Do law school grades correlate to lawyering ability? Forum

[QContinuum]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

[NotSkadden]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

That's a bit over the top, don't you think? Anecdotal of course but my TTT hired a local solo attorney to teach antitrust (i'm assuming given his 20+ years working in antitrust) and he was one of the most competent professors I had.

On a separate note, some (many?) top TTT grads had opportunities to attend top law schools, and chose against it. Would having gone to a higher ranked school made these top-TTT grads better lawyers? I don't think so, and I can't see how you can answer that with any degree of certainty.

[LBJ's Hair]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

On a separate note, some (many?) top TTT grads had opportunities to attend top law schools, and chose against it. Would having gone to a higher ranked school made these top-TTT grads better lawyers? I don't think so, and I can't see how you can answer that with any degree of certainty.

That's just empirically false. If there were large numbers of TTT grads self-selecting into bad law schools, then the 75th percentile LSAT scores of the TTTs wouldn't be materially below T14 schools' 25th percentile.

There are people who are super smart and just bad at standardized tests, or the LSAT in particular, for sure. I have a friend who transferred to a T6 and graduated top 10% there. But there aren't like, hundreds of the people across the TTT that got into Penn and decided they'd rather be at Texas A&M.

[NotSkadden]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

On a separate note, some (many?) top TTT grads had opportunities to attend top law schools, and chose against it. Would having gone to a higher ranked school made these top-TTT grads better lawyers? I don't think so, and I can't see how you can answer that with any degree of certainty.

That's just empirically false. If there were large numbers of TTT grads self-selecting into bad law schools, then the 75th percentile LSAT scores of the TTTs wouldn't be materially below T14 schools' 25th percentile.

There are people who are super smart and just bad at standardized tests, or the LSAT in particular, for sure. I have a friend who transferred to a T6 and graduated top 10% there. But there aren't like, hundreds of the people across the TTT that got into Penn and decided they'd rather be at Texas A&M.

I agree with you on the above. I think I was misunderstood. I'm referring to top-TTT students (most people are referring to top 1-2% in this thread so that's what I was thinking) who get into top law schools as transfers and don't go. I'm wondering if staying at their TTT for their final 2 years made them "worse" lawyers than if they had gone to the higher ranked school.

[Anonymous User]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

On a separate note, some (many?) top TTT grads had opportunities to attend top law schools, and chose against it. Would having gone to a higher ranked school made these top-TTT grads better lawyers? I don't think so, and I can't see how you can answer that with any degree of certainty.

That's just empirically false. If there were large numbers of TTT grads self-selecting into bad law schools, then the 75th percentile LSAT scores of the TTTs wouldn't be materially below T14 schools' 25th percentile.

There are people who are super smart and just bad at standardized tests, or the LSAT in particular, for sure. I have a friend who transferred to a T6 and graduated top 10% there. But there aren't like, hundreds of the people across the TTT that got into Penn and decided they'd rather be at Texas A&M.

I agree with you on the above. I think I was misunderstood. I'm referring to top-TTT students (most people are referring to top 1-2% in this thread so that's what I was thinking) who get into top law schools as transfers and don't go. I'm wondering if staying at their TTT for their final 2 years made them "worse" lawyers than if they had gone to the higher ranked school.

Can I be super pretentious and say that I sincerely believe attending H/S/Y made me a better thinker and lawyer?

Was the first time in my life I was consistently just the middle of the pack in terms of intelligence and thoughtfulness, and three years of that stretches you and makes you adapt. I had to work harder to keep up, think through everything I said in class and casual conversation 10x as much as I ever did before (or since) and my friends from law school are still the people in my life that keep me honest intellectually. You forget it while you’re living it but it’s actually a pretty remarkable environment for three years - basically everyone you interact with is in the 99.somethingth percentile for this very specific type of intelligence, and if you think that doesn’t change you in some way, you’re kidding yourself.

Lots of Y/S/H grads will say that it changes you for the worse and emphasizes rationality and empiricism above other traits but even those who dislike the experience admit it does something to you.

