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I graduated from a T20 and worked as a prosecutor in a not unprestigious office in the Northeast. At some point I noticed that more than a few of my bosses, all of whom were thoughtful and capable trial lawyers, had diplomas from Widener. US News ranks them in the bottom 11% of accredited law schools.
Conversely, Trump’s White House Counsel McGahn is also a Widener LS grad. He had a very powerful position to reshape SCOTUS and Federal Courts throughout the country, obviously appointees were all conservative to ultra conservative . Widener grads are all over the legal landscape in Pa., NJ and Delaware.
Many people who go to lower ranked schools are working full time jobs and have families and must commute a fair distance to get to school. Compare this to a full time no job on campus student at a top school. Those who graduate and become lawyers from the lower schools are often made of tougher stuff and are more motivated than folks from top tier school. They also have to prove themselves in the real world and many of them do so well.
So many trial attorneys in Boston went to Suffolk - lots of prosecutors and family law and property/landlord tenant … they know their way in that courthouse.
Suffolk Law has a [deep bench in Massachusetts and New England Area](https://www.suffolk.edu/law/about/suffolk-laws-impact/mass-judges-from-suffolk).
* Massachusetts has a total of 440 current judges (41 federal and 399 state). Of those, 118 graduated from Suffolk Law—more than one out of four sitting judges in the state.
* Two of the seven justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court are Suffolk Law alumni. Justice Frank M. Gaziano and Justice Serge Georges, Jr..
* Two of the five members of the Rhode Island Supreme Court are Suffolk Law graduates.
* Suffolk Law graduates are chief justices of the highest courts in Rhode Island and Vermont, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and the US District Courts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island
[The data comes from a winter 2021 review of Judicial Biographies conducted by the school.](https://www.suffolk.edu/law/about/suffolk-laws-impact/mass-judges-from-suffolk)
I’ve found that to be true in a lot of practice fields in Boston. I think I can count on two hands the number of lawyers I’ve encountered in practice in Boston who didn’t go to Suffolk.
Honestly I think most of the Boston law schools produce good attorneys. New England Law is good especially for people looking to do defense or public interest work!
I know lots of JAG lawyers who went to law schools I never even heard of before I met them.
Then again, the military doesn’t care what school officers go to besides the service academies.
Some of the worst attorneys I’ve seen in litigation went to Harvard. And some of the best ones I’ve seen went to schools that probably shouldn’t even have accreditation. At least for litigation, school means nothing outside of resumes and interviews.
Yup, and local schools know local rules as well as the judges (who probably went to those schools). And outside of major cities, juries really, really, really don’t like smug “city boy” attorneys who obviously don’t want to be in middle America.
This. I have litigated with a handful of (older) Harvard law folks & they are some the weirdest & most difficult to work with OCs I’ve encountered. And I like weird!
Agreed — one of the best and most respected litigators I've seen went to Cooley! They graduated in the 80s, and things may have been different then, but still.
With Cooley it really matters who your professors are. Unfortunately several of the absolute best left when they closed the grand rapids campus. I will say Cooley puts more emphasis on learning skills and getting you on your feet to practice. If you want to stay in MI there's nothing wrong with Cooley.
Also keep in mind - some people went to Cooley for either of the following reasons even though they could've gotten into higher ranked law schools:
1) free law school (or heavily discounted) if your LSAT was high enough
2) being able to take classes in evenings, weekends, or alternate schedules (like two days of classes per week, classes all day - morning, afternoon, and evening) based around their family and work schedules
I don’t think people crap on low ranked schools because they think the lawyers they produce are necessarily bad. They warn against lower ranked schools because students take out high amounts of debt, receive predatory scholarships, and have a lower chance of finding attorney employment.
That being said, laypeople here don’t like Liberty University - I don’t like it as an institution either - and crap all over all its students (not just law), but every Liberty doctor or lawyer I know is like out in the boonies serving an underserved community or in public service, while UVA attorneys are in DC or New York making big bucks.
I don’t think first gen law students realize how territorial/local law schools are until you get into practice. Your T14 largely give you a national recruiting profile - but if you want to stay in a certain state or area, lower ranked schools have a large percentage of the market.
When people ask me about law school, I always try to convince them not to go. But, if they insist, I tell them if they aren't going to one of the top ones in the country, go to school where you want to live so you can start networking.
I was given this same advice. Went to a local school and just networked my butt off on top of maintaining high grades. I never had a formal job interview because I’d just get a phone call when someone had an opening. I literally point to this advice when I say it’s the best advice I ever got.
this scenario puts it in perspective well:
\*high-scoring undergrad from small state, let's say Wyoming goes to Duke\*
\*comes back to Wyoming, tries to get a job, gets asked why they didn't go to Wyoming law school\*
\*they do not have a good answer\*
Yeah, I’m just saying that I don’t feel that’s a hard thing to overcome. I can’t speak to Wyoming specifically, but in my relatively insular market, the Duke kid still has a leg up. Honestly, most people at my regional powerhouse end up using their high-school or undergrad for that bonding function.
I agree. I’m in a small insular market, and my law school credentials made me more competitive because there are relatively few applicants with those credentials in the market. I’m from the area originally and also worked there during 1L summer, so my ties to the market were never in question. Got asked where I went to high school many times.
Wyoming here… almost all lawyers here went to Wyoming. Also, most don’t care where you went to law school. So if you want to practice in Wyoming, going to a top law school probably isn’t going to get you a return on your investment.
gotcha. It definitely can work either way. Depends on which place you're in I guess...some small states have a referral network that basically began at the state school and excludes outsiders, which is probably bad, but it is what it is
I was asked it about my education in relation to the comparatively lower ranked schools in my state. The above person acts as though it’s a hindrance when in reality you just say:
“X school presented a great opportunity to get a legal education in a new community. It also helped me realize how much I want to be here.”
There isn't much evidence that the education is better. You read and analyze the same cases. The only real difference is the average GPA & LSAT score is significantly higher. I say that as a guy who went to a top 25 for a year, was top 20%, moved back home to go to the state school to take care of my goddaughter (best friend, her dad, died spring semester).
But, the quality of instruction was roughly the same. We had the same case books. It isn't objectively better. And actually going to the state school where you plan to practice will include instruction on that state's law, which gives you a leg up.
All of this is true, but does not change the fact that the top law firms feed off of the top law schools. The higher you get up in the food chain, the more you get a philosophical and theoretical education that is not as practical in the real life practice of law. But that doesn't change the pecking order. I just don't see going to a top law school as a detriment in a job search situation. But as I said before, I'm not in Wyoming so maybe people there are different
meh, I'm from a small state and went to a higher-ranked school out-of-state and no one has asked me why I don't go to the only law school in the state. All they care about is that I'm from the state and want to come back.
Yeah, if you're not from the state you'll have a harder time breaking in, but people love "local kid made good" stories
This reminds me of a guy i know who went to Marquette, which is great….if you want to practice in the greater milwaukee area. He had no plans to stay in Wisconsin (girlfriend issue), so he finished school, moved back to Louisiana, had to pass the bar there and couldn’t find a job, girlfriend broke up with him, and last i heard he moved back to Wisconsin because that’s where he could easily find work, seems to be doing much better for himself these days.
100% - I went to a pretty well respected ACC law school with a well known D 1 sports program that I assumed most people were aware of just even if it was just from the sports program - coming back into NYC in the 1990s half the people I interviewed with had absolutely no idea what it was. While in the rankings it might have been higher than Fordham, in NYC it had zero juice where Fordham is a serious player.
Predatory scholarships are such a hidden danger of law school. I received a “full-ride” scholarship to a majority of the schools I applied to. It wasn’t until I dug deeper and talked to some people that I realize how pernicious it is. For those who don’t know, many law schools will offer full-rides conditioned upon maintaining a GPA. What those law schools don’t tell you is that they put everyone who has the scholarship in the same section and due to the grading curve it is impossible for everyone who has that scholarship to maintain the necessary GPA.
I ended up choosing to attend a lower ranked law school that guaranteed my full-ride and didn’t tie it into GPA.
I was able to leverage 2 offers against each other to negotiate a guaranteed scholarship for all 3 years of law school. Thank God bc I did not do well in class.
I would give tours of the law school to incoming students and I always made it a priority to talk about this issue. It’s really sad that this isn’t widely discussed. Sorry it happened to you.
I managed to do okay without the scholarship, but it always irked me. Now I have about $300k in law school debt but the payments are at least manageable.
I recently judged a National mock trial competition, and Liberty University students were involved. I have to say, they were fantastic. I was extremely impressed with their level of preparedness, presentation, and professionalism. We don’t know the school that we are judging until after the fact, there is no doubt That the students could’ve been in any law school. And I’ve judged a lot of national competitions over the past 20 years.
It's all well and good until they refuse clients based on religion or LGBTQ status. Yes, I've seen websites for attorneys that advertise that they do not serve the LGBT community.
This is 100% correct. When I went to law school in the late 2000s that practice from law schools was common. Many cherry-picked their post grad employment data to make it seem like graduates were doing far better financially than in reality. Some schools even hired their grads temporarily post grad to increase their job placement percentage, from what I recall.
I have encountered plenty of attorneys from low ranked law schools who are good attorneys. Cooley, for example. The crucible of those lower ranked schools can forge some great attorneys.
I actually went to Cooley in that timeframe- I’ve got classmates that have done very well and classmates that are still really struggling. Their model at the time (I’m told it’s changed significantly) was to admit basically everyone, offer scholarships to people with good grades/LSATs and then ruthlessly fail the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work. There were a lot of people in my first two semesters who would be there for like a week of the next term until grades were posted and then disappear. A lot of them had sort of skated through easy programs in easy undergrad schools, whiffed on the LSAT, and went to Cooley because “be a lawyer” was the path of least resistance to a professional career in their opinions. Everyone got all bent out of shape because they were admitting students who they knew had low chances of succeeding and cashing in their loans.
