Infilaw Allegedly Paid Graduates Not to Take the Bar; Faces Fraud and Discrimination Allegations

For those who haven't seen it, I wanted to repost what National Law Journal and Above the Law have reported regarding a lawsuit that's pending in Arizona by a terminated Arizona Summit employee.  From ATL:

Paula Lorona, a former assistant director of financial aid at Arizona Summit Law School, claims that starting in May 2014, all three of InfiLaw’s schools — Arizona Summit, Charlotte, and Florida Coastal — began offering $5,000 payoffs to students who were unlikely to pass the bar exam.

I guess it's a cost of doing business when you are enrolling tons of 140 LSATs and trying to stay accredited?

Above the Law has graciously posted a copy of the complaint that makes for some interesting reading to learn about the facts as alleged.  For example, Ms. Lorona was enrolled as an evening student in 2009 and became an administrative assistant for the school a few months later.  She received rather rapid promotions and was student accounts/accounting manager by 2011 (See para. 12, 16).  Pages 4-6 make allegations regarding alterations on an Arizona Summit state tax filing; by pointing out such things, Lorona allegedly became the recipient of harassment.

The really good stuff begins around page 8.  Lorona allegedly told Dean Shirley Mays that she they were misrepresenting the success rates of students admitted through the alternative admissions program. Beginning with paragraph 80, they set forth facts regarding the "failure predictor formula," which calculated whether a student was likely to fail the bar and if so, they would be offered $5000.

Lorona, as a 2014 alumna, allegedly received emails from the school regarding low anticipated pass rates and had a school-employed bar coach tell her the school was concerned about losing federal funding, while the school was still boasting high pass rates to the consuming public; the effect being that the school knew it was misleading students (see para. 90-100).

More intriguing, at least to me, is that in Count III the complaint sets forth a consumer fraud claim from an actual insider whose testimony can apparently establish admissions that show intent to deceive.  Lorona may face the same reliance problems that have plagued the class action cases in other jurisdictions, but as an employee of the school, she surely knows more than a run-of-the-mill student, and she's only suing on her own behalf rather than a class; thus, it should be her reliance that would matter, and not that of a vague made-up student with a time machine and unlimited access to things no one knows.

The complaint indicates that Lorona allegedly turned down a confidential waiver when she left employment.  Here's to hoping she and her attorneys continue that line of thought as the matter progresses.

The Battle of Law ScamDeans, Part II

Looking around, I realized that it has been a year since the first verses of "The Battle of LawScam Deans" were published!  Enough has happened since then to warrant an encore, so here goes:

 
(with apologies to Johnny Horton, "The Battle of New Orleans")


The schools threw open every door they had,
but student LSAT scores were really, really sad,
and the bar-pass rates started falling through the floor,
so Dean Allard said "it's the bar exam that's poor!"

            And the Scamblogs blogged 'cause they felt it was a calling,
            There weren't as many lemmings as there was awhile ago,
            The Scamblogs jeered as the Cartel found it galling,
            From the T13 to the Law Schools down below.

  
Cooley had no choice but to fire a bunch of Prawfs,
Hamline merged while uttering quiet coughs,
and just when UMass was about to take a fall,
Kosko and Carr knifed the Charleston School of Law.

            Chorus

Indiana Tech couldn't get accredited,
So they raffled off scholarships to try to get ahead,
TJSL hit the check-cashing place,
While Concordia quietly tried to save face.

            Chorus


Simkovic was mad that no one took him at his word,
When the bloggers all said his work was patently absurd,
Leiter preached the papers to his echo-chamber flock,
While Merritt, the Times and Leichter said the studies were a crock.

            Chorus


Professor Telman said "claw back the scholarships,"
But the critics continued to give the Prawfs the fits,
Steve Freeman's faux-outrage was certainly sublime,
And Steve Diamond was convinced the Kochs were funding law's decline.

            Chorus

　

The battle continues! Again, Fight the good fight, stay strong, and run the race with endurance! The truth is on our side.

 

JD disadvantage: make less than a janitor or a switchboard operator

The switchboard operator in a Massachusetts courthouse makes more than the public defender; the janitor, more than the assistant district attorney:

www.massbar.org/media/1494238/doing%20right%20by%20those%20who%20labor%20for%20justice.pdf

(See p 22.)

Of course, only two of those people have to pay annual fees to maintain a license to practice, and they happen to be the same two who had to complete a four-year bachelor's degree and a three-year law degree at a cost of several hundred thousand dollars, typically financed with student loans bearing high interest.

Pace Law School Asst. Dean of Career and Professional Development Jill Backer asserts that 25 U.S. Presidents will vouch for JD versatility.

Pace Law School has recently imposed some cutbacks in an effort to address its five million dollar deficit. These cutbacks reportedly include the elimination of all sabbaticals and all research stipends, a 5% salary cut for senior staff, and a 10% salary cut for all faculty. Perhaps more detailed information would be available but for Dean David Yassky’s decision to place a secret watermark on material distributed to faculty.

 

Yassky may be trying to discourage public discussions of Pace’s weak financial position, but really, these cutbacks are nothing to be ashamed of. I think that Pace Law’s website ought to feature banner articles describing, with pride, each and every defunded professorial perk. Pace could say that with the profession in crisis, the school has higher priorities than indulging its faculty with research stipends (aka well-funded summer staycations) or sending them off to expense-paid conferences in exotic resort locales (aka vacations).

