Selections from Cooley's President

So you're a law school president whose school has been sued for manipulative data. Wouldn't think it's a good idea to avoid making any comments in the media that might admit the case has some kind of merit? Apparently Don Deluc thinks otherwise.

About the school's new Florida campus:

The economy in Michigan is worse than elsewhere, so we were looking at a way to take our program to a location where students are, rather than try to entice students to come to Michigan where the economy is below par.

If the economy in Michigan is that bad - so bad that you're following Ave Maria's lead in high-tailing it to Florida - why was Thomas Cooley advertising promising salaries for its incoming graduates? If the local economy is "below par," can a law school really justify sucking in prospectives by the hundreds?

I realize the connection is not direct (and that it's indisputable that Michigan's economy sucks), but if I were representing Cooley, I would not be happy that the president is on record as saying the local economy is below par, especially when one of its recent studies shows relatively low unemployment for lawyers nationwide. If I'm trying to defend the accuracy of Cooley's representations to prospective students, I do not want the dean on record as saying the local economy was "below par" during a recession, especially when Cooley's representations looked surprisingly like its peers in non-"below par" states.

LJ: There are 11 ABA-accredited law schools in Florida. Is this really an underserved market?

D.L.: Florida is probably average for law school enrollment based on its population. It's 80% bigger than Michigan, but it doesn't have 80% more law school seats....

What we have here is, in my opinion, an admission that the "underserved market" - from Cooley's point of view - is not the amount of lawyers in practice or the amount of law school graduates looking for jobs, but rather the amount of people looking to go to law school. And he compares it not by looking at surveys of underserved populations, but rather by arguing that there are less proportional seats in Florida than in Michigan (of course there are, Cooley makes Michigan one of the most saturated law school states in the country).

One of the chief allegations of the suit, it seems to me, is that Cooley advertises an output (employment prospects of students) that is significantly rosier than it is. And here, the President of the school responds to a rather ambiguous question with the proportional input (government-backed demand for legal education) instead of even thinking that the "market" might be that of graduates' employability.

On the Kurzon Strauss lawsuit:

In effect, without commenting on the merits overall of what they said, they could have said what they said about the practices undertaken by any law school in the United States.
...
Without going into the details, because we haven't filed an answer to this yet, what we will be saying is that we are doing exactly what everybody else does.

Isn't lesson 8 or 9 in a course on negligence that this argument does not work because an entire industry could be out-of-compliance? Why would it be different for fraud? And why the hell would your defense be that "we're doing what everyone else does" when your defense should be "we're doing what's right," shouldn't it?

For that matter, could Kurzon Strauss really have filed a suit against Yale? Seriously? Cooley is no different than a T-14 or a solid state school like Texas or UCLA or Florida or Iowa?

Sometimes I think the arguments seem surprisingly childish. "Caveat emptor," "everyone else does it, so why can't we?", and my new personal favorite courtesy of the lawprof debacle "anonymous speech is cowardly and has no merit." None of these ideas has much serious legal heft anymore, and yet they get trotted out by parties that should have a sophisticated legal awareness and, often, bought wholesale by the same class of people.

How can Cooley defend a liability lawsuit on the grounds of 'all the kids are doing it" while (hopefully) telling their students that that argument hasn't flown since the century before last?

I'm not saying any of these statements will have legal relevance, but if I'm Cooley's attorney, I wouldn't be exactly delighted that my client's CEO is making comments that may bolster the opposition's points on some level.