Grades required post 1-L Forum

[Snake90]

Got a job at a top firm, top 10% (3.7) 1L, top 20 school. 1st semester 2L grades came back, I slacked off a bit and got a 3.4. Is this a concern? What are the importance of 2L and 3L grades once you get a offer to summer. (Firm has near 100% offer rate.)

[thesealocust]

Got a job at a top firm, top 10% (3.7) 1L, top 20 school. 1st semester 2L grades came back, I slacked off a bit and got a 3.4. Is this a concern? What are the importance of 2L and 3L grades once you get a offer to summer. (Firm has near 100% offer rate.)

2L and 3L grades don't matter - at all - at the overwhelming majority of big law firms. Once we're outside of the usual top biglaw firms with published offer rates I am less sure of that, however.

If you fail to receive an offer for any reason, obviously you'll wish you had better grades. Some people also suggest GPA can matter for lateral opportunities, but I'd be shocked if it was as important as your professional background once you're out of school.

There are isolated reports of people failing to get offers due to grades, but the odds seem high that's a fig leaf for the firm which either had economic issues and couldn't take everyone or else had other issues with your fit/performance.

At the end of the day, firms don't LIKE using GPA as a hiring metric, it's just the best they have to go on. After a summer at the firm, they care about how well you read/write/think/act and how hard you work, not how your ivy tower corporations professor feel about your corporate alter egoes essay.

The reality is that because of reversion to the mean and obviously shifted incentives, every year large numbers of students with sterling 1L grades go on to big firms and then experience a GPA decline. Yet those very same big firms (which often have the highest incoming GPA) maintain at or near 100% offers. Statistically there just isn't room for 2L/3L grades to play any role at all.

[Anonymous User]

I was at a V10 this summer, and they didn't even ask for grades. At top firms, it's unlikely to be an issue.

[Anonymous User]

I was at a V10 last summer. My firm asked for grades. My understanding from talking to classmates (and this also held true in my SA class) is that grades were sometimes used as an excuse to no-offer an SA, but it was clearly pretextual (ie the person was extremely weird/awkward and their grades dropped). A know a good number of people that summered at V20 firms, had grade drops, and had no problem securing offers--a few of them with significant grade drops (think top 25% to bottom 50%).