Top Law Schools

I am a 0L and am uncertain what I want to do as a lawyer, but it is important to me that I am able to get a relatively prestigious job in whatever field I ultimately decide to pursue. As I choose between law schools in the T14 that I have been fortunate enough to be accepted to, I just wonder how the chances to get prestigious jobs differs between these schools. In my mind, a good way to rank the difficulty or ease with which different jobs can be gotten is by comparing between schools the class rank necessary to get a certain job. You might say, for instance, that you need top 70% at Harvard for BigLaw, but top 35% at Georgetown. While fellow students at Harvard might be better on average than students at Georgetown, these sorts of numbers would tend to indicate that going to Harvard will better your chances of getting a BigLaw job.

So I am curious what people believe the general class rank cutoffs (I say 'general' because I know there are other factors involved) are to be able to get the following jobs from the various T14 schools:

US Court of Appeals Clerkships
US District Court Clerkships
BigLaw jobs paying market salary
BigGov jobs (like DOJ Honors, other Honors programs, or an AUSA job after a few years)
Tenure-track law professor jobs

If possible try to distinguish at least as precisely as Yale, HS, CCN, MVPB, and DNCG.

From what I've read, here is my guess on this:


US Court of Appeals Clerkships

Yale: Top 15%
Harvard/Stanford: Top 10%
CCN: Top 5%
MVPB: Top 5%
DNCG: Top 5%

US District Court Clerkships

Yale: Top 50%
Harvard/Stanford: Top 30%
CCN: Top 20%
MVPB: Top 20%
DNCG: Top 20%

BigLaw jobs paying market salary

Yale: Top 100%
Harvard/Stanford: Top 85%
CCN: Top 75%
MVPB: Top 65%
DNCG: Top 50%

BigGov jobs (like DOJ Honors, other Honors programs, or an AUSA job after a few years)

Yale: Top 50%
Harvard/Stanford: Top 33%
CCN: Top 15%
MVPB: Top 10%
DNCG: Top 10%

Tenure-track law professor jobs

Yale: Top 33%
Harvard/Stanford: Top 15%
CCN: Top 5%
MVPB: Top 5%
DNCG: Top 5%


How accurate is this? I basically have no basis for any of this besides reading stuff on this site and looking at some statistics, so I could be totally off (which is why I'm making this thread). I know there are numbers for percent of people who got into BigLaw or Article III Clerkships from these schools, but that doesn't entirely tell you what class rank was necessary to get those jobs because of self-selection. For instance, just because 20% of Harvard's class got an Article III Clerkship doesn't mean that you need to be top 20% to get that job, because plenty of top people presumably did not want or apply for a clerkship. As a result, all those statistics tell us is that the class rank cutoffs are definitely not below those numbers.

Idk, but if you shoot for top-5 (not "percent" but "top-5!"), you should be fine no matter what school you attend. Not being facetious. The idea is that you should worry only about what you can control. Just do your best, and the rest will work itself out.

PDaddy wrote:Idk, but if you shoot for top-5 (not "percent" but "top-5!"), you should be fine no matter what school you attend. Not being facetious. The idea is that you should worry only about what you can control. Just do your best, and the rest will work itself out.

Yeah, but I have no idea how good I will be at law school. I've always been a straight-A student, but so has virtually everyone else at top schools, and SOMEONE has to be in the bottom half/quarter/10% of the class. I certainly wouldn't be arrogant enough to assume, before ever stepping foot in a law school class, that that someone could never be me. If I don't make that assumption, then what school is most forgiving in terms of class-rank --> job-prospects must matter.

No one with enough time is going to have enough knowledge to give you percentages any more accurate than the ones you posted. Anyone with enough knowledge is not going to have enough time. Did you get Yale? Go to Yale. Otherwise, pick your fave and do your best. It doesn't make sense to go to any school aiming for a specific percentile.

OP, I was all ready to be snarky about this, but it actually looks just about right to me. Just keep in mind grades aren't everything and there's no hard and fast rule about any of this.

I applaud your attempt to quantify the class ranks (and therefore the possibility) of each prestigious job, but I am not sure if you're right.

(1) I don't think your clerkship numbers are right. I know personally that the type of exclusivity you're applying to COA clerkships and CCN is just not true. However, I have no way to really confirm that. I would convert these stats to the probability of the class getting certain clerkships. GPA is a strong factor in getting a clerkship, but there is SO MUCH that goes on in the background (i.e. a Professor willing to go to bat for you) that it just can't be quantified.

(2) Top 75% is misleading for CCN. I think within the bottom 10-40 percentile, students have near equitable shots at BigLaw. At that point, it comes down to intangibles from your resume, your personality, and, admittedly, how lucky you are.

