The 2005/ 2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide To Class Ranking ...

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The 2005/ 2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide To Class Ranking Distinctions And Law Review Admission At America's Top-50 Law Schools

The 2005/2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide to class ranking distinctions and law review admission at america's top-50 law schools

The 2005/2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide To Class Ranking Distinctions And Law Review Admission At America's Top-50 Law Schools

The 2005/ 2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide To Class Ranking Distinctions And Law Review Admission At America's Top-50 Law Schools

The Law School Bible

The goal of this book is to give law firms a "law school bible" in which they can find complete information on individual law schools. To this end, we have gathered as much information as we can from as many sources as possible and organized it so that it is easily found for the Top-50 law schools as identified by the 2006 U.S. News & World Report Law School rankings1. The goal is to de mystify the grading and ranking systems for the nation's Top-50 law schools and provide the reader with an objective and greater understanding of what it means to be a member of the particular journals and law reviews at these schools.

We will address a law school's geographic location, faculty strength and accessibility, class size, library and study and research facilities, academic honors and awards offered, moot court and clinical programs, student organizations and extra-curricular activities, entering class acceptance percentages and GPA and LSAT scores, OCIP program, post-law school employment statistics, plus an overall sense of the atmosphere existing at each school.

Our Sources

As noted, we started with 2004 law-school rankings provided by the U.S. News & World Report. Of all the various guides available on law schools, we concentrated on the Princeton Review's 2004 Complete Book of Law Schools, The ABA-LSAC Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools and the NALP Directory. Just to be sure, we also checked each of the 50 top law schools' websites and contacted Admissions Offices and Offices of Career Services. Each law school discussed in this book was given our completed version of information about that school and invited to provide corrections or verification of the data, in order to present the most current and accurate information available to date. Finally, we did our own informal and admittedly random sampling of recent graduates of the top-50 schools, and we used some of these quotes to provide a personal flavor to what otherwise might have been a mere recitation of facts. Upon occasion, there were complaints as to tone, and we made changes when we felt they would not compromise the objectivity we sought.

One Note

We have done our best to provide you with consistent information for each of the top-50 law schools listed. There were instances when law schools were reluctant to provide the information we requested. In addition, information between guides occasionally conflicted. We have done our best to eliminate such discrepancies, but if any should come to your attention, please let us know.

1. Abbie Willard, Ph.D., a Georgetown University Law Center assistant dean for Career Services, in her article Law School Rankings: Through the Education and Employment Looking Glass, Page 4, found in its entirety on , writes that "U.S. News' two types of information collection?opinion polls and statistical reporting?are unsatisfactory for different reasons: individual perceptions (of judges and lawyers) are flawed on the one hand, and statistics cannot convey subjective quality on the other. Even the variety of data requested has been challenged because deans and hiring partners disagree among themselves and with one another as to any meaningful and measurable definitions of quality." But Dr. Willard does not completely dismiss these annual rankings. She adds on the same page that "Although this ranking system has been criticized as not providing a balanced view of what individual law schools have to offer and as being to reliant on subjectively reported data, it has also been praised for modifying its research techniques, more precisely defining its terms, and adapting its analysis and report in response to the needs of the profession." What Dr. Willard is saying in sum is that although the U.S. News & World Report law school rankings are flawed, they represent, at the present moment, the best relatively unbiased source we have.

The 2005/ 2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide To Class Ranking Distinctions And Law Review Admission At America's Top-50 Law Schools

contents

06 Decoding Law School Grading Systems 22 Decoding Grading Systems at America's Top-50 Law Schools 26 What Making Law Review Means At The Top-50 Schools 30 Yale University 34 Harvard University 41 Stanford 54 New York University 63 University of Chicago 67 University of Pennsylvania 71 University of Michigan--Ann Arbor 76 University of Virginia 82 Northwestern University 89 Cornell University 94 Duke University 98 University of California--Berkeley 103 Georgetown University 113 University of California--Los Angeles 119 University of Texas-Austin 124 Vanderbilt University 130 University of Southern California 136 University of Minnesota--Twin Cities 141 Boston University 147 George Washington University 152 University of Iowa 158 Washington and Lee Uthniversity 164 University of Notre Dame

168 Washington University in St. Louis 173 University of Illinois--Urbana-Champaign 177 Boston College 182 College of William and Mary 188 Fordham University 194 University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 199 University of Washington 203 Emory University 207 University of California-Davis 213 University of Wisconsin-Madison 218 BYU, J. Reuben Clark Law School 222 Indiana University?Bloomington 227 University of Georgia 231 Wake Forest University 236 Ohio State University, Moritz College of Law 240 University of California-Hastingszv 246 George Mason University 251 Tulane University 257 University of Alabama 261 University of Arizona 265 University of Florida, Levin College of Law 270 University of Maryland 274 American University (Washington College of Law) 277 University of Colorado-Boulder 282 Case Western Reserve University 287 University of Connecticut 292 University of Utah, S.J. Quinney College of Law

Decoding Law School Ranking Systems: How to Separate the Best from the Rest

The Transcript: What It Says and Doesn't Say

Increasingly large numbers of hiring partners are guilty of making hiring decisions based on faulty assumptions that may no longer be true or relevant regarding law schools. This guide diminishes reliance on outdated assumptions and apprises law firms of the most up-to-date information on how law school transcripts translate in terms of law student achievement.

