Thos. Jefferson Answers Grad's Suit, Says Bar-Pass Stats Showed Some JDs Weren't Working Lawyers
Answering a California lawsuit filed by an unhappy graduate who says she’s working as a document reviewer despite earning a law degree with honors, Thomas Jefferson School of Law says it did nothing wrong.
The institution accurately reported its employment statistics, under applicable standards, to U.S. News & World Report for the magazine’s annual law school rankings survey, TJSL says in a demurrer (PDF) filed in response to Anna Alaburda’s complaint obtained by Above the Law.
And, as a college-educated law school applicant, Alaburda should not have been misled, as she claims, into thinking that TJSL graduates’ employment prospects were rosier than they are, the filing in the San Diego Superior Court suit contends.
She should have readily been able to see, from the magazine’s survey information, that a number of Jefferson law graduates could not possibly have been working as lawyers, it states, because the bar examination pass rates also included in the article make clear that a number of graduates did not have their law licenses.
A chart included in the demurrer, for example, shows that the 2011 edition of the survey reported 92 percent of the law school’s graduates were employed within 9 months of graduation but only 70 percent had passed the bar.
Additional and related coverage:
ABAJournal.com: “Honors Grad Working as Doc Reviewer Sues Law School, Says She Was Misled by US News Stats”
ABAJournal.com: “FTC Should Probe Law Schools’ Employment Stats, Recent Grad Asserts”
ABAJournal.com: “Around the Blawgosphere: Bloggers on New York Times’ Take on New York Law School, Its Outgoing Dean”