Again, I do think the general premise surrounding the analysis seems to be solid. But I don't think the way you quantified it is as solid.

At Michigan at least, your guesses are way off. We've got people with district court clerkships down to median. CoA clerkships don't require top 5% by any means. BigGov relies much more than on just GPA and your estimate is way off there too. Plenty of people below 65% have BigLaw (at least enough that it can't be a "cut off").

Did you just make this stuff up?

This list is not very helpful. I'm an unemployed CLS 3L who was a bit below median- probably 40th-50th percentile. I know plenty of people in the bottom 25% of the class with biglaw jobs. These people usually had work experience, in-demand foreign language skills, or were URM.

The better question is, what is the percentage of the class for whom biglaw or other employment is practically secure (barring massive interview fail)? I'd say that's Stone Scholar or roughly top 1/3.

.

Also, your projections regarding biglaw chances are off. NU and Duke place a larger % of their class into biglaw than NYU and UVA, for instance. Penn has more than just about everyone.


Gauging employment prospects based soley on tls mini tiers of T14 schools seems heavy handed.

EDIT: I realize that many HYS grads have access to biglaw but simply choose to take another route.

There are so many things wrong with your thread that I wish TLS's servers would crash and delete the entire website just to keep this one thread from ever being viewed by another pair of eyes.

Bildungsroman wrote:There are so many things wrong with your thread that I wish TLS's servers would crash and delete the entire website just to keep this one thread from ever being viewed by another pair of eyes.

I had a similar knee-jerk reaction

If you don't know what you want from life, but know you want to be prestigious, you're not ready for law school and the crippling debt that comes with it

Your premises are flawed. Class rank "cut-offs" are a much more fluid thing than I think you realize, and placement power is not coextensive with admissions selectivity. E.g. HLS has higher medians, but SLS is a much better bet for pretty much any kind of job than HLS. E.g. for both C/O 2010 and C/O 2011, Duke had slightly more federal clerks than U Chicago.

If you're trying to get a rough idea of how you need to do to get various jobs, you have to settle for much coarser guidelines than I think you're looking for.

E.g. for COA clerkships, outside HYS, top 5-10% is a pretty good guess. However, lot's of people in the top 5% won't get such clerkships, and some people outside the top 10% may get them. If you grew up in Iowa and find a professor who loves you who clerked on the 8th Circuit, a single phone call from him or her could get you a job that lots of people at your school with higher grades could not get. That being said, most people who get COA clerkships from outside HYS will be in the top 10% of their class.

^
+1....i mean, your first priority is a "relatively prestigious job"?

People are being a bit harsh. His clerkship guesses, outside of the cutoff for district court at Harvard and Stanford are pretty spot on actually. Same thing for his DOJ guesses since those jobs essentially require at least a district court clerkship. If you notice, his rankings don't differentate in the grades needed for jobs for the non HYS schools. That's pretty accurate. Especially when you consider schools like NU and Penn placing more people into NLJ 250 jobs is less about needing a specific rank and more about the markets they feed into, the W/E of their students, and the jobs their students are going for.

this thread is completely retarded, and i spend a lot of time over in the Lounge

This thread is super old and also moronic.

rad lulz wrote:This thread is super old and also moronic.

This.

One cannot quantify chances at clerkships and big law, especially at schools that are well regarded and that do not rank students. The reason for that is that there are a wide range of factors that would impact whether any given student would be able to secure one of those types of positions from those types of schools.

The 65% for Cal biglaw is too good to be true. I am going to Cal and i think to get biglaw, you have to be top 42% there.

jim-green wrote:The 65% for Cal biglaw is too good to be true. I am going to Cal and i think to get biglaw, you have to be top 42% there.

42% seems rather specific

CardinalLaw wrote:

jim-green wrote:The 65% for Cal biglaw is too good to be true. I am going to Cal and i think to get biglaw, you have to be top 42% there.

42% seems rather specific

Just the number from their website

CardinalLaw wrote:

jim-green wrote:The 65% for Cal biglaw is too good to be true. I am going to Cal and i think to get biglaw, you have to be top 42% there.

42% seems rather specific

That's the joke.

Bump. I am 0L who is interested in the BigLaw numbers. How accurate are those numbers? I know they are only supposed to be an estimate, but I fit the mold of an average law school student (no URM, no foreign language skills, no significant work experience).

boeing787 wrote:Bump. I am 0L who is interested in the BigLaw numbers. How accurate are those numbers? I know they are only supposed to be an estimate, but I fit the mold of an average law school student (no URM, no foreign language skills, no significant work experience).

Shut the fuck up and go the fuck away.

That seems excessive.