U.S. District Court Judge Robert Jonker yesterday dismissed a defamation lawsuit that Thomas M. Cooley Law School filed in July 2011 against the New York-based Kurzon Strauss law firm after that firm accused the law school of fraudulently misrepresenting its post-graduate employment statistics. Cooley recently prevailed in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit when the appeals court affirmed the dismissal of a separate lawsuit Kurzon Strauss had filed against Cooley over the supposed misrepresentations, specifically finding that Cooley had not fraudulently reported its employment data.
In dismissing Cooley’s defamation case, the court chose not to address the defamatory nature of Kurzon Strauss’s false accusations against Cooley, but instead ruled that Cooley could not prove that the Kurzon Strauss lawyers defamed Cooley with “actual malice.”
“After a federal trial court and a federal appeals court both found the Kurzon Strauss misrepresentation case against Cooley to be without merit, it’s hard to reconcile Judge Jonker’s ruling that Kurzon Strauss’s unfounded accusations can’t be pursued as defamation” said Jim Thelen, Cooley’s Associate Dean for Legal Affairs and General Counsel.
“We will pursue the case in the appeals court now, where we’ll have a new hearing on these issues,” Thelen continued.
In its unsuccessful misrepresentation case against Cooley over Cooley’s reported post-graduate employment statistics—one of several unsuccessful cases it filed against law schools around the country—the Kurzon Strauss firm had solicited Cooley graduates over the Internet to file claims that Cooley fraudulently misrepresented its graduates’ employment status in order to dupe them into attending law school. But Judge Gordon Quist of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Michigan dismissed that case in July 2012, finding it to be completely without legal merit. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed that ruling this summer. Seven other cases like it around the country have also been dismissed.
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