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David Anziska and Jesse Strauss, two law school litigators, filed class action lawsuits against Cooley Law and New York Law School last year. These two lawyers have now filed 12 new lawsuits against 12 new schools. In a media conference call earlier today, Anziska said the following, according to Above the Law:
“Now that fifty-one 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 12 new law schools facing lawsuits, in alphabetical order, include the following:
Albany Law School (with job placement rates between 91% and 97%); Brooklyn Law School (with job placement rates between 91% and 98%); California Western School of Law (with job placement rates between 90% and 93%); Chicago-Kent College of Law (with job placement rates between 90% and 97%); DePaul University College of Law (with job placement rates between 93% and 98%); Florida Coastal School of Law (with job placement rates between 80% and 95%); Golden Gate University School of Law (reports rates of 85% nine months after graduation); Hofstra Law School (with job placement rates between 94% and 97%); John Marshall School of Law (Chicago) (with job placement rates between 90% and 100%); Southwestern Law School (with job placement rates between 97% and 98%); University of San Francisco School of Law (with job placement rates between 90% and 95%) and Widener University School of Law (with job placement rates between 90% and 96%).
More information from the press release issued today is below:
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“Each lawsuit has been filed by multiple graduates as representative plaintiffs. The lawsuits allege that many schools falsely inflated graduate employment rates by, among other artifices, employing their own graduates in temporary jobs and counting graduates working in non-legal-related jobs and part-time and temporary jobs as “employed” even though such jobs either do not require a law degree or do not pay enough to service the massive debt taken on to finance the degree. The representative plaintiffs further allege that many schools reported “average” salaries based on a small sample of high earning graduates. As a result, the representative plaintiffs enrolled and remained enrolled at the school only to find themselves burdened with debt and with limited job prospects.”
The law firms that have gotten involved in the lawsuits include the following:
The Law Offices of Frank Raimond from New York; The Clinton Law Firm from Chicago, Illinois; Concepcion Martinez & Bellido LLP from Miami, Florida; Finkelstein Thompson LLP from Washington, D.C. and San Francisco, California; Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff LLP from Sacramento, California and Stone & Magnanini LLP from Short Hills, New Jersey and New York.
The duo of Strauss and Anziska claim that they will sue between 20 and 25 law schools each month. Strauss had the following to say about the scrutiny they face by filing the lawsuits:
“There has been a lot of positive movement in terms of more transparency from law schools, but it’s not happening fast enough, and not as thoroughly as we’d like. There’s been a lot of resistance. Folks coming into law school now have much better information than people who enrolled a few years ago, but people are continuing to enroll based on misleading information, and they continue to have massive debt. We’ve been working with Law School Transparency and we endorse a lot of their ideas, but in addition to the advocacy, there also needs to be compensation.”
