Law School Grads Sue Schools Over Lack of Jobs
With the higher education bubble bursting, some law students are blaming law schools for deceiving them into attending based on false post-graduation job numbers.
Maura Dolan of the Los Angeles Times reports.
Class action: Law school grads claim misleading reports of success
SAN FRANCISCO — Dozens of law graduates across the nation have joined class-action lawsuits alleging that law schools lured them in with misleading reports of their graduates’ success.
Instead of working in the law, some of the graduates were toiling at hourly jobs in department stores and restaurants and struggling to pay back more than $100,000 in loans used to finance their education. Others were in temporary or part-time legal positions.
Michael D. Lieberman decided to enroll at Southwestern Law School after reading that 97% of its graduates were employed within nine months. He graduated in 2009, passed the bar on his first try but could not find a job as a lawyer. He worked for a while as a software tester, then a technical writer, and now serves as a field representative for an elected official.
Lieberman, who earned his undergraduate degree at UC San Diego, believes his law degree may still be a “useful tool,” but he and other graduates said a suit they filed was intended to combat “systemic, ongoing fraud prevalent in the legal education industry” that could “leave a generation of law students in dire financial straits,” according to the complaint.
Nearly 20 lawsuits — five of them against California schools — are being litigated at a time of dim employment prospects for lawyers. Much of the work once done by lawyers can now be done more quickly by computers.
Online services have made law libraries largely unnecessary, allowing corporations to do more work in-house. Software has sped the hunt for information needed in discovery and other legal tasks, and Web-based companies offer litigants legal documents and help in filling them out. Even after the economy improves, some experts believe the supply of lawyers will outstrip jobs for years to come.
Class action: Law school grads claim misleading reports of success (The Los Angeles Times)
Comments
~ (b) How to Present Defenses. Every defense to a claim for relief in any pleading must be asserted in the responsive pleading if one is required. But a party may assert the following defenses by motion:
. . .
(6) failure to state a claim upon which relief can be granted.
~ Stated in non-legalese, Caveat emptor.
~ Or, ya pays your money and ya takes ya chances.
If a law school grad is part of a class action lawsuit, isn’t that kind of like an internship?