The legal troubles engulfing President Trump’s attorney, Michael Cohen, have sparked a PR disaster for Cohen’s alma mater, Cooley Law School based in Lansing.
Politico published a story today that calls Cooley “the worst law school in America” and adds that the institution serves as a “punchline in the legal world.”
Comments ridiculing Cooley and Cohen (Class of ’91) have deluged Twitter, Facebook and other social media sites, many of them posted by Midwesterners acquainted with the school.
Politico points out that Cooley’s ragged reputation is based on low admissions standards that lead to poor outcomes for many students:
The school accepts almost anyone who can pay the $51,000 annual tuition bill — more than 85 percent of its applicants were admitted last year. Fewer than half of its graduates manage to pass a bar exam on their first try; among all law school graduates in the country, (more than) 75 percent pass on their first attempt. The 46-year-old school has had to go to court over the past year to fight for its accreditation from the American Bar Association (ABA), which found that the school was out of compliance on basic admission standards for a time. Last year, the National Advisory Council for Law School Transparency gave Cooley a ranking no school wants: It was No. 1 on the group’s list of “the 10 least selective law schools in the country.
The ABA reported that 27.4 percent of Cooley graduates from the class of 2015 had obtained full-time, long-term
employment in the legal field nine months after graduation. At the same time, nearly 24 percent of graduates were unemployed nine months after graduation.
Nonetheless, until recently, Cooley — with Michigan campuses in Lansing, Grand Rapids and Auburn Hills — was the largest law school in America.
As Cohen’s legal abilities have come into question, mostly due to the manner in which he arranged $130,000 in hush money for porn star Stormy Daniels, and he has become embroiled in the Trump-Russia investigation by the Justice Department, Cooley is under the gun.
A column last month in American Lawyer magazine that profiled Cohen mockingly referred to Cooley as “often cited as one of the worst law schools in the nation.”
The worst-in-the-nation label has been used in recent years against Cooley, a private school which is affiliated with Western Michigan University, by two websites that keep tabs on law schools – Above The Law and lawschooli.com.
In a response to Politico, the school’s general counsel, James Robb, dismissed Cooley’s critics as “elitists” who are unfamiliar with the institution.
“In light of the current publicity about Mr. Michael Cohen, one of our graduates, it is disappointing to see all the gratuitous negative comments about our law school from people who know nothing about us,” Robb said in a written statement. “What I am seeing is incivility and bullying by people who truly know little about legal education –and especially about our fine law school.”
It should be pointed out that sometimes Cooley’s attempts at defending itself backfire. In 2011, to counter national lists that ranked the school near the bottom, Cooley officials created their own rating system. That process concluded Cooley ranked as the second-best law school in the country, behind only Harvard.
