Top Law Schools

People always claim HYS grads are always in demand years later. But is that true? After they flame out of Clearly -> Goodwin Proctor? Are they still HOT COMMODITIES? Or are they no better than any Goodwin Protoctor ALUM

Seems sorta flame, but never bet against legal prestige whoring.

Been looking at a lot of in house linkedin profiles lately and the youngins all seem to have extremely preftigiouf law schools on their resume.

Desert Fox wrote:People always claim HYS grads are always in demand years later. But is that true? After they flame out of Clearly -> Goodwin Proctor? Are they still HOT COMMODITIES? Or are they no better than any Goodwin Protoctor ALUM

Seems sorta flame, but never bet against legal prestige whoring.

They don't care one bit where you went to school. But they do care that your resume says you've worked on the $50 billion merger between bigco and hugeco and you've been around big deals/cases long enough that you can at least talk the talk.

There was an article years ago about the different outcomes of Harvard Law grads, including the homeless kid that turned himself into the parking ticket lawyer. I can't find it now though. I haven't seen anything recent. I guess the original guy might have retired, but there is a Harvard grad who fights traffic tickets for $150 in The Bronx.

There was that YLS grad that killed himself in court after being convicted of arson on the mansion he couldn't afford. That was in 2012 but he was a grad from a long time ago.

I am guessing a number of these YHS grads leave law so it's hard to track? There is an SLS grad who started Rap Genius but that was during the recession. I think it's now the genius app.

Tls2016 wrote:There was an article years ago about the different outcomes of Harvard Law grads, including the homeless kid that turned himself into the parking ticket lawyer. I can't find it now though. I haven't seen anything recent. I guess the original guy might have retired, but there is a Harvard grad who fights traffic tickets for $150 in The Bronx.

I may be going out on a limb, but the Harvard grad who fights traffic tickets is probably about as common as the Hofstra biglaw partner.

nealric wrote:

Tls2016 wrote:There was an article years ago about the different outcomes of Harvard Law grads, including the homeless kid that turned himself into the parking ticket lawyer. I can't find it now though. I haven't seen anything recent. I guess the original guy might have retired, but there is a Harvard grad who fights traffic tickets for $150 in The Bronx.

I may be going out on a limb, but the Harvard grad who fights traffic tickets is probably about as common as the Hofstra biglaw partner.

I would agree with that. As I recall, the brilliant formerly homeless guy just couldn't fit in with a firm. But that was just one of the outcomes from the article. Another woman had kids and had a job in Connecticut but seemed to struggle. A couple guys were still in biglaw.

I can't find it but it was eye opening as to the outcomes of the grads not being as uniformly great as people assume. It's old though so maybe not relevant.

nealric wrote:
They don't care one bit where you went to school. But they do care that your resume says you've worked on the $50 billion merger between bigco and hugeco and you've been around big deals/cases long enough that you can at least talk the talk.

Haha, not to be picking on your posts, but in-house opportunities came much earlier and more often to those with prestigious college and law school degrees at the firm I used to work at... but anecdotal evidence is anecdotal and so on and so forth.

Things did seem to even out around year 6-8. So, also just a perspective of timing, but 6-8 years is a long sentence.

Desert Fox wrote:People always claim HYS grads are always in demand years later. But is that true? After they flame out of Clearly -> Goodwin Proctor? Are they still HOT COMMODITIES? Or are they no better than any Goodwin Protoctor ALUM

Seems sorta flame, but never bet against legal prestige whoring.

I'd say 80% flame. But if you're looking at two big law washouts--one HLS grad, one UCLA grad--the HLS grad will have an advantage. Legal prestige whoring diminishes with time but never fully dies.

rpupkin wrote:I'd say 80% flame. But if you're looking at two big law washouts--one HLS grad, one UCLA grad--the HLS grad will have an advantage. Legal prestige whoring diminishes with time but never fully dies.

