Remember The Thomas M. Cooley Law School’s defamation suits against anonymous Internet commenters and the New York law firm that had made claims that Cooley misled prospective students with fraudulent job placement stats?
Earlier this week, the attorney for “Rockstar53,” Berkley attorney John Hermann, blasted the school in the Detroit Free Press, accusing it of abusing the system to silence critics:
“In contrast to their own mission statement, Cooley Law School is now seeking to use its power to stymie the constitutional right of free speech of its own students — albeit speech that negatively portrays the school consistent with other empirical data,” Berkley attorney John Hermann said in the motion, filed on behalf of his client, Rockstar05. “Ironically, Cooley is now the emperor who appears angry at being told he is not wearing any clothes.”
“Rockstar53” wrote on his blog “The Thomas M. Cooley Law School Scam” that the suit has caused “The Streisand Effect” i.e. by loudly objecting to something it wants silenced or deleted, it has actually done the reverse and brought more attention to it.
Today, New York law firm Kurzon Strauss filed a class-action suit against Cooley based on its earlier claims about the placement statistics. [Lansing State Journal]
“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,” Kurzon Strauss attorneys said in the suit. “Essentially, plaintiffs want to bring an element of ‘sunlight’ or transparency to the way law schools report postgraduate 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 postgraduate financial situation, as opposed to the status quo where law schools are incentivized to engage in all sorts of legerdemain when tabulating employment statistics.
“The school during the class period claims that a substantial majority of its graduates — roughly between 75% and 80% — secure employment within nine months of graduation. However, the reality of the situation is that these seemingly robust numbers include any type of employment, including jobs that have absolutely nothing to do with the legal industry, do not require a JD degree or are temporary or part-time in nature.”
The firm filed a similar case against New York Law School today.
The Michigan Lawyer 