[NotSkadden]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

On a separate note, some (many?) top TTT grads had opportunities to attend top law schools, and chose against it. Would having gone to a higher ranked school made these top-TTT grads better lawyers? I don't think so, and I can't see how you can answer that with any degree of certainty.

That's just empirically false. If there were large numbers of TTT grads self-selecting into bad law schools, then the 75th percentile LSAT scores of the TTTs wouldn't be materially below T14 schools' 25th percentile.

There are people who are super smart and just bad at standardized tests, or the LSAT in particular, for sure. I have a friend who transferred to a T6 and graduated top 10% there. But there aren't like, hundreds of the people across the TTT that got into Penn and decided they'd rather be at Texas A&M.

I agree with you on the above. I think I was misunderstood. I'm referring to top-TTT students (most people are referring to top 1-2% in this thread so that's what I was thinking) who get into top law schools as transfers and don't go. I'm wondering if staying at their TTT for their final 2 years made them "worse" lawyers than if they had gone to the higher ranked school.

Can I be super pretentious and say that I sincerely believe attending H/S/Y made me a better thinker and lawyer?

Was the first time in my life I was consistently just the middle of the pack in terms of intelligence and thoughtfulness, and three years of that stretches you and makes you adapt. I had to work harder to keep up, think through everything I said in class and casual conversation 10x as much as I ever did before (or since) and my friends from law school are still the people in my life that keep me honest intellectually. You forget it while you’re living it but it’s actually a pretty remarkable environment for three years - basically everyone you interact with is in the 99.somethingth percentile for this very specific type of intelligence, and if you think that doesn’t change you in some way, you’re kidding yourself.

Lots of Y/S/H grads will say that it changes you for the worse and emphasizes rationality and empiricism above other traits but even those who dislike the experience admit it does something to you.

Change you in some way? Perhaps. Make you a better lawyer? Seems like a stretch to me.

[icansortofmath]

It’s not pretentious.

It’s a well known phenomenon that talented people, on average, do even better when they are surrounded by other talented people.

This is why professional gamers play in gaming houses and even solo sports (like tennis) have training camps.

That said, once in biglaw, I think people who are talented enough to rise to the top will end up rising to the challenge and be fine after an adjustment period.

[nixy]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

I don’t. “Local solo” could mean all kinds of things. We don’t know anything about their qualifications.

[objctnyrhnr]

How hard is it to law-school-test better than 95% of the class when the vast majority of those 95% couldn’t crack 160 on their Lsat and couldn’t crack like 3.3 gpa in undergrad, relative to the difficulty of law-school-testing better than say 50% of your class that mostly all cracked say 170 and graduated magna/summa in undergrad?

Just seems like apples and oranges to me, tbh. “Oh I’m top of my class.” “Yeah, well who’s in your class?”

Is that an oversimplified way of thinking about this?

[nixy]

How hard is it to law-school-test better than 95% of the class when the vast majority of those 95% couldn’t crack 160 on their Lsat and couldn’t crack like 3.3 gpa in undergrad, relative to the difficulty of law-school-testing better than say 50% of your class that mostly all cracked say 170 and graduated magna/summa in undergrad?

Just seems like apples and oranges to me, tbh. “Oh I’m top of my class.” “Yeah, well who’s in your class?”

Is that an oversimplified way of thinking about this?

Yes. For one thing, it presumes that top is *only* in comparison with the other students and has no objective meaning - and yes, of course, that's what the curve literally means, but even if the top student is above a bunch of idiots, that doesn't tell you anything about the quality of that top exam. There is no cap on quality based on who's below the top students.

Second, this is still really all assuming that law school test taking ability directly correlates to success as a lawyer.

Third, it overlooks splitters - not everyone in a given class scored equally high (or low) on both GPA/LSAT, which can have a big effect on admission but obscures actual potential/ability (for ex: people who got low GPAs due to personal problems or simply not giving a shit when they were 18 are more likely to end up at lower-ranked schools - not invariably, but more likely - and may have since got their shit together. The people who show up here with 3.9s and a 150 LSAT because they don't want to take it again and go to lower-ranked schools may well be able to succeed in law school).

