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Breaking Class Action Suits Filed Against Cooley And Nyls

By Kyle McEntee and Patrick J. Lynch
We have just been informed that Kurzon Strauss, the law firm recently sued by Thomas M. Cooley Law School for defamation, will represent plaintiffs in two class action lawsuits against Cooley and New York Law School. The press release, complaints, and summons are attached below.

Both Cooley and NYLS have been in the news lately. Recently, the ABA Section of Legal Education Council acquiesced to Cooley opening a Florida campus. David Segal, writer for the New York Times, targeted NYLS in his latest piece on law schools. (For NYLS's response, see here.) We also wrote a piece, which is cited in the NYLS complaint, on NYLS's deceptive practices in April.

We will update this article throughout the day as we learn more.

Updates:

Commentary

Of note, the plaintiffs in the Cooley suit are represented by a 2006 Cooley graduate, Steven Hyder of The Hyder Law Firm, in addition to Kurzon Strauss. This is particularly interesting because Cooley received some pointed criticism for not using its own graduates when filing its defamation suit against Kurzon Strauss.

Readers may also remember that a Cooley graduate, Zenovia Evans, went on a hunger strike for law school transparency.

Both suits are motivated by a goal of transparency:

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 post-graduate 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 post-graduate financial situation, as opposed to the status quo where law schools are incentivized to engage in all sorts of legerdemain when tabulating employment statistics.

Gomez-Jimenez v. NYLS

  • Points out Dean Matasar's public recognition that law schools at times exploit students and that law schools and the academy have a "moral responsibilty" to either shut schools down or fix poor outcomes.
  • Alleges two basic, written uniform representations
    • Reporting misleading Nine-month Employment Rates
    • Reporting inflated mean salaries
  • Calls NYLS a "JD-factory"
  • States that there is no place for prospective students to find NYLS's real employment numbers.
  • "By playing fast and loose with its employment data, NYLS creates an impression of bountiful employment opportunity that in reality does not exist."
  • "[NYLS] continues to make the fantastical claim that the overwhelming majority of its graduates are gainfully employed."
  • "NYLS students graduate on average with a whopping $119,437 in loans, placing them in the top 17th percentile of indebtedness among all law school graduates."
  • "[T]he law school industry today is much like a game of three-card monte, with law schools flipping ace after ace, while a phalanx of non-suspecting players wager mostly borrowed money based on asymmetrical information on a game few of them can win."
  • Claims: a) New York's Deceptive Acts and Practices Law, NY General Business Law §349, et seq.; b) Fraud; and c) Negligent Misrepresentation.
  • NYLS increased its first-year class by over 30 percent in 2009, up to 736 students (its largest class ever). This is the second largest incoming class in the country.
  • NYLS Law Professor, Randolph N. Jonakait: "At a school like New York Law, which is toward the bottom of the pecking order, it's long been difficult for our students to find high-paying jobs…Adding more than 100 students to an incoming class harms their employments prospects. It's always been tough for our graduates. Now it's tougher."
  • "NYLS, by virtue of its participation in NALP's annual employment survey, clearly has the means to and actually does distinguish between various degrees of employment, and breaks down the exact percentage of its recent graduates who have secured part-time employment."
  • "NYLS, as with any law school, has every incentive to perpetuate this mass deception, because they are not required by the ABA, Department of Education or any other governing body to independently audit or verify their employment data."
  • "However, if NYLS was to disclose accurate employment data and the steep odds its graduates face in securing gainful employment, it would become abundantly clear to any rational purchaser how poor of an investment attending NYLS is."

Plaintiffs

  • Alexandra Gomez-Jimenez: 2007 NYLS graduate; practicing attorney who is a member in good standing of the New York Bar; secured full-time, permanant employment about one year after graduation; she now has her own law firm.
  • Scott Tiedke: 2009 NYLS graduate; practicing attorney who is a member in good standing of the New York Bar; since graduating law school, he has worked as a legal and compliance officer in an investment management firm.
  • Katherine Cooper: 2010 NYLS graduate; unemployed member in good standing of the New York Bar.

Relief Sought

  • Preliminary and injunctive relief enjoining Defendants, their agents, servants, employees and all persons acting in concert with them from continuing to engage in their unlawful recruitment program and manipulation of post-graduate employment data and salary information, and all other unfair, unlawful and/or fraudulent business practices alleged in the complaint and and that may yet be discovered in the prose dark:prose-invertcution of this action.
  • Injunctive relief ordering that NYLS retains unrelated, independent third-parties to audit and verify post-graduate employment data and salary information
  • Restitution and disgorgement of all tuition monies remitted to NYLS, totaling $200 million.
  • Damages
  • Punitive damages
  • Attorneys' fees and expenses pursuant to all applicable laws
  • Prejudgment interest

