Picking Where to Apply

"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take."

At times this quote has been the bane of my existence. At other times I have used it to torture my less-than-motivated friends. Even though it's not something you (necessarily) want to hear, that cliche will always ring true. And so that is the method to my madness when deciding where, or where not, to apply to law schools.

The thing is: law school applications are effing expensive. Running between $50 and $80 each application, you're not going to get too many shots at getting in to a great school before you run out of cash (unless you're lucky enough to win some serious cash at keno, or have a Daddy Warbucks. In either case I don't begrudge you. I'm just jealous.). So, it comes down to deciding which shots you can afford NOT to take.

One very handy tool that I utilized when narrowing down my (sizable) potential application list was LSP. It's awesome. You just punch in your LSAT Score and your LSDAS weighted GPA and then hit "Agree to Terms." It populates a list of all of the ABA-accredited law programs in the US (and Puerto Rico) and calculates your chances on getting in to each school. Then it identifies them using a very user friendly, color coded method:

• Admit (Green) - Your numbers mean will most likely be admitted to the school.
• Strong Consider (Lighter Green) - Your numbers don't make you an auto-admit, but you are very likely to be admitted.
• Consider (Yellow) - Your numbers fall in the middle, but you are a viable candidate for admission to the school.
• Weak Consider (Orange) - Your numbers are not as competitive as the school would desire, and you are not likely to gain admission without amazing softs and LORs, although your application will be considered.
• Deny (Red) - Your numbers mean you are not likely to be admitted to this school.

It also gives you handy statistics, like your index number for a school, which you can read more about on the LSP site, and the percentage of students at or below your numbers that gained admission to the school, based on the last several years' worth of available data.

The ideal way to decide which schools you should apply to is to determine what your budget is. It's VERY easy to spend butt-loads of money on apps, so sit down with a firm number in mind. Say you want to spend $300. That's about 5 schools. So depending on how much of a risk taker you are you could take the data you get off of LSP and make some decisions based on budget and likelihood of admission. Just like when you were applying for law schools, you should have a few safeties and a few reaches, and some in between. If you could only apply to 5 schools, my recommendation would be to apply to 2 safeties (1 admit and 1 strong consider), 2 targets (2 considers) and 1 reach (either a weak consider or a deny).

At this point in the application process it's really important to, to borrow a phrase from Oprah, be real with yourself. If you have a 3.2 and a 164 you have a decent shot of getting in to a LOT of great schools, but barring you being a Nobel Peace Prize winner you don't have a shot in hell at getting in to Harvard. So why waste the $70 just to say you applied? Not worth it.

Another thing you have to be real with yourself about is the geographical area in which you'd like to practice. If you go to what are commonly referred to as the top 14 law schools (the T14), odds are you can find a job pretty much anywhere in the US. Everyone has heard of Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, etc. But odds are that without a 3.5+ and a 170+ your application won't even be looked at by the admission committees at those schools.

Odds are that as a graduate from a mostly regional law school, the firms that are most likely to offer you jobs are firms in the general vicinity of where you got your JD, because your degree will actually mean something to them. So if you can't get in to the T14 (and there's no shame in not being T14 material, I'm DEFINITELY not), you're going to have to identify where you want to practice for the next few years, because that's probably where you'll be stuck -- I say stuck with all possible affection, I swear.

If you know you want to move to California, then look at schools that have good regional reputations. Conversely, if you are from California and know you DON'T want to live somewhere cold for the next seven to ten years, DON'T go to school at St. Thomas in Minnesota. When you try to move back to California you'll be interviewing with hiring partners who will have to ask you, "Where is that, again?" and who are interviewing a graduate from their alma mater in forty-five minutes. So narrowing down the geographic location in which you think you would be happy to live is another big thing to consider when deciding which schools to apply to.

Lastly (for purposes of our discussion, not in the end-all, be-all of law school applications), you should consider the employment statistics and specializations offered by your prospective schools. If you studied chemistry in college and want to go into IP and Patent Law, then why would you go to a school top-ranked in trial advocacy but lacking in serious IP professors? And if you're going to be taking out over $100k in loans to cover your law school education, don't you want to go to a school that will at least prepare you for a job in which you will earn enough money to make your loan payments every month? So check the employment statistics of each school - both 9 months out of school (the most commonly published number) AND the % of students employed upon graduation. And make sure you see what the median salary for new grads from the school is, and compare it to the cost of living in the area.

Aside from LSP, a handy tool I used quite a bit to get the statistics and information I needed was the Princeton Review's Best 172 Law Schools. It has surveys from current students talking about all aspects of campus life - quality of buildings, competitiveness, strength of professors and programs - from many of the ABA-accredited schools in the US.

SO, to sum up:

• Predict your chances at a given school using LSP (or another prediction website).
• Make sure you apply only to schools in geographical locations that you would be comfortable living and practicing in.
• Identify school specializations and areas of study that you are interested in and focus on those schools.
• Make sure that the school and career services offices are adequately preparing and promoting their graduates by checking employment statistics.
• Pick up a copy of the Princeton Review's 172 Best Law Schools.