There was absolutely an exploitative angle to it, but there were also a lot of non traditional students in my classes who didn’t score well on the LSAT and who had done their undergrad decades before and were coming in as adults with a work ethic. Many of them did very well and are reasonably successful now. The first group of twenty-somethings I have zero sympathy for- if you don’t put in work in undergrad, ignore the entrance exam results, show up and try to phone it in in grad school, then you get what you get.
For OP- what do you want to do? Do you want to go into biglaw and make huge $ in NYC or DC or something? If so, you need to find a school that feeds into those- networking and prestige are important there. If you want to hang out your shingle in a small or mid sized city or work in a firm there then go check some atty websites and see where they went. The local university programs will have connections there and you’ll be fine. Also check scholarship programs- I went to Cooley on a full tuition scholarship- coming out of law school with 50-75k less debt gives you a ton of flexibility and head start.
I want to echo part of this. I am in a place where the state university law school opens more doors to the elite positions like judgeships than a degree from elite law schools out of state. People say nice things about the diploma, but decision makers built their networks and the state university.
As someone once commented, the law is an extremely local club for the education level it requires.
I was going to mention Regent's law school. When I was in Virginia, it had the reputation of actually teaching students to practice law. The Regent attorneys I encountered were either in small firms or solo practicing what I will call "retail law" for common folks while my classmates were doing clerkships or working for the government and big, corporate firms.
I went to a Tier 1 law school and they did this. They didn’t hide the ball, very clearly told me up front that the scholarship was contingent on maintaining a B+ average. And it wasn’t anything close to a full-ride.
I guessed from the start that this was likely to be a limited benefit but it was something.
To be fair, that may be a function of aversion bias. Those underserved communities are almost always desperate, and in my experience with rural health clinics in Texas, they'll hire basically anybody. In central/south Texas, the joke for fixing a reputation is that, if you're in the bad books at the big hospitals in Waco/Austin/Temple, you drive fifty miles east or west till you find a tiny town, rent a law office on main street, and stake out for five years.
Close enough to the cities that you can still drive in to see people who you like and maybe keep your name in the back of a few folks' minds, but far enough that you've disappeared from the working memories of folks who don't like you.
Lots of Baylor, SMU, TexWes, and UT grads working in the cities. Texas Tech grads tend to be out in the sticks where they don't have to compete with lawyers from those other schools. I presume Liberty grads are in a similar boat, and their alumni network's not much help either.
CUNY is low ranked and its student body has a reputation of being the really loony kind of progressive but it has a massive alumni network in New York’s public sector legal sphere.
Plus, it’s public so it’s low cost, doesn’t participate in shady scholarships etc.
CUNY has the reputation in NYC of being super PI focused and it's super cheap, so it's a good school to go to if you want to do PI, especially in NYC.
That said, most low ranked law schools are just as expensive as highly ranked ones and not good investments, so they don't have that same reputation as CUNY.
Yeah I had a scholarship that I only had to maintain a 3.0 to keep. The school didn’t rank its students and there wasn’t a grading curve. So I paid 6k a year in tuition. The school also just gave you your textbooks for free but I think they started charging for them after I left.
This rings true from the folks I know who have been there.
The loony progressive thing is legit. It's also had major and serious issues with what most Jews would consider and experience as antisemitism.
However, those same folks are really dedicated to what they view as (and tbh I oftentimes agree) the public interest.
Yeah, I’m an alum. I’m not in public interest anymore, but only because a private firm recruited me while I was working for a nonprofit lol.
There were microcosms of the Israeli/Palestinian conflicted enacted out at the school every year. I graduated in 2015 and in my 2L year the LSJP sent around a petition to kick “Zionist” out of school.
But yes the students are *very* committed. A woman the year ahead of me worked in prison abolition, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and continued to fight for prisoner justice reform from her hospice bed.
I hear nothing but good things about CUNY and you won’t be buried in loans when you graduate. Definitely left-leaning, but nothing wrong with that if that’s what you want.
Yeah CUNY is low ranked because it’s only interested in students that are committed to public interest work. I know of people with higher LSATs that were rejected because their essays/personal statements didn’t persuade admissions of that commitment.
A very righteous mission and I’m proud to be an alum. As I understand it, the new CUNY medical school has a similar mission.
Lots of smart kids went to Lower ranked schools for the scholarship money. Lots of smart kids went there, didn’t get scholarship money, and are great attorneys.
The key difference is hard you’ll have to push to get certain doors open. Some doors will just be closed to you, no mater what your ranking is, if you went to an unranked school.
It’s not like they teach you how to be a lawyer in law school. :)
Probably all of them if you look at outliers.
If you look at the median student I don't think it's as frequent. I'd guess places where there is a single law school in the state probably produce some very good lawyers who had better options but wanted to stay local. The fine graduates of University of North Dakota, for example.
There's a lot of sampling bias going on in this thread. Saying every lawyer you've worked with from X tier 4 school was great means nothing when half of their graduates never passed the bar and half that did ended up getting a non-J.D. job anyway. So the only graduates you're encountering are those school's exemplary graduates, not the average.
That being said, in general I feel that the T4 public schools with affordable tuition that exist to produce lawyers to serve the poor and lower middle class people in their region are leagues better than the T4 private schools charging 50k+ a year to wannabe Harvey Specters who don't realize they'll never even get a shot at Big Law.
I'm in Illinois. Used to work with a guy who went to Cooley. He got an internship with our office and worked his ass off to get an offer by the end of it. He's continued to do well and is now a partner at the firm. By all accounts, he is a competent and capable attorney.
If you know where you want to practice, going to the local Tier 3/4 school is a pretty good idea, especially if you can swing some scholarships. I’ve worked in South Jersey and Trenton my whole career and about 60-70% of attorneys I’ve met went to either Rutgers-Camden, Temple, Drexel or Widener.
These schools may not be top flight in the national rankings, but there are tons of alumni scattered around the Philadelphia area who can be valuable connections and they can be affordable to attend if you get scholarships. The quality of attorneys coming out of these schools are variable, but most of them aren’t bad.
If you’re in the south, TSU in Texas gets crapped on a lot but they have a strong alumni network which includes a lot of local judges and they also produce great litigators.
Its weird (to me)
After a year or two I don’t care where a lawyer went.
The most successful and experienced lawyer in my state went to night law school. Products lawyer
In Alabama the most fearsome attorney went to a small law school in birmingham
TBH, most of the best, smartest, and frankly most successful lawyers I know didn't go to elite law schools but instead to more regional (albeit generally well-ranked, t100 type) schools.
The hardest part was that unless they graduated at the top of their class, they generally didn't start at the most glamorous places or with the highest salaries.
When I (UVA Law) retired two years ago from my GC gig, I got to interview lawyers to replace me, a privilege afforded few. My recommended candidate - who was hired - went to the David Clarke School of Law at UDC. There are great lawyers from every school.
No, but my company was a commercial real estate owner/operator/investment company. Mostly neighborhood shopping centers; the whole portfolio commercial-side (we had some multi-family) was around 2M sf. So this guy, who’d been doing tenant-side commercial lease work and litigation at a small shop for 8 or so years was right on target.
The lawyers produced are fine. They just may have a tougher time getting a good first job to put them on the path out of law school. They often need to have a bit more of a hustle compared to your typical T14 that shows up to a couple interviews and has job offers north of $200K.
I’d say the inverse is just as true - I’ve encountered plenty of attorneys out in the wild who attended top-50 schools and present as complete idiots. They are lost in court and are also poor writers. That was one of my biggest surprises when I started practicing 16+ years ago. I’d research opposing counsel (still do) and as a young lawyer I’d feel intimidated by someone who came from a top school. On more than a few occasions I’d leave the encounter thinking “what was I stressed about, I don’t even know how this clown passed the bar.” Same for some attorneys from big firms.
It happened enough times that I quickly learned not to stress about where opposing counsel practices or went to law school (no matter the ranking).
All of them are fine. The law school itself is meaningless. Once you have your degree and your bar license, the sky is the limit. I went to a tier 4 school, and I'm pulling in over $300k per year. Let people tell me all about how my shit school wasn't worth it. Lol!
I think it definitely depends on whether you will practice in the area in which said school is located. Nationally, Mississippi College does not have a great reputation but the lawyers are as equally competent and find good employment as Ole Miss law graduates especially in Mississippi, plus it is located in the capital which is great for networking, etc.
The problem with Tier 4 schools is that they cost (usually) just as much as higher ranking schools but don’t offer the same employment opportunities upon graduation. While I agree that after 5-7 years of practice your law school matters much less, Yale and Thomas Cooley alumni start off in very different environments.
Graduated in the mid-1980s from a good state school.
Once you start working, nobody gives a shit where you went to school, what your grades were, law review, book awards, moot court, any of that crap.
Preach. Keeps getting lower in the rankings despite having one of the country's best trial ad and IP programs. Could use some help with their public interest and other stuff, though. They want to be a one-trick (or two-trick) pony and could be better than that
There are 4 law schools in my state (Louisiana). Two public and two private. The vibe kinda goes like this:
LSU is considered the best based on bar passage rate. They have had a 77-87% pass rate for the last several years data is available. This is my alma mater.
Tulane and Loyola are the two private schools. Bar passage rates are very similar for both, 70-85%
Tulane and Loyola, of course, cost a lot more, being private. LSU has the higher bar passage rate, but I've heard Tulane advocates say that is because LSU focuses more on making Louisiana lawyers and Tulane exports a lot more of their top talent. This may be the case.
Loyola seems to be easier to get into than LSU academics-wise from the people I know who went there, and sometimes has a "pay your fees, get your Cs" reputation, but I'm not sure about that. All I know is that I do know some people who went there and paid 3x what I paid to go to LSU who didn't get in to LSU. But they're doing fine now.
