The scoreboard isn’t looking so good for law school graduates who are waging war against their alma maters.
On Friday, a judge in Illinois threw out consumer-fraud lawsuits against Chicago-based John Marshall Law School and Chicago-Kent College of Law. In the suits, debt-saddled graduates from the schools accused the institutions of misleading them about post-graduate opportunities by inflating figures showing how many graduates landed jobs.
In deciding to dismiss the graduates’ suits, Cook County Circuit Judge Mary Mikva said she agreed with Judge Neil Cohen’s reasoning when he threw out a similar suit against DePaul University College of Law in September. In that ruling, Cohen said it wasn’t DePaul’s fault that graduates were entering the workforce during “the height of a tumultuous and deep recession that seriously affected employment in the legal profession.”
Lawyers for the plaintiffs in the John Marshall and Kent cases told the Wall Street Journal that they plan to appeal Mikva’s ruling.
With the John Marshall and Kent cases dismissed, the score is now 5-0 in favor of law schools. Cooley Law and New York Law School escaped similar suits earlier this year.
For more InsideCounsel coverage of litigation against law schools, read:
Law school falsified jobs data, according to ex-employee
Judge tosses Cooley Law grads lawsuit
Judge tosses suit against New York Law School for misleading jobs data
