Top Law Schools

Dear TLS,

I'm a 2012 SLS grad and former biglaw associate. I was active on this forum a long time ago when I was applying for law schools, but stopped posting once law school and the 1L grind began. Since then, my career has taken a meandering path. Back in 2010 (when I was applying for summer associate positions), it seemed that everyday ATL would write a post about how another law firm was breaking layoff records and how offer rates and salaries were dropping. I was scared at the time that I wouldn't get a job, so I went with the safest bet (i.e. highest offer rate and PPP) out of the law firms from which I received offers. Ultimately, I ended up summering at a big NYC law firm and then working for that firm after graduation, but made it less than a year before I burnt out and quit.

To make a long story short, I left the law to go to a startup in silicon valley (one of the scariest decisions I've ever made). That startup (unlike many you hear about) didn't pan out, and I switched careers back to software engineering (my undergrad). Fast forward to today, and I'm gainfully employed again, albeit not in a legal respect. However, I still am passionate about the law, software engineering and the legal community, which is why I'm posting this.

I just launched a website called Biglawrefuge http://www.biglawrefuge.com. It's a website for law students and lawyers that lets them to put in anonymous employment stats (e.g. job applications, interview data) and law firm reviews. I then aggregate statistics so that over time, law students and lawyers alike will be able to discern things like the average GPA for students offered positions at law firm X, or what percentage of students at law school Y received offers from law firm X. My hope is that the site will be community-supported by users like you and that others will find the data useful in making a very big decision about what law firm to choose their 2L year and post-graduation.

As OCI approaches, I hope that many of you will sign up, post up and track your job applications as time goes on and that many will find the site useful.

Thanks,
codeandcodes

P.s. feel free to ask me any questions about the site or my background!

Damn dude. Cool story.

JohannDeMann wrote:Damn dude. Cool story.

Thanks! You can also find me @ http://codeandcodes.com/ where I've blogged some of my adventures. There's a lot of technical mumbo jumbo in there, but I also describe my journey from law school to big law back to software engineering. It's been a pretty crazy ride, and it's not over yet.

Very interesting. Would love to see something like this get big.

lawman84 wrote:Very interesting. Would love to see something like this get big.

I hope so too. TLS is literally the first place I announced the website, so this is ground zero. I'm taking feature requests too

This looks awesome, well done.

nice looking site

shouldnt schools career services have all these stats already tho (and actually complete stats)

Mack.Hambleton wrote:nice looking site

shouldnt schools career services have all these stats already tho (and actually complete stats)

Thanks! They probably have some of this information. When I was going through OCI, there was a chart that had some information (e.g. broken down by # applications, # callbacks), but it wasn't very comprehensive and it wasn't very public. I hope also that by putting in some written information relating to the interview and application process (e.g. what is a callback at firm X like, what is the average time for response, etc) we can add some additional information that you might not otherwise get from your school's career center.

Mack.Hambleton wrote:nice looking site

shouldnt schools career services have all these stats already tho (and actually complete stats)

I don't think mine does or they don't want to give them to me.

very cool

ManoftheHour wrote:

Mack.Hambleton wrote:nice looking site

shouldnt schools career services have all these stats already tho (and actually complete stats)

I don't think mine does or they don't want to give them to me.

Yea, OCS at my school gave us next to nothing. Definitely not that sort of information.

Sounds like an awesome idea. Good luck!

thesealocust wrote:Sounds like an awesome idea. Good luck!

Thanks!

Hi TLS,

I just wanted to bump this thread with an update to http://www.biglawrefuge.com. I've been working hard this past week on bringing new features that will help our community of law students and lawyers grow. Now you can add and reply to comments to job postings, either with your profile or anonymously.

I realize that anonymity is important in our community because it's close-knit. However, I'm hoping that the features on the website will enable us to continue sharing information.

If you haven't contributed a review or job posting yet, please do! Together we can bring greater transparency to law firm hiring.

Thanks,
codeandcodes

This is great. Good luck!

Apple Tree wrote:This is great. Good luck!

Thanks so much. Hope that you find the site useful.

I've created a twitter account as well so people can follow update to the website and I don't have to spam TLS

https://twitter.com/biglawrefuge

this looks great. signed up and bookmarked your twitter (since im not a tweeter). hope to use this in the future when i start applying for internships/jobs

fisheatbananas wrote:this looks great. signed up and bookmarked your twitter (since im not a tweeter). hope to use this in the future when i start applying for internships/jobs

Thanks! Hope that you will find the site useful and then contribute your own findings

Cool site. I guess my only concern at this point is that when people list their outcomes but go anonymous, we have no idea what school they're from, so the numbers become sort of unhelpful - someone getting rejected from Cravath with a 3.7 doesn't really tell me much if I have no idea if that's a T30 GPA or a T6. Maybe consider making anonymous postings show up with traditional TLS groupings, IE, MVP, T6, etc.?

Vexed wrote:Cool site. I guess my only concern at this point is that when people list their outcomes but go anonymous, we have no idea what school they're from, so the numbers become sort of unhelpful - someone getting rejected from Cravath with a 3.7 doesn't really tell me much if I have no idea if that's a T30 GPA or a T6. Maybe consider making anonymous postings show up with traditional TLS groupings, IE, MVP, T6, etc.?

That's an excellent idea. I was thinking that myself when browsing the job data.

Poll: I can show either "anonymous", "anonymous (law school name)" or "anonymous (law school grouping)" for each job posting. Right now I err on complete anonymity (ie no law school shown).

What do people prefer?

codeandcodes wrote:

Vexed wrote:Cool site. I guess my only concern at this point is that when people list their outcomes but go anonymous, we have no idea what school they're from, so the numbers become sort of unhelpful - someone getting rejected from Cravath with a 3.7 doesn't really tell me much if I have no idea if that's a T30 GPA or a T6. Maybe consider making anonymous postings show up with traditional TLS groupings, IE, MVP, T6, etc.?

That's an excellent idea. I was thinking that myself when browsing the job data.

Poll: I can show either "anonymous", "anonymous (law school name)" or "anonymous (law school grouping)" for each job posting. Right now I err on complete anonymity (ie no law school shown).

What do people prefer?

agree thats a great idea. "anonymous (law school name)" might not be anonymous enough when your site is just getting started. for example if theres only a few users that attend that law school. so maybe "anonymous (law school grouping)" at least until theres enough users that showing the law school name wont be too obvious?

Restrict signup to .edu emails only

Great idea!

I think it would be helpful to add a place to put the location of the office, so you could filter by city or something.

Clearly wrote:Restrict signup to .edu emails only

Some of us have graduated and no longer have .edu's but may be interested in contributing.

and, re: anonymous posts and schools, I think moving to traditional law school groupings makes sense (split the t-14 into 4, then just do bands of 10 for tier 1, then just straight up t2/3/4?)