What top undergrad gives you the best chance for a top law school?

[sakky]

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Then, after that recession broke out, and knowing that IB and BigLaw hiring level got crushed, what about those law students who still attended law school in 2009 or 2010?

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<p>What about them? In 2009 - an entire year after the largest crash since the Depression - IB’s actually paid record bonuses. Yes, that’s right - record bonuses: higher than even the monster year of 2007. </p>

<p>[Wall</a> Street’s Record Bonuses Will Be Bigger Than They Appear - Daniel Indiviglio - Business - The Atlantic](<a href=“Wall Street's Record Bonuses Will Be Bigger Than They Appear - The Atlantic”>Wall Street's Record Bonuses Will Be Bigger Than They Appear - The Atlantic)</p>

<p>Even in 2010, while IB bonuses did decline, they nevertheless remained at eye-popping levels. Furthermore, most prognosticators were predicting a strong financial recovery during 2010-2011, as nobody predicted how anemic the economy would remain in 2011. </p>

<p>Hence, I would argue that it was still economically rational for people to attend law school during 2009 or 2010, especially given their shrunken options in the rest of the economy. </p>

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Again, law firm hiring is somewhat different from other types of jobs, in the sense that you do all the interviews just one year after the first day of your law school. Hence, law firms will likely to hire new law students at the amount that will correspond with the health of economy one year after a law student enters law school.

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<p>Which therefore seems to point to another strategy - attend law school for the first year, and then interview. If you don’t find something to your liking because of the poor economy, then withdraw from law school, and return when the economy is better. Granted, you will be carrying a year’s worth of law school debt, but hey, that’s better than carrying 3 years of debt. And your seat in the law school will be secured. </p>

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Only advantage that HLS has over Columbia or NYU is that it places slightly higher percentage of its grads into selective clerkships (think SCOTUS) or academia. For BigLaw placement, there is very little difference between HLS and rest of T6.</p>

<p>In long-term grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if someone with 3.6 GPA and 172 LSAT did or didn’t get into HLS in one application cycle. That person would be fine regardless, since with those ‘borderline stats for HLS’, he would still end up at a strong school anyway for certain.

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<p>The same analysis applies in the comparison of T6 vs. non-T6 or T14 vs. non-T14 law school (or wherever the ‘discontinuity’ lies). Let’s face it - the vast majority of people don’t have the admissions statistics to be assured of admission to a “top” law school, whether defined as T3, T6, or T14. For them, if they can be admitted during a certain admissions cycle, they should lock up their seat.</p>

<p>Now, again, I agree with you that those people who do have such strong statistics to guarantee admission have little to worry about. But they’re only a tiny percentage of people out there.</p>