Cooley to open Tampa campus
Cooley to open Tampa campus
T hose looking for a legal education in Florida now have a 12th option.The Thomas M. Cooley Law School, based in Auburn Hills, Michigan, will begin offering classes next year at its new Riverview campus near Tampa.
The Cooley Law School announced in August that the ABA Council on Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar accepted the recommendation of the Accreditation Committee to acquiesce in Cooley’s application to open a Tampa Bay-area campus in Riverview, which has also been approved by the Higher Learning Commission and the Florida Department of Education, Commission for Independent Education.
The Tampa Bay campus will begin offering evening classes in May 2012, followed by morning classes in September 2012, and afternoon classes in January 2013.
The implementation will follow the same pattern as the school’s other campuses, rolling out the standard curriculum over a three-year period. The new campus will cater to an “underserved sector of law students,” particularly part-time students and minority populations, but will provide Cooley’s full-time program as well, according to Professor Jeffrey L. Martlew, a former Michigan circuit judge who has been designated as the associate dean for the Tampa Bay campus. All Cooley students will be eligible to attend classes at the Tampa Bay campus.
Florida represents Cooley’s largest alumni location outside Michigan, and Florida provides about 6 percent of the school’s applicants and 5 percent of its incoming students each year. The school also has an active externship program in the state.
Then There Were 12
Cooley, the largest law school in the nation, has acquired a 130,000-square-foot facility in Riverview, comparable in size to its campus in Auburn Hills, Michigan. The facility will accommodate the approximately 700 students who are expected to attend. Founded in 1972, the private, nonprofit law school operates J.D. programs across Michigan in Lansing, Auburn Hills, Grand Rapids, and Ann Arbor. Cooley has more than 15,000 graduates.
Cooley is the second Michigan-based law school to establish a presence in Florida. In 2009, Ave Maria School of Law relocated its entire Ann Arbor operation to a 12.5-acre Vineyards campus in Naples.
In 2000, the Legislature established law schools at both Florida International University in Miami and Florida A&M University. FAMU’s law school was originally created in 1949 in Tallahassee but was closed by the state in 1966, and the last class graduated in 1968. After years of lobbying by FAMU supporters, the Florida Legislature passed a bill to re-establish the law school, and Orlando was chosen as the campus site.
Florida Coastal School of Law in Jacksonville was established in 1996.
The University of Orlando School of Law enrolled its inaugural class in 1995. The struggling school was acquired by Barry University in 1999.
St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami Gardens was founded in 1984. A decade earlier, Nova Southeastern University established its law school in Davie in ’74.
Florida State University College of Law in Tallahassee opened in 1966.
Decades earlier, the old-timers put down roots. The University of Miami law school in Coral Gables was founded in 1926; The University of Florida started its law school in 1909; and the granddaddy of them all, Stetson University, established its law school in 1900 in DeLand. Stetson Law moved to Gulfport in 1954 and now also has a Tampa campus.
Lawyer Saturation?
The announcement of Cooley’s new Florida campus comes on the heels of a record 3,462 Bar applicants who sat for the July bar exam in Tampa — about 500 more than the average number. The number of Florida Bar members recently topped the 90,000 mark.
Thomas Morgan, a law professor from George Washington University and former law dean at Emory University in Atlanta, recently addressed the Bar’s Board of Governors about the future of the profession and was asked about the proliferation of lawyers.
Morgan — author of The Vanishing American Lawyer — said trying to control the supply side of lawyers raises antitrust issues, and law schools don’t have models for shrinking. It is really easy to grow.
“With law schools, you make money, large amounts of money, every time you admit 100 extra students,” Morgan said. “You lose a comparable amount every time you cut 100 students. So it is extremely difficult.”
Morgan said about 67,000 students applied for the nation’s 55,000 law school seats in 2011. But, he noted, that’s 11 percent below the 76,000 people who applied to law school last year.
“I think next year we may reach a stage when fewer students apply to law school than there are seats,” Morgan said. “That means law schools are going to have to address that question. But I’m afraid it is going to be demand driven rather than driven by the judgment of the deans that [reducing the number of law students] is a good idea.”
In addition to its large alumni base of 886 graduates throughout Florida, Cooley has had a growing presence in the Tampa Bay area through its Service to Soldiers: Legal Assistance Referral Program, which expanded to Florida in January. The ABA’s Military Pro Bono Project and the Hillsborough County Bar Association joined together with Cooley to offer a complementary training program aimed at preparing local attorneys to represent members of the military in legal issues ranging from child custody concerns to housing rental disputes.
