The suits on behalf of recent graduates claim that the law schools inflated the employment rates of their graduates. Here are excerpts from the two complaints:
Steven Hyder (P69875)
The Hyder Law Firm, P.C.
PO Box 2242
Monroe, MI 48161
hyders@hyderlawfirm.com
Phone (734) 757-4586
David Anziska
Jeff Kurzon
Jesse Strauss (admission pending)
Kurzon Strauss LLP
305 Broadway, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10007
Phone (212) 822-1496
Facsimile (212) 822-1407
www.KurzonStrauss.com
Counsel for Plaintiffs, individually
and for all others similarly situated
UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT
FOR THE WESTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
JOHN T. MACDONALD JR., CHELSEA : Case No._____
A. PEJIC, SHAWN HAFF, :
and STEVEN BARON, on behalf :
of themselves and all :
others similarly situated, :
: CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT
Plaintiffs, :
:
v. :
:
THOMAS M. COOLEY LAW SCHOOL, :
and DOES 1-20, :
Defendants. :
:
: JURY TRIAL DEMANDED
1
Plaintiffs, acting for themselves and for all persons who currently attend or graduated
from the Thomas M. Cooley Law School during the relevant time period (collectively
“Plaintiffs”), allege as follows. Plaintiffs‟ allegations are based on the investigation of counsel,
including but not limited to reviews of advertising and marketing material, various publicly
available information and interviews of former students, and are thus made on information and
belief, except as to individual actions of Plaintiffs, as to which Plaintiffs have personal
knowledge.
PRELIMINARY STATEME NT
“Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant” – Justice Louis Brandeis
1. 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. Essentially, Plaintiffs want to bring an element of “sunlight” or transparency to the way
law schools report post-graduate 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 post-graduate financial situation, as opposed to the status quo where law
schools are incentivized to engage in all sorts of legerdemain when tabulating employment
statistics.
2. Churning out nearly 1,000 newly-minted JD graduates each year, the Thomas M.
Cooley School of Law (“Thomas Cooley” or “Defendants”) is by far the largest law school in the
country with approximately 4,000 students spread out across four campuses, the overwhelming
majority of whom -- 82 percent -- are enrolled on a part-time basis. Indeed, Thomas Cooley‟s
enormous class size and diverse student body is a point of pride for the school, which expressly
markets itself as being “committed to providing a legal education to people from all walks of
Case 1:11-cv-00831 Doc #1 Filed 08/10/11 Page 2 of 45 Page ID#2
2
life.” To that end, Thomas Cooley in its Mission Statement represents that its underlying
purpose is to “prepare its graduates for entry into the legal profession through an integrated
program with practical legal scholarship as its guiding principle and focus,” by imbuing them
with the requisite skills and knowledge “needed to be a success in the law and a valuable
member of society.”
3. Unfortunately, in reality, far from preparing its many, many students for entry
into the legal profession and imbuing them with the skills and knowledge necessary to succeed in
law, the school consigns most of them to years of indentured servitude, saddling them with tens
of thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt that will take literally decades to pay
off. The school has done this while blatantly misrepresenting and manipulating its employment
statistics to prospective students, employing the type of “Enron-style” accounting techniques that
would leave most for-profit companies facing the long barrel of a government investigation and
the prospect of paying a substantial civil fine. These deceptions are perpetuated so as to prevent
prospective students from realizing the obvious -- that attending Thomas Cooley and forking
over nearly $100,000 in tuition payments is a terrible investment which makes little economic
sense and, most likely, will never pay off.
4. Specifically, Thomas Cooley, through both its print and internet marketing
materials, commits two basic written, uniform misrepresentations. First, the school during the
class period claims that a substantial majority of its graduates -- roughly between 75 and 80
percent -- 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. Rather, if Thomas Cooley was to disclose the more pertinent
Case 1:11-cv-00831 Doc #1 Filed 08/10/11 Page 3 of 45 Page ID#3
3
employment statistic -- i.e. those graduates who have secured full-time, permanent positions for
which a JD degree is required or preferred -- the numbers would drop dramatically, and could be
well below 30 percent, if not even lower.
