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Helen Anderson's avatar

Wow, this brings up a lot of different thoughts and feelings for me. Years ago, when I was a young attorney, a group of young adults came to me wanting to sue a local private college for something similar--the program they wanted was full so a recruiter convinced each of them to do a different program and switch later, and for various reasons, they were never able to switch, and they all had student loans--I think around $20,000 each--for something that ended up being a waste of their time. While I had some legal theories about why the school owed them a refund, I didn't know anyone who had taken a case like that before, and I felt lost and unsure of what I was doing. My colleagues didn't seem to think it was a great case. I felt a huge obligation to them but constantly put their case off for other cases that were more urgent. After five years, we finally settled, and the school refunded most of their tuition. I hated taking a third of that as my fee, but it ended up being much less than my normal hourly rate for all the time I'd put in. Years later I started hearing about cases like this in the news. It was validating because it meant I was right about about a lot of things. But it also made me wonder if there was something more I could've done for them. I didn't know about the borrower defense (my case started pre-Google and the statute is not something that would have come up in typical legal research). I'm glad you were able to solve this problem yourself. Good for you!

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Dalaina Heiberg's avatar

Holy crap, so cool to hear a story from someone I know whose benefited from this. So happy for you, Jessica!!!

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