Fourth, it ignores people who have a lot of natural raw ability, but didn't grow up either with the resources to succeed or in a community that valued striving for test scores. (For this one - this kind of thing may be less common in major coastal cities, but there are lots of parts of this country where local/good enough is fine. Someone who grows up in Wyoming and has no intention of leaving Wyoming is likely to go to Wyoming Law and is likely only to care about what they need to do to get in to Wyoming Law. I don't think looking at their school actually tells you anything about how they compare to, say, someone who grew up in Westchester county where everyone was obsessed with going to the most prestigious colleges and went to private high school and had all kinds of tutoring for SATs and LSATs and scraped their way into Cornell or Northwestern after taking the LSAT 3 times.)

Finally, it ignores the fact that people transfer out of crappy schools every year, and while yes, TTTT to T13 is pretty rare (again: I've said there are differences/cliffs, I just place them differently than some in this thread), a lot of people transfer and do pretty comparably at the fancy school compared to their original school. If they'd stayed at the original school they'd have been one of the top students; even if they do end up at median at their new school, why is your median T14 (or T6 or wherever you place it) magically better than the top (say) TTT student when they may literally be the same person?

[2013]

One summer I sat in on a T2 summer course on antitrust. I kid you not, the instructor they got was some local solo attorney. The class was a complete joke. I was shocked people get credit for that kind of thing.

At least in my experience, adjunct teaching was completely hit or miss - either amazingly great or terrible. And I'm also told antitrust is one of the hardest fields to get profs for. So I'm not saying it wasn't a terrible course, but if that was your only experience, there's no way to know if it was representative.

Sure, adjunct teaching is hit or miss (heck, same with full-time professors even). But can you really see a T13/T20 hiring a local solo to teach antitrust? I feel like it'd make ATL if that were to happen.

On a separate note, some (many?) top TTT grads had opportunities to attend top law schools, and chose against it. Would having gone to a higher ranked school made these top-TTT grads better lawyers? I don't think so, and I can't see how you can answer that with any degree of certainty.

That's just empirically false. If there were large numbers of TTT grads self-selecting into bad law schools, then the 75th percentile LSAT scores of the TTTs wouldn't be materially below T14 schools' 25th percentile.

There are people who are super smart and just bad at standardized tests, or the LSAT in particular, for sure. I have a friend who transferred to a T6 and graduated top 10% there. But there aren't like, hundreds of the people across the TTT that got into Penn and decided they'd rather be at Texas A&M.

I agree with you on the above. I think I was misunderstood. I'm referring to top-TTT students (most people are referring to top 1-2% in this thread so that's what I was thinking) who get into top law schools as transfers and don't go. I'm wondering if staying at their TTT for their final 2 years made them "worse" lawyers than if they had gone to the higher ranked school.

Can I be super pretentious and say that I sincerely believe attending H/S/Y made me a better thinker and lawyer?

Was the first time in my life I was consistently just the middle of the pack in terms of intelligence and thoughtfulness, and three years of that stretches you and makes you adapt. I had to work harder to keep up, think through everything I said in class and casual conversation 10x as much as I ever did before (or since) and my friends from law school are still the people in my life that keep me honest intellectually. You forget it while you’re living it but it’s actually a pretty remarkable environment for three years - basically everyone you interact with is in the 99.somethingth percentile for this very specific type of intelligence, and if you think that doesn’t change you in some way, you’re kidding yourself.

Lots of Y/S/H grads will say that it changes you for the worse and emphasizes rationality and empiricism above other traits but even those who dislike the experience admit it does something to you.

I’ve actually heard that Yale grads, and, to a certain extent, Harvard and Stanford grads, are actually not that great of lawyers at first because of how those schools teach. When you’re teaching your students to be judges and professors, you teach more legal theory than legal practice. Obviously these individuals are extremely intelligent and adapt quickly, but I wanted to add this. And the poster above seems to confirm this.

