Uh-Oh! T14 Law School Email Screw-Up Reveals Grades, Application Decisions For All LLM Candidates

This is quite the accidental data dump. Which law school did it?

It seems that law school personnel continue to find it difficult to keep their students’ personal information private. For example, in April 2012, someone at Baylor Law School sent out an email containing a trove of admissions data (including names, grades, and LSAT scores) to every student admitted to the Class of 2015. In March 2014, someone at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles sent out an email with a heap of financial information for the entire graduating class (including Social Security numbers and loan amounts) to some members of the Class of 2014. In June 2014, someone at UVA School of Law sent out an email containing every piece of vital information possible about its clerkship applicants (including names, GPAs, and class ranks) to everyone on its clerkship listserv.

Today, we have yet another example of a top law school’s email screw-up. This time, someone at a T14 law school “inadvertently” sent out a cornucopia of admissions data for all of its LLM applicants to everyone who was accepted into the program, including names, grades, TOEFL scores, and application decisions with comments.

The school in question is the University of Chicago Law School, and applicants are certainly less-than pleased with the release of their information. “I am deeply disappointed with the University of Chicago,” said one applicant whose data was disclosed. “INTOLERABLE!!!” said another.

We’re told that the school did not acknowledge the data breach until about three days after it occurred. “I was baffled that it took so long for the school to take an action, and that a short single email was all that the school can do. It was really unprofessional and disappointing,” said another LLM applicant whose information was leaked.

Here’s an excerpt from the email that U. Chicago Law sent in an attempt to assuage its LLM applicants’ anger and letdown in the wake of the school’s accidental data dump:

The document was inadvertently attached to an email that went to 297 recipients. All were applicants to the LLM program for the Fall of 2019. The Dean of the Law School has written to all the people who received that information and asked them to both delete the message and attachments, and confirm that they have done so. Those confirmation messages are coming back to the Law School daily.

Oh yes, we’re sure that all of the LLM applicants whose data was revealed deleted the attachment — after looking it over to gain a sense of where they stand among their prospective classmates at Chicago Law or another T14 law school, of course.

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We’ve reached out to the powers that be at Chicago Law to see if they have any additional comment on this situation as it unfolds, but we’ve not yet heard back. Perhaps they’re busy brushing up on their GDPR obligations.


Staci ZaretskyStaci Zaretsky is a senior editor at Above the Law, where she’s worked 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.

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