One lucky law school has escaped the wrath of angry graduates who slapped it with a lawsuit for allegedly misleading them about employment opportunities after graduation.
Yesterday, Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Melvin Schweitzer dismissed a $200 million class action lawsuit that nine New York Law School graduates filed against the school, accusing it of deceiving its students about job prospects and salaries. In their suit, the grads claimed the school published misleading data that misclassified graduates as fully employed when they only had temporary or part-time jobs. They also accused the school of skewing the data by creating post-graduate job programs in order to hire its own graduates.
In his opinion, Judge Schweitzer made it clear that though law school graduates face a bleak job market, they can’t blame the state of the economy on their alma maters. “In these new and troubling times, the reasonable consumer of legal education must realize that these omnipresent realities of the market obviously trump any allegedly overly optimistic claims in their law school’s marketing materials,” he wrote.
At the same time, Judge Schweitzer did say students are owed transparent information about job opportunities and salaries after law school. “It is this court’s fervent home that all the heat generated around this issue over the last year will be replaced with a renewed sense of responsibility to prospective applicants and students,” he wrote.
One of the plaintiffs’ attorneys, David Anziska, told Thomson Reuters that the group plans to appeal the decision. He also said he and his legal team plan on suing 20 more law schools by the end of May. Last week, Anziska and his team sued 20 law schools for misleading students about job opportunities, just one month after they had sued a dozen other schools.