MacDonald v. Cooley

  • Claims: Michigan's Consumer Protection Act, MCLS §445.901, et seq.; Fraud; Negligent Misrepresentation.
  • Points out how Cooley is the largest law school in the country, "Churning out nearly 1,000 newly-minted JD graduates each year."
  • Alleges the school has employed "Enron-style" accounting methods, a phrase coined by Professor Bill Henderson in David Segal's January New York Times article.
  • Claims that despite the school's advertised employment rate of 80% or higher, if the school were to disclose the percentage of only those "graduates who have secured full-time, permanent positions for which a JD degree is required or preferred," the percentage could be "30% or lower."
  • Alleges the school "grossly inflates its graduates' reported mean salaries" and that the reported medians are not statistically meaningful.
  • Refers to prospective law students as "naïve, relatively unsophiscicated consumers" who are basing their decision to "purchase" a law degree from Cooley "based on asymmetrical information."
  • "According to US News, Thomas Cooley has the lowest admissions standards of any accredited and provisionally accredited law school in the country. For 2010, it accepted approximately 83 percent of all applicants, an acceptance rate that is nearly 15 percentage points more than the second least selective law school, Phoenix School of Law. The mean LSAT score for incoming students is 146 and the mean undergraduate GPA is 2.99, both lows for all accredited and provisionary accredited law schools."
  • "In marketing itself to students, Thomas Cooley makes a number of bold, if not incredulous statements that are incommensurate to its low academic and reputational standings in the legal marketplace."

Plaintiffs

  • John T. MacDonald Jr.: 2010 Cooley graduate; former Naval Officer who served four years and received an honorable discharge prior to attending law school; practicing attorney in good standing with the Michigan Bar; could not find full-time, permanent legal employment and currently operates his own law firm.
  • Chelsea A. Pejic: 2006 Cooley graduate; practicing attorney in good standing with the Illinois Bar; could not obtain gainful legal employment and was unemployed for a long period of time despite circulating hundreds of resumes; has worked as a volunteer staff attorney and temporary contract attorney and has briefly operated her own firm.
  • Shawn Haff: 2010 Cooley graduate; practicing attorney in good standing of the Michigan Bar; could not find full-time, permanent legal employment and was forced to take temporary, contract assignments reviewing documents; currently has his own law firm.
  • Steven Baron: 2008 Cooley graduate; currently unemployed, despite having circulated hundreds of resumes since graduation.

Relief Sought

Seeks refunding or reimbursement to current and former students, an injunction against Cooley's marketing practices, auditing by an independent third party, and attorneys' fees.

Press Release

Lawsuits Seek to Reform Reporting of Post-Graduate Employment Data

Two class action lawsuits alleging fraud, negligent misrepresentation and deceptive business practices were filed today against New York Law School ("NYLS") and Thomas M. Cooley Law School ("Thomas Cooley"). The suits allege that the schools knowingly inflate reported rates of post-graduate employment and salary statistics to recruit and retain students. The putative class actions were filed by three NYLS graduates and four Thomas Cooley graduates, respectively.

"These suits are not just about NYLS and Thomas Cooley – we believe the practice of inflating employment statistics and salary information is endemic among law schools" stated David Anziska an attorney at Kurzon Strauss LLP ("Kurzon Strauss"). "We hope these suits bring systematic change in the way legal education is marketed by making transparency and accuracy the rule, not the exception. Our efforts to bring about that change begin today."

In addition to seeking monetary relief for current and former students, the suits seek to ensure that law schools report accurate post-graduate employment data that allows prospective students to make an informed decision regarding whether to invest in a law degree. The suits allege that to recruit students for their programs – which cost tens-of-thousands of dollars per-year – law schools, including NYLS and Thomas Cooley, misrepresent their graduates' employment prospects by misclassifying graduates who have only secured temporary or part-time employment as being "fully" employed, excluding graduates who do not supply information from employment surveys, and creating post-graduate "jobs programs" into which they hire their own graduates.

"We are bringing these suits because thousands of young lawyers, like the plaintiffs, struggle to purchase a home, raise a family and make investments because they leveraged their future to a law school based on inaccurate information," stated Jesse Strauss, a Kurzon Strauss partner. "It is time for the legal academy to own up to this problem."

To help prose dark:prose-invertcute the Thomas Cooley lawsuit, Kurzon Strauss has retained as local counsel Steven Hyder of The Hyder Law Firm, PC, who is a 2006 graduate of Thomas Cooley.

The cases are Gomez-Jimenez et al. v. New York Law School, Index No. Unassigned (electronically filed), (Supreme Court, New York County) and MacDonald et al. v. Thomas M. Cooley Law School, 11-CV-00831 (W.D.MI).

Kurzon Strauss LLP is one of the premier New York based commercial litigation and corporate transactional law firms. For more information, log on to www.kurzonstrauss.com.