Top Law Schools

At the risk of coming off as douchey, I need help narrowing down the field:

Grades came in, and the only cutoff Cornell gives is the top 10%. I'm high enough above the cutoff that it's probable I'm in the top 5% or so. I need to have a preliminary "bid list" for the Fall NYC job fair before I meet with career services this week.

I'm guessing my options are pretty open as far as how high I should bid, but how should I go about figuring out where to bid? People always say it's a combination of where, geographically, you want to work and what firms are within the right GPA range. Is this just a case of find "Look at vault/Apply to the best-ranked firms at the Job Fair-OCI/profit" or is there some way to tell these big firms apart and find out if there's any difference between them? I have no real goal as far as a specialty I want to work with, or a kind of law I want to do, or even really a city I want to end up in (although I'll probably look at NYC for next summer).

What kind of things should I be looking for where GPA is mostly not an issue for me? Also, are there any firms that are still out of reach? (I swear I'd heard of firms who don't take Cornell students).

Help, I'm indecisive

Do you have a practice area preference?

Congrats. You're in play at most firms. The best place to start is with some data from Cornell's OCS so you can gauge what GPAs specific firms are looking for. There's lots of resources for figuring out how well firms are ranked overall, in specific geographic markets, and in specific practice areas. There's also other metrics to consider (e.g., how many students the firm takes from Cornell, how big their SA classes are overall, how economically stable they are, etc.) and more qualitative concerns (namely, culture).

Here's a thread compiling external resources: http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 3&t=157633. Here's a thread compiling internal resources: http://top-law-schools.com/forums/viewt ... 3&t=120382.