This makes sense in an "all-else-equal" scenario, but what is the practical relevance?

I can imagine school prestige making a difference at two stages: (1) getting your resume picked out of the pile, and (2) final decision between short list candidates. Prestige seems like a helpful but unnecessary boost for #1 -- you can network or play the numbers game to get by. For #2, how often are candidates close enough that school prestige is a meaningful tie-breaker? Is it relatively rare that there are two candidates that are equal in experience and "fit" qualifications? Probably varies by position and company.

kcdc1 wrote:

rpupkin wrote:I'd say 80% flame. But if you're looking at two big law washouts--one HLS grad, one UCLA grad--the HLS grad will have an advantage. Legal prestige whoring diminishes with time but never fully dies.

This makes sense in an "all-else-equal" scenario, but what is the practical relevance?

I can imagine school prestige making a difference at two stages: (1) getting your resume picked out of the pile, and (2) final decision between short list candidates. Prestige seems like a helpful but unnecessary boost for #1 -- you can network or play the numbers game to get by. For #2, how often are candidates close enough that school prestige is a meaningful tie-breaker? Is it relatively rare that there are two candidates that are equal in experience and "fit" qualifications? Probably varies by position and company.

Practically speaking, prestige is "a helpful but unnecessary boost" for pretty much all stages of hiring -- from 1L summer hiring all of the way to partnership decisions. The extent to which prestige matters will depend almost entirely on the job that you're applying for and the amount of other relevant considerations your prospective employer has with which to weigh its candidates. So, if you're being hired straight out of law school, employers have relatively few other ways to evaluate candidates and the prestige of your law school will matter pretty substantially. If you're being hired as a sixth year lateral associate in biglaw, you've likely done many other things that are more relevant to the question of how good of a hire you'll be, and the prestige of your law school will matter less. (And if you've somehow managed to accomplish nothing of note during your years of practice, your pedigree will make a relatively much bigger difference in your finding a job.)

tl;dr: I don't think it ever stops mattering entirely, but it quickly decreases in relevance as you build your legal career.

FWIW, in my experience, for entry-level jobs, prestige usually makes a noticeable difference in elite employers' decisions re who gets put on the short list, and prestige often (but not always or maybe even usually) makes a noticeable impact in who gets hired off of the short list. Lateral hires are more difficult to evaluate, and I've been less involved with that process, but I'd say that prestige seems to remain highly relevant for associate-level lateral hiring.

Incidentally, I think it's worth noting that prestige matters not only in getting the job, but in things like getting assignments, publications, accolades, etc (which in turn make a huge difference in getting your next job/promotion). I don't think it's nearly the biggest factor, but at every place that I've worked -- three prestigious legal jobs now -- it's been a noticeable factor on the margins. Candidates who are hired out of HYS or out of prestigious clerkships do seem to tend to get somewhat better assignments and somewhat more responsibility sooner than candidates who have come from more "humble" beginnings. It's far from an enormous factor, and merit quickly becomes the primary driver of these things, but I suspect that in the aggregate, it does account for a couple of "prestigious" folks getting further or doing better each year than talent alone would indicate.

Desert Fox wrote:People always claim HYS grads are always in demand years later. But is that true? After they flame out of Clearly -> Goodwin Proctor? Are they still HOT COMMODITIES? Or are they no better than any Goodwin Protoctor ALUM

Seems sorta flame, but never bet against legal prestige whoring.

(egregious v35 exit options trolling)

I sense an abl presence ITT to remind us of how much it still actually matters to go to one of a couple of law schools rather than some extremely comparable other ones

My honest answer would be that obviously the network that includes a higher % of persons in more elite positions must help at least on the fringes with career moves between those positions. But I don't think its an "H Y S" thing so much as a good schools with strong networks thing with no precise dividing lines.

