Top Law Schools

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First off, I suggest retaking because a couple more points on your LSAT (and maybe even one more point) will give you a very high chance of getting into Columbia or NYU regular decision.

Regardless of whether or not you retake, I strongly suggest you blanket the T14. Every T14 except YHS and Cal-B will probably give you a fee waiver to apply and you can use competing scholarship offers to negotiate $$$ later on in the cycle.

As far as your goals, no, the Penn certificate will not confer any material advantage, although Penn is a good option if you want to do NYC biglaw. NYU and Columbia have their own business law programs and both do a great job of placing into NYC biglaw. In-house openings will look mostly at your actual professional experience so it's more about the firm and practice area you work in after law school that will get you your in-house jobs.

Don't know much about ED apps so I can't help you there.

So tl;dr is blanket the T14, retake the LSAT, leverage scholarship offers and increased LSAT score to get more scholly money from competing schools, come back here with all of your final offers and make a decision then.

>cost is not a concern


literally how

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Most biglaw is in NYC. Penn places better than Duke in NYC biglaw.

What are your ties to Houston? Sound tenuous at best, that probably won't happen.

So, NYC. Penn seems to place better than Duke, percentage-wise but if you strongly preferred Duke for personal reasons I don't think you could be faulted for choosing that.

Definitely retake to save your family some money. I want to say that if you're too short-sighted to understand why money is important that you'll probably never make it that far but sounds like your family is absolutely loaded so you'll somehow land on your feet despite everything anyway, so I guess I can't say that.

Good luck, just choose whatever you prefer cuz you only live once.

Penn and Columbia are beasts at placing into biglaw, though Columbia might be out of your range.