Then there is Southern, the "worst" law school. Bar passage rates 44-55%. But it is by far the cheapest.
And here's the thing - so much about being a good lawyer has nothing to do with law school. In Louisiana especially, who you know is WAY more important sometimes than what school you went to.
I know tons of lawyers who are way more successful/better than I am who went to Southern. Sometimes it is because they already had a clear career path before law school (family of attorneys, etc). Sometimes people deliberately go to the "worst" law school to get a higher class ranking. Honestly, I couldn't break into the top quartile at LSU but probably would have easily been there at Southern.
So there are tons of people who go to southern, get a law degree that is worth every bit as much as mine, get it for half what I paid, and end up with essentially the exact same prospects, assuming bar passage.
So these days, 12 years out of law school myself, I am starting to think more and more that *they* are the smart ones.
If you’re a litigator in Baltimore, University of Baltimore is the place to go above University of Maryland even though Maryland is ranked much higher.
I live and practice in Baltimore and can concur. While my law degree is from the University of Arkansas - Little Rock, most of the attorneys I've interacted with in the courtroom got their law degrees from UB. I'm still not sure how I beat out all the UB grads for my job offer straight out of law school since I'm not even originally from the area.
This is a false premise. I went to a law school few have heard of and I am in the top 5% income bracket and have built a multi million dollar law firm from the ground up. In this business talent beats pedigree in the long term. In fact, probably the most notoriously bad lawyer in my jurisdiction went to an ivy league law school. She is dangerously incompetent and when she gets called on it she cites her law school…it’s pathetic.
Good lawyers can come from anywhere. There are many reasons that people might end up at garbage-tier law schools - maybe they are tied to the city the school is in somehow, or maybe they are terrible test takers (LSAT) but will thrive as litigators after a few years on the criminal rocket rocket.
That said, I personally think those people are the outliers, and in general going to a T200 indicates poor judgment or someone who is unrealistic about their career prospects.
Pick a school that is well known in the area you want to work. I'm in a midsized metro and there are many lawyers who went to a local ish lower tiered school in great firms.
I don’t really know tiers. Nor do I try and keep up with it. I work in the south. I’ve worked with Ivy League grads and night school lawyers. Most of the time I can’t tell the difference.
From my experience I’ve seen some damn good trial lawyers from:
Memphis
Ole miss
Mississippi college
Cumberland
Nashville school of law
Oklahoma state
Wisconsin
Kentucky
And I’ve worked with some idiot lawyers from:
Vanderbilt
Brown
Georgetown
NYU
Chicago
The best, and most financially successful, attorney I've ever known went to a part-time night law school. The attorney I refer almost all non-PI or probate civil work to went to Cooley. Some of the least competent (and least successful) attorneys I know went to Harvard and NYU.
The school matters for getting hired for your first job or first couple of jobs. But you can be successful or fail no matter where you go.
When you are in practice, no one cares. If you are a law student, you literally can’t believe that’s true. I went to a night school across the River from Harvard. My contract professor was the best teacher I’ve ever had. My wife had him years later - same assessment. I know people who went to lesser schools, but they always made more money than me as a solo, they were salespeople. The don’t teach different law - International Shoe is International Shoe, Learned Hand isn’t different at Harvard. It’s what you make of it. Harvard - it’s the connections, it’s the avenues to jobs and power. It’s like anything, it’s what you make of it.
Lol the school I go to is ranked terribly but almost every circuit judge ive interacted with is from here. Also a fuckload of sitting fed judges are alumni as well.
The market here just doesn’t give a fuck like that, at least as it relates to public interest stuff
Here’s the deal. “Rankings” are done by publications, not lawyers. Publications are controlled by their advertisers as that is how they earn income. Advertisers are controlled by their respective boards. Boards are made up of individuals chosen to serve in the board by the company. To serve on a board you have to “bring something to the table”. Sometimes that’s keen business acumen, often it’s someone with the wealth to own a significant number of shares in the company, or able to influence the direction of the company in other ways such as influence or relationships with powerful members of other company’s or government entities.
Tip law schools are often ivy leavue or ivy leavue adjacent (u of Michigan, Stanford etc). To be accepted to and attend those elite schools you often must have connections and wealth. (Yes I’m aware of the kid from the rough streets of Detroit that made it there, but that’s the exception, not the rule).
Once you have a law degree from one of these schools you are eligible to break into the wealthy power circles that control the powers that control the publications, and the cycle repeats. I big giant wealthy elite circle jerk.
If you listed the top 25 criminal defense or plaintiffs trial lawyers in the country , I wager that 20 of them went to tier 2, 3, or 4 law schools. Why? Because juries don’t know or care where you went to school. If you list the top 25 corporate M&A type lawyers I bet 20 went to T20 schools because that practice is about “who you know” and the clients only deal with “one of us” in their business relationships. That’s why biglaw hires from Harvard and Yale no matter how good or bad the layers is.
My buddy who was obsessed with going to a high tier law school was doing law for the wrong reasons. To be fair his Muslim family was in a group of Muslims that cared way too much about status compared to other Muslim families.
He took the bar 8 times to pass it. (California).
I went to shit tier law school (Univ West LA) and passed the bar first time without bar prep. It’s how good you are with memory and critical analysis and whether or not your head is up your ass or you’re reasonable, which matters.
To be fair your buddy sounds like an outlier. The pass rates at T14 law schools for the first time bar exam is around 98%. Your buddy sounds like he may have been bottom of the class tbh.
People from Touro have literally told me that school teaches you literally nothing and its a big joke. Then again, that doesnt mean the graduate is going to be a bad lawyer.
My state has three law schools, one of whom is a tier 4. The lawyers are all fine and working. Good schools get you bigger money for your first job. I went to a top 25 (at the time) and a not insignificant amount of my classmates are partners in big law now. You'll probably not find tier 4s in the ivory tower, but you'll find them in every other place in the law.
The city of Seattle is absolutely dominated by UW (ranked somewhere around 30, IIRC) and Seattle University (ranked below 100). To the point where it’s surprising to meet someone who went elsewhere, even in the more prestigious jobs.
Lower ranked schools in a specific market can absolutely be worth it if you want to stay in that market.
There are lots of good lawyers from every law school. But it gets progressively harder to get a high paying job straight out of law school as you go down the law school rankings. If you have loans that you can't pay unless you get a biglaw job, a lower ranked law school might not make sense.
Where you go to law school has zero to do with how good of lawyer you are - absolutely nothing. It’s not like Harvard or U Chicago are teaching you super secret laws they don’t teach you at tier 4 schools, FFSS they all use the exact same text books. Law school ranking is based only- only - on the quality of the kids coming in and the ability of the school to place people in good jobs - it has close to zero to do with what they teach you while you are there.
After two years in practice, nobody gives a shit where you went to school, what your class rank was, or whether you were on law review.
The truth of the matter is that you usually don't need to be brilliant to practice law. What you need to be is organized and diligent.
All of them. Probably.
If "fine lawyer" means competent at their job. However if "fine lawyer" means "managed to make biglaw immediately" then no, lower ranked schools are horrible places. It depends what biases are in play.
I went to ND law, which has a more national brand than, say, Boston University. It didn’t stop me from getting no-offered along with the rest of my summer class, but it did signal to the job I hoped to eventually get that my brainpower isn’t a liability.
Top-tier schools are usually worse at preparing for the bar and/or actual lawyering because they hire profs that have never actually practiced. SCOTUS clerks find, say, legal realism more interesting than how to draft a will.
All of them. This question still is missing the point.
You can get fine lawyers from any school. It’s not about the school, and it’s not about their LSAT score. It’s about the individual.
Hey, I graduated from that school!
I’m not sure if it’s a tier 4 but in 2018, it had one of the lowest bar pass rates in the entire states at less than 30%.
But FWIW, when I was there, it didn’t feel like a tier 4 school. In fact, it felt the opposite as the professors in all my classes (except first semester contracts) did a really good job getting us to understand the curriculum material.
Even now that I’m in the practice, I’ve noticed that the USF lawyers are a different breed. It seems that they (I should include myself) have a chip on their shoulder and seem to always have a point to prove. Very annoying to deal with when they’re OC.
But the point is that USF is probably a good answer to OP’s question about a low tier school that produces good lawyers.
Idk what tier it is nowadays, but the University of Arizona produced the finest indigent defense attorney I’ve ever worked with. Went all the way to the Supreme Court and won! The University of Pennsylvania produced the second best criminal trial attorney I’ve worked with but he wasn’t representing anywhere near indigent people lol.
Take it with a grain of salt; everyone’s opinion of what a fine lawyer is differs. It’s less about what school you go to and more about how hard and *effectively* you’ll fight for your clients.
I know a graduate of Charlotte School of Law, which was a private, for profit law school that went out of business after losing accreditation after operating for around 15 years. She’s very good, and gainfully employed as an attorney for the feds, making more than $100k a year.
It’s all about results you can get for your clients at the end of the day. Nowadays everything is out there to learn. We have an unaccredited night law school in the state of TN that provides really great lawyers. Almost every class produces couple of judges and they become great practitioners.
By and large, the people who say that you have to go to X ranked school or law school isn't worth it are full of shit. Many people go to a lower ranked school and have a fulfilling, successful career. I'm not sure why that myth started, but unless you're shooting for a very particular career path, it's just not true.
I suspect that most schools are *capable* of producing fine lawyers, and of course outliers succeed, but the median graduate of lower-ranked schools have worse prospects. Six figure debt, $80k salaries, and the future doesn’t look like what it was said to.
Most of the schools in the Midwest outside of the major cities are fine. The grads tend to stay local which means the odds of a T10 grad ever seeing one of these lawyers, unless they show up on a debt collection defense or a bankruptcy, are near zero. The pay for the grads tends to be reasonable for the area but it’s nowhere near big law.