I think the biggest reason prestige "matters" in the first place is that hiring committees need a way to evaluate candidates with limited information, and so they hire from HYS and other good schools more often because:
1. 1L grades are only a snapshot of someone's achievement. By hiring people from schools with high admissions standards, employers are effectively hiring not only based on 1L grades, but on college GPA/LSAT score/etc. Not especially relevant (1L grades are debatably not especially relevant either), but at least additional data points.
2. Because of the high admissions standards, the people competing with each other (everything is curved) are (based on the above factors) more qualified, and so a top 50% person at HYS might be equal to a top 33% person at CCN, etc. I don't know if this is actually true--I have not found it to be based on my friends from other schools--but assuming it is, it makes sense to take more people from the top schools, even if they have worse grades, up until the point at which someone's grades from a lesser-ranked school are equivalent.

That is, I don't know if most of the hiring from top schools is prestige-based. By the time people apply for other positions later in their careers, there are way more data points including relevant experience--so I'd imagine attending a top school would be considerably less important.

Law school prestige is very overhyped. Almost no one cares where someone went to school.

jbagelboy wrote:I sense an abl presence ITT to remind us of how much it still actually matters to go to one of a couple of law schools rather than some extremely comparable other ones

My honest answer would be that obviously the network that includes a higher % of persons in more elite positions must help at least on the fringes with career moves between those positions. But I don't think its an "H Y S" thing so much as a good schools with strong networks thing with no precise dividing lines.

Lol, I have been summoned!

But in all seriousness, nothing in this thread strikes me as being controversial (and I didn't see any posts advocating for attending any particular law school, let alone "one of a couple of law schools rather than some extremely comparable other ones"). The primary question I see is whether prestige markers matter past the initial hiring decision. I think the obvious answer is: yes -- but to a quickly diminishing extent.

(And to respond to your response , in my experience network isn't all that influential--especially past the initial hire. I think the power of "[x] school is good!" generally dwarfs the power of having an alum of your school with hiring influence at a place in which you want to work.)

.

My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

bc i'm unremarkable otherwise

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

bc i'm unremarkable otherwise

I mean, obv school matters and still matters quite a bit for young attorneys in their first lateral. But weren't you at a nice firm before? And you probably did Ok in school? Do you think if you'd gone to a slightly different school but applied from the same firm it would have made a huge difference? Idk.

jbagelboy wrote:

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

bc i'm unremarkable otherwise

I mean, obv school matters and still matters quite a bit for young attorneys in their first lateral. But weren't you at a nice firm before? And you probably did Ok in school? Do you think if you'd gone to a slightly different school but applied from the same firm it would have made a huge difference? Idk.

yes i honestly do think it makes a huge difference, at least a few years out (and when looking at other firms, i can't speak to in house)

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

bc i'm unremarkable otherwise

Not to diminish the value of your school—I'm sure it helps—but you don't have to be all that remarkable to get a lateral interview. Or lots of lateral interviews.

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

bc i'm unremarkable otherwise

Not to diminish the value of your school—I'm sure it helps—but you don't have to be all that remarkable to get a lateral interview. Or lots of lateral interviews.

i agree, but how do you think they are handed out on first glance?

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

bc i'm unremarkable otherwise

Not to diminish the value of your school—I'm sure it helps—but you don't have to be all that remarkable to get a lateral interview. Or lots of lateral interviews.

i agree, but how do you think they are handed out on first glance?

In the order of stuff that matters, I'd say it goes something like Law Firm You're At > Class Year > Law School > Law School Grades

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:

rpupkin wrote:

El Pollito wrote:My school alone got me like a million lateral interviews, so yeah, it matters.

How do you know that it was your school alone that got you the lateral interviews?

bc i'm unremarkable otherwise

Not to diminish the value of your school—I'm sure it helps—but you don't have to be all that remarkable to get a lateral interview. Or lots of lateral interviews.

i agree, but how do you think they are handed out on first glance?

In the order of stuff that matters, I'd say it goes something like Law Firm You're At > Class Year > Law School > Law School Grades

well, i agree with you on grades.