5. Second, Thomas Cooley grossly inflates its graduates‟ reported mean salaries, by
calculating them based on a small, mostly self-selected subset of graduates who actually submit
their salary information. If the Defendants were to disclose salary data based on a broad,
statistically meaningful representation of its graduates, by including more graduates who have
failed to secure full-time, permanent employment, the reported mean salaries would decline
precipitously. 1
6. Defendants‟ deceptions are all the more shocking considering that they are being
perpetuated on naïve, relatively unsophisticated consumers -- many of whom are barely removed
from college -- who are often making their first “big-ticket” purchase. These students tend to
apply to law school with one objective in mind: to attain the kind of job that provides the
compensation and lifestyle that are commensurate with and worthy of the enormous time, money
and personal sacrifice invested in a legal education.
7. Compounding problems, there is no place where prospective students can find
Thomas Cooley‟s “real” employment numbers. Indeed, the school supplies the same dubious
statistics to the U.S. News & World Report (“US News”) and the American Bar Association
(“ABA”), the two primary sources of information for law school employment data. Like
1
True to its past patterns and practices of lashing out at critics and tolerating absolutely
zero dissent, Thomas Cooley, in a crude, cynical attempt to intimidate potential plaintiffs, chill
free speech and police the Internet, has filed two sham, SLAPP lawsuits in Michigan State court
against Plaintiffs‟ Counsel, Kurzon Strauss LLP (“Kurzon Strauss”), and its attorneys David
Anziska and Jesse Strauss, and four “John Doe” plaintiffs for alleged defamatory statements
made over the Internet. Needless to say, these lawsuits have been met with near universal
derision, engendering a strong backlash in both the press and the legal community, and are
deficient on both procedural and substantive grounds.
Case 1:11-cv-00831 Doc #1 Filed 08/10/11 Page 4 of 45 Page ID#4
4
Thomas Cooley, these sources count as “employed” those who have secured employment in any
capacity in any kind of job, no matter how unrelated to the legal field.
8. By playing fast and loose with its employment data, Thomas Cooley creates an
impression of bountiful employment opportunity that in reality does not exist. This problem has
grown more acute since the onset of the “Great Recession” in 2008. The stark reality of the
situation is that law students today face the grimmest job market in decades. Yet Thomas
Cooley, instead of telling the sobering truth to prospective and current students, continues to
make the fantastical claim that the overwhelming majority of its graduates are gainfully
employed.
9. Worse yet, Thomas Cooley deceives its students while saddling them with tens of
thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt. According to US News, Thomas
Cooley students graduate on average with a whopping $105,798 in loans, with over 90 percent of
them assuming debt to attend the school. The current annual tuition for full-time students at
Thomas Cooley is $30,644 and $19,714 for part-time students, excluding thousands of dollars in
living expenses, making it one of the more expense law schools in the country, despite the fact
that it is ranked in the fourth or bottom tier by the U.S. News in its annual law school rankings.
10. Unfortunately, Thomas Cooley‟s false and fraudulent representations and
omissions are endemic in the law school industry, as nearly every school to a certain degree
blatantly manipulates their employment data to make themselves more attractive to prospective
students. It is a dirty industry secret that law schools employ a variety of deceptive practices
and accounting legerdemain to “pretty up” or “cook” the job numbers, including, among other
things, hiring recent unemployed graduates as “research assistants” or providing them with
“public interest” stipends so as to classify them as employed, excluding graduates who do not
Case 1:11-cv-00831 Doc #1 Filed 08/10/11 Page 5 of 45 Page ID#5
supply employment information from employment surveys, refusing to categorize unemployed
graduates who are not “actively” seeking employment as unemployed and classifying graduates
who have only secured temporary, part-time employment as being “fully” employed.
11. Thus, the law school industry today is much like a game of three-card monte, with
law schools flipping ace after ace, while a phalanx of non-suspecting players wager mostly
borrowed money based on asymmetrical information on a game few of them can win. To a
remarkable extent, law schools have been astonishingly successful in carrying out this scheme.
Last year law schools awarded over 43,000 JD degrees, an increase of 11 percent from a decade
earlier, while law school tuition over the past two decades has risen exponentially, far exceeding
both inflation and any increase in attorneys‟ starting salaries. Not surprisingly, the debt burden
of law school graduates has risen correspondingly, and the average debt burden for graduates of
private institutions is now over $100,000.
************************************************************************************************
SUPREME COURT OF THE STATE OF NEW YORK
COUNTY OF NEW YORK
------------------------------------------------------------x
ALEXANDRA GOMEZ-JIMENEZ, SCOTT
TIEDKE and KATHERINE COOPER, on behalf
of themselves and all others similarly situated,
Plaintiffs,
-against-
NEW YORK LAW SCHOOL, and DOES 1-20,
Defendants.
