I once knew a sales guy who was such a shucking and jiving backslapping ‘B.S.er’ that some of his customers called him “the laughing, lying one.” Most of them knew better than to take his salesman’s patter seriously. Still, I thought the description deliciously apt.
Now it turns out that in an entirely different context, that ‘laughing, lying’ moniker might also fit those B.S.-spewing law schools hungry to garner favorable ratings to continue attracting gullible student enrollees. However, in their case, the law schools’ “customers” are starting to take matters more seriously. And they aren’t laughing at saleman’s puffery.
For example, Anna Alaburda, a 2008 honors graduate of San Diego, California’s Thomas Jefferson School of Law (TJSL), is the lead plaintiff in a class action suit filed May 26, 2011 in state court against her alma mater. The Complaint, which can be accessed here seeks $50 million in compensatory damages on behalf of the class, which could number as many as 2,300.
Causes of Action.
The suit has 5 causes of action, mostly for various alleged violations of California’s Business & Professions Code § 17200 et seq, including alleged material misrepresentations and acts of concealment by TJSL. The plaintiffs deem these acts “unlawful, unfair and fraudulent business practices prohibited by UCL [California's Unfair Competition Law].”
Additionally, Alaburda and the class contend TJSL violated the False Advertising Act by purportedly disseminating “false and misleading statements in U.S. News & World Report’s “Best Graduate Schools” publication, on its website, and in its marketing brochures.”
The Complaint further states that “These misleading statements concerned post-graduation employment statistics, among others. These false and misleading statements were made with the intent to induce the general public, including Plaintiff and the Class, to enroll at TJSL”
The third cause of action sounds in fraud. Alaburda and the class allege the school has a “fraudulent marketing program.”
The fourth cause of action is for alleged violation of the Consumer Legal Remedies Act, which “prohibits unfair methods of competition and unfair or deceptive acts or practices undertaken by any person in a transaction intended to result or which results in the sale of goods and services.” The underlying basis of the violation complains that TJSL misrepresented its post-graduation employment rates.
And the fifth and final cause of action alleges negligent misrepresentation.
The news of the class action comes courtesy of the website, Law School Transparency, “a Tennessee non-profit dedicated to encouraging and facilitating the transparent flow of law school consumer information.” Law School Transparency has a terrific recap on the dispute, which it posted on Friday, May 27, 2011. Also see Law.com‘s report at “Law school sued over ‘false’ employment statistics.”
Given the theories raised by Alaburda and the class against TJSL and the recently widely reported law schools’ fudging of graduate post-employment numbers, it’s logical to anticipate that this suit will be closely watched by the law school industry.
Will more lawsuits follow?
But more ominously, since the theories underpinning Alaburda’s Complaint could just as easily be raised against many other law schools, i.e., the inflating of post-graduation employment numbers to induce enrollment and reputation, it’s easy to foresee similar suits to follow. In her Complaint, Alaburda makes note of the recent media reports about fudged job numbers, e.g., “Is Law School a Losing Game?” – NYTimes.com Also see, “Law schools award a degree of “BS.”
However, as much as Alaburda’s case engenders a plaintiff’s lawyer’s sympathies, it appears to me that like the foreclosure defense suits brought by underwater homeowners against predatory lenders, lawsuits against law schools may not find a lot of support from regular folks still making mortgage payments and otherwise fulfilling their obligations. Regular folks, as I have found from my own conversations, put more stock in personal responsibility. And surprisingly, they’re quicker to blame the defaulting homeowners and not the predatory mortgage industry or the quick-buck realtors or the greedy Wall Street investment firms.
Buying an unaffordably overpriced law degree by cluelessly betting on a non-existent job market is analogous to deceptively financing an unaffordably overpriced home based on a ludicrous expectation that a hyper-inflated real estate market would exist in perpetuity.
No matter that law graduates have been suckered or that their anger at law school disassembling is justified. Which side has the stronger legal and especially, the moral equities? Is it the law graduates who fell down on adequate due diligence and now have buyer’s remorse? Or is it the “laughing, lying” law schools?
