Whether administrators concede a major problem or not, many other members of the community say the school is currently operating like it suffers from reputation difficulties.

In a somewhat unprecedented action, HLS recently commissioned a million-dollar study by the McKinsey consulting group, a move some see as an indication that the school is concerned with rectifying its status as the perennial number two law school.

But in a letter to alumni in the Harvard Law Bulletin, Dean of Law School Robert C. Clark presented the study as a form of strategic planning for the school and not as a response to criticisms that the school may be losing its luster.

The study, which is currently underway, has assigned about half of law school's active faculty to five strategic planning committees that range from academic development and internationalization to infrastructure and intellectual life.

According to Chan, HLS students were asked to complete surveys of about 20 pages in length and attend small focus groups on various topics.

Inherent in the goal of the study, it seems, is a concern with upholding HLS' reputation.

"The quest is for a Harvard Law School of the future that gets the highest marks for analytical rigor of its training and the theoretical sophistication of its scholarship," Clark writes.

But this concern for maintaining high marks, some say, is not necessarily warranted.

Despite some of the existing lore about the school, alumni in the field say HLS' reputation has not been tarnished by recent rumors.

"I don't think that anyone would dispute that [HLS] is one of the top few law schools," says Robert N. Shapiro '72, who, as a partner at prestigious Boston law firm Ropes & Gray, is one of the people responsible for hiring new lawyers.

Shapiro, who is also vice president for the HLS alumni association, says the firm consistently hires "deep" into the graduating class, a fact that reflects the academic quality of the school's students.

Similarly, Boston lawyer and HLS graduate Harvey A. Silverglate says his impression from working with undergraduates considering lawschool is that people recognize that "it's veryvaluable to have a HLS degree...in terms of beingable to generate choices for after you graduate."

But Silverglate acknowledges that HLS oftenlacks some of the vibrancy of schools like Yale orStanford, simply because it often fails to drawstudents who don't fit into a traditional mold.

"I do think from time to time that law schoolfails to get some of the more interestingstudents...and that's where the law school loses,"he says.

Still, as a former solicitor for the lawschool's alumni fund when he was a student atHarvard College, Chan says he noticed that manyalumni do indeed look back at their HLSexperiences with a bit of resentment.

"There is this strong sentiment among manyalums that HLS is this haunted mansion of a lawschool that they don't want much associationwith," Chan recalls.