Lawyer Up: Litigators Add 12 Law Schools To Class Action Complaint

A team of lawyers representing law school graduates has followed through on plans to file suit against a dozen additional schools, bringing the total of former students to 73 who are suing 15 law schools they claim misled them.

The litigators, headed by Jesse Strauss and David Anziska, charge that the schools named in the complaint fudged data on post-graduate employment rates by including jobs in non-legal fields and that pay too little to make a dent in average law school loans.

“We believe that some in the legal academy have done a disservice to the profession and the nation by saddling tens of thousands of young lawyers with massive debt for a degree worth far less than advertised,” Azinska said in a press release [PDF]. “Now that 51 additional recent law school graduates, represented by some of the most accomplished consumer protection lawyers in the country, have sued their law schools, it is time for the schools to take responsibility, provide compensation and commit to transparency. These lawsuits are only the beginning.”

The new targets include Albany Law School, Florida Coastal School of Law, and the Chicago-based John Marshall School of Law. Six additional law firms have signed up to provide primary council for the graduates.

Anziska frames the lawsuits as a consumer protection effort—acauseheseemstotakeseriously.He told AboveTheLaw, a prominent legal blog,that “these lawsuits will define a generation.”

(Read More About Affordable Education at Campus Progress.)

Without oversight, there is tremendous incentive for less competitive schools to bend the truth during recruitment in order to attract better applicants or just save face. According to USNews&WorldReport, among the estimated third of University of Texas-Austin’s School of Law graduates who are now working in non-law fields are “cartoonists, service dog trainers, and wind farm employees.”

“There can be no more self-reporting of unaudited employment data released to the public,” Anziska told AboveTheLawin a separate interview. “Over my dead body, this has to happen, because the incentive to cheat is too great. All law schools must be forced to have their employment data independently verified. I will not sign off on an agreement that does not have that in it. Period. It will not happen.”

According to Anziska's website, the team is still seeking law school graduates to join the class action suit.

Jon Christian is a staff writer with Campus Progress. Follow him on Twitter @Jon_Christian.

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