Incoming Thomas Cooley 1Ls Relax! You Really Are Attending the Second Best Law School in the Country

... according to Judging Law Schools, 12th ed. (2010). And Thomas M. Cooley Law School doesn't like it when anyone says otherwise. In case incoming 1Ls didn't get the "message," the Law School filed two lawsuits last month claiming defamation and tortious interferrence with its students.

To: Students
From: President LeDuc
Re: Litigation
Date: July 14, 2011

Cooley filed two lawsuits in Ingham County today.

The first lawsuit is against a small New York law firm. Our suit contends that the firm has defamed us and tortiously interfered with our student relationships, and that the firm and two of its lawyers have been unethically soliciting former and present Cooley students to join in a class action lawsuit against us. At our insistence, the firm previously retracted blatantly false online statements about Cooley, but only days later the firm moved their focus to Craigslist and Facebook, where they began circulating a draft complaint filled with more false and damaging statements about Cooley.

The second lawsuit is against four John Doe defendants. As with the law firm defendants, we contend the Doe defendants are defaming Cooley online and tortiously interfering with our student relationships through a series of false, damaging, and often vulgar statements in Internet blogs and comments to those blogs and other sites.

For the full text of President and Dean Don LeDuc’s message, including his summary of the school's claims, see this ATL post.

Thomas Cooley Expanding to Florida. Not distracted by the lawsuits, Thomas Cooley is expanding. Evening courses are set to be offered in May of 2012 with day classes commencing in September 2012 at the Law School's new campus in Florida. See the Law School's recent web page announcement. Already the largest law school in the country, Cooley is going to open a Tampa Bay branch campus at Riverview, Florida. Apparently Cooley plans to enroll 700 students at the new campus!

I guess that means that after completion of their first year, incoming 1Ls may be able to transfer from one of Thomas Cooley's four Michigan campuses to Florida to avoid Michigan winters! For more, see Staci Zaretsky's Because Cooley Law Really Needs Another Campus ATL post. Zaretsky adds:

Both the ABA Section on Legal Education and the ABA Accreditation Committee thought it would be a smashing idea for this diploma mill to throw open its doors in May 2012. Color me surprised.

Note to Thomas Cooley Law: sue ALT, not me. I didn't characterize your school as a "diploma mill."

Jim Levy (Nova Southeastern) reports "[t]hat will bring the number of law schools in Florida to Twelve" on Legal Skills Prof Blog (emphasis in the original). No basis for a lawsuit because that is a factual statement. Unless, of course, Thomas Cooley Law can find some sanction-free legal grounds for a complaint that the use of bold somehow injures the school's reputation. [JH]