More Lawsuits Filed against Law Schools over Post-grad Employment Rates
A couple of weeks ago Above the Law had this story about the growing list of lawsuits against law schools for allegedly misrepresenting employment rates to potential students. Lawsuits are filed or planned against over 15 law schools nationwide.
The plaintiffs' lawyers in many of these cases predict that there will be suits filed against all law schools within the next year:
Strauss and Anziska held a media conference call this afternoon, with Strauss stating that he believed “almost every law school in the country will be sued by the end of 2012&Prime because the “problem isn’t going away, and the legal academy isn’t owning up to it.” Strauss and Anziska noted multiple times that they would not sue a school unless they had three plaintiffs.
Anziska noted that prior to the Alaburda v. TJSL suit, law schools reported inaccurate employment data with “Madoff-like consistency.” Strauss and Anziska are challenging the post-graduate employment data of these 15 additional law schools because they are in “markets that are saturated with lawyers, making the statistics implausible.”
Dean Wormer must be quaking in his boots.
And now the U.S. Senate is getting involved.
It will be interesting to see if law school litigation makes it to Mississippi. It will be more difficult here than in some states with no state court Rule 23 and no mass joinder allowed. If cases are filed, one would expect Miss. College to be sued before Ole Miss because it is a private school that is more expensive.
Without being burdeoned by an heightened understanding of the plaintiffs' claims aside from their allegation that law schools misrepresented post-graduate employment statistics, I am calling these cases BS at this point. I have been telling college students not to go to law school for years because the profession was over saturated and not one listended. People go to law school because they become enthralled with the "glamorous" perception of law practice as depicted in the media -- not because of real world data. These folks want to do what Jack McCoy or Denny Crane does on any given episode, not conduct document review and respond to discovery. I guess they will sue Dreamworks and Time-Warner next. Geez!
My niece was expressing thoughts of going to law school after obtaining her B.A. I told her to google "job prospects for law students" and saved her a life of depression and poverty. Now she's in grad school in business or something. There are no jobs out there for anyone in any field but especially so in law. And then there's the misery factor.
Phillip,
I think it would be interesting if you would compare and publish admission credentials, i.e. lsat scores, of the University of Mississippi and Mississippi College students. I would be particularly interested to know what percentage of MC students fall below the twenty fifth percentile LSAT scores of U of M entrants.
Not that i mean to infer that MC is alone is abandoning standards. The U of M has now fallen to a third tier law school status, largely, I think, to the average quality of admitted students.
So, have these schools (and others) created a glut of law graduates by admitting students of increasingly lesser qualifications? If so, what are the implications of culpability in relation to employment opportunities?