How Law Students Can Choose the Right Law School

Choosing a law school may well be the most important professional decision a law student makes. It should not be made based on casual information or your acquaintance with alumni who enjoyed attending a particular school. Unfortunately, there are no magic formulas into which a prospective law student's preferences may be plugged to identify the ideal law school for that student.

Click Here to Find Law Student Jobs on LawCrossing


Law schools come in all shapes and sizes and can be found in most states in a variety of environments. Each law school is unique in its combination of location, programs, facilities, and approach to the study of law. Research facilities and extracurricular opportunities vary widely from institution to institution, as do admissions requirements and tuition rates.

You need to learn as much as possible about a prospective school and make an honest self-appraisal of your personal, professional, and financial circumstances and goals. This article suggests various factors by which law schools can be differentiated and suggests a practical approach to arriving at a list of schools that might be right for you.

There is a ray of sunshine through this financial cloud. Financial aid is available in all ABA-accredited schools, as well as at some non-accredited schools. Federally subsidized loan programs are also available at most schools. These loans require either no payments until after graduation or payment of only interest until the student graduates. Finally, most of the individual schools have other grants and scholarships available. While academic performance remains an important criterion for many of these grants, others are based solely on financial need or consider student activities and employment experience.

If the cost of law school still appears staggering or if you are not prepared for three more years on a student budget, you may want to consider attending law school at night. Night programs require four years of study instead of three. Working full-time, attending class four nights a week, and studying while maintaining your sanity is a grueling endeavor. However, you may find that your personal circumstances mesh more effectively with an evening program than with a full-time one.

A Practical Approach

Once you have made this honest self-evaluation, you still must choose a law school. Even after exhaustive analysis, more than one school will be likely to fit all of your personal, professional, and financial needs. Here is a practical approach to narrow the number of schools to which you apply.

You are well-advised not to put all your application eggs in one basket. Unless you have very good friends in very high places (or have compromising pictures of the dean of admissions), there is no guarantee that you will be accepted by any particular law school. Applying to several schools where admissions criteria match your credentials will increase your chances of acceptance into at least one school.

Click Here to Find Summer Associate Jobs on LawCrossing

Make a list that ultimately will be pared to those schools to which you will send applications. The first group of schools on your list should be all of those that you have always wanted to attend. This group probably will not include very many schools and could have as few as zero. It could also include all those schools to which your parents and friends have insisted you apply.

The second group of schools should be those to which you believe you have a good chance of being admitted based solely on your GPA and LSAT numbers. The schools in this group that remain on the list after final paring will be your fallbacks in case the schools on your "want" list all reject you.

The third group on the list should contain the names of those schools that consider factors, other than the GPA and LSAT numbers, that are applicable to you. These can include any significant work history or extracurricular activities, as well as your minority status, heritage, and religious affiliation.

The fourth group of schools on the list should be those that have the special programs and honors that correspond to your professional goals. This list should include those schools that offer any Master of Laws' programs that might interest you.

The final group of schools on the list should contain those located in the area where you would prefer to go to school and/or practice law. If this area is an entire state and the state has a large number of law schools (such as California and New York), you should try to narrow your preference to a certain area or areas within the state.

The list should now consist of five groups containing the names of all those schools that you might attend-those that you want to attend, those that will probably accept you, those that might accept you, and those that fit your personal and professional needs-and it can now be pared down to a workable number, depending on your application budget. If the total amount of application fees for the schools on your list does not exceed your application budget, there is no reason why you should not apply to all of them. If this list contains more schools than you can afford to apply to, begin to narrow it down. Look at the list as a whole and note the schools that appear in every category. These are your first- choice schools for application.

Whatever the process you use to further reduce the list, be careful to apply to enough schools to maximize your chances of acceptance. After being accepted by as many schools as possible, you can then use the information gleaned from your self-evaluation to reject those schools that do not meet your personal needs, professional goals, and financial considerations.

A final word: law school can be hard, fun, exciting, depressing, rewarding, tense, competitive, disappointing, boring, and a drain on normal personal activities and relationships. You will be doing a disservice to yourself and those around you who care about you if you pick a law school randomly or based solely on the advice of friends, relatives, or alumni. By evaluating your own needs and goals prior to attending school, you will maximize both the education you receive and your enjoyment of the legal education process.

Click Here to View the 2015 LawCrossing Salary Survey of Lawyer Salaries in the Best Law Firms