------------------------------------------------------------x
Index No.:
Date Purchased: August 10, 2011
Plaintiff designates New York
County as the place of trial.
Summons
The basis of venue is the county of
Defendant’s principal office as
listed with the New York Secretary
of State: 57 Worth Street, New
York, NY 10013
To the above named Defendants:
YOU ARE HEREBY SUMMONED to answer the complaint in this action and to serve a
copy of your answer, or, if the complaint is not served with this summons, to serve a notice of
appearance, on the Plaintiffs’ Attorney(s) within 20 days after the service of this summons,
exclusive of the day of service (or within 30 days after the service is complete if this summons is
not personally delivered to you within the State of New York), and in case of your failure to
appear to answer, judgment will be taken against you by default for the relief demanded in the
complaint.
Dated: New York, New York
August 10, 2011
By:
/s/ Jeff Kurzon
Jeffrey M. Kurzon
Kurzon Strauss LLP
305 Broadway, 9th Floor
New York, New York 10007
Jeff@KurzonStrauss.com
Phone: 212-822-1496
Facsimile: 212-822-1407
www.KurzonStrauss.com
Counsel for the Plaintiffs, individually
and for all others similarly situated
Defendants’ Addresses:
57 Worth Street
New York, NY 10013
185 West Broadway
New York, NY 10013
Phone: 212-431-2100
David Anziska
Jeff Kurzon
Jesse Strauss
Kurzon Strauss LLP
305 Broadway, 9th Floor
New York, NY 10007
Phone (212) 822-1496
Facsimile (212) 822-1407
www.KurzonStrauss.com
Counsel for Plaintiffs, individually
and for all others similarly situated
SUPREME COURT OF NEW YORK
FOR THE COUNTY OF NEW YORK
ALEXANDRA GOMEZ-JIMENEZ, : Index No._________________
SCOTT TIEDKE, and :
KATHERINE COOPER, on behalf of :
themselves and all others similarly situated, :
: CLASS ACTION COMPLAINT
Plaintiffs, :
:
v. :
:
NEW YORK LAW SCHOOL, and :
DOES 1-20, :
Defendants. :
:
: JURY TRIAL DEMANDED
1
Plaintiffs, acting for themselves and for all persons who currently attend or graduated
from New York Law School during the relevant time period (collectively “Plaintiffs”), allege as
follows. Plaintiffs’ allegations are based on the investigation of counsel, including but not
limited to reviews of advertising and marketing material, various publicly available information
and interviews of former students, and are thus made on information and belief, except as to
individual actions of Plaintiffs, as to which Plaintiffs have personal knowledge. Upon
information and belief, more than two-thirds of all members of the putative class, at all material
times relevant to the allegations of this Complaint, were residents of the State of New York and
are current or former students of Defendant New York Law School (“New York Law,” “NYLS”
or “Defendants”).
PRELIMINARY STATEME NT
“Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant” – Justice Louis Brandeis
1. 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. Essentially, Plaintiffs want to bring an element of “sunlight” or transparency to the way
law schools report post-graduate 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 post-graduate financial situation, as opposed to the status quo where law
schools are incentivized to engage in all sorts of legerdemain when tabulating employment
statistics.
2. Indeed, New York Law’s dean, Richard Matasar, actually publicly recognized this
problem, when, during a program sponsored by the Association of American Law Schools,
acknowledged that “[w]e [law school deans] should be ashamed of ourselves. We own our
2
students’ outcomes. We took them. We took their money....And if they don't have a good
outcome in life, we're exploiting them. It's our responsibility to own the outcomes of our
institutions. If they're not doing well ... it's gotta be fixed. Or we should shut the damn place
down. And that's a moral responsibility that we bear in the academy.”
3. However, far from heeding his own advice by taking “ownership” of his students’
outcomes, Mr. Matasar’s school consigns the overwhelming majority of them to years of
indentured servitude, saddling them with tens of thousands of dollars in crushing, non-
dischargeable debt that will take literally decades to pay off. New York Law has done this while
blatantly misrepresenting and manipulating its employment statistics to prospective students,
employing the type of “Enron-style” accounting techniques that would leave most for-profit
companies facing the long barrel of a government investigation and the prospect of paying a
substantial civil fine. These deceptions are perpetuated so as to prevent prospective students
from realizing the obvious -- that attending NYLS and forking over nearly $150,000 in tuition
payments is a terrible investment which makes little economic sense and, most likely, will never
pay off.
