog went to law school. He has a place to sleep right next to my desk.”
For Kennedy and Al Taqatqa, the final weeks of law school will be a touch bittersweet.
Together, they won a regional competition last year in negotiation and dispute resolution, similar to a mock trial.
In February, they became national champions, winning their negotiation competition in Chicago. In July, they were off to Oslo for five days of intense competition, which ended with them being crowned the best of 32 teams from around the world.
That was followed by a celebration in the Nobel Peace Center.
Brian Kennedy and Briana al Taqatqa, reigning world champions of mock-negotiation, crowned July 2017 in Oslo, Norway pic.twitter.com/ZCBOvD3PSy
— Frederick Melo, Reporter (@FrederickMelo) November 15, 2017
“We are literally the reigning world champions,” said an excited Kennedy. Al Taqatqa added, tongue-in-cheek, “We’re real easygoing. Just don’t question us.”
