By Connor Samuelson
the daily northwestern
Future law school applicants may not get the illustrious legal jobs they feel they were promised post-graduation.
Struggling law school alumni filed class-action lawsuits earlier in February against 15 law schools across the country for inflating job placement statistics. The respondents include three Chicago law schools: John Marshall Law School, DePaul University College of Law and Chicago-Kent College of Law.
Law schools report job placement statistics as the percentage of graduates who find employment within nine months of graduation.
Alumni plaintiffs argued their alma maters reported job placement rates upwards of 80 percent, although the rates of graduates who are actually employed in the legal profession may be below 40 percent.
The plaintiffs argue law schools count alumni who work part-time and outside of the legal profession as “employed” to increase their job placement rates.
Steven J. Harper, a professor at Northwestern’s Law School, said the suit will likely change how law schools report their statistics.
“In order to show high placement rates, law schools, in reporting graduates as employed, don’t make any distinction about what that employment actually is,” Harper said. “And the American Bar Association has let them get away with this until now. Instead they will demand that all law schools break down data in ways that show more accurate employment rates.”
The professor said the law schools’ desire to pad statistics and increase their national rankings is the heart of the problem.
Harper added the 90 percent job placement rates reported by some of these law schools are absurdly high, especially when factoring in the poor state of the economy and “the combination of the cost and the less certain job prospects” for lawyers.
Nonetheless, confidence among NU undergraduates planning on going to law school is not affected.
Taylor Hartstein, who is considering going to Columbia Law School next year, said he understands the plaintiffs’ point of view, even though job placement rates are not his primary concern.
“It would be very disappointing to make an investment in law school and not get the result you were expecting,” the SESP senior said. “I think that they have an obligation at least to disclose how they come up with these numbers.”
Harper said it makes sense that these lawsuits have little effect on NU’s undergraduates planning to attend prestigious law schools.
“These lawsuits would ultimately not affect the top-tier law schools as far as there will always be the prestigious level,” the professor said.
Weinberg senior Jenny Johnson said she was not surprised when she read news of the lawsuits, and she still plans to attend law school next year.
She does, however, see an issue with what this lawsuit implies about the legal profession itself.
“There is a terrible representation of people in law schools and in the legal profession that they do anything to get ahead,” Johnson said. “I want to go into law to do the right thing. I think there is dignity in law and I don’t like when there are things like this lawsuit that make people think otherwise.”
