Thomas M. Cooley Law School of Lansing, Mich., is planning its new campus at 9445 Camden Field Parkway in Riverview, just off U.S. 301. School officials and the president of the Hillsborough County Bar Association attended a news conference at the new campus Tuesday morning.

Where other law schools boast of prestige, Cooley Law touts its size as the nation's biggest law school, with 4,001 students spread out over four campuses in Michigan.

It chose Riverview as its first campus outside Michigan because the Tampa Bay area only has one other law school, Jeff Martlew, associate dean of the new Riverview campus, told the Tribune last month.

Its only competitor will be Stetson University College of Law, which has campuses in Gulfport and Tampa. Plus, Cooley Law prides itself on its appeal to minorities, and it believes it will find strong demand among blacks and Hispanics in the Bay area, Martlew said.

On Tuesday, Martlew said he has heard complaints that the Bay area already is "overlawyered" with too many attorneys. However, he has heard the same complaint since Cooley Law opened in Michigan in 1973.

"To a degree, it's a feeling that, 'OK, now I've got my piece of the pie. I don't want to share it within anyone,' " Martlew said,

School officials announced some details of its new campus and its timetable Tuesday. Cooley Law will move into an existing 132,000-square-foot building that previously to house Progressive Insurance, and it bought an adjacent piece of land that will provide for a 13.3-acre campus.

It expects to start renovations Monday and open the campus in May. The school is expected to enroll about 700 students over the next several years. The school will hire two-dozen full-time faculty, 30 to 40 adjunct faculty and 40 support staff, many from the Bay area, Martlew said.

It will begin recruiting students shortly and plans an open house at a nearby hotel next month.

Martlew stressed Tuesday that Cooley Law doesn't try to be an elitist school and that its founder, Thomas Brennan, thought law schools were unnecessarily restrictive. One of its mottos is "big, cheap and good."

Brennan once took offense at U.S. News & World Report's annual law school rankings, which traditionally ranked the school low nationally. So, he and a colleague created a new ranking with a new methodology.

In their own report, called "Judging the Law Schools," Cooley Law finished second only to Harvard University's Law School in 2010. Their report uses some nontraditional measures such as total enrollment and minority enrollment.