"I really should have taken that Ruby over HYS sticker" Forum

[utahraptor]

Yeah, I see this as a battle of BruceWayne's anecdotes of terror vs. numbers.

I just also don't understand your position at all here—

We're talking about people choosing to go to a T14 for free or for COL over HYS, right?

Are the differences in the bottom end employment worth paying that much more for HYS, knowing that you still might strike out at HYS?

If you're on a Ruby and you strike out, you're still OK. You're not debt-owned.

If you're paying a normal amount for H and you get a job you're still stuck with the debt and are probably stuck in Biglaw.

To be crystal, I'm saying I'd prefer the absolute downside for the Ruby to the normal outcome of an H student.

Yale is different. I think most of us will say Yale is different. You get different job opportunities. You have a loan repayment program that is bananas.

But, if the question is free vs. not-free, the answer is so. laughably. clear. that I feel silly having to defend it.

I didn't have the option presented in this thread, but close friends did (not law school friends, people who went to law school after me) and I told them to follow the money. It's what you would tell anyone you cared about.

Bruce, what is your experience with legal hiring? I thought you were a UVA valer. That's OK. Good friends of mine struck out at EIP at CLS. Thing is, the two who I know best? Both had honors. And, as jbagelboy pointed out, we know the curves here. We know how common those grades are. The idea that the people who strike out strike out mainly due to grades just isn't true.* Apologies if I turn this into a tirade, but there are multiple myths to squash here— the first is that it's worth paying lots of money for the employment upside of H, the second is that people with "bad" grades are doomed, and the third is that you're somehow a legal hiring mastermind.

How much of this is colored by your own experiences? (What are those experiences?) How much of this is colored by comparing a pre-select system (like at UVA) to one that is pure lottery (like Columbia, NYU, Chicago, many others)?

tl;dr if you're actually concerned about people ending up unemployed, tell them to follow the money goddamnit

* I honestly think that bad luck will doom you more than bad grades. That's a deeply unsettling thing to hear, but I think it's the truth. Grades are what people can control, so they obsess over them. They're also more easily externalized than poor interviewing, bad strategy, or other factors. I think that you have worse luck with bad grades. That's totally true. But, when push comes to shove, there's a lot of luck in who you're slated to interview, who you interview with that day, whether your interviewer is in a good mood or a bad mood. Great interviewers can probably make their own luck. Poor interviewers (like me) are rolling the dice each time.

[UnicornHunter]

tl;dr if you're actually concerned about people ending up unemployed, tell them to follow the money goddamnit

Pretty much this. Also it's not entirely clear to me that a LP at HYS is going to look any better than a B-/C+ or 1?? at CCN. LP seems like it sends a worse message, if anything.

I mean, not that any of it matters. People will strike out from HYSCCN, but it probably won't be limited to the bottom 2-5% of people in the class.

[skers]

At least at H, the whole non-competitiveness thing b/c of grades is a the biggest lie that has ever been told per everyone I know who goes there.

[nothingtosee]

At least at H, the whole non-competitiveness thing b/c of grades is a the biggest lie that has ever been told per everyone I know who goes there.

I don't think anyone in this thread has disagreed with this statement. I don't think Harvard sells itself as being a chill non-competitive place.

But I do think the psychological boost of Top 30%/Everything else exists (see my prior post). [And no, I'm not claiming it's a $250,000 value added boost]

[Fred Norris]

Yale is different. I think most of us will say Yale is different. You get different job opportunities. You have a loan repayment program that is bananas.

But, if the question is free vs. not-free, the answer is so. laughably. clear. that I feel silly having to defend it.

Does free vs. not free maxim apply to Yale for you? Can't tell.

[jbagelboy]

Yale is different. I think most of us will say Yale is different. You get different job opportunities. You have a loan repayment program that is bananas.

But, if the question is free vs. not-free, the answer is so. laughably. clear. that I feel silly having to defend it.

Does free vs. not free maxim apply to Yale for you? Can't tell.

can't speak for smaug, but for me you have to qualify "not free". Are we talking 18 months of heavy debt payments or seven years?

[utahraptor]

Yale is different. I think most of us will say Yale is different. You get different job opportunities. You have a loan repayment program that is bananas.

But, if the question is free vs. not-free, the answer is so. laughably. clear. that I feel silly having to defend it.

Does free vs. not free maxim apply to Yale for you? Can't tell.

You're right, that wasn't clear.

