Top Law Schools

Recently, I had followed some threads regarding the negligible differences in school rank within the T14, outside of HYS.

Specifically, in regard to what little I know about OCI. From what I take, some schools pre-filter via GPA thereby making firms accessible via a set number of bids one has relative to the school. Still, some others do not. After initial screening interviews, firms themselves, I assume, are given a number of predetermined call backs, lets say 5 for Penn and 7 for NYU, at a target GPA of 3.5, whatever. The underlying theme here for a 1L/0L is, GPA, GPA, GPA. Leading one to believe the difference between a 3.5, at CCN, is negligible to to a 3.5, at the opposite end, with Cornell. This of course is aside from the advantage that CCN might have with more initial bids, predetermined call backs, and a longer OCI list to begin with.

IMO, this is relevant to any 0L determining their future contingent on presumed indebtedness, location, schollys, acceptances, grading/medians policies, and the like. This also makes me question whether a 3.3 at Penn trumps a 3.3 at USC, in California. What about UWashington versus NYU, in Seattle, at 3.4/(no grade reported???) at another extreme.

Does the T14 still trump regional at median? Do firms take into account differences in medians? Would it be wiser to attend a school with higher medians or no medians?

Medians link, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_la ... GPA_curves

This helped somewhat but not enough info...
The Vault Career Insider (http://www.law.yale.edu/vaultonlinelibrary)

More importantly, my reasoning for this thread was to glean information that may prove valuable to anybody making an investment in a legal education.

Is there any way access T14(18) OCI lists for each school?
Is there any way to access the GPA charts listing firm cut offs for those lists?
If so how? Is there post-able* link?

I value the breadth of knowledge on this sight, but I was unable to access this info via the search engine, esp. GPA charts. I was able to find fragmented bid lists threads for different schools but no GPA charts. Therefore, the bold text is most relevant to my interests.

Thanks!

You can access oci lists from the nalp directory. You can run an advanced search on firms that do OCI at a particular location. I know that individual schools keep track of Gpa medians and floors but I do not know of anywhere it is accessible to outsiders.

http://www.nalpdirectory.com/

http://www.nalp.org/

I am going to have to play around with this for a bit.

Thanks top30!

These are very smart questions to be asking about the process - this is exactly the kind of information that will make a big difference in each student's career prospects.

Much of it is proprietary and hidden, however. Schools generally give some information to their students, but usually strongly discourage spreading it. The reason is that the more public the data it is, the more likely firms are to get 'competitive' with one another and reduce their willingness to evaluate candidates holistically.

Anyway, here's a quick lo-down of how OCI works:

Every school invites basically all of the firms, but firms choose what schools to attend. Most big/good firms attend most of the OCIs at T14 schools. Smaller schools sometimes get fewer firms, and smaller firms sometimes visit fewer schools (why visit 14 schools to hire a summer class of 7?).

Each school the runs a bidding process for OCI interviews. Students ranks firms from 1 to (max number of bids, but that doesn't really matter). Schools then either assign interviews via lottery (more common at higher ranked schools), allow the firms to choose who to interview based on the resumes/transcripts of the students who bid (more common at lower ranked schools), or a mix of the two (UVA, for example, let's firms choose some of their interview schedule via pre-select and assigns the remainder via lottery).

Each firm chooses (a) how many interviews to do, usually with a minimum of 15 or 20 and (b) determines on its own how many students to callback and subsequently offer.

Here are some broad trends to be aware of (I have seen hiring charts from many schools):

(1) At the 'top' of the class, you'll have similar (nearly unlimited) opportunities at every T14 school.

(2) At 'better' T14 schools, you are likely to have more leeway with medianish grades. Median at Columbia is in a better spot than median at Cornell. Both will get OCI interviews, but some firms are hire more deeply into the class at Columbia than at Cornell.

(3) At 'better' T14 schools individual firms often conduct more OCI interviews. Some big New York firms do 100+ interviews at Columbia and do a fraction of that number at other schools, for example.

(4) As a consequence of #3, the average number of OCI interviews is generally higher at 'better' T14 schools. A made up, hypothetical example might be the average Columbia student gets 15 interviews while the average Cornell student gets 12.

(5) Region matters a lot. UVA has a lot of southern firms and medium sized midatalantic firms but fewer California or Chicago firms. Generally, the 'big' names in eery major market attend all or most OCIs at T14 schools. After that though, the less selective and smaller firms will be geographically related to the school you attend.

(6) 1L GPA is the most important factor at OCI (in addition to the school you attend) but it's rarely dispositive. People with great GPAs can screw up interviews or have shitty personalities and people with more moderate GPAs can get tons of offers with great firms if they have impressive backgrounds/personalities. 1L GPA is all you can control after you choose your school, but things like: Race, gender, work experience, social skills, prior accomplishments/accolades, etc. have a dramatic impact on OCI prospects. Two random people with a 3.5 at Columbia and one could get 2 offers out of 5 callbacks while another gets 7 offers out of 8 callbacks (another made up hypothetical).

(7) No matter what happens at OCI, you can apply for spots in a summer program just by sending a letter to a firm. This is a very good way to supplement the 2L summer job hunt no matter what your rank and school.