Echoing @Midwestmomofboys She has it spot on.
The T14 metric basically ensures two things 1) that your child will actually be able to practice law when she graduate and 2) that she will be able to pay for her loans.
Personally? I think you should aim for any school that also has loan-forgiveness programs. This will allow your child to opt for public interest law upon graduation and she can avoid Big Law to pay her loans. They may also have post-graduate fellowships to get her started in a cool PI career, which a less deeply resourced school may not have, and fellowships while she’s in law school to gain her experience and exposure to the entities who will hire her.
While your child may be talented enough to be in the 5% of people in Local Law School to actually land a job that requires a JD, most people don’t want to risk that and opt instead to study at a school with better employment stats, those would be the T14. It’s not elitism per se, it’s practical decision making because the field of law has been over saturated by local law unis using their law schools as cash cows.
They accept nearly anyone, charge the same tuition as at T14 (or close to that) and their grads can’t pass the bar and/or if they do manage to pass, firms that pay enough to offset their loans won’t hire them. Why? because they have hired from a T14.
Also several T14s have extensive alumni networks that are actively maintained by the school at the highest reaches–through alumni events in X remote location, through education forums that bring in alumni to the school, through invitations in to speak at events and at school, through requests to donate for those scholarships and fellowships that your daughter will benefit from while in school, through invitations to recruit and hire their best and brightest, etc. If your daughter needs to make a career adjustment later, the Career Services office can help her network into another position. It’s part of what you’re paying for.
Employment stats should be on each law school’s web page. The ABA also lists schools’ employment stats as an FYI.
FYI I can’t put the link to the list here, because it’s a blog and CC rules won’t allow it, but if you google the title “Surprise: Where Harvard Law Students Got Their Undergrad Degrees” you should pull up a list of all of the undergrad schools of the 2013 class that entered Harvard law school.