I think I'd always go to Yale, but I'm not sure. I think it would depend more on if you wanted to work in a traditional law job or not. I'd want to talk to Yale students to see how many people get superlative outcomes and move from there.

By superlative outcomes, I mean things that you might get at lower schools but are very rare. (real) lit boutiques, gubmint, non-law options.

Also, yeah, it would depend on how "not free" it was. If I thought I could pay off my debt in two years, I think I'd take Yale every time, regardless of career aspirations. Longer than that and I'd start going through the stuff above.

I don't mean to cut Stanford out, I just have spent a lot more time talking with Harvard and Yale people, and don't really have an impression as to what Stanford is like.

[Monochromatic Oeuvre]

PSA #1: Non-aspies who bid reasonably got offers at probably a 95-97% clip at CLS last year, and I'm betting there's a similar story at UChi and NYU as well.

PSA #2: ITE is over.

PSA #3: Six-figure debt blows. Hard.

[BruceWayne]

Yeah, I see this as a battle of BruceWayne's anecdotes of terror vs. numbers.

I just also don't understand your position at all here—

We're talking about people choosing to go to a T14 for free or for COL over HYS, right?

Are the differences in the bottom end employment worth paying that much more for HYS, knowing that you still might strike out at HYS?

If you're on a Ruby and you strike out, you're still OK. You're not debt-owned.

If you're paying a normal amount for H and you get a job you're still stuck with the debt and are probably stuck in Biglaw.

To be crystal, I'm saying I'd prefer the absolute downside for the Ruby to the normal outcome of an H student.

Yale is different. I think most of us will say Yale is different. You get different job opportunities. You have a loan repayment program that is bananas.

But, if the question is free vs. not-free, the answer is so. laughably. clear. that I feel silly having to defend it.

I didn't have the option presented in this thread, but close friends did (not law school friends, people who went to law school after me) and I told them to follow the money. It's what you would tell anyone you cared about.

Bruce, what is your experience with legal hiring? I thought you were a UVA valer. That's OK. Good friends of mine struck out at EIP at CLS. Thing is, the two who I know best? Both had honors. And, as jbagelboy pointed out, we know the curves here. We know how common those grades are. The idea that the people who strike out strike out mainly due to grades just isn't true.* Apologies if I turn this into a tirade, but there are multiple myths to squash here— the first is that it's worth paying lots of money for the employment upside of H, the second is that people with "bad" grades are doomed, and the third is that you're somehow a legal hiring mastermind.

How much of this is colored by your own experiences? (What are those experiences?) How much of this is colored by comparing a pre-select system (like at UVA) to one that is pure lottery (like Columbia, NYU, Chicago, many others)?

tl;dr if you're actually concerned about people ending up unemployed, tell them to follow the money goddamnit

* I honestly think that bad luck will doom you more than bad grades. That's a deeply unsettling thing to hear, but I think it's the truth. Grades are what people can control, so they obsess over them. They're also more easily externalized than poor interviewing, bad strategy, or other factors. I think that you have worse luck with bad grades. That's totally true. But, when push comes to shove, there's a lot of luck in who you're slated to interview, who you interview with that day, whether your interviewer is in a good mood or a bad mood. Great interviewers can probably make their own luck. Poor interviewers (like me) are rolling the dice each time.

Jesus Christ I know I said I wasn't going to seriously respond to you anymore but the extent to which your advice is bad is just absolutely mind boggling. Have you even graduated from law school? If you want to make moronic straw man arguments like " I shouldn't be telling people to take HYS sticker over a full ride + stipend at Columbia" that's fine. But you are spouting some seriously dangerous bullshit by telling 0Ls and people who really need to know what this market is like that "Most people don't strike out because of grades". You really don't have any idea how legal hiring works at all do you?

MOST PEOPLE DO STRIKE OUT BECAUSE OF GRADES. As you are obviously blissfully unaware biglaw firms have HARD GPA CUTOFFS that they follow without even taking into account ANYTHING ELSE at the various schools that they interview at. In fact they look at this info BEFORE they go forward and make decisions off of the candidate's soft skills. Yes other things can prevent you from getting a job--thank you for that Sherlock. But grades will cut you before those things even come into play. More importantly these cutoffs will finish you EVEN if you are strong in other areas. Cut offs vary from school to school but they exist. In fact schools even track this sort of information themselves and they guard it heavily because it is very important information. They even go so far as to have students "promise" to not reveal the info to anyone outside of the school or even their particular class year. A few years ago a bigfirm even had an incident where an interviewer accidently left a copy of his firm's grade cutoff guidelines on campus after performing summer associate interviews. I don't understand how someone could be so confident in themselves when they so clearly have no idea what they are talking about at all. I mean your misunderstanding of how "pure lottery" works alone shows how unaware you are. Newsflash about lottery systems--it does not mean that they never take your grades into account like you seem to believe.

