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ABA to report more accurate employment data

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The American Bar Association is laying down the law, reacting to the recent scrutiny of law schools’ job placement data by starting to enforce an already-announced series of regulations.

The push to revise data collection measures is, in part, a reaction to U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer’s recent public criticism of how the ABA doesn’t require law schools to disclose their legal employment rates. Boxer sent a third letter to the ABA on Oct. 6 expressing her complaints.

The ABA, in a response letter to Boxer dated Oct. 20, says it’s altering the way it collects law school employment and placement data to in an effort to make the reporting more accurate, timely, complete and specific. The National Association of Law Placement used to collect the data in the past, but now the information will be reported directly to the ABA.

New York law firm Strauss PLLC has been leading the charge to expose schools that post misleading figures, with a pack of disgruntled and jobless law school graduates acting as plaintiffs. Strauss sued New York Law School in Manhattan and Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Lansing, Mich. this summer for allegedly inflating post-grad hiring numbers and announced plans on Oct. 5 to sue 15 more law schools that are mostly concentrated in large metro areas saturated with lawyers, like Chicago, New York City and Philadelphia.

“In light of recent revelations of violations or possible violations … [the ABA] is working on a new standard that would provide for specific and severe penalties for intentional misreporting of basic consumer information,” the ABA said in a statement.

Law schools will have to improve their transparency by reporting each graduate’s employment status, employment type (differentiating jobs that do and don’t require a bar passage or preferred J.D. degree), employment location, salary, whether a position is short-term or long-term, and whether a position is funded by the school itself.

At least one school under the spotlight, NYLS, insists it has been reporting numbers to date accurately and is now asking the court to dismiss the suit as meritless.

In a lawsuit filed this summer, Strauss sued NYLS for $200 million in tuition refunds as well as other damages and reformed methods of reporting their graduates’ employment numbers.

“The allegations are not only baseless, but also belied by the plaintiffs’ own complaint which demonstrates this case has nothing to do with New York Law School and everything to do with a crusade against the entire law school industry,” said Michael Volpe of Venable LLP, lead attorney representing New York Law School and a NYLS graduate.

Thousands of new lawyers are facing minimal job prospects each year, said Strauss’ partner Jesse Strauss, but law schools are instead advertising skewed figures that appear to make the job market for lawyers sound more appealing than it really is.

NYLS is standing up for itself, saying there is no legal basis for the suit.

“NYLS clearly communicates the realities of the legal job market to prospective students,” said Harry Althaus, associate dean for special projects.

He says the school’s website lists more information than is required by the ABA, like the industries in which NYLS grads are likely to work, detailed post-graduate placement statistics and current salary figures.

As stated in the school’s brief, filed on Oct. 6 in the Manhattan Superior Court, “Notably, the Complaint does not allege … that the employment and salary data NYLS published violated the ABA’s standards, rules or policies [or] that Plaintiffs would have forgone a law school education or gone to a different ABA-compliant law school had NYLS published different statistics.”

NYLS, established in 1891, sits in lower Manhattan’s TriBeCa district near where many legal and government sectors and corporate headquarters live.

Its grads include U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan and former New York Appellate Division First Department Justice Emilio Nuñez, the first Latino to be named to the bench in New York.

Tierney Plumb

Tierney Plumb

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