Top Law Schools

Hey guys,

3.53/169, not URM, I want to either go solo or do big law, not sure which one yet. I have looked on the forum but still have some questions, and haven’t been able to get great answers anywhere else. I’m applying to law school this fall. I looked on a law school predictor and it told me to apply to these ones:

UVA, Cornell, George Washington, Georgetown, u of Gregoria, u of Washington, Duke, usc, UCLA and Vanderbilt.

Some of these are pretty expensive, are any worth attending at sticker? I have a pretty good job right now so I can save a lot of money, and my family will help me out a lot, but I’ll still probably debt finance 1/3-1/2 the cost of tuition. I would like to not have to rely on my family to finance college if possible, and if I do I would like to have the salary to pay then back just like a loan.

A lot of these schools I’m above the median LSAT, but my GPA is very low. My freshman year of college, a member of my immediate family died suddenly, causing a lot of stress. Is this worth writing an addendum for? I also began medication for ADHD, which raised my subsequent GPA each semester after treatment to a 4.0. Is this worth mentioning? I don’t want to seem like I’m excusing away too much.

How does financial aid work in law school?

Is it a bad idea to go to a school I might just barely get into (Cornell) instead of one that’s a safety (u of Georgia) becuase I might have a worse class rank at Cornell?

Thanks guys

That school list is all over the place, so before answering your questions, let's narrow things down:

Can you be slightly more specific about your goals? Going solo and going to biglaw are pretty much polar opposites, so I feel like you should maybe think about this in terms of what you see yourself doing 10 or 20 years from now. And where do you want to live/work?

Same LSAT as you and nearly identical GPA. Got $$ from GULC and Duke - but I also had a few years of WE. You should not attend any of those schools at sticker, and leverage your offers to get as much money as you can.

To answer some of your other questions: merit scholarships are heavily based on LSAT, financial need scholarships are based on your parents income and wealth (even when you’re out of undergrad), and feel free to write the addendum.

You should attend the school that best fits your goals and financial situation, not worry about whether you “barely get in.” For reference, my GPA was below the 25th percentile at the school I attend, and I finished in the top 10% after 1L. Learning to take law school exams is a unique skill, and your LSAT score suggests you have the ability to learn that skill well. Good luck!

HarryPutter wrote:Same LSAT as you and nearly identical GPA. Got $$ from GULC and Duke - but I also had a few years of WE. You should not attend any of those schools at sticker, and leverage your offers to get as much money as you can.

Question unrelated to the OP's post: how much money did GULC and Duke give you? You can PM me if you'd rather not say on the forums, but I'm really interested since I will be blanketing the T14 this year.

cavalier1138 wrote:That school list is all over the place, so before answering your questions, let's narrow things down:

Can you be slightly more specific about your goals? Going solo and going to biglaw are pretty much polar opposites, so I feel like you should maybe think about this in terms of what you see yourself doing 10 or 20 years from now. And where do you want to live/work?

I’m not too sure about my goals becuase I haven’t had a chance to try out different types of law, but I’ll try and be as specific as possible. I want to make decent money or have a nice work life balance. So solo attracts to me because of my ability to control my workload, and because I have some academic background in finance and accounting for the business side of things. Big law attracts to me because I love to work long hours and the pay is good. Beyond that it’s hard for me to be specific because I have no idea if I will love trials, or be any good at depositions, or if I have a zeal for prosecuting criminals. I know I want to have a stake in what I’m doing; equity partner at a firm, whether that’s mine or a firm with 100 partners, is something that I want.

I do not really care where I live or work. I would like to be near a medium sized city so I have access to things like a gym.

jennaisthecat wrote:I want to make decent money or have a nice work life balance.

That's supposedly possible, but no one really achieves it. At any rate, if you want to remain flexible, you need to target T13 schools. No, it won't be harder to do well there, and more importantly, you don't need to do as well to get the same employment outcomes. The only caveat is this:

jennaisthecat wrote:equity partner at a firm, whether that’s mine or a firm with 100 partners, is something that I want.

This should be a sign to you that you need to slow your roll. You're young, and it seems like you need to give yourself a little more time to figure out what you actually want to do. You don't even know what areas of law sound interesting to you, but you've managed to convince yourself that equity partnership is a life goal, despite having even less knowledge of what that entails.