And "Grades are what people can control so that's what they focus on". Lord you're actually WORSE than most 0Ls. I'm glad you "feel" like grades "don't matter" but from what I'm reading the majority of what you "feel" is bullshit. That you just brush off the entire structure of legal hiring, failing to explain how it actually works, in favor of telling people "how you feel" is why a lot of people with experience don't like 0Ls posting responses to job related questions. But that's clearly an unfair bias, as apparently they aren't the only one's who spout uninformed info. You're essentially going around telling people it's 2005 again because that's how you "feel".

[A. Nony Mouse]

I mean, isn't the point that you and smaug went/go to different schools, and that what you know to be true for your school may be less true for Columbia, and so the calculus about taking HYS over Columbia is different from the calculus for HYS over UVA?

[BruceWayne]

I mean, isn't the point that you and smaug went/go to different schools, and that what you know to be true for your school may be less true for Columbia, and so the calculus about taking HYS over Columbia is different from the calculus for HYS over UVA?

Well 1) I'm not basing what I'm saying off of only UVA. But 2, even if I was Biglaw firms have HARD GPA CUTOFFS for ALL schools outside of HYS. Honestly, I've been told by people at S and H that they have them there as well; but the difference is that you can find a firm that will take you at basically any level even if it's not the one you really want. The cutoffs just end up keeping them out of the firms they probably envisioned before they got their grades. The other thins is that they can't be as precise about it as they are at CCN on down because they don't use a GPA system and explain to the firms exactly how a GPA lines up with class rank. The firms are forced to use proxies instead but they still have their ways of distinguishing apparently. For example a LP at Harvard is apparently an auto ding at a lot of firms (although in fairness these are big time firms). I knew of a URM who got a LP that only got one offer (and according to a widely held fallacy on TLS URMS are basically guaranteed a massive employment boost lol) and struggled mightily up until that point. That's at damn Harvard. Firms have cutoffs at CCN period. To pretend like they don't is disingenuous at best and willfully ignorant and inconsiderate at worst.

This isn't 2005 where everyone and their mother can get a firm job and it's just about "fit". I think JCougar posted stats showing that the unemployment rate is actually even higher for law grads this year than last year. What he's saying USED to be SOMEWHAT true many years ago but it's just not now (there was never really a time when grades didn't matter for getting a job, but back in the boom they apparently weren't an auto deal breaker like they are now).



The crazy thing about this is that there have been threads ON THIS SITE FROM PEOPLE with bottom 1/3 and worse grades at CCN who have struggled to get jobs/struck out with firms....

[RodneyRuxin]

My experience that conflicts with some statements in this thread:

I know an interviewer at a top firm that gives a bump to Rubys. My guess is that this would be especially true for 1L positions because we have basically no grades at that point. I agree with Nony's characterization, though. It's more like a presumption of competence that bad grades or a bad interview will overshadow.

I know tons of people at UChi who got B-/C equivalents (173, 172, etc) and have "elite" jobs (it's more on the rare side to land so high because it'll bring down your GPA quite a bit, but saying that such a grade would keep you from biglaw is insane). I even know someone with all B-/C equivalents (173 GPA) who got a market paying biglaw position.

Finally, I know lots of people who have AIII clerkships with a low 179 average (our "A" equivalent starts at 180 and 179 is the cutoff for degree honors). I get the impression that people often don't think it's worth applying if they can't get CoA or a top judge in a competitive district. AIIIs in flyover districts don't seem very hard to obtain.

[Emma.]

I mean, isn't the point that you and smaug went/go to different schools, and that what you know to be true for your school may be less true for Columbia, and so the calculus about taking HYS over Columbia is different from the calculus for HYS over UVA?

