The New York law firm sued last month by Cooley Law School for defamation filed a class action lawsuit today against the school. The allegations in the class action lawsuit -- that the school misrepresents the employment and salary status of its graduates -- are similar to the allegations that form the basis of Cooley's lawsuit against the law firm, Kurzon Strauss. The suit was filed in the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan.
Cooley continues to push back aggressively against the allegations. As reported by the Detroit Free Press, Associate Dean and general counsel Jim Thelen said:
To the extent the lawsuit challenges our postgraduation employment and salary statistics, we stand by our reporting to the National Association for Law Placement, and any claims that prospective students or our graduates have been misled or legally harmed by our reporting are simply baseless. We understand that three of the four named plaintiffs have established and are working in their own law firms. This proves that Cooley's graduates are practice-ready lawyers who are well prepared to pass the bar exam and enter a profession with one of the lowest national unemployment rates among any profession in the country.
Thelen told the WSJ Law Blog if any of the plaintiffs or their attorneys has issue with how law schools report employment numbers they should take it up with the American Bar Association (which accredits law schools), or the Department of Education (which grants authority to accredit), not with individual law schools.
Kurzon Strauss, which is also suing New York Law School on similar grounds, is equally pugnacious in its complaint:
This action seeks to remedy a systemic, ongoing fraud that is ubiquitous in the legal education industry and threatens to leave a generation of law students in dire financial straits. Essentially, plaintiffs want to bring an element of ‘sunlight’ or transparency to the way law schools report postgraduate employment data and salary information, by requiring that they make critical, material disclosures that will give both prospective and current students a more accurate picture of their postgraduate financial situation, as opposed to the status quo where law schools are incentivized to engage in all sorts of legerdemain when tabulating employment statistics. The school during the class period claims that a substantial majority of its graduates -- roughly between 75% and 80% -- secure employment within nine months of graduation. However, the reality of the situation is that these seemingly robust numbers include any type of employment, including jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with the legal industry, do not require a JD degree or are temporary or part-time in nature.
Here's the complaint (PDF). (Note: Kurzon Strauss might want to file an amended complaint correcting the spelling of Sen. Charles Grassley's name.) Here's the ABA Journal story.
The other law school sued, New York Law School, most recently attracted legal blogosphere attention when it expanded its class size by 30%. Blog commentators pointed out that the NYLS's dean, Richard Matasar, in 2009 had taken law schools to task for "exploiting" students who don't succeed, saying at a panel discussion on legal education, "we should be ashamed of ourselves."
