Is It Worth Transferring From a Poorly-Ranked Law School to a Better One?

Dear Lawcrossing,

I am currently a first-year law student. My goal is to land a job with a large law firm. I currently attend a fourth-tier (according to U.S. News) school and rank first in my class. My question is, should I transfer to a first-tier school, or stay where I am?


JH, MtthujOJV

DEARJH,

LawCrossing would like to congratulate you, JH, on sending her the thorniest question she has ever received. She has consulted with a variety of law school administrators, both from highly-ranked as well as-well-not-so-highly-ranked schools, as well as recruiting coordinators at large law firms, to fashion an answer for you. For fairly predictable reasons, she's not going to quote any of them by name, but she is certain that the advice she learned is spot-on, and it boils down
to this: You probably don't have to transfer if you don't want to, and if you do, there are a few issues for you to consider.

First of all, consider where it is, geographically, that you want to wind up. Once you've figured that out, take a look at the Martindale Hubbell listing of lawyers in the large firms in town (you can find MarHub at your career services office or on-line at http://lawyers. martindale.com/marhub). Look at where the junior-ish associates went to law school, the ones hired in the last five years or so. If your school has a particularly harsh reputation-which is extremely unlikely-you may find that they just don't hire from your school. LawCrossing has known large firms to say to students from particularly struggling law schools, "We'd hire you but we don't want lawyers with a diploma from your school on our walls." Ouch! But even if that's the case, and your heart is set on firms like those, you don't have to transfer. LawCrossing talked to a number of associates at large firms, themselves graduates of less-than-stellar law schools, and they had an excellent suggestion: a judicial clerkship. As one associate told LawCrossing, "If you do a federal court clerkship, large law firms will want you, regardless of where you went to school." Apart from increasing your marketability, JH, you would love doing a clerkship for a year or two. It's great experience, and many lawyers look back on their clerkships as the most enjoyable part of their career. With your grades, getting a clerkship with a federal judge shouldn't be difficult, and LawCrossing encourages you to consider that route.

LawCrossing is probably painting a far worse scenario than actually exists, JH, because it is far more likely that the firms you're eyeing have hired people from your school, which means they'll consider you as well. After all, as many recruiting coordinators at large firms have explained to LawCrossing, often the reason that law firms haven't hired students from certain law schools isn't because they've got something against the school-it's just an unknown quantity to them. Once they've got an associate from a school and they like that associate, the way is paved for you to approach that firm.

If you do stick with your school, JH, you've got a lot going for you. Most obviously, you are "the man" or "the woman" (as the case may be). You're a shining star, a Law Review shoo-in, the intellectual center of the universe-and you won't be that anywhere else. Less pragmatically, you've undoubtedly made friends among your classmates and, in all likelihood, probably enjoy your environment. That may or may not be true at any school you transfer to. And while you may be taking a long-term view of your life, you've got another two years left of law school, and there couldn't be a place you'd be more comfortable than you are now. These are perhaps not dispositive issues for you, JH, but they're worth considering, especially with the judicial clerkship option LawCrossing so firmly favors.

But if the firms you're looking at don't hire from your school (or you've got a class full of schmoes and you can't wait to get away from them, or a judicial clerkship doesn't ring your chimes) such that you do decide to transfer, you've got to determine: where to? The two obvious choices are either a law school in the city where you want to live, or a distinguished national school. With the local school option, law firms virtually always hire from local schools, and you can always run a quick Mar-Hub check to see if that's the case. The only problem with this is that as a transferring student, you won't bring your class rank with you, and you won't be able to be on Law Review second year-both of which you'd have if you stayed put. You'd want to list your first-year results very prominently on your resume. Even so, if your grades drop at the new school, you won't have the buffer you have now. As one career services director at a "first-tier" law school told LawCrossing, "A lot of stu-dents transfer here thinking that they're set. They're not. If they're not in the top half of the class here, large firms won't look at them any more quickly than they would have before."

So not all first-tier schools are created equal, JH. Having said that, if you can successfully transfer into a school that anyone would recognize as having a phenomenal reputation, it's hard to come up with solid reasons not to do that-particularly with your large- firm aspirations. As one career services director at a moderately-ranked law school says, "If a student comes to me and says, 'I've got a chance to transfer to Columbia. Should I do it?' I've got a moral obligation to hold out my hand, and say, 'Go. And good luck to you.' The fact is, a degree from Columbia, Yale, or Harvard has cachet that you're going to have for your entire career."

So there you have it, JH. You will notice that throughout this discussion LawCrossing has not analyzed your stated desire of going to a "large firm." That's a matter for another column, or perhaps a chapter in a book. Suffice it to say that in researching her incredible America's Greatest Places to Work With a Law Degree, LawCrossing has uncovered very few large law firms where junior associates are-dare she say it?-happy. Before you pack your bags and pin your hopes on a generic "large firm," LawCrossing urges you to talk to alums who work at the firms you're considering joining, to find out from them how they enjoy their jobs-and what you can expect if you follow in their footsteps.