Would I ever tell anyone to turn down YHS? Of course not. But I think schools like Columbia, NYU, and Penn probably have better lawyers out of the gate.

[objctnyrhnr]

How hard is it to law-school-test better than 95% of the class when the vast majority of those 95% couldn’t crack 160 on their Lsat and couldn’t crack like 3.3 gpa in undergrad, relative to the difficulty of law-school-testing better than say 50% of your class that mostly all cracked say 170 and graduated magna/summa in undergrad?

Just seems like apples and oranges to me, tbh. “Oh I’m top of my class.” “Yeah, well who’s in your class?”

Is that an oversimplified way of thinking about this?

Yes. For one thing, it presumes that top is *only* in comparison with the other students and has no objective meaning - and yes, of course, that's what the curve literally means, but even if the top student is above a bunch of idiots, that doesn't tell you anything about the quality of that top exam. There is no cap on quality based on who's below the top students.

Second, this is still really all assuming that law school test taking ability directly correlates to success as a lawyer.

Third, it overlooks splitters - not everyone in a given class scored equally high (or low) on both GPA/LSAT, which can have a big effect on admission but obscures actual potential/ability (for ex: people who got low GPAs due to personal problems or simply not giving a shit when they were 18 are more likely to end up at lower-ranked schools - not invariably, but more likely - and may have since got their shit together. The people who show up here with 3.9s and a 150 LSAT because they don't want to take it again and go to lower-ranked schools may well be able to succeed in law school).

Fourth, it ignores people who have a lot of natural raw ability, but didn't grow up either with the resources to succeed or in a community that valued striving for test scores. (For this one - this kind of thing may be less common in major coastal cities, but there are lots of parts of this country where local/good enough is fine. Someone who grows up in Wyoming and has no intention of leaving Wyoming is likely to go to Wyoming Law and is likely only to care about what they need to do to get in to Wyoming Law. I don't think looking at their school actually tells you anything about how they compare to, say, someone who grew up in Westchester county where everyone was obsessed with going to the most prestigious colleges and went to private high school and had all kinds of tutoring for SATs and LSATs and scraped their way into Cornell or Northwestern after taking the LSAT 3 times.)

Finally, it ignores the fact that people transfer out of crappy schools every year, and while yes, TTTT to T13 is pretty rare (again: I've said there are differences/cliffs, I just place them differently than some in this thread), a lot of people transfer and do pretty comparably at the fancy school compared to their original school. If they'd stayed at the original school they'd have been one of the top students; even if they do end up at median at their new school, why is your median T14 (or T6 or wherever you place it) magically better than the top (say) TTT student when they may literally be the same person?

So I take a number of your points and acknowledge that we have a well-reasoned respectful disagreement on this point, and I appreciate you pointing out the counter arguments.

That said, one of the issues I find in this post is it seems to take certain relatively anamalous situations (ie super high performing law school candidate choosing to remain in Wyoming, top of tttt transferring to t14) and using those circumstances to counter my point/opinion as if they were the norm.

Even if I did not expressly say this, it goes without saying that my view (to the extent it is correct) goes to the idea of looking at these students in an enormous aggregation. I’m not saying that every median t6 is smarter or has more lawyering potential than every student from a ttt. Of course not. I’m talking about a given/average student at one compared to a given/average student at the other...in a vacuum, all other things being equal (meaning adjusted for that Einstein outlier who chooses to stay in Omaha).

[nixy]

First, I agree about respectful disagreement. It’s certainly something on which reasonable minds can differ.

My point in bringing up what you call anamolous figures is twofold. First, the post I responded to was specifically talking about top TTT/TTTT vs. median T6/14. By definition you’re talking about anamolous figures (though I don’t think they’re as unlikely/improbable as you do. Like they don’t have to be an “Einstein” outlier unless you’re suggesting all T6 median students are Einsteins; I’m just saying that there are a lot of very smart people out there who don’t chase traditional coastal/major city prestige). So I didn’t intend to disagree with all generalizations about schools as much as to address “but of course top of TTT is easier to get than median T6, so you can’t assume top TTT are actually smart” [that last phrase wasn’t express but was implied]. Actually, yeah, I think you can assume that top of a class is pretty smart, and that’s what your specific post was addressing, not average vs. average.

