i'm a 1L at uc hastings. got my grades back and i should place somewhere in the top 5%-10% range.

i am interested in practicing only in CA. i want big law.

edit: admitted to usc's nonbinding early decision so far.

i would suspect given your numbers you should have a reasonable chance at boalt and UCLA. certainly enough to be worth the application fee if you can maintain your grades.

the calculation about whether or not to transfer is a little more complicated. do you want biglaw? how big of a concern is your debt load? do you have a scholarship now/does hastings have a history of giving scholarships to people who perform well and ask?

think about your answers to these and find out about the scholarship stuff. then weigh them. in the end it's going to be a personal decision though - nobody can make guarantees about how it will turn out.

As the previous poster mentioned, it really depends on your goals. Also consider any scholarship/aid involved.

Top 5-10% at Hastings should have good prospects. Boalt might be worth transferring to, but I am not so sure about UCLA. A transfer at UCLA might not do as well at OCI as a top 5-10% student at Hastings.


I have a co-intern from last summer who went to Hastings. From what he told me this year, their top 10% placed well at OCI, but those outside that range had trouble with getting a big law position. If you maintain your grades you have a shot at big law.

Anecdotal example: a buddy of mine went from Hastings > UCLA > top 20 Biglaw firm in LA.

Si, se puede.

This thread is relevant to my interests What if the transferee doesn't want biglaw?

Jones Day...

thanks for all the responses.

let me add a few things:

first, i want big law or at least a nice paying job in the private sector. second, debt is not really an issue. third, i have no scholarship at hastings besides financial aid, but i have heard they will give $$$ to retain top students (i will look into this more).

i am open to practicing anywhere in CA and don't really care if it is socal or norcal.

my concerns above all is leaving a nice position at hastings (where i may have law review and be near the top of the class) to be just another student at boalt/ucla. do transfers do well at OCI there? how are transfers considered during OCI relative to those already there (are transfers considered as near the top of the incumbent class, or nearer median?) i read there are slim chances for law review at those schools for transfers as well?

reasons i want to transfer is obviously and most importantly better potential job prospects and of course prestige level. i love hastings, but i'd rather simply say boalt/ucla than explain that "yeah, the uc system does have a standalone law school" to a layperson. (also, i have a somewhat irrational love for ucla...i don't know why and don't ask.)

You can go ahead and ask for recommendations now, but understand that you may not have the opportunity to transfer if your grades fall second semester. If you are in the position to transfer, I believe it is almost always the right call. This is especially true if money is not an issue.

Top 5-10% at Hastings should get you into Boalt. If you end up closer to top 5%, you will almost certainly get in. You might also want to consider other schools in the CCNMVPB range as you will have a decent shot at all of them.

I don't think UCLA makes sense for you. Your chance at Big Law probably won't increase by transferring to a T20 school from a T1 school. UCLA can make a lot of sense to those at the top of their class at a T2 school or perhaps someone in the top 15% range at a school like Hastings.

If your grades increase next semester and you get well within the top 5% range, you might also have a shot at HYS (low chance unless you are in the top 1%, but worth a shot). In fact, in your position, I would apply to all three, even if it is a long shot (never know if you don't try!).

Just make sure you don't fall below the 10% mark. Top students at Hastings place well in big law, but your chance of getting big law when below top 10% (even more so if not top 15%) are not that great.

hmm, thanks guys.

so i assume that i have to apply to transfer before spring semester grades are made available and then send those in when they are released? i guess there's more pressure to do even better now...

i think i will apply to stanford (long shot), boalt, and ucla and weigh my options again then.

i'll second the advice some people are giving here.

i would say if money is not an issue and you fail to get a significant scholarship it's probably worth the trouble to transfer. the earliest application deadlines (with the exception of ED/EA at uchicago and GULC) are not until june, so if you want a comfortable schedule you can wait until sometime in the middle-end of next semester to ask for letters. i waited until after exams and it was a real struggle to get everything in by june 15 to SLS/Boalt.

you're right that you send your transcripts generally after submitting your apps because the grades come in later. some schools are cool with you emailing as soon as they come out, others want official transcripts. last year's transfer waiting thread is a useful resource.

anecdotally i have one friend who transferred to boalt (5% at T35 that wasn't hastings, but had bay area ties) who struck out at oci, but bear in mind he half assed it because he wanted a government job (and got DOJ SLIP). i'm at SLS and everyone here is doing something they wanted whether that's biglaw or PI. i have on pretty high authority that they admitted #1 and #2 in the class at hastings last year.

