dd Forum

[mudiverse]

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[Rigo]

GPA: 3.55 and LSAT: 165 ... I would love to work in BigLaw.

You're going to have to retake. You will need to attend a Top 13 law school to have more than a 50% chance of getting Biglaw.
A 165 is too low to overcome a relatively mediocre GPA. Even if you got into some lower T13's, then you would be paying close to sticker price and it would be unwise to take on that much debt.
Here are the medians for this year's entering 1L class:


Retake for both a better chance at admission and getting scholarships.

[03152016]

no shot

[mudiverse]

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[Rigo]

To what extent do you think my Work Experience would help? I tend to think its a big boost over some of the kids that are K-JD.

Unfortunately law school admissions, unlike MBA programs, is almost completely numbers-based. Sure extensive work experience is a good soft factor, but softs only come into play at the margins. A k-jd with 3.75/168 will beat you almost ten times out of ten. That's just the nature of the game.

Also does coming from a Classics/Business major count as a plus? I feel like I would be a strong fit for programs that value multi-disciplinary fields (Penn?).

Undergraduate majors do not help or hurt with law school admissions.
Speaking of MBA though, why aren't you pursuing that by itself instead of a joint degree? That seems like a wiser investment for you.

[mudiverse]

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[hillz]

I think you have to keep in mind that softs can matter, but unless you have incredible softs (being an Olympic athlete, curing cancer, etc.), they won't be enough to overcome subpar stats. Softs matter more when a school is comparing candidates with very similar numbers.

Focus first on making a better LSAT score (170+ if possible) and then writing the best personal statement you can & getting good LORs.

[03152016]

I am saddened by the information you are telling me (and a little skeptical that an adcom's job may as well be a macro in an excel spreadsheet). Don't law schools strongly speak out about how they do a "holistic" admissions review?

admissions are driven by selectivity because it factors so heavily into usnwr
mylsn/lawschoolnumbers has 72,106 data points in the t14 alone
this data is available for you to view anytime you'd like

adcomms say whatever they need to say to drive up applicants and lower their offer rate
you're free to believe them despite 72,106 data points which show that the admissions process is numbers driven in the vast, vast majority of cases

imo, your softs are not nearly strong enough to have any effect on your chances of admission with a 3.55 and 165
maybe if you were on the bubble it would help, but you're not close

[Rigo]

Don't law schools strongly speak out about how they do a "holistic" admissions review?

Yes they do, but it's really just a lot of talk. The schools first and foremost care about their rankings and one of the few elements of the rankings they can control is their medians.
There are exceptions. Yale and Stanford are known for being especially holistic, as is Berkeley.

Nevertheless if I hit 170 (what looks to be the 75% at most T14) - would I then be a lock for the lower T14? This would make me hit the 25th GPA and 75th for LSAT.

Yes and you'd probably be in with some decent money. With declining applications, schools are really shelling out for those high LSAT scores. Especially since you're considering a joint degree where you'll have a whole extra year of tuition and COL expenses, cost minimization is key. Think of each LSAT point as being at least an extra $25k saved. Never again will you get paid that much for such a small amount of effort.

[twenty]

Law schools do claim to evaluate candidates holistically, but this is, quite frankly, bullshit. Perhaps someone would receive more scholarship money based on their soft factors (which is not something to ignore), but someone with a 165 and a 3.5 is not going to Northwestern. That's not to say you couldn't with a retake, but that is to say you're not going to right now. Like, for example, of the 19 applicants with roughly your numbers that we have data for that applied to Northwestern over the last four years, 15 of them were rejected, 3 were waitlisted, and one was accepted. The one person that was accepted was a URM-lite.

Conversely, with the same GPA, and raising the LSAT score to 170: of 17 applicants, 13 were accepted, 4 were waitlisted, and not a single person was rejected. Assuming that the "holistic" profiles of these people were otherwise similar enough to the people with 165s, that should quickly dispel any myth as to an adcom doing anything other than evaluating candidates by their LSAT/GPA combos.

[umichman]

no offense, but you are pretty conventional for t13 law student i think. just raise lsat, that really seems to be all that matters since ur GPA is stuck

[GreenEggs]

I'm still waiting for the part where you're an "unconventional applicant."

[mudiverse]

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