My second point is that I don’t really see the point in trying to assess what you call the enormous aggregation. No one deals with an enormous aggregation, we only deal with individuals and my concern with the aggregation thing is that it gets used to prejudge individuals. That’s not intended to move the goalposts, but just explaining my issue with the discussion. I see the aggregation thing as creating a presumption that I don’t think is helpful.

[PeanutsNJam]

given how learnable the LSAT is (and, thus, not a good measure of “innate ability”), doing better than 95% of 155 LSAT people is more impressive than only doing better than 50% of 167 or whatever the typical T14 median is nowadays.

Most sub-160 people who aren’t (1) potatoes or (2) bad test takers w/ anxiety are there because they didn’t buy LSAT prep books and troll through Top Law Schools 6 months before the test. Sure, you can argue that’s a reflection of resourcefulness and grit, but I’ve seen too many 170+ people end up at or below median (and <170 people near the top of my class) to put much of any stock in the lsat.

On average, across a large sample size, will 170 students outperform 160? Absolutely. But the correlation is so weak (something like .14?), and so inconsistent, that it’s meaningless.

I mean, anybody with a 3.8+ GPA in basket weaving from Nowhere University who buys a powescore bible and hits a 167-175 score is in at T6 so maybe I’m just not impressed by mere admission to T14 law schools.

[FND]

Just to get back on topic, a friend of mine graduated top 1% of his class at a TTT (he got a full ride and his mother is a member of the faculty). Last time I checked in on him, he was the global department head for his practice group at his biglaw firm in Chicago.

I've also come across attorneys at biglaw firms with impeccable credentials who I can run rings around because they're fairly mediocre lawyers.

And, separately, I've also worked with some phenomenal lawyers and caught silly mistakes that lawyers of their caliber shouldn't be making - if it was my only time working with them, I might have thought very poorly of them, but due to continued interaction I could tell they were a cut above the rest.

In summation:
- there are great lawyers coming out of TTTs
- there are lousy lawyers coming out of T14s with great grades
- from a single interaction, you could get a completely wrong impression about a lawyer's ability

[lavarman84]

given how learnable the LSAT is (and, thus, not a good measure of “innate ability”), doing better than 95% of 155 LSAT people is more impressive than only doing better than 50% of 167 or whatever the typical T14 median is nowadays.

Most sub-160 people who aren’t (1) potatoes or (2) bad test takers w/ anxiety are there because they didn’t buy LSAT prep books and troll through Top Law Schools 6 months before the test. Sure, you can argue that’s a reflection of resourcefulness and grit, but I’ve seen too many 170+ people end up at or below median (and <170 people near the top of my class) to put much of any stock in the lsat.

On average, across a large sample size, will 170 students outperform 160? Absolutely. But the correlation is so weak (something like .14?), and so inconsistent, that it’s meaningless.

I mean, anybody with a 3.8+ GPA in basket weaving from Nowhere University who buys a powescore bible and hits a 167-175 score is in at T6 so maybe I’m just not impressed by mere admission to T14 law schools.

Yep, I got a 160 or 161 without studying for the LSAT. I actually had no idea that it was a learnable test. I didn't decide to go to law school until the last minute and signed up for the February LSAT not too far ahead of the deadline. I guessed during the entire logic games sections because I had no idea how to do logic games. I did no real research into law schools and just planned on going somewhere close to home or where I went for college.

Was it stupid? Sure. But I was an impulsive college kid who had never put much thought into my future. Knowing what I know now, I would have taken a gap year, gotten a tutor, and learned the test. Had I done that, I could have easily scored much higher. I simply didn't realize how prestige-obsessed lawyers are and how much law school rankings matter. I should have done more research. I should have done more planning. I give that advice to anybody who is considered this path now, but sometimes, life ends up working out. While I would have done it differently if I had a do-over, I can't say I regret going to law school where I did or feel that I can't achieve what I want in my career.

