When an outside investigator's report deemed Stockton University's $18 million purchase of the defunct Showboat casino property a poor decision, it spread the blame among numerous parties, and the New Jersey firm counseling the university in the transaction was not spared.

The purchase of the Atlantic City boardwalk property, intended to be repurposed as a satellite campus for the Galloway Township-based university, closed last December despite a pair of covenants placing conflicting restrictions on the use of the property—an issue whose significance outside counsel failed to detect, according to the Sept. 15 report, issued by Gibbons.

The conflicting covenants—one placed on the property in 1988 by the predecessor to the Trump Taj Mahal that said the property could only be used as a “'first-class hotel-casino'” and another placed on the property in November 2014 by Caesars that prohibited gaming—left the university with property it could not use as a school and could not resell as a casino, according to the report.