What Law Schools Look For

At a typical law school, the ultimate power to set admission standards and to admit or reject any applicant is vested in a committee of law professors. (At some schools, including Lewis and Clark College's Northwestern School of Law, students, as well as professors, sit on the admissions committee.) Because these professors have only limited amounts of time to deal with admissions, they are assisted by full-time admissions officers. The Dean (or Assistant Dean, or Director) of Admissions and a staff of assistants, counselors, recruiters, financial aid officers, and staff professionals publicize the law school and encourage you to apply; answer your questions (on the telephone and in writing); mail out catalogs and application forms; and perform a wide variety of other admissions-related chores.

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When you apply, these staffers will assemble all the information you submit-all the application forms, essays, transcripts, and letters of recommendation-into a file. They may compare the files, rank the candidates, and make recommendations about who should be admitted. In clear-cut cases, they may make the actual decisions to admit or reject. The law professors supervise the work of the full-time staff professionals and make the admit/reject decisions in marginal cases. Since they make rules and set standards, they usually must consent to any requests for waivers or exemptions.

All this standard setting and evaluating is directed toward one overriding goal: to identify and choose students who will be able to do law school work, survive, and graduate. The law school doesn't want to flunk out any law students. Nor does it want to admit people who will drop out. Poor retention rates are wasteful. If a law school has room for, say, 150 freshmen, it wants to find 150 candidates who will work successfully for three years and then graduate.

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Being lawyers, the committee members naturally try to identity candidates who will become capable and ethical lawyers. They'd also like to turn out graduates who will be successful in their careers and who will support the alma mater and contribute generously to alumni fund-raising efforts. These other goals are important, and you need to know about them to know how to present yourself properly. (I'll show you how to take advantage of some of these objectives in the chapters that follow.) But these goals are clearly and explicitly secondary. Everything else pales before the need to fill the freshman class with students who will be able to do the work, survive, and graduate.

It's not as easy as you may think to identify the candidates who are likely to be successful law students. Law school work is intense and demanding. The people most likely to succeed are physically healthy, disciplined, hardworking, intelligent, good at speaking and writing, and possessed of large vocabularies and good reading skills. But how can a law school tell if any particular applicant possesses these qualities? How can a law school admissions committee look at candidates it doesn't know-at you, for instance-and determine whether they have the peculiar combination of talents, skills, and work habits they will need? The professors can't look inside your head, and wouldn't know what to look for if they could. They can subject you to various tests, or make you produce information about your past career. A test or criterion that correlates with success in law school is law school success. Some tests or criteria are better predictors than others. Because no single predictor perfectly correlates with law school success, law schools use several different predictors. But of all the predictors that have been tried, the one that consistently works best is the undergraduate grade point average. Put simply, the better you did in college the more likely you are to make it through law school .

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Thus, of all the various pieces of evidence you will be required to submit, the one that the law schools will look at most closely will always be your GPA. It is usually expressed on a standard four-point scale, according to which a straight-A undergraduate record converts to a 4.0, a transcript that contains only Bs becomes a 3.0, and a college record of Cs becomes a 2.0. At present, even some low-rated law schools are reporting that their incoming freshman classes have median GPAs of 3.2 or 3.3.

Knowing this, the most valuable single thing you can do to maximize your chances of getting into law school is to Get Good Grades!

Good grades will never hurt you. If you have good grades, you may be able to attend one of the more prestigious law schools, you'll have many more career options than applicants with poor grades, and you'll get a better start toward accomplishing your own personal goals, whether they are wealth, or fame, or the opportunity to do interesting and socially beneficial work.

If you have poor grades, your options will always be relatively limited. Poor grades will hold you back; you'll always have to explain them away or compensate for them. (I'll give you some tips on how to do this in later chapters.) You'll have to attend a less prestigious law school. If your grades are extremely poor, you won't be able to go to law school at all, at least not soon after you graduate from college.

A Word of Encouragement for Nontraditional Applicants

I'll refer to you as a nontraditional if you're applying to law school at any other time in your life than your senior year of college. If you've been out of school for a while, you're probably wondering whether you can compete with traditional students. There's a simple answer: you can. In fact, you'll probably find that you're in demand. Law schools know that drive, self-discipline, and motivation tend to improve as you get older; conversely, the ability to learn doesn't decline (at least not until you get very old). Unless you have an employment history of frequent firings, dishonesty, or substance abuse, your work experience is likely to be an asset. You've certainly learned something since you left school; since law is a very diverse field, whatever you have learned is probably law-related in some way. As a law student, you will add needed diversity to a freshman class that is otherwise filled with 22-year-olds who have all had similar educations.

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