Setting Your Priorities While Choosing the Right Law School for You

Let's perform a little experiment. First, name the law school you would attend if you could choose any one you wanted.

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Perhaps you named a distinguished law school with a national reputation or a law school known to be strong in the specialty you want to study. Or perhaps you named the school that one of your parents attended. But you came up with a name, right? If you're like most applicants, you've given a great deal of thought to this question. You've read through that law school's catalog, you've spoken to some of its students and alumni, and perhaps you've even visited.

Now, what school will be your second choice? Did you find it harder to come up with a name? List your third and fourth choices. And your fifth, sixth and seventh. If you're like most applicants, you quickly run out of names. You've given very little thought to other schools that you might have to fall back on.

Many applicants don't know what they will do if they don't get accepted by their first choice schools. They wind up applying to a nearby local law school with a night program, or whichever schools their friends are applying to, or schools chosen at random. These schools, about which they know little, often don't have the programs and features they want.

If this is your attitude, you're taking a big risk. You may have to settle for a school that is not your first choice. You may have to settle for your last choice. This means, first of all, that you'd better have a last choice. One reason candidates fail is that they don't apply to enough law schools. Your application list should include some schools that you're pretty sure will accept you.

But if you're going to have a productive and enjoyable law school experience, these insurance schools need to be as carefully chosen as your top choices. You can have a happy and productive law school experience at a local school that has the programs and specialties you want and is situated in a comfortable location, even if the school doesn't have much of a reputation. But you won't be happy or well-educated if you wind up at a school that offers few programs, has poor quality instruction, and is located in an unpleasant, inconvenient, or dangerous setting.

You should attend the most selective law school you get admitted to that has the particular combination of programs and qualities that you want. You can be confident of attending a compatible law school only if you make sure before you apply that all the law schools on your application list-insurance schools as well as top choices-have the programs and qualities that you want. Or most of those programs and qualities. Or, at the very least, your top priorities. So you should know in advance that the things you will need to have a good law school experience are present at all the schools you apply to.

Here is the best method to use to decide which law schools to apply to: first, go through all your information and make a list of all the schools that have the programs and qualities you want. Consider as many schools as you can. Work from the Official Guide; it contains the names of all the accredited law schools. When you make this first list-call it your preferred list-don't worry about which of these law schools you have the numbers to get into. And don't worry if your preferred list is very long. You're not going to apply to all of these schools. Just list the schools you'd be happy going to. Calculate your chances of admission to each of these schools. Decide how many schools to apply to. Next, prune your preferred list into your application list. You'll wind up with five to fifteen schools, at varying levels of selectivity, all of which you'd be happy attending.

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The old-boy and status-ladder connections are becoming more important now that many law firms are hiring law students on a part-time basis for summer jobs and then choosing new full-time associates from the ranks of young lawyers who were former summer employees. Many more of these summer opportunities will be available in the immediate community near your law school.

These advantages are mostly for people who want to work with established firms and who will do traditional kinds of business or government-oriented law. If you want some unusual specialty-entertainment law, for example-then studying where you intend to practice is less important. If you're going to study a still-emerging specialty, career patterns and employment patterns are much less fixed and affected by tradition. And if you have the numbers to attend one of the most selective law schools, you're likely to be able to secure legal employment anywhere.

Joint degree programs are of value for people aiming at legal specialties for which extensive education is appropriate. To understand the legal environment of hospitals, doctors, and drug companies, it's valuable to be both a lawyer and a doctor. There are similar niches for lawyers who are also economists, or scientists, or scholars of foreign cultures and languages. Extra degrees also come in handy if you're applying for a job with a government body or a large corporation. Big organizations sometimes insist on stringent formal qualifications as a way of reducing a large number of job applicants to a manageable number. They often favor applicants who have MBAs or MPAs as well as legal credentials.

But joint degree programs aren't for everyone. If you're interested in a traditional business or litigation career, and if you expect to work for a smaller firm or be self-employed, you'll get little benefit from a second degree. You shouldn't apply for a joint degree program unless you anticipate some career use for the second degree.

Since more law students drop out than flunk out, attrition rates can reveal the existence of problems with student morale. The size of each law school's first-, second- and third-year classes can be found in the American Bar Association's annual Review of Legal Education. With the exception of a few local and night programs that still anticipate high flunkout rates, law schools try to keep their attrition to less than 10 percent between the first and second years. If it's much higher than that at a school you are considering, ask the school's recruiter to explain why. There may be a good reason. The sophomore class may have been smaller to begin with, for some law schools are expanding. If the recruiter can't provide a good reason, ask whether such attrition is typical. If so, it may mean that the school's educational climate is discouraging.