Litigation against law schools in Michigan, New York, Illinois, and California challenging employment data for recent grads as fraudulent has generally not been going well for the plaintiffs, although several appeals of dismissals are still pending. Perhaps that's what prompts a University of Missouri law professor to contemplate another type of challenge -- ethics complaints based on model rule 8.4 against lawyers at the law schools who are tied to the issuance of fraudulent data. Prof. Ben Trachtenberg says the easiest case is intentionally false data about the LSAT and GPA's of admitted students, but he believes that misleading employment data could also be the basis of an ethics complaint now that problems with the data are better known.
Trachtenberg has authored an article on the subject in the June 2013 Nebraska Law Review (draft available here). He told Bloomberg Law:
Almost every day when I get up I have to wonder: Is today the day I'm going to break down and file a complaint?
The lone comment to the ABA Journal story about Trachtenberg is skeptical.
Meanwhile, the ABA's Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar has issued a request for proposals to design a process to help the section do a better job of policing the data.
