Law Schools

Which Law School Has Been Put Up For Rent?

How much is a law school going for these days?

By  
on

Imagine you’re a law student at a school that was recently on the receiving end of a letter from the American Bar Association which relayed the finding that the school was “significantly out of compliance” with accreditation requirements. Imagine that about one month later, you and your fellow classmates begin to see real estate listings for the very building your law school currently occupies. You’d, understandably, be quite worried about your law school’s fate.

This is what seems to be going on at Florida Coastal School of Law, where ads like this, from Foundry Commercial, offer prospective tenants the ability to “[l]ease full floors or entire building.” When listings like this are promising 44,000 to 220,000 rentable square feet, law students are absolutely right to question what’s happening.

Here’s a screenshot of the rental listing for 8787 Baypine Road (aka Florida Coastal Law). You can see the law school’s banners just outside the entryway:

In an effort to calm students, Dean Scott DeVito sent a schoolwide email late last month, explaining that the administration had been “working to either shrink our footprint in our current building or move the law school to a location that better fits our needs” since 2015, citing a Daily Record report from October 2015 which spoke to this very issue. Why? Because he and President Dennis Stone “recogniz[ed] that enrollments would need to decline if we were to raise incoming credentials and that a location with better access to the courts would be to the benefit of our students.”

(Recall, however, that four months earlier, in June 2015, an optimistic Dean DeVito said that Florida Coastal was “going to have to build more on the parking garage because people will want to go here.”)

Dean DeVito goes on to explain that for the past two years, the administration has been trying to make this change, and that they’ve been working with brokers — who use advertisements like the one seen above — to find sub-tenants. Further, if such a move were to come to fruition, Dean DeVito assured students that they’d be notified immediately and have the opportunity to be part of a committee to “work through all of the issues related to such a move.”

Sponsored

How much is a law school going for these days? We tried to speak to an agent from Foundry Commercial, but were unable to get in touch with anyone prior to publication. We will update this post when we hear back.

If and when Florida Coastal is able to move out of its current location, we’re sure that students will have a lot to say about it. At the moment, some say that they’ve been misled, as they claim to have no recollection of being told about these plans in 2015.

Best of luck trying to find a sub-tenant, Florida Coastal. It seems like you may need it.

(Flip to the next page to read Dean Scott DeVito’s full email.)

Sponsored

Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky has been an editor at Above the Law since 2011. She’d love to hear from you, so please feel free to email her with any tips, questions, comments, or critiques. You can follow her on Twitter or connect with her on LinkedIn.

1 2Next »

Topics

, , , ,