Last week, the Lansing State Journal reported that The Thomas M. Cooley Law School, in two suits, went on the offensive against lawyers and bloggers who, the school claims, damaged Cooley’s reputation with a series of defamatory posts and statements.
Yesterday’s LSJ revealed some of what has raised Cooley’s hackles: a 6,000-word post on a website called “The Thomas M. Cooley Law School Scam.” An excerpt from the post, as reported by the LSJ:
“I am probably doing YOU THE BIGGEST FAVOR OF YOUR LIFE by raising public awareness and offering you this advice….all free of charge! As a prior student who was fortunate enough to GET OUT OF COOLEY let me lay a SMACKDOWN on this PIECE OF [excrement] TTTT (Third Tier Toilet Trash) school.”
The post, written by “Rockstar05,” took Cooley to task, says the LSJ:
for its low admissions standards, its high attrition rate, the job prospects of its graduates, [and] the fact that Cooley produces its own set of law school rankings which place it in the number two spot, just behind Harvard.
In his the post, reports the LSJ, Rockstar05 wound things up this way:
You want to spend years of your life that you cannot get back, likely get into 150K or more of non-dischargeable debt, for a degree with a ZERO RETURN ON INVESTMENT????!!!! …
LISTEN TO ME, YOU WILL RUIN YOUR LIFE BY ATTENDING THIS SCHOOL.
Rockstar05’s original post has been taken down and replaced with a response to Cooley’s suit. The comments to the original post, however, remain on the blog.
Two anonymous responders to Rockstar 05’s original post are also named in one of Cooley’s suits. According to the LSJ, the responders:
claimed that Cooley was involved in criminal activity related to federal student loans.
[The school] also sued an anonymous poster to The Huffington Post, who repeated the claims of criminality, and, in a separate case, two New York attorneys who appeared to be soliciting clients for a class action suit against the school.
A Cooley press release explains the claims against the Big Apple attorneys:
Cooley contends that the law firm of Kurzon Strauss LLP and two lawyers in that firm, David Anziska and Jesse Strauss, defamed Cooley by falsely claiming on Internet websites, social media, and email that Cooley, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) Michigan educational corporation, has defrauded students by misrepresenting its graduate employment placement rates, average starting salary figures, and student loan default rates. …
“Cooley has consistently and truthfully reported job placement and salary figures in the manner required by the American Bar Association (ABA), our accrediting agency, and by the National Association for Law Placement (NALP), a national jobs-reporting clearinghouse,” said Charles Toy, associate dean of Career and Professional Development at Cooley and the immediate past president of the State Bar of Michigan.
The Michigan Lawyer 
Every person that tries to use internet for bad purposes should be punished. Internet defamation became a powerful tool against any type of business or people over the internet and unfortunately it’s very hard to stop this trend because there’s no way to punish those people. They are very good on hiding their tracks so is hard to see who’s writing a bad review or a defamatory article.
I think these probably disgruntled law school failures need to learn a lesson. Cooley is great.
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