Well 1) I'm not basing what I'm saying off of only UVA. But 2, even if I was Biglaw firms have HARD GPA CUTOFFS for ALL schools outside of HYS. Honestly, I've been told by people at S and H that they have them there as well; but the difference is that you can find a firm that will take you at basically any level even if it's not the one you really want. The cutoffs just end up keeping them out of the firms they probably envisioned before they got their grades. The other thins is that they can't be as precise about it as they are at CCN on down because they don't use a GPA system and explain to the firms exactly how a GPA lines up with class rank. The firms are forced to use proxies instead but they still have their ways of distinguishing apparently. For example a LP at Harvard is apparently an auto ding at a lot of firms (although in fairness these are big time firms). I knew of a URM who got a LP that only got one offer (and according to a widely held fallacy on TLS URMS are basically guaranteed a massive employment boost lol) and struggled mightily up until that point. That's at damn Harvard. Firms have cutoffs at CCN period. To pretend like they don't is disingenuous at best and willfully ignorant and inconsiderate at worst.

This isn't 2005 where everyone and their mother can get a firm job and it's just about "fit". I think JCougar posted stats showing that the unemployment rate is actually even higher for law grads this year than last year. What he's saying USED to be SOMEWHAT true many years ago but it's just not now (there was never really a time when grades didn't matter for getting a job, but back in the boom they apparently weren't an auto deal breaker like they are now).



The crazy thing about this is that there have been threads ON THIS SITE FROM PEOPLE with bottom 1/3 and worse grades at CCN who have struggled to get jobs/struck out with firms....

Of course certain firms have GPA cutoffs. And those cutoffs definitely do apply to H & S as well. But the fact that low grades from any law school will preclude you from certain firms doesn't mean that a majority of folks who struck out at H, S, or UChi didn't strike out for reasons other than grades. I don't think anyone is saying that grades don't have a huge impact on hiring, or that being at the bottom of the class is going to make OCI tough at any of these schools. And of course if you have great grades than to some extent a firm might be willing to overlook other things that cause people to strike out. But in my experience the group of people who struck out wasn't even close to coextensive with the group of people who were at the bottom of the class.

And I'm not sure that, despite having a very fine-grained grading system, it is any easier to discern GPA or class rank from a UChicago transcript. When we were doing clerkship hiring in my chambers my coclerks would have no trouble figuring out roughly where a H or S candidate falls in their class just based on the number of H, P, DS, etc. But they would always come to me to figure out how the UChi transcript works.

edit for typo.

[BruceWayne]

"Article III clerkships in flyover districts are EASY to obtain"

"the idea that B- and C grades can keep you out of biglaw is INSASNE"


Wow and I thought 2005 was boom hiring Rodney but 2015 is on another level. My apologies I haven't been keeping up with how good things have gotten. Clearly I've been out of the loop; carry on.

And I would have never thought that it was possible for someone who just barely missed honors graduation requirements at UChicago to get a clerkship--I'm shocked!

[utahraptor]

Yes, many firms have grade cuttoffs. But, not every firm has hard GPA cutoffs, that's the entire point. That's why it's important for people to go through the numbers and to talk to people. Legal hiring isn't a monolith—some places will ding you for being a weirdo, and some won't. Some places won't give you an offer because you have a B, but many places will. I never said they wouldn't. That's why people with bad grades have worse luck—they're starting with a smaller pool of firms available to them. But, there's still a pool available to them. People with "bad" grades get jobs here. The numbers don't lie.

The thing that I'm saying that you, personally, really don't want to hear is that it's not the grades that doom someone. It's grades plus something else. And, if that plus is bad enough, you're not getting hired with good grades. Again, from a pool of like, 30 people, I know multiple people with honors who were OCI strikeouts. It's surprisingly common for law students to have a behavior that kills them in interviews and for them to be totally unaware. It's also surprisingly common for law students to not understand how bidding works and to end up with bad odds from that alone.

Yes, if you have bad grades and only interview with SullCrom, Cravath and Boies, you're going to have a bad time. That's obvious.

But, at Columbia at least, you can totally get a biglaw job.

And because you brought up the lottery stuff, I'll explain the advantage it has over pre-select—you still get the interviews. Yes, if you're way below a firm's grade cutoff you're doomed. There's a story about a Quinn interviewer (back when the did OCI) who acknowledged that the interview was a waste of time after seeing a student's grades. But, here's the thing—things like grade cutoffs and the like aren't as static as you seem to believe. A firm is going to interview its slate of students, offer callbacks on the information it has, and wait. But what happens when they're suddenly dealing with tons of cancelled callbacks because STB decided it needed bodies this year? Are they just going to sit on their hands and go "well this sucks" and stick with their original, insufficient slate of callbacks? No. They're going to adjust.