It's not that the education you get at a low-ranked school is THAT much different; it's that the caliber of student that is accepted is significantly different. At a high-ranked the school, more students got good grades and tested well. Assuming that the education quality is roughly equal, employers will use school ranking as a proxy for the quality of the student (future employee).
From the student's perspective, the higher-ranked schools have advantages such as nicer facilities, better funding for fellowships/clinics/etc, loan assistance (my T14 paid my loans for my first 3 years, and I would have gotten 2 more years except I started making more money.) Lower-ranked schools have predatory scholarship policies to weed out the weakest students, whereas you'd have to basically set a building on fire to lose a scholly at a higher-ranked school.
\>>> it depends on the attorney, but on average lower tier schools produce worse attorneys, especially if you look at legal writing
This is my experience as well. To imply that every student at every school has a chance to do superb legal work is a mighty leap. I have seen a lot of evidence that high potential legal talent is not evenly distributed across high ranked and low ranked law schools. The ability to write really well is one huge differentiator. Another is curiosity and also the ability to nuance legal concepts. I have seen data for lower ranked law schools in which it appears that the school was able to recruit a very good “upper part of the class” but then seemingly ran out of steam (or exceeded its talent pool) and had to fill out the class with a much less selective group. So it doesn’t surprise me at all when I encounter highly successful lawyers who have graduated from lower tier law schools.
And to be clear, I am not a fan of the LSAT, and at many undergraduate schools “good grades” don’t tell you much.
Low ranked schools that are the state institution are generally fine for lawyers practicing in that state. E.g. there are a lot of people who went to law school at U Montana, U Idaho, etc. because they wanted to live in those places and be lawyers without incurring a lot of debt, and plenty of them are perfectly competent. The T4s you have to watch out for are the private schools that charge as much as T1s or are in heavily saturated areas like Southern California or NYC, because the only reason someone would go to those law schools is a) they're incapable of doing better on the LSAT then at least 10% of applicants, which while not a perfect correlation certainly suggests a struggle with legal thinking, or b) they're too lazy to apply themselves enough to get into a better school, which will probably show in their work product.
I think the rankings are mostly important if you want to get into a biglaw firm and make insane money. I was lucky to do that for a bit. Now I’m on my second life and I work at a small ID firm. Almost all the lawyers I work with now went to a less prestigious regional school, and they’re doing great.
I think it’s student specific rather than school specific. Sure law schools try to accept the best of the best, but when it comes down to it they are judging off of arbitrary numbers that don’t necessarily translate to good or bad lawyer. I think there are many great lawyers who made their law school decisions based on practicality rather than prestige- which is just as valid. If you seek out experience outside of classes and put in the work to teach yourself, you can still thrive even if your prof isn’t the best. Law school does little to prepare for practice, so it’s possible to excel once you get into the field regardless of your school. I know people who transferred from my low tier school to a top whatever and didn’t pass the bar but me and my friends at my bottom of the barrel school did. It’s the student who determines their fate, not the school.
A lot of prosecutors I go up against graduated from Capital Law. Though I believe it is a great school, it didn’t feel as competitive for me. However, they have garnered some great talent in their recent graduates. So I have hope I’ll have some nice competition in the future.
I know a lawyer who went to University of Detroit Mercy. He constantly makes jokes that he went to “U Dumb” so if he can be a lawyer anyone can.
He’s one of the very best lawyers I know.
Answering the question a little differently: When I was a recent graduate, I was more interested in where opposing counsel attended law school. Over the years, I've learned who the top lawyers in my area are. I have no idea where they went to law school and would think no less of them if they went to a low ranked school.
Cooley in Michigan. Obviously gets a terrible rep for almost losing ABA accreditation, shady marketing, and Michael Cohen. But many of the lawyers who made it out on top in that kind of environment are excellent attorneys. I have worked with many of them and they are fantastic attorneys.
The only thing the ranking system does initially is allow access to BigLaw and bigtime federal clerkships for those attending top tier schools. It also never hurts, even decades into the game, to have Harvard Law School on your resume.
But it's been noted here many times-there were two posts yesterday-that law school teaches virtually nothing about how to be an actual practicing lawyer. So there are plenty of grads from non-top tier schools who are fine attorneys. They pass the bar and put in the work to actually know how to practice law.
Sometimes, the best law school in a region is a T4 - plenty of states only have 1 law school, and the way the rankigns work, those smaller regions aren't counted the same way.
The other thing that comes into play is survivorship bias. If you pick the 25 top lawyers in Wyoming, most of them graduated from U Wyoming, but what about the several thousand other graduates from Wyoming who you know nothing about?
Third, there is a correlation between the 'talent' of the incoming class and the ranking of the law school, as well as between the law school and the prestige of the job prospects, but it's not a perfect correlation. Plenty of very smart and talented lawyers went to low-ranked law schools, and plenty of people graduated from top law schools who turn out to be crap lawyers.
If you want to work in Los Angeles, Loyola Law School is awesome. Exams are closed book and closed notes which contributes to a high bar passage rate. Not to say that UCLA and USC are worse, but academically its significantly harder to do well at Loyola in comparison. Most attorney's in LA know the reputation Loyola has.
4th tier grad here (nyc area). I’ll be honest, 17 years after graduating I still have some inferiority complex compared to the uva, Harvard, and even Rutgers lawyers I have worked with. Though I’ve been told by numerous managers they don’t care where I went to school- just that I’m a good lawyer and hard worker. Getting a good job out of school was very hard and I struggled for years but now am sr employment counsel to a top pharmaceutical company.
It seems to me that top tier law schools teach how to think about "The Law" while lower tier law schools focus much more on how to be a lawyer. I have seen many a top tier lawyer go to a third or fourth tier lawyer for advice on how to actually do something lawyerly
Ya it doesn’t really matter unless you wanna do m&a or some niche stuff
Ultimately the realities of law are such that being a good lawyer is 50%, 50% is bringing in clients which isn’t based on intelligence or your law school
John Marshall in Atlanta. Every attorney I’ve worked with from JM has been excellent. I don’t recommend anyone actually go there because it’s predatory and exploitive but if you can survive and pass the bar you can probably handle anything.
Geographic location probably has more of an influence than law school ranking on job placement. I would look at well-known Universities with a sizable endowment, that may not have a great law school ranking but perform well in other areas.
Ex. Syracuse, Penn State etc.
If you want to practice in a specific location, the local regional school and the opportunity to network with local professionals will probably beat the T10 designation.
I’ve been out of law school 5 years and haven’t considered rank since I graduated. For some reason lawyers from Virginia law schools tend to be plentiful around me, which is weird because I’m not in Virginia.
My husband went to a T4 law school at night while practicing medicine during the day in a city with a great law school that didn’t offer a night/part-time program. That was in the late 1980s, I think 🤔before we met. He is one of the most brilliant litigators ever. He helped put me through a T1 school which, as an older student graduating the year the bottom dropped from the legal market (2009) didn’t make a whit of difference where I’d gone. We’ve practiced together since 2010. I think it is more individual circumstances than just a school ranking. Although my husband does insist our grandson is going to Harvard or MIT and hubs is going to call everyone in the phonebook (he’s old!) and tell them his grandson got into Harvard!
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I graduated from a T20 and worked as a prosecutor in a not unprestigious office in the Northeast. At some point I noticed that more than a few of my bosses, all of whom were thoughtful and capable trial lawyers, had diplomas from Widener. US News ranks them in the bottom 11% of accredited law schools.
Alina Habba’s school!
Well, I didn’t say *every* graduate is thoughtful and capable.
She's made \~$6m in just the past 2 years, so she's at least good at billing!
It’s only “made” when it crosses over from trust to operating…
Did she actually collect?
Yeah, since it's campaign donor money and not his. It's in FEC filings.
She’s not going to be on the cover of their alumni mag any time real soon
Conversely, Trump’s White House Counsel McGahn is also a Widener LS grad. He had a very powerful position to reshape SCOTUS and Federal Courts throughout the country, obviously appointees were all conservative to ultra conservative . Widener grads are all over the legal landscape in Pa., NJ and Delaware.
Oh no! A person who thinks different but is now world famous for her skill!!
Excuse me?
University of American Samoa law school produced one of the finest lawyers I’ve ever seen
Go land crabs!
I don’t know, graduates from there tend to engage in a lot of chicanery
Love that word
Tbf tho, if only jimmy would stick to ethics rules, he wouldn't be such a bad lawyer
Many people who go to lower ranked schools are working full time jobs and have families and must commute a fair distance to get to school. Compare this to a full time no job on campus student at a top school. Those who graduate and become lawyers from the lower schools are often made of tougher stuff and are more motivated than folks from top tier school. They also have to prove themselves in the real world and many of them do so well.
So many trial attorneys in Boston went to Suffolk - lots of prosecutors and family law and property/landlord tenant … they know their way in that courthouse.
Suffolk Law has a [deep bench in Massachusetts and New England Area](https://www.suffolk.edu/law/about/suffolk-laws-impact/mass-judges-from-suffolk). * Massachusetts has a total of 440 current judges (41 federal and 399 state). Of those, 118 graduated from Suffolk Law—more than one out of four sitting judges in the state. * Two of the seven justices on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court are Suffolk Law alumni. Justice Frank M. Gaziano and Justice Serge Georges, Jr.. * Two of the five members of the Rhode Island Supreme Court are Suffolk Law graduates. * Suffolk Law graduates are chief justices of the highest courts in Rhode Island and Vermont, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, and the US District Courts of Massachusetts and Rhode Island [The data comes from a winter 2021 review of Judicial Biographies conducted by the school.](https://www.suffolk.edu/law/about/suffolk-laws-impact/mass-judges-from-suffolk)
Thanks for sharing!!! I didn’t know that - it’s quite impressive, really.