4. Specifically, NYLS, through both its print and internet marketing materials,
commits two basic written, uniform misrepresentations. First, the school during the class
period claims that the overwhelming majority of its graduates – roughly between 90 and 95
percent -- 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. Rather, if NYLS was to disclose the more pertinent
employment statistic -- i.e. those graduates who have secured full-time, permanent positions for
3
which a JD degree is required or preferred -- the numbers would drop dramatically, and could be
well below 50 percent, if not even lower.
5. Second, NYLS grossly inflates its graduates’ reported mean salaries, by
calculating them based on a small, mostly self-selected subset of graduates who actually submit
their salary information. To that end, if the Defendants were to disclose salary data based on a
broad, statistically meaningful representation of its graduates, by including more graduates who
have failed to secure full-time, permanent employment, the reported mean salaries would decline
precipitously.
6. Defendants’ deceptions are all the more shocking considering that the school has
functioned as a veritable “JD-factory”, enrolling in 2009 1,596 total students, an increase of 270
students from 2000. In 2009, at the height of the “Great Recession” and while the legal industry
was experiencing historic job cuts, NYLS enrolled its largest first-year class ever -- 736 students
-- which was an astounding 30 percent increase from the previous year. As detailed in a recent
New York Times exposé, these increases can largely be explained by the school’s desire to
maintain the AAA rating that Moody’s had given the school’s $135 million bond offering which
was floated to finance the construction of a brand new 235,000-square-foot complex.
7. Compounding problems, there is no place where prospective students can find
NYLS’s “real” employment numbers. The school supplies the same dubious statistics to the U.S.
News & World Report (“US News”) and the American Bar Association (“ABA”), the two
primary sources of information for law school employment data. Like NYLS, these sources
count as “employed” those who have secured employment in any capacity in any kind of job, no
matter how unrelated to the legal field.
4
8. By playing fast and loose with its employment data, NYLS creates an impression
of bountiful employment opportunity that in reality does not exist. This problem has grown
more acute since the onset of the “Great Recession” in 2008. The stark reality of the situation is
that law students today face the grimmest job market in decades. Yet NYLS, instead of telling
the sobering truth to prospective and current students, continues to make the fantastical claim
that the overwhelming majority of its graduates are gainfully employed.
9. Worse yet, NYLS deceives its students while saddling them with tens of
thousands of dollars in crushing, non-dischargeable debt. According to US News, NYLS
students graduate on average with a whopping $119,437 in loans, placing them in the top 17th
percentile of indebtedness among all law school graduates. The current tuition for NYLS is
almost $50,000, excluding living expenses, making it one of the most expensive law schools in
the country, despite the fact that it is ranked by US News 135th of all accredited law schools.
10. Unfortunately, NYLS’s false and fraudulent representations and omissions are
endemic in the law school industry, as nearly every school to a certain degree blatantly
manipulates their employment data to make themselves more attractive to prospective students.
It is a dirty industry secret that law schools employ a variety of deceptive practices and
accounting legerdemain to “pretty up” or “cook” the job numbers, including, among other things,
hiring recent unemployed graduates as “research assistants” or providing them with “public
interest” stipends so as to classify them as employed, excluding graduates who do not supply
employment information from employment surveys, refusing to categorize unemployed
graduates who are not “actively” seeking employment as unemployed, and classifying graduates
who have only secured temporary, part-time employment as being “fully” employed.
11. Thus, the law school industry today is much like a game of three-card monte, with
law schools flipping ace after ace, while a phalanx of non-suspecting players wager mostly
borrowed money based on asymmetrical information on a game few of them can win. To a
remarkable extent, law schools have been astonishingly successful in carrying out this scheme.
Last year law schools awarded over 43,000 JD degrees, an increase of 11 percent from a decade
earlier, while law school tuition over the past two decades has risen exponentially, far exceeding
both inflation and any increase in attorneys’ starting salaries. Not surprisingly, the debt burden
of law school graduates has risen correspondingly, and the average debt burden for graduates of
private institutions is now over $100,000.
12. The dramatic increase in law school tuition has dovetailed with the dramatic
increase in faculty compensation. Law school professors and deans are perhaps the best
remunerated in academia today, enjoying both lavish perks and exorbitant salaries that rival
those of Fortune 500 executives. For example, during the fiscal year of 2008-2009, Dean
Matasar earned a staggering $543,738 in total compensation, making him one of the highest paid
law school deans in the country.
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