I don't want to make a straw man out of your argument here, mainly because your argument is so bad that I don't need to, but to be clear—you get that most interviewers aren't busting out the GPA calculator the second you walk out of the door, right? The curve also has moved over time. This means unless you're "the guy" with multiple B-s, you're generally lumped in the median or below mass. And yes, again, "the guy" with multiple B-s, because there's only going to be one. Does the one guy with obviously the worst grades strike out? I'm not sure. Maybe. But I don't think it makes sense to make life choices based on the one guy on the bottom, just like it doesn't make sense to go to Brooklyn because the top handful of students will end up at great firms. "What if I finish at the absolute bottom of the class" insurance isn't something someone should buy at any school.

Moreover, I get the impression that the HARD FLOOR is significantly lower than the gut instinct soft-floor. That's why you have people with median grades at Skadden. That's why you have people with straight Bs at V50 firms. It's the big advantage of the lottery system. Under the lottery system those people get jobs. Maybe they don't under pre-select. I don't know; I don't have that life experience.

So, again, what are you basing this on, Bruce? It's not the numbers. We have anecdotes to match (and surpass) yours. What's your experience with legal hiring that silly little me can't see?

Finally and most importantly, will you agree that this is stupid, because regardless of the discussion above, you're much better off with no job (after OCI) and no debt than with biglaw job and crippling debt?

[utahraptor]

The "you're so not with the times" thing is just so tired, because the advice on TLS has moved. It's just moved from questioning the Rayiner analytics of "will you get a job" to the question "hey, do you actually want the job you'll get for what you're paying?"

[PeanutsNJam]

What if you could pay for HYS out of pocket? Or have family assistance? So there's no debt. Does that change the decision.

[jbagelboy]

What if you could pay for HYS out of pocket? Or have family assistance? So there's no debt. Does that change the decision.

...

that's like 0.3% of americans

[suppy183]

The thing that I'm saying that you, personally, really don't want to hear is that it's not the grades that doom someone. It's grades plus something else. And, if that plus is bad enough, you're not getting hired with good grades. Again, from a pool of like, 30 people, I know multiple people with honors who were OCI strikeouts. It's surprisingly common for law students to have a behavior that kills them in interviews and for them to be totally unaware.

As a paranoid 0L, I'm curious if you could elaborate on what some of these behaviors might look like. Going to a school next year where grades could definitely kill me by themselves, but I'm sure this advice would be applicable regardless (probably more so).

[ymmv]

What if you could pay for HYS out of pocket? Or have family assistance? So there's no debt. Does that change the decision.

That's still $200,000 you could have spent/invested on something else. I guess if you're megawealthy, sure, chump change, but if you are then why the fuck would you go to law school?

[PeanutsNJam]

The thing that I'm saying that you, personally, really don't want to hear is that it's not the grades that doom someone. It's grades plus something else. And, if that plus is bad enough, you're not getting hired with good grades. Again, from a pool of like, 30 people, I know multiple people with honors who were OCI strikeouts. It's surprisingly common for law students to have a behavior that kills them in interviews and for them to be totally unaware.

As a paranoid 0L, I'm curious if you could elaborate on what some of these behaviors might look like. Going to a school next year where grades could definitely kill me by themselves, but I'm sure this advice would be applicable regardless (probably more so).

My guess is entitlement/superiority complex, subtle racism, problem with authority, yada yada

[RodneyRuxin]

Wow and I thought 2005 was boom hiring Rodney but 2015 is on another level. My apologies I haven't been keeping up with how good things have gotten. Clearly I've been out of the loop; carry on.

And I would have never thought that it was possible for someone who just barely missed honors graduation requirements at UChicago to get a clerkship--I'm shocked!

Earlier ITT you said B-/C type grades would finish someone and they would be "LUCKY" to get biglaw. That's just not true, dude. Sure my comment was anecdotal but when I know a C-average student (that is, bottom of the class in almost every class) with a market-paying biglaw job you have very little to stand on. That's especially true when there's a large number of people who have one or two bad grades and do very well for themselves.

I'm just providing data points. If you have legitimate evidence to support your blanket statement, let us know. But otherwise you're just causing more "panicking about 1L grades" threads and law students are neurotic enough without you.

[jbagelboy]

I mean, isn't the point that you and smaug went/go to different schools, and that what you know to be true for your school may be less true for Columbia, and so the calculus about taking HYS over Columbia is different from the calculus for HYS over UVA?

