Top Law Schools

http://abovethelaw.com/2015/06/2016-vau ... -prestige/

?

In the sense that higher ranked firms generally have higher offer rates, a lot. I didn't choose a V5 because prestige, but because of the 100% offer rate.

It's one consideration among many.

Offer rate
Prestige / Exit Options
Resources vs. Thinly Staffed Assignments
Mentoring / Training Opportunities
Culture / Fit
Quality of Practice Area(s) your interested in
Transparency
Likelihood of success at making Partner etc.

Anonymous User wrote:It's one consideration among many.

Likelihood of success at making Partner etc.

At a V10? 0.

In the sense that higher ranked firms generally have higher offer rates, a lot. I didn't choose a V5 because prestige, but because of the 100% offer rate.

As a 1L, this was everything. Now that I am a lateral, I only really consider Chambers bands.

This thread needs more anon posts.

I chose the lower Vault-ranked of my two offers, so I guess not very much. (Just kidding, I agonized over the decision because prestige whore reasons)

Vault itself was helpful for OCI for discovering firms. Having a nice, neat list of well reputiaded firms came in handy. But now having gone through it and having done CBs I now know that are many, much more important factors than a firm's vault ranking (some listed above).

It still cracks me up when I read an anonymous post on here that begins with "V10 associate here" though

My OCI experience was this:

of 21 interviews, 5 were with V20 firms.

4/5 V20s gave me a callback.
2 have given me an offer and I'm waiting to hear back from the other 2.

1/15 non-V20s gave me a callback.
I did not get an offer.

Once you clear the grades/school bar, it seems (from my experience) to be way easier to get a job at a top vault firm than at other places.

TheUnicornHunter wrote:My OCI experience was this:

of 21 interviews, 5 were with V20 firms.

4/5 V20s gave me a callback.
2 have given me an offer and I'm waiting to hear back from the other 2.

1/15 non-V20s gave me a callback.
I did not get an offer.

Once you clear the grades/school bar, it seems (from my experience) to be way easier to get a job at a top vault firm than at other places.

Well yeah I mean they hire a shit ton of people and have a shit ton of work.

Anonymous User wrote:

In the sense that higher ranked firms generally have higher offer rates, a lot. I didn't choose a V5 because prestige, but because of the 100% offer rate.

As a 1L, this was everything. Now that I am a lateral, I only really consider Chambers bands.

Yeah, chambers is where it is at, especially outside of NYC

Desert Fox wrote:Vault isn't accurate enough to use at all.

for litigation. in fact, the higher ranked the firm, the shittier it is for litigation, in many cases. top firms are making bank on mass doc review projects, not sending associates to court (lol). good luck trying to find a job after 5 years of doc review at Latham. you'd be much better off working at a smaller firm and getting less "high stakes" experience but building actual litigation skills. high stakes giant litigations are great for equity partners, super shitty for junior associates

Vault probably influenced my decision more than I'd like to admit.

makerbreaker wrote:Vault probably influenced my decision more than I'd like to admit.

Why wasn't this anon?

Biglaw_Associate_V20 wrote:

Desert Fox wrote:Vault isn't accurate enough to use at all.

for litigation. in fact, the higher ranked the firm, the shittier it is for litigation, in many cases. top firms are making bank on mass doc review projects, not sending associates to court (lol). good luck trying to find a job after 5 years of doc review at Latham. you'd be much better off working at a smaller firm and getting less "high stakes" experience but building actual litigation skills. high stakes giant litigations are great for equity partners, super shitty for junior associates

I see this assertion a lot, but this doesn't explain the rankings of Boise or Quinn.

rpupkin wrote:

makerbreaker wrote:Vault probably influenced my decision more than I'd like to admit.

Why wasn't this anon?

I think the whole boart should be anon actually

Biglaw_Associate_V20 wrote:

Desert Fox wrote:Vault isn't accurate enough to use at all.

for litigation. in fact, the higher ranked the firm, the shittier it is for litigation, in many cases. top firms are making bank on mass doc review projects, not sending associates to court (lol). good luck trying to find a job after 5 years of doc review at Latham. you'd be much better off working at a smaller firm and getting less "high stakes" experience but building actual litigation skills. high stakes giant litigations are great for equity partners, super shitty for junior associates

Damn, going to have to tell all those associates I've seen leave Latham for DOJ, AUSA and various in-house positions that they're shit out of luck.

Using vault to pick a firm is dumb because vault is not attempting to measure the things new associates should care about.

rpupkin wrote:

makerbreaker wrote:Vault probably influenced my decision more than I'd like to admit.

Why wasn't this anon?

I think the sentiment is more norm than exception.

Bildungsroman wrote:Using vault to pick a firm is dumb because vault is not attempting to measure the things new associates should care about.

Yeah where's the ranking of competent paralegals and overnight word processing

if you really care about rankings and want to go to town, don't forget:

the american lawyer
chambers
us news and world report
above the law
legal 500

http://www.americanlawyer.com/home/id=1 ... curindex=0

http://www.chambersandpartners.com/guide/usa/5/12788/1

http://bestlawfirms.usnews.com/

http://abovethelaw.com/careers/2015-law-firm-rankings/

http://www.legal500.com/assets/pages/un ... tates.html

Bildungsroman wrote:Using vault to pick a firm is dumb because vault is not attempting to measure the things new associates should care about.

But isn't Vault based mostly (only?) on surveys submitted by associates? Of all the law firm rankings, it's by far the most associate-centric.

Also, does someone on here want to explain why a new associate should ignore Vault but heed Chambers?

rpupkin wrote:

Bildungsroman wrote:Using vault to pick a firm is dumb because vault is not attempting to measure the things new associates should care about.

But isn't Vault based mostly (only?) on surveys submitted by associates? Of all the law firm rankings, it's by far the most associate-centric.

Also, does someone on here want to explain why a new associate should ignore Vault but heed Chambers?

Well, its complicated. Vault is a superb measure of NYC general transactional. If you don't know what kind of transactional you want to do, but you know you want to do some kind of transactional work, you could do worse than following Vault, understanding that there isn't a meaningful difference b/w, say, rank 4 and 5 while there probably is b/w rank 4 and 8.

But if you want to do a specific practice group Chambers becomes important. If you want to do restructuring, you'd be a moron to take your Cravath offer (cravath just killed whatever restructuring group it had) over Weil or K&E. If you want to do projects, White & Case is probably a better option than a Wilkie or a Weil, even though for general corporate its the other way around. Etc.

but what does vault measure other than associates' perception of the reputation of firms? how does prestige indicate one firm is better than the other?

"This year, over 17,000 law associates rated law firms on a scale of 1 to 10 based on prestige."