 

What Pace Law should be ashamed of, however, is the recent editorial in the New York Law Journal by Jill Backer, Pace’s Assistant Dean of Career and Professional Development, criticizing the "sharp delineation" between law jobs and JD-Advantage jobs in the mandatory annual job placement survey. Here is the most remarkable quote from the article: 

 

"[I]t has long been acknowledged that practicing law is only one way to utilize a law degree. Indeed, a J.D. is a versatile degree, just ask 25 of 44 U.S. Presidents how they used theirs. So, why are the various regulators and reviewers of law schools making a sharp delineation between those graduates that are practicing law in the traditional sense which requires the Bar exam and those graduates using their degree in other ways?"

http://www.newyorklawjournal.com/id=1202723607549/JD-Advantage-Versus-JD-Required-The-Old-Rules-No-Longer-Apply#ixzz3aMY3l700

 

Is the annual 10-month-after-graduation employment survey of law grads misleading due to the segmentation of law and non-law jobs? Wouldn't it be better instead to do a 239-year-after-independence survey of Electoral College (I mean, Electoral Law School) victors? Skeptical of authority I may be, but if 25 U.S. Presidents are prepared to vouch for JD Advantage I just might have to do a rethink. So, with the assistance of google and a book by Robert Stevens called Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s, here is a Presidential legal education survey-- OTLSS’s contribution to employment transparency in the manner recommended by Pace.

Briefer News Update : Charleston SOL to Enroll 1Ls for 2015...

"Ignore the fact that we took $25 million dollars out of the school.  Our graduates will be well-prepared to be the lawyers of the new, post-apocalyptic millennium."

...because pushing harder in the same direction always works.

What else is there to say here?  OTLSS welcomes your comments.  H/T to the Faculty Lounge.

Brief News Update: There are too many lawyers? Say it ain't so!

As we all know, the lawyer job recovery is right around the corner, if you listen to Freedman, Diamond, Barros, Seto, et al.  

Apparently Bloomberg and several major law firms didn't get the scholarly memo:

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-13/there-are-too-many-lawyers-say-law-firms


But what about the 73% of associates that are "busy?"  That's good news, right?  Not so fast.  Of the firms surveyed, 61% are using part-time lawyers and 56% are using contract lawyers.  When asked if this trend was going to continue and be permanent, 73% of firms said "Yes" on both counts.  Outsourcing legal work will be a permanent trend for 52% of surveyed work going forward.  So much for the equity partnership track.

http://www.altmanweil.com/dir_docs/resource/1c789ef2-5cff-463a-863a-2248d23882a7_document.pdf 

As the Law School Cartel continues to bang the table, remember, folks, the scambloggers are disgruntled losers who don't want to work hard for a living, and are Koch-Brothers-backed haters of academic freedom and student-loans-setting-people-free on top of it.  You heard it here first!

Today's Lesson from Charleston School of Law: Law Students are Creditors

Things continue to happen at Charleston Law School, and the Post and Courier continues to earn my respect by actually reporting them fairly well (seriously, Charleston appears to have a solid smaller-market paper).

The latest plan is that a group of local lawyers are petitioning the state's supreme court to put the school into a bankruptcy-dodging receivership to formulate a debt settlement plan.  They would file this on behalf of the students still enrolled, and their standing argument I find intriguing:

The students have standing because they are “creditors” who have invested thousands in tuitions, much of it in student loans paid up front to the school.

Wait...what?  Current students are creditors?  Can anyone explain this adequately?

We just spent a multi-year period in the courts and concluded that law students are atypical consumers (atypical because they're assumed to be sophisticated beyond what they objectively can be and told that it's impossible for them to rely on things the seller regularly intends its customers to rely upon).  You don't have a right to a financial benefit of any kind at any point, and surely the school doesn't have a legally cognizable contract obligation to give you a degree if it closes in the meantime.  And surely they aren't admitting that the students have a common unliquidated claim against the school, right?  One has to wonder exactly how these students are "creditors" in the same universe where it's apparently impossible to prove a graduate school committed run-of-the-mill fraud.  Does the South Carolina Supreme Court want to set that precedent?

In any event, now we're faced with a situation where law school proponents are advocating for expanded student legal rights in order to defeat more vile law school proponents.  Of course, all this effort, all this nostalgia and savior complexing, is about a decade-old 4th-tier for-profit crap hole.

In addition to the receivership to basically settle debts to InfiLaw (which I'm sure InfiLaw won't fight at all), the plan calls for million-dollar gifts from each of the five founders to set up a non-profit foundation.

If you think such an idea is rooted in the same type of fantasy that clings to the idea of a fourth-tier law school being an essential community institution, you're about to get a cherry on top of the ridiculousness sundae:

And the success of the endeavor would be national news, thus generating more financial support funneled through the non-profit foundation.

Exactly what would be "national news" here?  "Greedy Old Dudes Give Up Pirate Treasure"?!  "Lawyers Use Trickery to Continue Pumping Out Lawyers"?!  "Fourth-Tier School Robs 2Ls of School Closure Discharge"?! 


If current 1Ls and 2Ls - particularly those in the bottom half of the class - have any notable legal interest in CSOL's fate, it's actually that CSOL goes under before they graduate, which gives them the special mulligan right of a closed school discharge.  That a group is filing on behalf of the current students to keep the place open is almost as sad as banking on a plan involving largess from the people who drove the place into the ground.

The worst possible outcome for the current students is that they find a way to keep the school open for two years so these classes can graduate and then it closes.  I would bet that's precisely what happens, and I would bet all too many of the students don't understand what a terrible deal that is for most of them.

But the students likely know better.  They're creditors in an educational-financial transaction so mysterious, it's almost like someone is just making it up.