How to explain the discrepancy between individual program and overall rankings? Forum

[chicagoburger]

According to 2017 U.S. News individual program rankings, all three non-t1 Chicago schools are ranked very high. (namely Loyola Chicago, Chicago Kent, and John Marshall). In many cases , they are just flat out beating T14s. They each made the top list in 3 out of 10 ranked individual programs. From the look of the list, one will think that all three schools must be at least top 50 overall.

Can someone explain such big discrepancy between their individual program and overall rankings?

Best Part time: #11 Loyola, #18 Kent

Best Health Care Law: #8 Loyola

Best Legal Writing: #5 John Marshall

Best Trial Advocacy: #3 Kent, #10 Loyola, #19 John Marshall

Best IP Law: #13 Kent, #21 John Marshall

[A. Nony Mouse]

The specialized rankings don't matter for students and you shouldn't consider them. They are rankings of faculty scholarship by other faculty. Whether a bunch of professors think Other Professor X writes amazing scholarship about health care law is not going to make a difference to your law school experience, and it's not going to get you a job in heath care law. (Legal writing and Trial Ad aren't about legal scholarship per se, but they're still faculty rankings of other faculty. Also non-T14s tend to rank higher in these kinds of categories because T14s tend not to focus as much on the nitty gritty of practice.)

Also best part time is utterly irrelevant unless you plan to go part time, in which case you're not considering the T14 anyway except maybe Georgetown, since the others don't have part time programs.

[cavalier1138]

The specialized rankings don't matter for students and you shouldn't consider them.

Quoting for emphasis.

Look at the schools' job reports. As you can see, almost half of John Marshall's great legal writers can't get jobs as lawyers after school.

[chicagoburger]

The specialized rankings don't matter for students and you shouldn't consider them.

Quoting for emphasis.

Look at the schools' job reports. As you can see, almost half of John Marshall's great legal writers can't get jobs as lawyers after school.

That's exactly my question. Why do other professors rank John Marshall or Kent so high in 3 out of 10 individual programs?
Plus don't you think that, for example, JM and Kent's good reputation in IP Law in Chicago has a lot to do with their high ranking in IP Law nation wide?

[chicagoburger]

The specialized rankings don't matter for students and you shouldn't consider them. They are rankings of faculty scholarship by other faculty. Whether a bunch of professors think Other Professor X writes amazing scholarship about health care law is not going to make a difference to your law school experience, and it's not going to get you a job in heath care law. (Legal writing and Trial Ad aren't about legal scholarship per se, but they're still faculty rankings of other faculty. Also non-T14s tend to rank higher in these kinds of categories because T14s tend not to focus as much on the nitty gritty of practice.)

Also best part time is utterly irrelevant unless you plan to go part time, in which case you're not considering the T14 anyway except maybe Georgetown, since the others don't have part time programs.

Why would they rank Kent over UPenn, NU, Columbia etc in IP Law?

[A. Nony Mouse]

The specialized rankings don't matter for students and you shouldn't consider them.

Quoting for emphasis.

Look at the schools' job reports. As you can see, almost half of John Marshall's great legal writers can't get jobs as lawyers after school.

That's exactly my question. Why do other professors rank John Marshall or Kent so high in 3 out of 10 individual programs?
Plus don't you think that, for example, JM and Kent's good reputation in IP Law in Chicago has a lot to do with their high ranking in IP Law nation wide?

Because there are specific professors at those schools who do a lot of good academic scholarship in those fields. They're ranking professors' scholarship, they're *not* ranking students' prospects for employment in those fields.

Academic reputation is very individual and isn't determined by where you're employed. Sure, there's a reasonable presumption that a prof at Yale is considered an excellent scholar in their field, but other scholars employed in random places can also have great academic reputations, based on what they actually publish, not on the ranking of their school in USNWR.

[cavalier1138]

...JM and Kent's good reputation in IP Law in Chicago...

Cite your sources, please.

Look, I know you really, really want John Marshall to magically become a great choice for law school. But it isn't.

[snowball2]

...JM and Kent's good reputation in IP Law in Chicago...

Cite your sources, please.

Look, I know you really, really want John Marshall to magically become a great choice for law school. But it isn't.

Ditto that. I know someone who graduated fairly high (top 15% - so it's "fairly high" at any other school) at John Marshall and was published in their law review and it took him 2 years to land a job -- and not a great one.