And since budding lawyers freshly-sprouted from law school don’t fall neatly into what my UCC Professor often explained were “the idiot consumers the law seeks to protect,” will this ultimately be a ‘you made your bed, now sleep in it‘ argument? Or as one of my favorite thinkers, Thomas Merton, more elegantly said, “In the last analysis, the individual person is responsible for living his own life and for “finding himself.” If he persists in shifting his responsibility to somebody else, he fails to find out the meaning of his own existence.”
Law schools expanded their enrollment because professor salaries were so high. The reason they were so high is that the ABA led a program to continually re price salaries to the mean, which of course continued to go up. The ABA signed a consent agreement regarding that.
Probably what happened is that the salaries at the ABA were pegged to the salaries at law schools.
[...] More: Class action filed against law school. Will more buyer's remorse … [...]
Ok, we have alllll heard of buyer beware. Fine. There is usually some merit to a lawsuit, a story to be heard, fine. But since we are on topic, let’s look to see who also influences her economic success (besides her own will to succeed): The real criminals are the people granting loans with ridiculous interest rates. A “bar loan” of $12k that one graduate took out in May is now at nearly $16k, despite having paid more than $4k in payments toward the loan. THAT IS A CRIME!!! It is not a suprise, that most grads will take out a bar loan because it is not a surprise that msot grads do not not have cushy jobs lined up to pay the bar exam expenses plus living costs. People wouldn’t be as concerned about the job prospects if the loans they now ‘owned’ weren’t as criminal as the ones these banks give out to the already struggling grads. We get it, the economy is bad. Jobs are starting to pick up in the legal field and it is not like we have no seen this economic cycle before, so really, grow up if you thought you were immune or that privileged to escape a bad economy. THE STUDENT LOAN LENDERS ARE THE CRIMINALS!!!! Consumers can get debt washed out in Bankruptcy for stupid debt they accumulated buying crap for their homes yet student debt as RIDICULOUSAS THIS is NOT?! Lets point the finger to the correct people here.
You make an excellent point. Overpriced law school tuition and then food and housing are bad enough but then to finance it all at usurious rates further compounds the imprudence. Thanks for your comment.
- Mo
I admit to being guilty of believing law schools when they produced information “proving” the value of their degree. I inquired further of the professors, all skilled advocates, and they uniformly assured me the representations were true and (?who knows?) perhaps in their life experience, they were. It was not until half-way through law school that I realize that possibly, just possibly, some of those professors were basing their opinions on conditions that no longer applied in the legal marketplace, and by then I had already sunk enough into law school loans that “the only way out is through” – if I had quit, I’d have huge debt and no way to pay it; only a law degree could get me the income to pay the loan!
Now, how was I supposed to figure out that these law schools and professors – who are professionals in the art of argumentation and in possession of far more data than I – were bullshitters?
Randall
Excellent points and many thanks for your observations. Your remarks bring up another consideration, one I have parenthetically blogged about before, which is about the cluelessness of those denizens living and preaching in the so-called ‘Ivory Towers’ of academia. There’s always been much truth to the old adage, “Those that can, do and those that can’t, teach.”
And consequently, I’ve wondered before about what the percentage is of full-time (not adjunct) law school professors who have actually worked as practicing, fee-earning lawyers for any meaningful period of time, e.g., at least 10 years. Indeed, I suspect many of them have not ever actually practiced law whether for a big firm or for themselves as solos. And I further hypothesize that even now, as law school professors, the professors maintain a status with their respective jurisdictions as “inactive” members of the bar. This arguably makes them even less connected to the ‘real world.’ They really can’t know what they’re talking about today. Moreover, were they to concede that law degrees no longer justify their cost or have value would conflict with their salary-producing employment self-interest.
Your opinion is apt, though, that some of your professors “were basing their opinions on conditions that no longer applied in the legal marketplace.” But I would go further and say that some of them may have never actually worked as lawyers ‘in the trenches’ and so they really don’t know anything about what it takes to survive in the legal marketplace.
- Mo