Three attorneys have said they will sue the Washington College of Law by Memorial Day weekend for attracting students with allegedly fraudulent post-graduation statistics.
New York-based attorney Frank Raimond said the supposedly misrepresented employment data allows the school to over-inflate tuition rates each year.
The schools are intentionally “over-inclusive with the employment statistic and under-inclusive with the salary statistic,” Raimond said, including any type of employment in employment statistics.
“If you’re working at Starbucks, if you’re working a jackhammer on the corner, you’re employed with your legal degree,” Raimond said of employment statistics. “We say that is misleading. People who are applying to law school aren’t envisioning that they’re going to work a jackhammer.”
Plaintiff attorneys Raimond, David Anziska and Jesse Strauss have already filed lawsuits against 15 law schools and now plan to do the same against 20 more. Their law firms, the Law Offices of David Anziska and Strauss Law PLLC, are partnering with six others nationwide to advance the lawsuits in multiple states.
Two schools, WCL and Pepperdine University, are ranked at 49 in the top 50 2013 U.S. News and World Report Best Law Schools. Eight of the 20 new targets are ranked between 50 and 100, including Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law at 82.
Raimond said WCL, as well as most law schools, inflate their statistics by including every type of job in the employment percentage instead of just “J.D.-preferred full-time employment,” a term he said NALP uses for “a job you need a law degree for.”
The Washington College of Law declined to comment or speculate on a lawsuit that has not been filed, according to WCL Director of Public Relations Franki Fitterer.
Employment stats don’t always reflect law-related employment
WCL’s Class of 2010 had an employment rate of 84.6 percent, as calculated by the Association for Legal Career Professionals (NALP) methodology.
NALP-method statistics also showed 4.8 percent as further pursuing a degree, 4.3 percent as not seeking employment, 6.3 percent as actively seeking employment and 0.21 percent as unknown.
NALP statistics are calculated on Feb. 15 each year and show the employment rate by dividing the number of graduates employed by the number of graduates whose employment status is known, according to NALP’s website.
The organization considers someone employed if they have a job — full-time, part-time, temporary, permanent, law-related or otherwise. Those who are not employed are those returning to graduate school, as well as those without a job, whether or not they are looking for one.
In 2011, U.S. News and World Report, another top reporting organization, changed its methodology for calculating employment statistics. In the past, graduates were considered employed if they were working full- or part-time in a legal or non-legal job, pursuing more graduate education or if employment information was unknown.
Graduates were considered unemployed if they had not found a job in the nine months since graduation, and they were not included in the calculation if they had reported themselves as not seeking unemployment.
The methodology was changed to count unemployed as those returning to graduate school, those who reported not seeking employment and those who did not provide the information.
The American Bar Association requires its approved schools to publish post-graduation data and recently changed its standards to show “J.D.-preferred full-time employment” rather than simply requiring any employment data at all, according to Raimond. However, he said the new standard does not require separating temporary and permanent employment and does not require schools to have a third-party auditor.
Lawyers say salary information is not representative
Raimond said salary information is also misrepresented. Schools often reach out specifically to high-earning graduates to complete surveys, meaning collected data does not always accurately reflect the entire graduating class, he said.
For WCL 2010, the private sector mean salary was reported as $99,612 per year, including the top 25 percent who make around $160,000 per year, and its public sector mean salary as $54,506 per year.
“Salary information reported is based on a very small subsection of the class,” Raimond said. “Certain schools … reach out to the law review students of their class. The law review students are always the top of the class and they have the best chance of getting these uber-competitive jobs, and thus they oftentimes have salaries that skewed toward the high end.”
Raimond said graduates entering the current law job market have less chance of making a salary that can compensate for the cost of their law education.
WCL reports show the 2012-2013 academic year tuition costing $45,914 per year, an increase of $9,450 in five years from 2007-2008 when tuition was $36,464 per year.
Similar lawsuit dismissed last week
An existing lawsuit against the New York Law School was dismissed March 21 when the New York State Supreme Court ruled “the plaintiffs’ demand of damages that would equal the difference between what they paid for law school and how much their degree is worth is not a remedy under the law since the ‘great recession’ of 2008 and its aftermath have ‘wreaked havoc’ on the legal job market,” according to Judge Melvin L. Schweitzer Jr.
Inclusion of an independent third-party auditor to verify law schools’ statistics is one goal of the simultaneous lawsuits, Anziska said. They are also seeking partial tuition reimbursement to students in recent graduating classes.
Anziska said they would appeal the dismissal.
“We’ve always expected, especially on a trial court level, a lot of judges might not be that sympathetic, but on the appellate level where law matters, they will be,” Anziska said.
The attorneys want to find at least three WCL graduates willing to be named plaintiffs before they bring a case against the University. Raimond said “a couple of people” have contacted them about WCL since announcing the litigation March 14.
“The more that call us, the better,” he said.
Raimond said the team is willing to take the cases as far as they have to go.
“We think if you’re going to ask a bunch of 22-year-old kids to sign over $150,000 and three years of their life, they should know what they’re getting into and they should know what the real prospects for them are on the other end of it,” he said. “It’s really crippled a lot of graduates over the past six years now, both financially and personally, and we don’t want that to continue.”
rkaras@theeagleonline.com