[chicagoburger]

...JM and Kent's good reputation in IP Law in Chicago...

Cite your sources, please.

Look, I know you really, really want John Marshall to magically become a great choice for law school. But it isn't.

I heard from friends in Chicago. Well, take this 80 people IP firm in Chicago for example(really randomly picked by me). They pay biglaw salary. http://www.marshallip.com/ It could be an outlier but I highly doubt about that. Number shows Kent and John Marshall have good standing in IP Law in Chicago.

JD from school:

John Marshall:7
Chicago Kent: 10
Northwestern: 12
UChicago:5
UMichigan:10
IU-Bloomington:4
UofIllinois:3

[A. Nony Mouse]

That a firm has hired people from a given school doesn't prove the school had "good standing" in the Chicago IP community. You don't know anything about what those people brought to the table otherwise. Also, when were they hired? Legal hiring has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

[BigZuck]

That firm's website has some highly underrated anti- U Chicago trolling

I approve

[chicagoburger]

That a firm has hired people from a given school doesn't prove the school had "good standing" in the Chicago IP community. You don't know anything about what those people brought to the table otherwise. Also, when were they hired? Legal hiring has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

Picked another high ranking search on google with "Chicago IP Law firm", 600 people strong Barnes & Thornburg has a big IP team in Chicago office. http://www.btlaw.com Of all the 33 listed attorneys, 6 are from Kent or JM. I mean I can't pick two outliers in a row.
John Marshall: 4
Chicago Kent:2
UofIllinois:5
UChicago:1
Northwestern:2
IU-Bloomington:2
Iowa:2

[A. Nony Mouse]

That a firm has hired people from a given school doesn't prove the school had "good standing" in the Chicago IP community. You don't know anything about what those people brought to the table otherwise. Also, when were they hired? Legal hiring has changed a lot in the last 10 years.

Picked another high ranking search on google with "Chicago IP Law firm", 600 people strong Barnes & Thornburg has a big IP team in Chicago office. http://www.btlaw.com Of all the 33 listed attorneys, 6 are from Kent or JM. I mean I can't pick two outliers in a row.
John Marshall: 4
Chicago Kent:2
UofIllinois:5
UChicago:1
Northwestern:2
IU-Bloomington:2
Iowa:2

Sure you can. But you also haven't addressed my points. What else do these attorneys bring to the table? Do they have PhDs (or other advanced degrees) relevant to their practice area? If so, where they get their JD is less pressing. (Do you have a PhD/other advanced degree in the area?) Do they have connections? When were they hired?

Also, no one has said that top students at Kent or JM can't ever get a job in IP, so this is really all a straw man. What you need to look at is not a random selection of people who got hired at unknown times under unknown circumstances, but the percentages of people in the last few graduating classes who got hired into jobs like the ones you want.

Finally, by your logic - looking just at the numbers - Iowa and Indiana have just as good a reputation for IP in Chicago as Kent, and Illinois has a better reputation for IP in Chicago than either JM or Kent. (You can only go to one of those schools so you can't lump them together to assess their reputations.)

[chicagoburger]

Sure you can. But you also haven't addressed my points. What else do these attorneys bring to the table? Do they have PhDs (or other advanced degrees) relevant to their practice area? If so, where they get their JD is less pressing. (Do you have a PhD/other advanced degree in the area?) Do they have connections? When were they hired?

I don't have answers to your question. Do me a favor, search "Chicago IP Law firms". I have listed the first two firm names that returned on page 1 (not the goole map ones). Now let's go to number 3: Brinks Gilson. Call it three times a charm?

John Marshall: 10
Kent: 4
Northwestern: 5
Illinois: 7
Iowa:6
UMichigan:17
IU:6
UChicago:2

[mjb447]

Also, no one has said that top students at Kent or JM can't ever get a job in IP, so this is really all a straw man. What you need to look at is not a random selection of people who got hired at unknown times under unknown circumstances, but the percentages of people in the last few graduating classes who got hired into jobs like the ones you want.

[BigZuck]

Dude random numbers are pretty meaningless. Answer Nony's questions. Think about what you're looking at.

I mean, there's not a lot of U Chi people at those places. Are you telling me it's better to go to John Marshall than it is THE University of Chicago if you want to be an IP lawyer in Chicago?

[guynourmin]

fwiw:

Marshall Gerstein appears to pay substantially below market. 4/7 JM grads have phds and of the 3 who do not the youngest graduated from law school in 1997.

