Can a Law School be successfully sued for inflating its employment numbers to attract more students to enter its Law School?
More students mean well more $$. And lots of it.
Thus there is increasing pressure on Law Schools to “fudge” their numbers to get more enrollment.
A few years ago Villanova Law School got caught lying about some of its admission rates in order to boost its ranking as a top tier Law School in US News and World Report rankings.
What this case seems to boil down to is whether Thomas Jefferson School of Law is legally liable for using inflated employment data about its law school graduates in order to get people to enroll at their school.
What the plaintiff is saying is she RELIED upon the false information the school passed out about its graduates as a reason for going to its law school.
The school claimed that most of its graduates got full time law related jobs shortly after graduating from its school.
However what it considered full time law related work included working as a WAITRESS full time. Not exactly law related right?
Pittsburgh wrongful death,medical malpractice slip and fall car accident and criminal attorney Bernie Tully will be the first to say this is a very difficult case to win.
Consider that most of these type of cases are thrown out of court by a Judge.
But if the Law School is lying about its statistics don’t you think they should be held accountable?
Well that is how I see it.
What do you think of this article from the legal Intelligencer?
“Nearly a decade has passed since an aspiring young lawyer in California, Anna Alaburda, graduated in the top tier of her class, passed the state bar exam and set out to use the law degree she had spent about $150,000 to acquire.
But on Monday, in a San Diego courtroom, she will tell a story that has become all too familiar among law students in the United States: Since graduating from the Thomas Jefferson School of Law in 2008, she has yet to find a full-time salaried job as a lawyer.
From there, though, her story has taken an unusual twist: Ms. Alaburda, 37, is the first former law student whose case against a law school, charging that it inflated the employment data for its graduates as a way to lure students to enroll, will go to trial.
Other disgruntled students have tried to do the same. In the last several years, 15 lawsuits have sought to hold various law schools accountable for publicly listing information critics say was used to pump up alumni job numbers by counting part-time waitress and other similar, full-time jobs as employment. Only one suit besides Ms. Alaburda’s remains active.
None of the other cases reached trial because judges in Illinois, Michigan and New York, where several cases were filed, generally concluded that law students had opted for legal education at their own peril.
But a California judge let Ms. Alaburda’s suit proceed, brushing aside efforts by the law school to derail her claims.”
Thanks for reading
Bernie The Attorney