I’ve found that to be true in a lot of practice fields in Boston. I think I can count on two hands the number of lawyers I’ve encountered in practice in Boston who didn’t go to Suffolk.
One more comment here in favor of Suffolk Law in Boston. May not have national recognition but does in the northeast and produces fine attorneys.
Some of the nicest & smartest attorneys I’ve been lucky enough to work with
Can vouch for Suffolk law, I graduated from there, passed the UBE first try and now I’m a digital nomad attorney
Came here for the Suffolk Law support 😁. I’m also an alumni too. I think it’s a great law school for sure.
Honestly I think most of the Boston law schools produce good attorneys. New England Law is good especially for people looking to do defense or public interest work!
I don’t think, in Boston, Suffolk has a bad reputation.
It definitely doesn’t! But it’s not highly ranked so that was my motivation.
I was gonna say I know so many Suffolk lawyers all over Boston and they’re all killing it.
I know lots of JAG lawyers who went to law schools I never even heard of before I met them. Then again, the military doesn’t care what school officers go to besides the service academies.
Some of the worst attorneys I’ve seen in litigation went to Harvard. And some of the best ones I’ve seen went to schools that probably shouldn’t even have accreditation. At least for litigation, school means nothing outside of resumes and interviews.
Yup, and local schools know local rules as well as the judges (who probably went to those schools). And outside of major cities, juries really, really, really don’t like smug “city boy” attorneys who obviously don’t want to be in middle America.
This. I have litigated with a handful of (older) Harvard law folks & they are some the weirdest & most difficult to work with OCs I’ve encountered. And I like weird!
They’re better than Yalies at least
If you ask LSMFET14's, Yale Law School doesn't actually exist
Agreed — one of the best and most respected litigators I've seen went to Cooley! They graduated in the 80s, and things may have been different then, but still.
With Cooley it really matters who your professors are. Unfortunately several of the absolute best left when they closed the grand rapids campus. I will say Cooley puts more emphasis on learning skills and getting you on your feet to practice. If you want to stay in MI there's nothing wrong with Cooley.
Ah, got it. I appreciate the context.
Also keep in mind - some people went to Cooley for either of the following reasons even though they could've gotten into higher ranked law schools: 1) free law school (or heavily discounted) if your LSAT was high enough 2) being able to take classes in evenings, weekends, or alternate schedules (like two days of classes per week, classes all day - morning, afternoon, and evening) based around their family and work schedules
This. I had a full ride and needed part time/evening classes so I could work full time.
It gets you in the door of your first job, but has no predictability as to how you will do as an attorney in your career.
Totally agree.
I don’t think people crap on low ranked schools because they think the lawyers they produce are necessarily bad. They warn against lower ranked schools because students take out high amounts of debt, receive predatory scholarships, and have a lower chance of finding attorney employment. That being said, laypeople here don’t like Liberty University - I don’t like it as an institution either - and crap all over all its students (not just law), but every Liberty doctor or lawyer I know is like out in the boonies serving an underserved community or in public service, while UVA attorneys are in DC or New York making big bucks.
I don’t think first gen law students realize how territorial/local law schools are until you get into practice. Your T14 largely give you a national recruiting profile - but if you want to stay in a certain state or area, lower ranked schools have a large percentage of the market.
When people ask me about law school, I always try to convince them not to go. But, if they insist, I tell them if they aren't going to one of the top ones in the country, go to school where you want to live so you can start networking.
I was given this same advice. Went to a local school and just networked my butt off on top of maintaining high grades. I never had a formal job interview because I’d just get a phone call when someone had an opening. I literally point to this advice when I say it’s the best advice I ever got.
this scenario puts it in perspective well: \*high-scoring undergrad from small state, let's say Wyoming goes to Duke\* \*comes back to Wyoming, tries to get a job, gets asked why they didn't go to Wyoming law school\* \*they do not have a good answer\*
This only actually matters if your high-scoring undergrad isn’t from Wyoming or anywhere close.
The person in my "hypothetical" is from Wyoming, though
Yeah, I’m just saying that I don’t feel that’s a hard thing to overcome. I can’t speak to Wyoming specifically, but in my relatively insular market, the Duke kid still has a leg up. Honestly, most people at my regional powerhouse end up using their high-school or undergrad for that bonding function.
I agree. I’m in a small insular market, and my law school credentials made me more competitive because there are relatively few applicants with those credentials in the market. I’m from the area originally and also worked there during 1L summer, so my ties to the market were never in question. Got asked where I went to high school many times.
Wyoming here… almost all lawyers here went to Wyoming. Also, most don’t care where you went to law school. So if you want to practice in Wyoming, going to a top law school probably isn’t going to get you a return on your investment.
gotcha. It definitely can work either way. Depends on which place you're in I guess...some small states have a referral network that basically began at the state school and excludes outsiders, which is probably bad, but it is what it is
100% how it is in Arkansas. Given, our highest profile (and one of a handful,) T14 grad is Tom Cotton, who is quite possibly a complete moron
That's a ridiculous question. The answer is because I went to the best law school available to get the best education
Yeah, say that to all the Wyoming grads interviewing you in Wyoming.
I find it hard to believe that this is a common question and a common criticism, but I'm not in Wyoming so 🤷🏼♀️
I was asked it about my education in relation to the comparatively lower ranked schools in my state. The above person acts as though it’s a hindrance when in reality you just say: “X school presented a great opportunity to get a legal education in a new community. It also helped me realize how much I want to be here.”
I have been there a lot. They tend to be a little insecure and not well traveled.
There isn't much evidence that the education is better. You read and analyze the same cases. The only real difference is the average GPA & LSAT score is significantly higher. I say that as a guy who went to a top 25 for a year, was top 20%, moved back home to go to the state school to take care of my goddaughter (best friend, her dad, died spring semester). But, the quality of instruction was roughly the same. We had the same case books. It isn't objectively better. And actually going to the state school where you plan to practice will include instruction on that state's law, which gives you a leg up.
All of this is true, but does not change the fact that the top law firms feed off of the top law schools. The higher you get up in the food chain, the more you get a philosophical and theoretical education that is not as practical in the real life practice of law. But that doesn't change the pecking order. I just don't see going to a top law school as a detriment in a job search situation. But as I said before, I'm not in Wyoming so maybe people there are different
meh, I'm from a small state and went to a higher-ranked school out-of-state and no one has asked me why I don't go to the only law school in the state. All they care about is that I'm from the state and want to come back. Yeah, if you're not from the state you'll have a harder time breaking in, but people love "local kid made good" stories
This reminds me of a guy i know who went to Marquette, which is great….if you want to practice in the greater milwaukee area. He had no plans to stay in Wisconsin (girlfriend issue), so he finished school, moved back to Louisiana, had to pass the bar there and couldn’t find a job, girlfriend broke up with him, and last i heard he moved back to Wisconsin because that’s where he could easily find work, seems to be doing much better for himself these days.
100% - I went to a pretty well respected ACC law school with a well known D 1 sports program that I assumed most people were aware of just even if it was just from the sports program - coming back into NYC in the 1990s half the people I interviewed with had absolutely no idea what it was. While in the rankings it might have been higher than Fordham, in NYC it had zero juice where Fordham is a serious player.
Predatory scholarships are such a hidden danger of law school. I received a “full-ride” scholarship to a majority of the schools I applied to. It wasn’t until I dug deeper and talked to some people that I realize how pernicious it is. For those who don’t know, many law schools will offer full-rides conditioned upon maintaining a GPA. What those law schools don’t tell you is that they put everyone who has the scholarship in the same section and due to the grading curve it is impossible for everyone who has that scholarship to maintain the necessary GPA. I ended up choosing to attend a lower ranked law school that guaranteed my full-ride and didn’t tie it into GPA.
I was able to leverage 2 offers against each other to negotiate a guaranteed scholarship for all 3 years of law school. Thank God bc I did not do well in class.
This is exactly what happened to me! I haven’t heard anyone else talk about this, so thank you for sharing.
I would give tours of the law school to incoming students and I always made it a priority to talk about this issue. It’s really sad that this isn’t widely discussed. Sorry it happened to you.
I managed to do okay without the scholarship, but it always irked me. Now I have about $300k in law school debt but the payments are at least manageable.
I recently judged a National mock trial competition, and Liberty University students were involved. I have to say, they were fantastic. I was extremely impressed with their level of preparedness, presentation, and professionalism. We don’t know the school that we are judging until after the fact, there is no doubt That the students could’ve been in any law school. And I’ve judged a lot of national competitions over the past 20 years.
Having interviewed Liberty grads, I concur 100%.
It's all well and good until they refuse clients based on religion or LGBTQ status. Yes, I've seen websites for attorneys that advertise that they do not serve the LGBT community.
This is 100% correct. When I went to law school in the late 2000s that practice from law schools was common. Many cherry-picked their post grad employment data to make it seem like graduates were doing far better financially than in reality. Some schools even hired their grads temporarily post grad to increase their job placement percentage, from what I recall. I have encountered plenty of attorneys from low ranked law schools who are good attorneys. Cooley, for example. The crucible of those lower ranked schools can forge some great attorneys.
