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The most important determinants of whether you will be admitted to any law school are your numbers-your undergraduate GPA and your LSAT score. The more highly regarded a law school is, the higher your numbers have to be for you to be reasonably sure of being admitted. How can you tell what your chances are at each of the schools on your preferred list?
Since the law school will choose from among many students who have roughly the same numbers, it will consider other factors. Thus, your chances will improve if you can present yourself well on the formal application: if you can write a good essay, get good letters of reference, present desirable work experience and extracurricular activities, or in some other way distinguish yourself from the others in your cell.
Here are some other strategies that may give you an edge at schools at which you are competitive:
- If you are applying to a state school, make sure your application identifies you as an in-state resident.
- Make sure you identify yourself as a "legacy" if you apply to a school that one of your parents attended, especially if it is a private school to which your parents have donated money. (As schools continue to face budget problems, keeping contributors happy is becoming increasingly important.)
- If you can pay your own way to law school, consider applying to schools that are known to be extremely expensive. Applications to such schools declined by 1 percent in 1990-91, while applications to inexpensive public schools grew dramatically. If unlike most students, you don't have to consider costs, you may be able to gain a slight advantage by applying to a more expensive school.
- Try to get whatever benefit there is in applying early.
- If appropriate, identify yourself as a sought-after protected group member. Affirmative action programs are still thriving.
- Finally, be particularly careful to make sure that your application is complete, neat, and in proper form. When a committee has to choose between a number of candidates who have very similar qualifications, it may be tempted to simplify its decision making by becoming extremely finicky about its formal rules. It can then eliminate applicants who make trivial errors or omit even unimportant pieces of information.
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But there are exceptions. First, the benefits of attending a top law school are so great that it's worth at least trying, even if your numbers make admission unlikely. If you present yourself properly and exploit some of the edge factors I described earlier, there's always the chance that something in your background will lead the school to conclude that it needs to make its student body more diverse. It doesn't cost that much to try.
Second, if a school offers some unique advantage to you-if, for example, it has a unique specialized program or is in an ideal location-then to you the cost of applying is much less than the reward if you are admitted.
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In either case, you will need to do your damnedest on the subjective parts of the applications, and you will also need to pray for a break. If the school has a bad year and has to become less selective because fewer qualified students have applied; or if you turn out to be the only applicant from, say, rural Nebraska; you could get lucky.
But you must never, never put all your eggs in any basket marked "long shot." It's one thing to pray for a break, but it's something else entirely to plan your life around the expectation of getting that break.
There's a third time when you should apply to a wish school-or, better, several wish schools-and that's when you have no alternative. If you're like the person in the third example, the student with a 3.0 average and an LSAT score at the 40th percentile, you won't have any insurance schools. You won't find any schools at which the odds are in your favor. If you want to go to law school, you'll have to try to bring home a long shot.
But before you give up entirely, there's one more thing you should know about grids. Sometimes they make schools look more selective than they actually are. We know that this happens, but we're not sure how often.
Remember, the information on the grids is supplied to the Official Guide by the law schools themselves. Because a law school's main asset is its reputation, and because it will attract better students by seeming already to have better students, law schools have an incentive to make their student bodies look more elite than they actually are. They can't actually lie about student qualifications, but they can present the data in the most favorable ways.
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