There are Hastings/Davis transfers at Michigan. Both got SF offers but only one is going back.

Assuming you are able to get some $$$ out of Hastings, this is sort of a tough decision. You say you don't care about debt, but unless you have a rich uncle who is literally sitting there waiting to pay your loans when you graduate, then there is no question you care about the debt.

Transferring schools in the same market can be a little harder to justify than transferring to a school in another market that you want to work in. Presumably there will be some overlap between the firms that come to Hastings to recruit and those that go to Stanford/Boalt, and thus there will be some overlap of firms you would like to work for. If the firms you want to work for are already coming to your current school, then why transfer?

Oh, at this point I should mention that in my experience I don't think transfers receive much of a bump in the recruiting process by suddenly becoming a Stanford/Boalt student. If a firm wouldn't have hired you as 10% at Hastings, they most likely aren't going to hire you as a Boalt transfer whose grades were 10% at Hastings. Reasonable people may disagree about this, but that's just my thought and I think it is rooted in some common sense. One of the bumps you MAY get is it shows a desire to work in a certain market (say, if you go from BU to Chicago because you want to work in Chicago, that will show commitment to the Chicago market), but that won't apply to you because you are transferring within a market (so to speak, I understand CA is big).

Anyway, so why transfer then? It becomes all about access. Are you going to be able to interview with significantly more firms that you want to work for by transferring? What is the OCI process like at Stanford/Boalt? 100% lottery? How many firms do students there typically interview with? Ditto for Hastings. How many more firms are going to recruiting at Stanford/Boalt than at Hastings? Which firms? Are those firms ones you would have a shot at anyway? Important to remember is that you can always mass mail the firms that aren't going to be at Hastings for OCI. You would probably end up doing this at Boalt/Stanford anyway, since you aren't going to get EVERY firm you want through OCI and the ones you don't get you will mass mail (in which case you have the same access you would have if you hadn't transferred). Only now when you mass mail as a transfer, you likely won't get to add law review to your resume.

This is a long ass post and so I'm going to stop for now but what I guess I'm getting at is that there is a sense around here that transferring is almost always a good decision. When you are talking about increasing your debt load but 75-100k, though, it is almost never an easy decision and I tend to think more people in that position should stay than go. You give up a lot when you transfer, and even if you end up at a great school, you could still strike out at OCI. Trust me, life is all rainbows and gumdrops before OCI when you are sitting at 5-10% from a decent school, whether you end up transferring or not. I was there, and I thought everything would be fine no matter what I did, but once OCI starts rolling and you begin to struggle, things look a lot worse in a hurry. All of a sudden you feel like you might as well have finished in the bottom 10%, because the result is going to be the same - OCI strikeout. Granted, this wouldn't be fun no matter what school you are at, but it's A LOT worse when you feel like you gave up a significant amount of money, law review, etc. for nothing.

But you are a 1L, so don't even worry about this stuff until you finished your first year.

thanks a lot for the responses. gave me quite a bit to think about.

there are certainly a lot of factors to weigh. as stated above, i'll just apply to a few schools and see what happens. i'll be sure to bump this thread back up in a few months if i have a decision to make.

Just curious, how do y'alls know what percentile you'll be in? All I got was a GPA...

just estimated based off the class ranks for the class of 2013, 2012, and 2011. we won't know for sure until the records office calculates the ranks for the class of 2014 at the end of the year, but the ranks for the past three years are very good indicators.

^ Thanks. Finally found 'em on HCO.

according to these stats, hastings only placed 8.5% in big law: http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?interactive=true&id=1202543436520&slreturn=1

even being somewhere in the top 10% doesn't seem to give me a decent shot at big law out of hastings, especially when compared to schools like USC/UCLA and especially berkley...

Those people OCI'ed 3 years ago and it doesn't factor in clerkships.

To extend this a little: 3 years ago was possibly the worst year of legal hiring. It's almost certainly rebounded since then. To what extent? That's an empirical question that nobody can answer. Conventional wisdom says somewhere between pre-recession numbers and 8.5%.

The year before those statistics had Hastings at ~13%. IMHO, this is a decent benchmark to use for predicting our OCI results.

still, for usc/ucla/berk to place as relatively well as they did in the worst years means they would very likely still clearly trump whatever the current numbers are at hastings (probably around 10-15%).

