Top Law Schools

I graduated from a TT in 2015, and I was nowhere near top 10% or whatever. No OCI interviews, passed over by every big firm in NYC. My point is, I was not the top shelf academic achiever in law school so I don't mean to be snooty with this observation.

That being said, it seems like a lot of NYC big firm real estate finance groups are filled with... well I'll call them people like me. It seems a significant chunk of the peers in my graduating class that went to big law are in real estate finance groups, and most of them were also not top 10% etc. Anyone else notice this? Is there a reason for it?

How do you know what their grades were

s1m4 wrote:How do you know what their grades were

I mean I'm speaking anecdotally but one of them had to take a required 3L bar class reserved for people with sub 3.0 GPAs, the rest (and my sample pool is 5 people from my class), none of them have latin honors on their profiles where others at the firm do. Just thought it was an odd coincidence.

That can be said about most speciality groups that aren’t subgroups of corporate or lit. It’s harder to fill positions in some specialties so firms are willing to dip a little lower

misterjames wrote:

s1m4 wrote:How do you know what their grades were

I mean I'm speaking anecdotally but one of them had to take a required 3L bar class reserved for people with sub 3.0 GPAs, the rest (and my sample pool is 5 people from my class), none of them have latin honors on their profiles where others at the firm do. Just thought it was an odd coincidence.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but a lot of people don't list latin honors on their firm profiles despite having them (and even listing them on LinkedIn sometimes). It's definitely a method to screen for academic credentials, but it is imperfect at the end of the day.

I think a lot of the "lower-tier" schools (in NY specifically, at least) do an ok job of focusing their curriculum on this & carve out a bit more of a niche - e.g., I was interested in RE at NYU (and above median but not latin honors, if this matters, I guess) and there wasn't really a clinic for me to do, whereas schools like Brooklyn (at the very least) have clinics devoted to this. Just spitballing but schools targeting training in that area might have something to do with it! I chose to go into general RE (with some finance, though not a finance-specific group) over lit and the group I'm joining seems to have a mix of schools (some like you're describing, some T14, with most partners from T14), but it also seems like YMMV by firm (also, not actually practicing yet).