Top Law Schools

Arrow's guide states that:

"To transfer into HYS you need:
-top 5-10% at a Top 20
-top 5% at T1
-top 1% at a mid-upper T2"

This post is dated now and I find it hard to believe that I would be in consideration for HYS. I am top 1-2% at 40-50 (based on historical numbers - actual % or ranks not released yet).

Anyone recently have this type of success in the transfer game?

Thanks!

I think the conventional wisdom is that you have to be what arrow says you have to be, but also have been competitive for the school to begin with. Splitters would be an up-in-the-air question.

User has been warned for giving transfer advice as a 1L.

manofjustice wrote:also have been competitive for the school to begin with. Splitters would be an up-in-the-air question.

wat

manofjustice wrote:I think the conventional wisdom is that you have to be what arrow says you have to be, but also have been competitive for the school to begin with. Splitters would be an up-in-the-air question.

pretty sure this is not true...at all.

stillwater wrote:

manofjustice wrote:I think the conventional wisdom is that you have to be what arrow says you have to be, but also have been competitive for the school to begin with. Splitters would be an up-in-the-air question.

pretty sure this is not true...at all.

LOL this has been helpful...

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Jessuf wrote:It's pretty much what you have to have in order to have a fighting chance but no guarantees.

You are disadvantaged for being bottom of T1. Is your school local to any of the HYS markets?

No, unfortunately, not even close. Is that relevant?

Jessuf wrote:It's pretty much what you have to have in order to have a fighting chance but no guarantees.

You are disadvantaged for being bottom of T1. Is your school local to any of the HYS markets?

This

If your metrics are not in the ballpark of what HYS expects in its first year class, you're probably not getting in. There's no debating that.

User has been warned for giving transfer advice as a 1L.

manofjustice wrote:If your metrics are not in the ballpark of what HYS expects in its first year class, you're probably not getting in. There's no debating that.

Stop giving advice in the transfer forum you GODDAMN FUCKING 1L.

Bildungsroman wrote:

manofjustice wrote:If your metrics are not in the ballpark of what HYS expects in its first year class, you're probably not getting in. There's no debating that.

Stop giving advice in the transfer forum you GODDAMN FUCKING 1L.

Thank you. No matter how many times that point is disspelled on here, it always seems to resurface.

You definitely have a chance with those numbers. I personally know people at my HYS who had those numbers and transferred here. But, see the countless threads on TLS in which people with those numbers post about getting rejected to remind yourself that they are not even close to a guarantee. Keep your grades up and post back in May when you sit down to prepare a transfer application.

(I realize you deleted your post, worm, but your post was fine.)

Wormfather wrote:Edit: I posted this because even as an 0L I have an interest in knowing what I might have to do to move up later and because the info posted was primary source. Sorry if I offended the rules by posting here.

Posting as a 0L is fine for certain things, but 0Ls and 1Ls should tread cautiously and not give advice on things they don't know much about.

Plenty (maybe even most, if not a vast majority) of transfers could not have gotten into their transfer school, including transfers at HYS. What law schools say they do and what they actually do often differs. Many schools say they average LSATs. They do not. Many schools say transfers should have been competitive for 1L admission. They do not require this.

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Jessuf wrote:I never understood the logic behind "HYS only takes people who would have been competitive as 0Ls."

Wouldn't they have gone to HYS in the first place then?

It's because the schools themselves say it either explicitly or implicitly (worm had posted a link to HLS that essentially said it).

But you're right that most of them would have, which is why I intuitively think that most transfers could not have gotten into their transfer school's 1L admissions, though there are of course exceptions.

I post this rant every year around this time, but here goes again: HLS does not say you need 0L-admission-worthy stats to transfer in.

Here's what they do say:

HLS Admissions wrote:The competition for transfer admission is high. Many successful transfer candidates typically place very near the top of their first-year law class and would have also been admitted or wait-listed as first-year students on the basis of their pre-law-school credentials. Given the small number of transfer spaces available and a comparatively large and accomplished transfer applicant pool, some applicants who meet these characterizations cannot be offered admission.

They're not actually saying you need to have been competitive as a 0L. They're saying that many applicants would've been competitive even as 0Ls, and that even if you were competitive as a 0L it's no guarantee you'll get in. It's their way of announcing that nothing (not even being the ideal 0L admission candidate) is a guarantee of getting in as a transfer. They're trying to avoid saying what actually does and doesn't get you in, because their entire position is that they make no guarantees.

I can tell you as an absolute fact that HLS admits people as transfers who were rejected as 0Ls. Not just people who wouldn't have gotten if they applied, people who did apply and were rejected. So no, you don't need to have been competitive as a 0L.

My thread might be helpful for you: http://www.top-law-schools.com/forums/v ... 7&t=186555

As a related question, is there any admission advantage of trying to transfer up to a school in the same city? E.g. BU/BC to Harvard or any analogous scenario

stillwater wrote:As a related question, is there any admission advantage of trying to transfer up to a school in the same city? E.g. BU/BC to Harvard or any analogous scenario

Probably. UChicago had around 5/6 students from the local T2s this year

stillwater wrote:As a related question, is there any admission advantage of trying to transfer up to a school in the same city? E.g. BU/BC to Harvard or any analogous scenario

Schools do tend to favor locals, but it's nothing to count on and hard to tell whether it is meaningful since locals likely tend to prefer the local school over out of town schools.

Schools do tend to favor locals, but also remember that many schools take a "compelling reason" into account - and people who are local to that school often have a high need to go to the best regional school. Also there may just be more local applications as a percentage of the whole due to the lower barrier to entry of locals.

Basically - it helps but it is in no way determinative. At the end of the day it is 98% numbers.

I'd say his guide is outdated. My transfer cycle didnt go anything like I expected after reading his guide. Feel free to search my old posts. I could be an outlier, but I must really have had bad luck all around then.

Also, sometimes it really pays NOT to transfer, though it isn't the conventional TLS wisdom. I'd be glad to elaborate for anyone that wants to PM me.