Going K-JD is generally a bad idea. Graduate and get a job in an interesting field. Maybe even get a job in the legal field. Go out of your way to meet lawyers and ask them about what they do. Figure out if you actually want to do this before you commit to three years and a significant amount of debt. Law school isn't going anywhere.

jennaisthecat wrote:Hey guys,

3.53/169, not URM, I want to either go solo or do big law, not sure which one yet. I have looked on the forum but still have some questions, and haven’t been able to get great answers anywhere else. I’m applying to law school this fall. I looked on a law school predictor and it told me to apply to these ones:

UVA, Cornell, George Washington, Georgetown, u of Gregoria, u of Washington, Duke, usc, UCLA and Vanderbilt.

Some of these are pretty expensive, are any worth attending at sticker? I have a pretty good job right now so I can save a lot of money, and my family will help me out a lot, but I’ll still probably debt finance 1/3-1/2 the cost of tuition. I would like to not have to rely on my family to finance college if possible, and if I do I would like to have the salary to pay then back just like a loan.

A lot of these schools I’m above the median LSAT, but my GPA is very low. My freshman year of college, a member of my immediate family died suddenly, causing a lot of stress. Is this worth writing an addendum for? I also began medication for ADHD, which raised my subsequent GPA each semester after treatment to a 4.0. Is this worth mentioning? I don’t want to seem like I’m excusing away too much.

How does financial aid work in law school?

Is it a bad idea to go to a school I might just barely get into (Cornell) instead of one that’s a safety (u of Georgia) becuase I might have a worse class rank at Cornell?

Thanks guys

1.) School rank - It is a bad idea because the difference between the aptitude of the average student at Georgia and at Cornell is not enough to offset how much better you'd need to do at Georgia to be in the same spot. While admission numbers have predictive value on 1L grades, they are predictive in intervals of around 5 LSAT points + and only predictive insofar as you're 80% likely to have a better GPA than someone with a 164, and better can be 3.5 vs 3.4, not 4.0 vs. 3.0.

Anecdotally, among friends of mine who transferred from TTT schools to T-14 schools, there is a major qualitative difference not only in how competitive grading is, but in the basic curriculum. Lower ranked schools tend to teach more to the bar exam from day one and may only get through 4-5 cases an entire semester (with black letter law supplying the rest of the curriculum) whereas T-14 schools utilize the Socratic method and tend to get through 4-5 cases a class with students expected to figure out the BLL for themselves. However, there isn't a noticeable difference between tier one schools and t-14 schools insofar as top-law-schools.com is concerned.

2.) The schools you are talking about are all over the place geographically. You want to go to a school in an area you'd be comfortable living in for many years. Even Cornell is somewhat regional in that you'd be largely limited to NYC and upstate NY unless you have lived in another city.

3.) Big law vs. being a solo - This is a night and day difference in goals not only in terms of money, but also in terms of the kind of work you'd be doing. It's just totally different areas of law with totally different day by day responsibilities. The idea of working for yourself seems great, but the issue is that you aren't going to have the skills necessary to be very effective at running a solo operation out of the gate. This is why it's best to work for someone else first until you'd be able to effectively run a solo operation. The people who are solos out of the gate generally tend to be the sort of people who work in doc review, and have vistaprint cards they give to friends and family.

4.) Want to make a lot of money or have a work-life balance - The prototypical way to do this for many is to work in big law for a few years, and then go in-house to a more 9-5 gig. There are other ways to do it, but generally you need to have a skillset that's specialized to a company that is 9-5. Like other things, the more specialized and less replaceable your skill-set, the more you can dictate the terms of your relationship with your employer and clients. Generally speaking, the more value you contribute, the more you can dictate your work-life balance.

If you're contingent on someone supplying clients to you and doing work for those clients on an hourly basis to produce value, you're naturally only going to contribute value by working long hours. This is why law is bad for a work-life balance. The only real ways to acquire this are to either supply work to other lawyers, or to go somewhere where your value is not based on your billable hours, but on work specific to that company's business.

5.) The addendum - I would include this but keep this brief.

6.) Going straight through - I think this depends on how confident you are you want to be a lawyer for the net 40-years. I don't think it's generally a good or bad idea. I think it's specific to the person, and not something random strangers or a pre-law adviser can answer. I would say pre-law advising is generally unnecessary because law school is such a numbers game that a monkey who could apply a schools' numbers to your numbers could adequately advise you on which schools you're competitive for. Your circumstances are also not very unique. You have pretty good numbers, and your issues such as ADHD and upward grade trend aren't all that unique.