San Francisco - Michael D. Lieberman decided to enroll at Southwestern Law School in Los Angeles after reading that 97 percent of its graduates were employed within nine months. He graduated in 2009, passed the bar on his first try but could not find a job as a lawyer. He worked for a while as a software tester, then a technical writer, and now serves as a field representative for an elected official.

Lieberman, who earned his undergraduate degree at the University of California-San Diego, is one of dozens of law graduates across the country who have joined class-action lawsuits, alleging that law schools lured them in with misleading reports of their graduates' success.

Instead of working in the law, some of the graduates were toiling at hourly jobs in department stores and restaurants and struggling to pay back more than $100,000 in loans used to finance their education. Others were in temporary or part-time legal positions.

Although Lieberman believes his degree may still be a "useful tool," he and other graduates said the suit was intended to combat "systemic, ongoing fraud prevalent in the legal education industry" that could "leave a generation of law students in dire financial straits," according to the complaint.

Nearly 20 lawsuits are being litigated at a time of dim employment prospects for lawyers. Much of the work once done by lawyers can now be done more quickly by computers.

Online services have made law libraries largely unnecessary, allowing corporations to do more work in-house. Software has sped the hunt for information needed in discovery and other legal tasks, and Web-based companies offer litigants legal documents and help in filling them out.

Even after the economy improves, some experts believe the supply of lawyers will outstrip jobs for years to come.

Although lawyer gluts come and go, "I don't think any of them rival the situation we are seeing today," said Joseph Dunn, chief executive of the State Bar of California, which regulates the state's 230,000 attorneys. "The legal community in all 50 states is being dramatically impacted."

New and inexperienced lawyers, unable to find jobs at law firms, are opening private practices, potentially putting clients at risk, according to a California bar report issued in February. To confront "serious issues of public protection," a bar task force has recommended requiring practical experience as a condition of a license.

Besides Southwestern, alumni have sued Golden Gate University, the University of San Francisco and San Diego's Thomas Jefferson and California Western schools of law.

Each school charges about $40,000 a year in tuition.

J.R. Parker, a lead lawyer in four of the California cases, said graduate jobs included "literally folding shirts in Macy's."

Parker said he found it "galling" that the schools gathered data that showed graduates were ending up in non-legal jobs but omitted that information from what they disclosed to the public - a contention that is in dispute. Job data are a highly influential factor in law school rankings. The suits allege the schools also inflated their graduate earnings, reporting the results of only a carefully selected sample.

Michael C. Sullivan, a lawyer representing the schools, said they provided employment data the same way as other law schools, publishing the figures they were required to report to the American Bar Association. The ABA has since changed the requirements so that law schools now must disclose how many of their graduates were in jobs that required a law degree or for which one was preferred.

In advance of the ABA rule changes, Southwestern reported in 2011 that only 52 percent of the previous year's graduating class had obtained full-time, permanent jobs for which a law degree was needed or preferred, and that salary figures were based on only 19 percent of the class, according to the suit.