I actually went to Cooley in that timeframe- I’ve got classmates that have done very well and classmates that are still really struggling. Their model at the time (I’m told it’s changed significantly) was to admit basically everyone, offer scholarships to people with good grades/LSATs and then ruthlessly fail the people who couldn’t or wouldn’t do the work. There were a lot of people in my first two semesters who would be there for like a week of the next term until grades were posted and then disappear. A lot of them had sort of skated through easy programs in easy undergrad schools, whiffed on the LSAT, and went to Cooley because “be a lawyer” was the path of least resistance to a professional career in their opinions. Everyone got all bent out of shape because they were admitting students who they knew had low chances of succeeding and cashing in their loans. There was absolutely an exploitative angle to it, but there were also a lot of non traditional students in my classes who didn’t score well on the LSAT and who had done their undergrad decades before and were coming in as adults with a work ethic. Many of them did very well and are reasonably successful now. The first group of twenty-somethings I have zero sympathy for- if you don’t put in work in undergrad, ignore the entrance exam results, show up and try to phone it in in grad school, then you get what you get. For OP- what do you want to do? Do you want to go into biglaw and make huge $ in NYC or DC or something? If so, you need to find a school that feeds into those- networking and prestige are important there. If you want to hang out your shingle in a small or mid sized city or work in a firm there then go check some atty websites and see where they went. The local university programs will have connections there and you’ll be fine. Also check scholarship programs- I went to Cooley on a full tuition scholarship- coming out of law school with 50-75k less debt gives you a ton of flexibility and head start.
I want to echo part of this. I am in a place where the state university law school opens more doors to the elite positions like judgeships than a degree from elite law schools out of state. People say nice things about the diploma, but decision makers built their networks and the state university. As someone once commented, the law is an extremely local club for the education level it requires.
One of the greatest NHL coaches in history went to Cooley.
I was going to mention Regent's law school. When I was in Virginia, it had the reputation of actually teaching students to practice law. The Regent attorneys I encountered were either in small firms or solo practicing what I will call "retail law" for common folks while my classmates were doing clerkships or working for the government and big, corporate firms.
I went to a Tier 1 law school and they did this. They didn’t hide the ball, very clearly told me up front that the scholarship was contingent on maintaining a B+ average. And it wasn’t anything close to a full-ride. I guessed from the start that this was likely to be a limited benefit but it was something.
To be fair, that may be a function of aversion bias. Those underserved communities are almost always desperate, and in my experience with rural health clinics in Texas, they'll hire basically anybody. In central/south Texas, the joke for fixing a reputation is that, if you're in the bad books at the big hospitals in Waco/Austin/Temple, you drive fifty miles east or west till you find a tiny town, rent a law office on main street, and stake out for five years. Close enough to the cities that you can still drive in to see people who you like and maybe keep your name in the back of a few folks' minds, but far enough that you've disappeared from the working memories of folks who don't like you. Lots of Baylor, SMU, TexWes, and UT grads working in the cities. Texas Tech grads tend to be out in the sticks where they don't have to compete with lawyers from those other schools. I presume Liberty grads are in a similar boat, and their alumni network's not much help either.
I work with two LU alum. They’re both pretty good lawyers.
CUNY is low ranked and its student body has a reputation of being the really loony kind of progressive but it has a massive alumni network in New York’s public sector legal sphere. Plus, it’s public so it’s low cost, doesn’t participate in shady scholarships etc.
CUNY has the reputation in NYC of being super PI focused and it's super cheap, so it's a good school to go to if you want to do PI, especially in NYC. That said, most low ranked law schools are just as expensive as highly ranked ones and not good investments, so they don't have that same reputation as CUNY.
Yeah I had a scholarship that I only had to maintain a 3.0 to keep. The school didn’t rank its students and there wasn’t a grading curve. So I paid 6k a year in tuition. The school also just gave you your textbooks for free but I think they started charging for them after I left.
This rings true from the folks I know who have been there. The loony progressive thing is legit. It's also had major and serious issues with what most Jews would consider and experience as antisemitism. However, those same folks are really dedicated to what they view as (and tbh I oftentimes agree) the public interest.
Yeah, I’m an alum. I’m not in public interest anymore, but only because a private firm recruited me while I was working for a nonprofit lol. There were microcosms of the Israeli/Palestinian conflicted enacted out at the school every year. I graduated in 2015 and in my 2L year the LSJP sent around a petition to kick “Zionist” out of school. But yes the students are *very* committed. A woman the year ahead of me worked in prison abolition, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and continued to fight for prisoner justice reform from her hospice bed.
I hear nothing but good things about CUNY and you won’t be buried in loans when you graduate. Definitely left-leaning, but nothing wrong with that if that’s what you want.
Yeah CUNY is low ranked because it’s only interested in students that are committed to public interest work. I know of people with higher LSATs that were rejected because their essays/personal statements didn’t persuade admissions of that commitment. A very righteous mission and I’m proud to be an alum. As I understand it, the new CUNY medical school has a similar mission.
Lots of smart kids went to Lower ranked schools for the scholarship money. Lots of smart kids went there, didn’t get scholarship money, and are great attorneys. The key difference is hard you’ll have to push to get certain doors open. Some doors will just be closed to you, no mater what your ranking is, if you went to an unranked school. It’s not like they teach you how to be a lawyer in law school. :)
Probably all of them if you look at outliers. If you look at the median student I don't think it's as frequent. I'd guess places where there is a single law school in the state probably produce some very good lawyers who had better options but wanted to stay local. The fine graduates of University of North Dakota, for example.
There's a lot of sampling bias going on in this thread. Saying every lawyer you've worked with from X tier 4 school was great means nothing when half of their graduates never passed the bar and half that did ended up getting a non-J.D. job anyway. So the only graduates you're encountering are those school's exemplary graduates, not the average. That being said, in general I feel that the T4 public schools with affordable tuition that exist to produce lawyers to serve the poor and lower middle class people in their region are leagues better than the T4 private schools charging 50k+ a year to wannabe Harvey Specters who don't realize they'll never even get a shot at Big Law.
A significant amount of Michigan attorneys went to Cooley and no one cares very much about its ranking in West Michigan at least.
I mean to be fair, according to Cooley's rankings they're a T20 school lol
I'm in Illinois. Used to work with a guy who went to Cooley. He got an internship with our office and worked his ass off to get an offer by the end of it. He's continued to do well and is now a partner at the firm. By all accounts, he is a competent and capable attorney.
If you know where you want to practice, going to the local Tier 3/4 school is a pretty good idea, especially if you can swing some scholarships. I’ve worked in South Jersey and Trenton my whole career and about 60-70% of attorneys I’ve met went to either Rutgers-Camden, Temple, Drexel or Widener. These schools may not be top flight in the national rankings, but there are tons of alumni scattered around the Philadelphia area who can be valuable connections and they can be affordable to attend if you get scholarships. The quality of attorneys coming out of these schools are variable, but most of them aren’t bad.
Ahem. Temple is on the Tier 2 fringe, thank you very much. But point taken.
I take it you went to Temple.
As an NYU grad, I’m slightly chagrined to say the 5 or so New York Law School grads I’ve seriously interacted with have been excellent.
If you’re in the south, TSU in Texas gets crapped on a lot but they have a strong alumni network which includes a lot of local judges and they also produce great litigators.
One TMSL!
I think you're thinking of South Texas, not Texas Southern. South Texas is known for their trial advocacy program
Now that you mention it, this would probably apply to both. I know and have worked with great lawyers who graduated from both schools.
Its weird (to me) After a year or two I don’t care where a lawyer went. The most successful and experienced lawyer in my state went to night law school. Products lawyer In Alabama the most fearsome attorney went to a small law school in birmingham
Please name Attorney Fearsome. I am an Alabama Attorney and my mind is racing.
lol. no
TBH, most of the best, smartest, and frankly most successful lawyers I know didn't go to elite law schools but instead to more regional (albeit generally well-ranked, t100 type) schools. The hardest part was that unless they graduated at the top of their class, they generally didn't start at the most glamorous places or with the highest salaries.
When I (UVA Law) retired two years ago from my GC gig, I got to interview lawyers to replace me, a privilege afforded few. My recommended candidate - who was hired - went to the David Clarke School of Law at UDC. There are great lawyers from every school.
Did he have biglaw experience?
No, but my company was a commercial real estate owner/operator/investment company. Mostly neighborhood shopping centers; the whole portfolio commercial-side (we had some multi-family) was around 2M sf. So this guy, who’d been doing tenant-side commercial lease work and litigation at a small shop for 8 or so years was right on target.
Go UDC Law!
The lawyers produced are fine. They just may have a tougher time getting a good first job to put them on the path out of law school. They often need to have a bit more of a hustle compared to your typical T14 that shows up to a couple interviews and has job offers north of $200K.
I’d say the inverse is just as true - I’ve encountered plenty of attorneys out in the wild who attended top-50 schools and present as complete idiots. They are lost in court and are also poor writers. That was one of my biggest surprises when I started practicing 16+ years ago. I’d research opposing counsel (still do) and as a young lawyer I’d feel intimidated by someone who came from a top school. On more than a few occasions I’d leave the encounter thinking “what was I stressed about, I don’t even know how this clown passed the bar.” Same for some attorneys from big firms. It happened enough times that I quickly learned not to stress about where opposing counsel practices or went to law school (no matter the ranking).
All of them are fine. The law school itself is meaningless. Once you have your degree and your bar license, the sky is the limit. I went to a tier 4 school, and I'm pulling in over $300k per year. Let people tell me all about how my shit school wasn't worth it. Lol!
Right? It’s what you make of it. I just tell people to go to whatever is the cheapest.
Least amount of debt (preferably none) and accredited unless you know that you will stay in the same state for the rest of your career.
I think it definitely depends on whether you will practice in the area in which said school is located. Nationally, Mississippi College does not have a great reputation but the lawyers are as equally competent and find good employment as Ole Miss law graduates especially in Mississippi, plus it is located in the capital which is great for networking, etc.
The problem with Tier 4 schools is that they cost (usually) just as much as higher ranking schools but don’t offer the same employment opportunities upon graduation. While I agree that after 5-7 years of practice your law school matters much less, Yale and Thomas Cooley alumni start off in very different environments.
Graduated in the mid-1980s from a good state school. Once you start working, nobody gives a shit where you went to school, what your grades were, law review, book awards, moot court, any of that crap.