At Brinks Gilson, of the 10 JM grads, only 3 were hired in the last 8 years, and 2 of those 3 have phds (and one of them speaks Mandarin). Of the Kent grads, the most recent graduated in 2007 and has substantial professional work experience.

[BigZuck]

Oh snap!

[stego]

Sure you can. But you also haven't addressed my points. What else do these attorneys bring to the table? Do they have PhDs (or other advanced degrees) relevant to their practice area? If so, where they get their JD is less pressing. (Do you have a PhD/other advanced degree in the area?) Do they have connections? When were they hired?

I don't have answers to your question. Do me a favor, search "Chicago IP Law firms". I have listed the first two firm names that returned on page 1 (not the goole map ones). Now let's go to number 3: Brinks Gilson. Call it three times a charm?

John Marshall: 10
Kent: 4
Northwestern: 5
Illinois: 7
Iowa:6
UMichigan:17
IU:6
UChicago:2

You're missing the point. All this exercise proves is that it's not impossible for well-qualified John Marshall grads to get a job in IP law in Chicago. It doesn't prove that it's a likely outcome for a random 0L applying to John Marshall in 2017.

[cavalier1138]

Sure you can. But you also haven't addressed my points. What else do these attorneys bring to the table? Do they have PhDs (or other advanced degrees) relevant to their practice area? If so, where they get their JD is less pressing. (Do you have a PhD/other advanced degree in the area?) Do they have connections? When were they hired?

I don't have answers to your question. Do me a favor, search "Chicago IP Law firms". I have listed the first two firm names that returned on page 1 (not the goole map ones). Now let's go to number 3: Brinks Gilson. Call it three times a charm?

John Marshall: 10
Kent: 4
Northwestern: 5
Illinois: 7
Iowa:6
UMichigan:17
IU:6
UChicago:2

Oh, I see your point now! Michigan is clearly the best school in the country for Chicago IP!

Seriously, just stop.

[stego]

If I could ask a couple of questions for more knowledgeable folks ITT:

(1) what are the biggest ways legal hiring has changed in the last 10 years?

(2) Does legal scholarship matter at all? I.e., do practicing lawyers read it? And/or, does it influence the way other law professors teach in law school, in a way that affects how their students practice later on?

[Thomas Hagan, ESQ.]

Sure you can. But you also haven't addressed my points. What else do these attorneys bring to the table? Do they have PhDs (or other advanced degrees) relevant to their practice area? If so, where they get their JD is less pressing. (Do you have a PhD/other advanced degree in the area?) Do they have connections? When were they hired?

I don't have answers to your question. Do me a favor, search "Chicago IP Law firms". I have listed the first two firm names that returned on page 1 (not the goole map ones). Now let's go to number 3: Brinks Gilson. Call it three times a charm?

John Marshall: 10
Kent: 4
Northwestern: 5
Illinois: 7
Iowa:6
UMichigan:17
IU:6
UChicago:2

Do me a favor, search "Donald Trump's Lawyers." Here's where they went to school:

Sheri Dillon, GULC
Thomas Wells, Case Western
Michael Cohen, Cooley Law

Your logic: "Why aren't these schools higher ranked than schools like Yale, Harvard, and Stanford?! The President's own attorneys are from these schools, so anyone who wants to be a President's lawyer in the future should go to GULC, Case Western, and Cooley instead of those arbitrarily high-ranked schools."

[HYPSM]

.

[CenterFringe]

I actually thought OP had a reasonable question (one I've also wondered) about the discrepancy. Like, there is no question in my mind that the University of Vermont is a terrible option, even if I want to practice environmental law, but why is ranked higher.

If I am understanding the answer correctly, it's because that school has some professors who are particularly prolific/respected with respect to their writing and research on the topic, AND the program specific rankings are determined via faculty voting. It then get's mismarketed at an indicator of that schools prestige in the field. Even as flawed the USNWR rankings are, they kinda-sorta follow employability/prestige so maybe someone naturally thinks the USNWR program rankings are comparable. Obviously they aren't, and faculty voting (if that is, indeed, the sole metric for the program rankings) is a beyond worthless metric.

Anyway, serious question, why do program rankings even exist?

[A. Nony Mouse]

Because (especially if TLS is any indication) laywers like to rank things.

Also to sell USNWR.