Well 1) I'm not basing what I'm saying off of only UVA. But 2, even if I was Biglaw firms have HARD GPA CUTOFFS for ALL schools outside of HYS. Honestly, I've been told by people at S and H that they have them there as well; but the difference is that you can find a firm that will take you at basically any level even if it's not the one you really want. The cutoffs just end up keeping them out of the firms they probably envisioned before they got their grades. The other thins is that they can't be as precise about it as they are at CCN on down because they don't use a GPA system and explain to the firms exactly how a GPA lines up with class rank. The firms are forced to use proxies instead but they still have their ways of distinguishing apparently. For example a LP at Harvard is apparently an auto ding at a lot of firms (although in fairness these are big time firms). I knew of a URM who got a LP that only got one offer (and according to a widely held fallacy on TLS URMS are basically guaranteed a massive employment boost lol) and struggled mightily up until that point. That's at damn Harvard. Firms have cutoffs at CCN period. To pretend like they don't is disingenuous at best and willfully ignorant and inconsiderate at worst.

This isn't 2005 where everyone and their mother can get a firm job and it's just about "fit". I think JCougar posted stats showing that the unemployment rate is actually even higher for law grads this year than last year. What he's saying USED to be SOMEWHAT true many years ago but it's just not now (there was never really a time when grades didn't matter for getting a job, but back in the boom they apparently weren't an auto deal breaker like they are now).

The crazy thing about this is that there have been threads ON THIS SITE FROM PEOPLE with bottom 1/3 and worse grades at CCN who have struggled to get jobs/struck out with firms....

1) obviously firms have grade cutoffs. they have cutoffs for all law schools, and it's just amateur thinking to assert that the sophisticated recruiting machinery of OCI can't parse unique grading structures at HS when there are half a dozen different grading regimes in the T14 alone.

2) having a cutoff doesn't actually, numerically preclude the bottom 1/3 or bottom 1/4 of the class at some schools. Some people mentioned the UChi students at 173-174 getting good jobs despite cutoffs; at CLS, correspondingly many less selective firms have grade cutoffs of 3.0 or 2.85. (The most selective firms are like 3.6+..., so it runs the gamut). As we discussed earlier, it's very unlikely you won't meet those bottom cutoff. You would have to have straight B's (which means you wrote a below median exam in every class) and a discretionary low grade to miss 3.0. This does happen, to a very small handful of students. But the same could happen at the other schools you deem 'safer'.

3) Also, ITE, cutoffs lie. Some firms put up like 3.2 or 3.3, or "B+ average," which might have been true several years ago, but I know of people who fell beneath those stated numbers and got summer offers at those same firms. The firms are trying to adapt to changes in the market just as we are.

Get your shit together and stop arguing against the current reality. Yes legal hiring still sucks but not in big law for people at these schools. Your arbitrary dividing line from 2011 just no longer applies.

[utahraptor]

The thing that I'm saying that you, personally, really don't want to hear is that it's not the grades that doom someone. It's grades plus something else. And, if that plus is bad enough, you're not getting hired with good grades. Again, from a pool of like, 30 people, I know multiple people with honors who were OCI strikeouts. It's surprisingly common for law students to have a behavior that kills them in interviews and for them to be totally unaware.

As a paranoid 0L, I'm curious if you could elaborate on what some of these behaviors might look like. Going to a school next year where grades could definitely kill me by themselves, but I'm sure this advice would be applicable regardless (probably more so).

My guess is entitlement/superiority complex, subtle racism, problem with authority, yada yada

Actually no, I'm more thinking about things like just talking way too loud, or having a verbal tick, or having an answer to a common interview question that indicates you don't actually want biglaw—things that are hard to know unless you've been through a few interviews/interview coach.

One (relatively) obvious one that I think TLS has talked about before is mentioning appellate litigation, unless you clearly have the credentials to make a clerkship happen. You might be over the grade cutoff for the firm, but if you talk about appellate litigation and the firm sets you up to interview with people in that group, you might quickly find that your grades aren't up to snuff.

But, career services (at least here) isn't good at telling people "hey, you probably should remove the word appellate from your vocab" or "hey, you might want to say you're interested in corporate if your grades aren't as good."

[A. Nony Mouse]

I think that Bruce's general point that people can strike out from any of these schools, so it's always a risk, is important. And sure, having higher grades is probably better than having lower grades, all else being equal. But going back to the subject of this thread, it seems overblown to suggest that the difference in outcomes between HYS and CCN is as stark as Bruce is suggesting. If your goal is biglaw, suggesting that the difference is worth paying sticker at HYS over a free ride at CCN just seems ridiculous.

(If you're not looking for biglaw, or the finances are different, then it's more complicated.)