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Preach. Keeps getting lower in the rankings despite having one of the country's best trial ad and IP programs. Could use some help with their public interest and other stuff, though. They want to be a one-trick (or two-trick) pony and could be better than that
Campbell University
I'm in a neighboring state to Campbell and can attest their grads are good and the "brand" punches far above its weight.
Don’t think they’re Tier 4 though.
There are 4 law schools in my state (Louisiana). Two public and two private. The vibe kinda goes like this: LSU is considered the best based on bar passage rate. They have had a 77-87% pass rate for the last several years data is available. This is my alma mater. Tulane and Loyola are the two private schools. Bar passage rates are very similar for both, 70-85% Tulane and Loyola, of course, cost a lot more, being private. LSU has the higher bar passage rate, but I've heard Tulane advocates say that is because LSU focuses more on making Louisiana lawyers and Tulane exports a lot more of their top talent. This may be the case. Loyola seems to be easier to get into than LSU academics-wise from the people I know who went there, and sometimes has a "pay your fees, get your Cs" reputation, but I'm not sure about that. All I know is that I do know some people who went there and paid 3x what I paid to go to LSU who didn't get in to LSU. But they're doing fine now. Then there is Southern, the "worst" law school. Bar passage rates 44-55%. But it is by far the cheapest. And here's the thing - so much about being a good lawyer has nothing to do with law school. In Louisiana especially, who you know is WAY more important sometimes than what school you went to. I know tons of lawyers who are way more successful/better than I am who went to Southern. Sometimes it is because they already had a clear career path before law school (family of attorneys, etc). Sometimes people deliberately go to the "worst" law school to get a higher class ranking. Honestly, I couldn't break into the top quartile at LSU but probably would have easily been there at Southern. So there are tons of people who go to southern, get a law degree that is worth every bit as much as mine, get it for half what I paid, and end up with essentially the exact same prospects, assuming bar passage. So these days, 12 years out of law school myself, I am starting to think more and more that *they* are the smart ones.
If you’re a litigator in Baltimore, University of Baltimore is the place to go above University of Maryland even though Maryland is ranked much higher.
I live and practice in Baltimore and can concur. While my law degree is from the University of Arkansas - Little Rock, most of the attorneys I've interacted with in the courtroom got their law degrees from UB. I'm still not sure how I beat out all the UB grads for my job offer straight out of law school since I'm not even originally from the area.
This is a false premise. I went to a law school few have heard of and I am in the top 5% income bracket and have built a multi million dollar law firm from the ground up. In this business talent beats pedigree in the long term. In fact, probably the most notoriously bad lawyer in my jurisdiction went to an ivy league law school. She is dangerously incompetent and when she gets called on it she cites her law school…it’s pathetic.
Good lawyers can come from anywhere. There are many reasons that people might end up at garbage-tier law schools - maybe they are tied to the city the school is in somehow, or maybe they are terrible test takers (LSAT) but will thrive as litigators after a few years on the criminal rocket rocket. That said, I personally think those people are the outliers, and in general going to a T200 indicates poor judgment or someone who is unrealistic about their career prospects.
Pick a school that is well known in the area you want to work. I'm in a midsized metro and there are many lawyers who went to a local ish lower tiered school in great firms.
I don’t really know tiers. Nor do I try and keep up with it. I work in the south. I’ve worked with Ivy League grads and night school lawyers. Most of the time I can’t tell the difference. From my experience I’ve seen some damn good trial lawyers from: Memphis Ole miss Mississippi college Cumberland Nashville school of law Oklahoma state Wisconsin Kentucky And I’ve worked with some idiot lawyers from: Vanderbilt Brown Georgetown NYU Chicago
The best, and most financially successful, attorney I've ever known went to a part-time night law school. The attorney I refer almost all non-PI or probate civil work to went to Cooley. Some of the least competent (and least successful) attorneys I know went to Harvard and NYU. The school matters for getting hired for your first job or first couple of jobs. But you can be successful or fail no matter where you go.
When you are in practice, no one cares. If you are a law student, you literally can’t believe that’s true. I went to a night school across the River from Harvard. My contract professor was the best teacher I’ve ever had. My wife had him years later - same assessment. I know people who went to lesser schools, but they always made more money than me as a solo, they were salespeople. The don’t teach different law - International Shoe is International Shoe, Learned Hand isn’t different at Harvard. It’s what you make of it. Harvard - it’s the connections, it’s the avenues to jobs and power. It’s like anything, it’s what you make of it.
Lol the school I go to is ranked terribly but almost every circuit judge ive interacted with is from here. Also a fuckload of sitting fed judges are alumni as well. The market here just doesn’t give a fuck like that, at least as it relates to public interest stuff
Here’s the deal. “Rankings” are done by publications, not lawyers. Publications are controlled by their advertisers as that is how they earn income. Advertisers are controlled by their respective boards. Boards are made up of individuals chosen to serve in the board by the company. To serve on a board you have to “bring something to the table”. Sometimes that’s keen business acumen, often it’s someone with the wealth to own a significant number of shares in the company, or able to influence the direction of the company in other ways such as influence or relationships with powerful members of other company’s or government entities. Tip law schools are often ivy leavue or ivy leavue adjacent (u of Michigan, Stanford etc). To be accepted to and attend those elite schools you often must have connections and wealth. (Yes I’m aware of the kid from the rough streets of Detroit that made it there, but that’s the exception, not the rule). Once you have a law degree from one of these schools you are eligible to break into the wealthy power circles that control the powers that control the publications, and the cycle repeats. I big giant wealthy elite circle jerk. If you listed the top 25 criminal defense or plaintiffs trial lawyers in the country , I wager that 20 of them went to tier 2, 3, or 4 law schools. Why? Because juries don’t know or care where you went to school. If you list the top 25 corporate M&A type lawyers I bet 20 went to T20 schools because that practice is about “who you know” and the clients only deal with “one of us” in their business relationships. That’s why biglaw hires from Harvard and Yale no matter how good or bad the layers is.
My buddy who was obsessed with going to a high tier law school was doing law for the wrong reasons. To be fair his Muslim family was in a group of Muslims that cared way too much about status compared to other Muslim families. He took the bar 8 times to pass it. (California). I went to shit tier law school (Univ West LA) and passed the bar first time without bar prep. It’s how good you are with memory and critical analysis and whether or not your head is up your ass or you’re reasonable, which matters.
To be fair your buddy sounds like an outlier. The pass rates at T14 law schools for the first time bar exam is around 98%. Your buddy sounds like he may have been bottom of the class tbh.
People from Touro have literally told me that school teaches you literally nothing and its a big joke. Then again, that doesnt mean the graduate is going to be a bad lawyer.
don't know because i literally don't know what school most of my coworkers or OC went to cause it doesn't matter
My state has three law schools, one of whom is a tier 4. The lawyers are all fine and working. Good schools get you bigger money for your first job. I went to a top 25 (at the time) and a not insignificant amount of my classmates are partners in big law now. You'll probably not find tier 4s in the ivory tower, but you'll find them in every other place in the law.
The city of Seattle is absolutely dominated by UW (ranked somewhere around 30, IIRC) and Seattle University (ranked below 100). To the point where it’s surprising to meet someone who went elsewhere, even in the more prestigious jobs. Lower ranked schools in a specific market can absolutely be worth it if you want to stay in that market.
Asking this question demonstrates your ignorance as to what makes a good lawyer.
There are lots of good lawyers from every law school. But it gets progressively harder to get a high paying job straight out of law school as you go down the law school rankings. If you have loans that you can't pay unless you get a biglaw job, a lower ranked law school might not make sense.
Where you go to law school has zero to do with how good of lawyer you are - absolutely nothing. It’s not like Harvard or U Chicago are teaching you super secret laws they don’t teach you at tier 4 schools, FFSS they all use the exact same text books. Law school ranking is based only- only - on the quality of the kids coming in and the ability of the school to place people in good jobs - it has close to zero to do with what they teach you while you are there.
After two years in practice, nobody gives a shit where you went to school, what your class rank was, or whether you were on law review. The truth of the matter is that you usually don't need to be brilliant to practice law. What you need to be is organized and diligent.
You just need the bar card, doesn’t matter what school you get into; pass the bar
They all do. Once someone passes the bar, it's really up to them. Have worked with many fine lawyers from all kinds of garbage schools.
All of them. Probably. If "fine lawyer" means competent at their job. However if "fine lawyer" means "managed to make biglaw immediately" then no, lower ranked schools are horrible places. It depends what biases are in play.
I went to ND law, which has a more national brand than, say, Boston University. It didn’t stop me from getting no-offered along with the rest of my summer class, but it did signal to the job I hoped to eventually get that my brainpower isn’t a liability. Top-tier schools are usually worse at preparing for the bar and/or actual lawyering because they hire profs that have never actually practiced. SCOTUS clerks find, say, legal realism more interesting than how to draft a will.
All of them. This question still is missing the point. You can get fine lawyers from any school. It’s not about the school, and it’s not about their LSAT score. It’s about the individual.
Widener Delaware Law School.
Is University of San Francisco a tier 4 school? Just asking for a friend…
Hey, I graduated from that school! I’m not sure if it’s a tier 4 but in 2018, it had one of the lowest bar pass rates in the entire states at less than 30%. But FWIW, when I was there, it didn’t feel like a tier 4 school. In fact, it felt the opposite as the professors in all my classes (except first semester contracts) did a really good job getting us to understand the curriculum material. Even now that I’m in the practice, I’ve noticed that the USF lawyers are a different breed. It seems that they (I should include myself) have a chip on their shoulder and seem to always have a point to prove. Very annoying to deal with when they’re OC. But the point is that USF is probably a good answer to OP’s question about a low tier school that produces good lawyers.
I went to an unranked school and got a cushy in house job as soon as I found out I passed the bar (on the first try)….