For starters, you have probably noticed that law schools often refuse to rank their students: They give all sorts of reasons for this behavior--from asserting that such fine distinctions are meaningless to advancing that their students are selected from the cream of the undergraduate crop, thus leading to a quality candidate no matter what his/her achievement in law school. Indeed, some law schools do not use numerical or letter grading systems, opting instead for a mix of Credit/No Credit and Honors, Pass, Low Pass designations for classes but where the tiers bear no relation to an A, B, or C. This brings us to a dilemma. How does one determine just how well an attorney candidate did vis-?-vis his/her law-school peers at different schools? Here's an oft-experienced hypothetical.

You receive a resume from John Doe. He attended Law School X, which the U.S. News & World Report designates as one of America's top ten. You notice that this candidate has a B average. You assume that someone with a B average from a top-ten law school will have placed in approximately the top third of his/her class. What you might not know is that at this top-ten law school, a B is the average grade.

The law school in question, like most others, is merely trying to present its graduates as attractively as possible. Constructing the grading system so that all of them can be B students is but one way this can be accomplished.

Your job as a recruiter for your firm or business is to get the best attorney you can. This usually means selecting someone who has excelled over others, finishing in at least the top half of his/her class. With the tools this book provides, you will be able to do this. You'll have at your disposal the key markers that tell you how well a student has performed relative to his/her peers at any law school.

The 2005/ 2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide To Class Ranking Distinctions And Law Review Admission At America's Top-50 Law Schools

One way to decipher comparative achievement is to look at honors distinctions an attorney may have earned; namely--summa cum laude, magna cum laude, or cum laude; or with Honors. We'll tell you what these designations really mean, because they differ from law school to law school. You might also check to see if your candidate was a member of any honors societies, such as Order of the Coif or Law Review. But a caution is in order here. Again, qualifications for law review differ depending on the law school. You must search in this book for the law school in question and check to see what such an honor designates.

Law Firm Hiring Criteria

Firms seek the best intellectual capital they can buy. This intellectual capital tends, according to popular wisdom, to be concentrated at a handful of law schools--no more than fifteen and perhaps as few as ten. Such schools hold leading positions because they are known to be the toughest to enter, meaning the average grades and LSAT scores of their entering classes are higher than those of competing schools.

Hairsplitting

Within these law schools, Harvard and Yale are widely held in highest esteem, with, say, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and Columbia also highly regarded, but a step behind. Thus, even though the differences between Stanford's 3.73-3.95 median grade point average and Yale's 3.803.97 may seem like monumental hair splitting, such distinctions become meaningful in the world of competitive national and international law firms, which like to boast that their high hourly fees are justified because only they can afford to harness the best legal talent available to serve a corporation or individual's needs.

Selection processes in all cultures come down to perception, demonstrated performance, and personal preference. Pre-teens in gym class choose teams based on observed or perceived ability and to a minor degree on gut feeling. Selection processes organized by adults do not vary all that much from the pre-teen model; although in economic entities such as law firms, perceived reputation of a candidate's law school and demonstrated performance in that law school by the candidate, usually trump consideration of a candidate's personal qualities, except in rare instances, such as when the candidate lacks even a modicum of social skills.

Most law firms chose attorneys by entering a bidding war. Big international firms routinely pay the highest salaries, so for the most part, they buy the "best" talent. Everyone else chooses from what is left. This is not to deny that this process bypasses much talent. And it should also not be implied that all attorneys rated highest by law firms decide to work there. Attorneys can and do choose work for the government, in small boutique operations, and in public interest law. They also opt for lines of work other than the law. However, it is still an operable assumption that the best college students end up at the best law schools and will be hired by the most prestigious, highest paying firms, which are working on the highest-profile local, national, and international issues.

No selection process is perfect. Later in this article, we shall introduce new research that raises questions as to how law firms currently make their hiring decisions; but first, we will describe the system currently employed to measure and select the best attorneys.

Identifying Talent

So how do law schools identify the "best" talent? And once this talent is trained, how do law firms identify it? There are three parts to this answer: college and law school grades, the Law School Aptitude Test (LSAT) score, and for law firms, the "quality" of the law school attended. Attorneys presumed to have the most talent are those who, in comparison with their peers, have accumu-

The 2005/ 2006 BCG Attorney Search Guide To Class Ranking Distinctions And Law Review Admission At America's Top-50 Law Schools

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