That's why I roll my eyes at some of the views on people who didn't go to top law schools. Yes, on average the students are better at the top, nobody doubts that. But when you're talking the elite students at lower ranked schools (T1/T2/TTT), I'll take them over the median at the t6 (except for Y). There are plenty of exceptionally talented people who didn't go to top law schools for one reason or another.

[Anonymous User]

Can I be super pretentious and say that I sincerely believe attending H/S/Y made me a better thinker and lawyer?

Was the first time in my life I was consistently just the middle of the pack in terms of intelligence and thoughtfulness, and three years of that stretches you and makes you adapt. I had to work harder to keep up, think through everything I said in class and casual conversation 10x as much as I ever did before (or since) and my friends from law school are still the people in my life that keep me honest intellectually. You forget it while you’re living it but it’s actually a pretty remarkable environment for three years - basically everyone you interact with is in the 99.somethingth percentile for this very specific type of intelligence, and if you think that doesn’t change you in some way, you’re kidding yourself.

Lots of Y/S/H grads will say that it changes you for the worse and emphasizes rationality and empiricism above other traits but even those who dislike the experience admit it does something to you.

Seconded. Given that law school learning is very student-participation-based (from socratic-method and seminar classes to out-of-class study groups to substantive (e.g., articles committee) journal work), the quality of my classmates at HYS played a hugely positive role in my legal education. I was a top student from a top undergrad, but in law school I was constantly pushed harder by my classmates in ways that were hugely conducive to me better understanding the material in ways that I am confident now as an experienced litigator have been beneficial to my lawyering. I doubt there's a material difference between HYS and, say, CCN in this respect -- but I do think that there's a very real difference between schools like HYSCCN and Maryland/UConn (which are more-than-respectable law schools in their own rights!). Also, with the probable exception of Yale, I don't think that the whole 'elite graduates don't actually know how to practice law' trope has any merit.

I posted about this earlier, but I also think that there's a material difference in the way that classes are taught at HYS (and most of the T14) and schools like Maryland/UConn that makes a very significant impact in (at least) complex litigation.

So, to circle back to the OP's question, if I'm at a lit boutique or the ACLU and am hiring someone for their ability to make challenging legal arguments about challenging areas of the law, I'm probably hiring someone who is T30-40% from HYS over the #2 student at Maryland, all else equal.* If I'm at White & Case and am hiring an associate who is statistically likely to leave the firm after ~2-4 years of mostly grunt work--but whose attention to detail is crucial--I'm probably hiring the #2 student at Maryland over anyone outside the top 10-20% at HYS, all else equal. FWIW, this is both normative (I'm describing what I think should happen with hiring) and descriptive: I have personal experience with hiring in both categories of jobs.

*All else is rarely equal with these sorts of comparisons. Most HYS students (and many T14 students) are particularly interesting and impressive in ways not simply reflected in their grades. On the other hand, students who finish #2 in their class, irrespective of the school, usually have extraordinarily impressive LORs and additional sparkling credentials that weigh on hiring decisions (EIC of law review, winner of moot court, etc.).

[FND]

there's a material difference in the way that classes are taught at HYS (and most of the T14) and schools like Maryland/UConn that makes a very significant impact

This is very true. My law school mostly taught appellate practice. I've moved to a smaller market, and the local law school is very far down the rankings (146-192 US News). Talking to attorneys and professors who went there, it's a completely different beast. A lot of classes teach to the bar. Other classes just focus on the basics. It's much more practical, less theoretical. I've spoken to the professor for my specialty, and was amazed at what's not taught in class.

[+] Spoiler

Likewise with the other professions. I routinely counsel clients that the big accounting firm in town is giving them bad tax advise that is costing them bucketloads of money. One client paid over 60% federal tax on a transaction - when he could have paid $0. I'm persona non-grata at said firm, but my clients love me when I explain the difference.

For the most part, I wouldn't trust even the bigger local firms for anything complex. Talking to other firms here, the biggest hiring concern is whether or not the student will even be able to pass the bar.