In May 2011, Anna Alaburda, a 2008 honors graduate of Thomas Jefferson School of Law, filed a class-action lawsuit against her alma mater, alleging that the law school had committed fraud by publishing deceptive post-graduation employment statistics and salary data in order to bait new students into enrolling. When her complaint was first filed, she claimed that despite graduating at the top of her class and passing the California bar exam, she was unable to find suitable legal employment, and had racked up more than $150,000 in student loan debt.

Almost five years later, after acquiring three additional class plaintiffs, inspiring dozens of other class-action lawsuits against law schools, and surviving several motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgment, it seems that judgment day has finally come for Thomas Jefferson School of Law. Plaintiffs Anna Alaburda, Jill Ballard, Daniela Loomis, and Nikki Nguyen prevailed on all issues in the latest the law school’s latest motion for summary judgment, and the case has been set for trial in March.

While many other law schools have been taken to court over issues similar to the ones presented in the Alaburda case, never before has a law school been forced to actually stand trial for allegedly inflating its employment statistics. This is historic.

The operative complaint contains counts for fraud, negligent misrepresentation, negligence, and violations of various California statutes (including laws against unfair and deceptive business practices and false advertising). In considering each cause of action, Judge Joel M. Pressman found for the plaintiffs time and again, overruling each of Thomas Jefferson Law’s arguments. Perhaps most importantly, Judge Pressman differentiated this case from that of Gomez-Jimenez v. New York Law School.

There, in dismissing a proposed class-action lawsuit against NYLS, Judge Melvin Schweitzer of the New York Supreme Court did not view the law school’s employment statistics to be “misleading in a material way for reasonable consumer acting reasonably” as the plaintiffs were “a sophisticated subset of education consumers” who “would have to be wearing blinders” not to know that a “goodly number of law school graduates toil (perhaps part-time) in drudgery or have less than hugely successful careers.”

Conversely, in Judge Pressman’s minute order in the Alaburda case, he said that the plaintiffs’ reliance on employment statistics presented by TJSL in U.S. News & World Report — employment statistics they believed “reflected the status of graduates who either worked in a professional capacity, worked as attorneys or worked in law-related jobs” — was not unreasonable. Judge Pressman continued, bolstering their argument:

A reasonable consumer would not believe employment figures included any and all employment, which would render the figure meaningless in the context of a legal education. A reasonable consumer expects the employment figure to include graduates who work in law-related jobs.

In a statement given to Above the Law, attorneys Brian Procel and Vinay Kohli of Miller Barondess explained what makes the plaintiffs’ case against Thomas Jefferson School of Law so persuasive. Kohli went on to say, “We appreciate the Court’s thoughtful and well-reasoned ruling, and we look forward to our day in court.” Procel and Kohli noted:

We have discovered very compelling evidence of wrongdoing, including evidence that TJSL reported different numbers to US News and NALP in the same year (knowing that the NALP data is not publicly available); we conducted a survey indicating that TJSL’s figures were inflated by 20 and 28 percent in two successive years; and TJSL had a practice of reporting graduates as employed as long as they had a job any time since graduation (i.e., the graduates were actually unemployed at the time of reporting).

In the original version of the complaint, Alaburda sought compensatory damages “believed to be in excess of $50,000,000,” punitive damages, as well as injunctive relief. In the very recent past, Thomas Jefferson School of Law found itself on precarious financial footing. Though the law school has claimed it’s recovered, this trial could potentially yield a tremendous verdict for each of the plaintiffs if it goes to a jury. Embarrassing testimony in court will no doubt be extremely damaging to the law school’s already tenuous credibility. All this having been said, one wonders if Thomas Jefferson School of Law will allow itself to be further denigrated by going to trial.

Will the Alaburda plaintiffs see a rewarding settlement offer in their futures, and if so, would they even be willing to take it after all these years spent litigating their claims? Will Thomas Jefferson School of Law demonstrate that it truly has no shame and continue to beat this already dead horse in the California court system? Stay tuned.

(Flip to the next page to see Judge Joel Pressman’s Minute Order denying Thomas Jefferson School of Law’s motion for summary judgment in its entirety.)