I have a hard time being convinced that between top 5-10% you're going to see any interesting improvement in your employment prospects by shifting around california, especially if you're interested in biglaw. If a firm interviewing in CA would be interested in a top 10% hastings student, I'm sure they would make the couple of hour drive or whatever it is from berkeley to san francisco to interview there, and I'm sure they can afford a flight from LA to San Francisco.

Seems to me that transferring only makes a difference if (1) you're going to get a considerable change in the quantity, quality, or location of interview prospects, or (2) the name of the school alone is going to give you a boost or they have some special programs/professors you want to be involved with. And keep in mind that this should be weighed against the drawbacks of leaving (law review, scholarship, etc.).

I dont foresee a worthwhile change in either of these aspects unless you can get into SLS (or other T6). And I only say SLS because I think that there are probably some firms that interview there that wouldn't interview at hastings, because they would only consider top 5% hastings grads (keep in mind firms of course think of transfers in terms of their old school.. think I saw a thread in employment where a v15 interviewer said they don't interview transfers unless they would've made cutoff at the old school) and assume that virtually the entire top 5% transferred out because of their odds at HYSCCN. I dont think the same assumption is made for outside the top 5% at a t1. Besides SLS you're probably getting the same interviews and level of consideration you would have had at hastings, without the benefit of stuff like law review and a school that has a strong incentive to champion you as a candidate for the best jobs.

I think I saw arrow talking about the real difficulty that berkeley transfers had the last OCI round (despite that B is crushing biglaw numbers recently, it looks like). Being good enough to transfer into a good school doesn't necessarily mean you're going to be in their group of biglaw picks. Being top 10% at a school that during a terrible year had 13% biglaw placement (and not including clerkships and top students that transferred out) puts you in a very competitive position for biglaw placement, though, especially if you can get on law review and work your connection magic there.

Anyway, I understand the position you're in and I'm in a similar one. I was very strongly considering transferring to myself (to CA even) but after crunching the numbers and snooping around a lot I've realized I'm better off staying put. Being able to transfer to a school you would've gone to in a heartbeat had you initially been admitted to seems too good to turn down, and I think a lot of transfers operate on that instinct, but I think if you're in the 5-10% range of T20-T40, transferring is probably overhyped (and maybe risky) unless you want to make a big geographical move or get a lucky transfer cycle. Taking the time you would've spent on transfer apps, moving, and getting used to a new school and using the time to practice interview skills will probably do you a bigger favor than a small bump in school prestige. Just my .02

P.S. you might check out the transferapps group on yahoo. If I remember correctly they also had OCI results for transfers. I havent seen recent years but I remember being surprised at how much transfers can struggle, especially outside the T6. Anyway, again, best of luck to ya and do whatever suits you best.

thanks for the advice.

however, i still don't see how there wouldn't be a tangible benefit to transferring. assuming hastings places 15% in biglaw (an estimate almost double their % from 2011 just to be favorable), that would mean roughly 62 out of 410 students get big law. now, comparing that to a school like usc, which placed slightly over 30% in 2011, that would mean about 65 out of 210 students got big law (i estimated slightly lower than their placement in 2011).

i just don't see how, even when giving a favorable bump to hastings' placement, that there wouldn't be an advantage to transferring. a school like usc places more students in big law with less students in the class competing for those jobs. couple that with anecdotal evidence that transfers do very well during OCI, and i just don't see how there wouldn't be at least some advantage to transferring. am i missing something?

I think sillyboots's point was that the school's placement power wasn't really the factor. USC places better than Hastings because firms have a lower grade cutoff for USC students than they have for Hastings students. Transferring to USC doesn't change the fact that your 1L grades came from Hastings. Firms are going to look at you and see a top 10% Hastings student whether you're at Hastings or USC.

The argument seems to be that going to UCLA/USC/Berkeley isn't going to give you access to interviews that you wouldn't have had at Hastings.

1. Seems like you're determined to transfer. Which is fine, but why ask then?
2. As sillyboots alluded here, and others too either here or in one of the other recent prospective transfer threads, the bottom line main issue is that you'll probably get viewed as median at the school you transfer to, which might not be as good as top 10% at Hastings, unless it's at YHS or thereabouts. And USC, UCLA, and even Cal are not in that league.
3. You should seek out current Hastings 2 and 3L's who finished 1L with your approximate current rank to ask why they didn't transfer and to gauge how they fared at OCI. This is really the most sensible thing you can do at this time and I think the career office or the student dean should be able to help you get in touch with some of these people.