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Twelve more law schools sued
RICHARD WEINER
Legal Notebook
Published: February 16, 2012
After several months of threatened lawsuits, 12 more law schools have finally, officially been sued for misleading incoming students about their employment prospects and other aspects of law school and law degrees...
New York Law School as well as Thomas Cooley and Thomas Jefferson law schools are already in suit. In total now, 15 law schools, or 8 percent of all ABA-accredited schools, are in litigation brought by 74 former students.
All 12 class action lawsuits were filed by the offices of New York City attorney David Anziska, together with Strauss Law PLLC and six other law firms.
The 12 new schools that were sued on the last day of January are Albany Law School, Brooklyn Law School, California Western School of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law, DePaul University College of Law, Florida Coastal School of Law, Golden Gate University School of Law, Hofstra Law School, John Marshall School of Law (Chicago), Southwestern Law School, University of San Francisco School of Law and Widener University School of Law.
The actions are in fraud.
The lawsuit against Thomas Jefferson is now in discovery mode, as of the end of January.
Anziska had previously announced his intention to sue 11 of these schools back in October, and had actively sought former students of each of these schools to act as plaintiffs in fact. The firms added Golden Gate to the list late last year.
Each lawsuit has multiple graduates of each school as representative plaintiffs. Each suit is being handled by local counsel, which accounts for the multiple firms that are involved.
Basically, each lawsuit alleges that the schools in question falsified the employment rates and types of employment of their graduates. The suits allege that the schools did this by, among other “artifices:”
• employing their own graduates, particularly in temporary jobs;
• counting graduates working in non-legal-related jobs;
• counting graduates in part-time and temporary jobs as “employed;”
• counting as employed graduates who took jobs that do not require a law degree;
• counting graduates as employed although they are underemployed to the extent that they are unable to service their student debt.
Another allegation in the suits is that schools reported “average” salaries based on a small sample of high earning graduates. As a result, said the lawsuits, the representative plaintiffs enrolled and remained enrolled at the school “only to find themselves burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.”
“We believe that some in the legal academy have done a disservice to the profession and the nation by saddling tens of thousands of young lawyers with massive debt for a degree worth far less than advertised” said David Anziska in a written statement, on behalf of plaintiffs’ counsel. “Now that 51 additional recent law school graduates, represented by some of the most accomplished consumer protection lawyers in the country, have sued their law schools, it is time for the schools to take responsibility, provide compensation and commit to transparency. These lawsuits are only the beginning.”
The advocate website Law School Transparency (LST) has done some in-depth analysis they are calling a “Transparency Index Performance” of the allegations against each school. The site recently posted that only one of those 12 schools even currently discloses the number of graduates who found full-time, permanent jobs for which bar passage was required.
Specifically per school, each of the schools’ websites has the following problems in dispensing the needed information, according to LST:
One of the most common problems is that the schools do not list the numbers of full time jobs versus part time jobs (FT/PT). This is true of nearly every school on the list.
The University of San Francisco School of Law “does not even list employment statistics on its website.”
On the other hand, Southwestern Law School, located in Los Angeles, is, “[O]ne of the best performing schools with 12 met criteria,” and is one of two schools that currently provide the “full-time, long-term legal employment rate.” The school’s only weakness is that it does not provide the number of school-funded jobs.
Other problems included the website of Hofstra, which provided “misleading salary figures and employment list.” More than half of the schools, according to LST, provided misleading salary figures.
Plaintiff’s counsel has said that copies of the complaints will be posted at www.anziskalaw.com.