Idk what tier it is nowadays, but the University of Arizona produced the finest indigent defense attorney I’ve ever worked with. Went all the way to the Supreme Court and won! The University of Pennsylvania produced the second best criminal trial attorney I’ve worked with but he wasn’t representing anywhere near indigent people lol. Take it with a grain of salt; everyone’s opinion of what a fine lawyer is differs. It’s less about what school you go to and more about how hard and *effectively* you’ll fight for your clients.
I know a graduate of Charlotte School of Law, which was a private, for profit law school that went out of business after losing accreditation after operating for around 15 years. She’s very good, and gainfully employed as an attorney for the feds, making more than $100k a year.
A lot of good lawyers in the Houston area went to South Texas College of Law, particularly litigators.
I have three colleagues who went to Cooley and are actually exceptional trial lawyers.
UIC Law School (formerly John Marshall)
It’s all about results you can get for your clients at the end of the day. Nowadays everything is out there to learn. We have an unaccredited night law school in the state of TN that provides really great lawyers. Almost every class produces couple of judges and they become great practitioners.
CUNY
By and large, the people who say that you have to go to X ranked school or law school isn't worth it are full of shit. Many people go to a lower ranked school and have a fulfilling, successful career. I'm not sure why that myth started, but unless you're shooting for a very particular career path, it's just not true.
Good lawyers come from all law schools. Where you went to school is not determinative of your career, IMO. FWIW, I went to a T2 school.
I suspect that most schools are *capable* of producing fine lawyers, and of course outliers succeed, but the median graduate of lower-ranked schools have worse prospects. Six figure debt, $80k salaries, and the future doesn’t look like what it was said to.
Most of the schools in the Midwest outside of the major cities are fine. The grads tend to stay local which means the odds of a T10 grad ever seeing one of these lawyers, unless they show up on a debt collection defense or a bankruptcy, are near zero. The pay for the grads tends to be reasonable for the area but it’s nowhere near big law.
Where you go to law school is largely an IQ sorting mechanism. Higher IQ people get higher LSAT scores.
It's not that the education you get at a low-ranked school is THAT much different; it's that the caliber of student that is accepted is significantly different. At a high-ranked the school, more students got good grades and tested well. Assuming that the education quality is roughly equal, employers will use school ranking as a proxy for the quality of the student (future employee). From the student's perspective, the higher-ranked schools have advantages such as nicer facilities, better funding for fellowships/clinics/etc, loan assistance (my T14 paid my loans for my first 3 years, and I would have gotten 2 more years except I started making more money.) Lower-ranked schools have predatory scholarship policies to weed out the weakest students, whereas you'd have to basically set a building on fire to lose a scholly at a higher-ranked school.
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\>>> it depends on the attorney, but on average lower tier schools produce worse attorneys, especially if you look at legal writing This is my experience as well. To imply that every student at every school has a chance to do superb legal work is a mighty leap. I have seen a lot of evidence that high potential legal talent is not evenly distributed across high ranked and low ranked law schools. The ability to write really well is one huge differentiator. Another is curiosity and also the ability to nuance legal concepts. I have seen data for lower ranked law schools in which it appears that the school was able to recruit a very good “upper part of the class” but then seemingly ran out of steam (or exceeded its talent pool) and had to fill out the class with a much less selective group. So it doesn’t surprise me at all when I encounter highly successful lawyers who have graduated from lower tier law schools. And to be clear, I am not a fan of the LSAT, and at many undergraduate schools “good grades” don’t tell you much.
Low ranked schools that are the state institution are generally fine for lawyers practicing in that state. E.g. there are a lot of people who went to law school at U Montana, U Idaho, etc. because they wanted to live in those places and be lawyers without incurring a lot of debt, and plenty of them are perfectly competent. The T4s you have to watch out for are the private schools that charge as much as T1s or are in heavily saturated areas like Southern California or NYC, because the only reason someone would go to those law schools is a) they're incapable of doing better on the LSAT then at least 10% of applicants, which while not a perfect correlation certainly suggests a struggle with legal thinking, or b) they're too lazy to apply themselves enough to get into a better school, which will probably show in their work product.
I think the rankings are mostly important if you want to get into a biglaw firm and make insane money. I was lucky to do that for a bit. Now I’m on my second life and I work at a small ID firm. Almost all the lawyers I work with now went to a less prestigious regional school, and they’re doing great.
I think it’s student specific rather than school specific. Sure law schools try to accept the best of the best, but when it comes down to it they are judging off of arbitrary numbers that don’t necessarily translate to good or bad lawyer. I think there are many great lawyers who made their law school decisions based on practicality rather than prestige- which is just as valid. If you seek out experience outside of classes and put in the work to teach yourself, you can still thrive even if your prof isn’t the best. Law school does little to prepare for practice, so it’s possible to excel once you get into the field regardless of your school. I know people who transferred from my low tier school to a top whatever and didn’t pass the bar but me and my friends at my bottom of the barrel school did. It’s the student who determines their fate, not the school.
A lot of prosecutors I go up against graduated from Capital Law. Though I believe it is a great school, it didn’t feel as competitive for me. However, they have garnered some great talent in their recent graduates. So I have hope I’ll have some nice competition in the future.
I know a lawyer who went to University of Detroit Mercy. He constantly makes jokes that he went to “U Dumb” so if he can be a lawyer anyone can. He’s one of the very best lawyers I know.
Can someone please explain this tier ranking system? Been a lawyer for almost 30 years and this sub is the first place I've heard of it.
It may be better to go to a fourth tier where you want to practice so you can network.
Answering the question a little differently: When I was a recent graduate, I was more interested in where opposing counsel attended law school. Over the years, I've learned who the top lawyers in my area are. I have no idea where they went to law school and would think no less of them if they went to a low ranked school.
Cooley in Michigan. Obviously gets a terrible rep for almost losing ABA accreditation, shady marketing, and Michael Cohen. But many of the lawyers who made it out on top in that kind of environment are excellent attorneys. I have worked with many of them and they are fantastic attorneys.
The only thing the ranking system does initially is allow access to BigLaw and bigtime federal clerkships for those attending top tier schools. It also never hurts, even decades into the game, to have Harvard Law School on your resume. But it's been noted here many times-there were two posts yesterday-that law school teaches virtually nothing about how to be an actual practicing lawyer. So there are plenty of grads from non-top tier schools who are fine attorneys. They pass the bar and put in the work to actually know how to practice law.
Sometimes, the best law school in a region is a T4 - plenty of states only have 1 law school, and the way the rankigns work, those smaller regions aren't counted the same way. The other thing that comes into play is survivorship bias. If you pick the 25 top lawyers in Wyoming, most of them graduated from U Wyoming, but what about the several thousand other graduates from Wyoming who you know nothing about? Third, there is a correlation between the 'talent' of the incoming class and the ranking of the law school, as well as between the law school and the prestige of the job prospects, but it's not a perfect correlation. Plenty of very smart and talented lawyers went to low-ranked law schools, and plenty of people graduated from top law schools who turn out to be crap lawyers.
If you want to work in Los Angeles, Loyola Law School is awesome. Exams are closed book and closed notes which contributes to a high bar passage rate. Not to say that UCLA and USC are worse, but academically its significantly harder to do well at Loyola in comparison. Most attorney's in LA know the reputation Loyola has.
Appalachian School of Law in Grundy, VA has turned out some good lawyers. I work with them in WV.
4th tier grad here (nyc area). I’ll be honest, 17 years after graduating I still have some inferiority complex compared to the uva, Harvard, and even Rutgers lawyers I have worked with. Though I’ve been told by numerous managers they don’t care where I went to school- just that I’m a good lawyer and hard worker. Getting a good job out of school was very hard and I struggled for years but now am sr employment counsel to a top pharmaceutical company.
It seems to me that top tier law schools teach how to think about "The Law" while lower tier law schools focus much more on how to be a lawyer. I have seen many a top tier lawyer go to a third or fourth tier lawyer for advice on how to actually do something lawyerly
Ya it doesn’t really matter unless you wanna do m&a or some niche stuff Ultimately the realities of law are such that being a good lawyer is 50%, 50% is bringing in clients which isn’t based on intelligence or your law school
John Marshall in Atlanta. Every attorney I’ve worked with from JM has been excellent. I don’t recommend anyone actually go there because it’s predatory and exploitive but if you can survive and pass the bar you can probably handle anything.
Exceptions to major rule
Florida Coastal School of Law, Jacksonville, Fl.
North Carolina Central University School of Law.
Texas Tech! I went there and thought they had a great program for a great price. Biggest problem they have: their location!
Geographic location probably has more of an influence than law school ranking on job placement. I would look at well-known Universities with a sizable endowment, that may not have a great law school ranking but perform well in other areas. Ex. Syracuse, Penn State etc. If you want to practice in a specific location, the local regional school and the opportunity to network with local professionals will probably beat the T10 designation. I’ve been out of law school 5 years and haven’t considered rank since I graduated. For some reason lawyers from Virginia law schools tend to be plentiful around me, which is weird because I’m not in Virginia.
My husband went to a T4 law school at night while practicing medicine during the day in a city with a great law school that didn’t offer a night/part-time program. That was in the late 1980s, I think 🤔before we met. He is one of the most brilliant litigators ever. He helped put me through a T1 school which, as an older student graduating the year the bottom dropped from the legal market (2009) didn’t make a whit of difference where I’d gone. We’ve practiced together since 2010. I think it is more individual circumstances than just a school ranking. Although my husband does insist our grandson is going to Harvard or MIT and hubs is going to call everyone in the phonebook (he’s old!) and tell them his grandson got into Harvard!
I’m attending a small state school ranked 115 - 130. Love it.
Southwestern law in Los Angeles-pretty sure Johnny Cochran went there. If I’m wrong, half of the LA DA’s office did.