How high do you have to rank in each T14 to get a biglaw job?

Graduate School Law School
1

<p>The USNWR top 14 this year are:</p>

<p>Yale
Harvard
Stanford
Columbia
Chicago
NYU
Berkeley/Penn
Michigan
Virginia
Duke/Northwestern
Cornell
Georgetown</p>

2

<p>Hard to say. The one I went to didn’t rank its classes.</p>

3

<p>You can never go wrong being in the top 10% and making law review.</p>

4

<p>–Grades matter, but they’re not the only thing that matters. Somebody in the top 15% who interviews poorly will do worse than somebody in the top 20% who is socially comfortable.</p>

<p>–As a quick rule of thumb, you can use this chart:
<a href=“http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/law%20schools_charts_page12.pdf[/url]”>http://pdfserver.amlaw.com/nlj/law%20schools_charts_page12.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>–And then add in the clerkships from this documet:
<a href=“http://www.bcgsearch.com/pdf/BCG_Law_School_Guide_2009.pdf[/url]”>http://www.bcgsearch.com/pdf/BCG_Law_School_Guide_2009.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>And subtract, I don’t know, something like 10-15% or so.</p>

<hr>

<p>So Northwestern, for example, would be roughly 55% NLJ 250 + 8% clerkships = 63%.</p>

<p>Not all of the NLJ 250 is “biglaw,” and not everybody who clerks could get into biglaw. On the other hand, not everybody who gets into biglaw necessarily takes it. So I’d do some kind of correction, maybe subtracting 10% or so.</p>

<p>So it’s roughly the top half of Northwestern’s class.</p>

5

<p>And just to emphasize what I said above, getting on law review can make a big difference when applying to Big Law jobs.</p>

6

<p>

But don’t you know roughly where you fall in the class?</p>

7

<p>He’s just trying to say that he went to Harvard.</p>

<p>Place above the median.</p>

<p>The more reputable your school, the greater safety net you have.</p>

8

<p>LOL!! I assure you that when Greybeard was in law school, Harvard gave grades. Harvard “abandoned” grades quite recently.</p>

9

<p>The overwhelming majority of the T-14 does not rank.
HYS don’t have traditional grades

</p>

10

<p>Employers can tell where students are in the class at schools that don’t rank, and even at schools that “have no grades.”</p>

11

<p>Back to the original question: How high do you have to rank?</p>

<p>I’d say this year you’d have to rank at least median (as best someone can figure out what that is) even at the very top law schools</p>

<p>But, remember, getting a biglaw job is not just about the grades. It’s also about interview skills, work experience, and other things that might be called ‘soft’ factors elsewhere on this board.</p>

<p>Even kids with almost all H’s at HLS aren’t getting a lot of call back interviews this year. It’s brutal out there, but, then again, $3k/week jobs don’t just get handed out to anybody.</p>

12

<p>BDM. You neglect things like DOJ honors, SEC honors, and prestigious PI/government that people self select into that could easily get biglaw. So you probably don’t need the subtraction at the end. Now this is tough because you have a lot more people looking for these types of jobs and clerkships at stanford than Northwestern. </p>

<p>Parentstwo, it isn’t quite that simple. Median doesn’t seem to do that well at Georgetown or Cornell right now. But from anecdotal evidence median (and below to a varying extent) seems fine for Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Columbia, Chicago, NYU and maybe a few others.</p>

13

<p>I’m not suggesting that I went to Harvard, which mailed me a rejection letter on approximately the same day my application was complete.</p>

<p>I went to Berkeley, which had the same vague grading system they have today (10% high honors, 30% honors,and 60% “pass” in each class). They didn’t compute class rank. I first heard the term “BigLaw” years after I graduated. They talked about “big firms,” but the difference in pay for first year associates at big firms and smaller firms wasn’t that significant at the time.</p>

<p>Carry on.</p>

14

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</p>

<p>Off-topic, but this is a point which deserves a lot more attention than it gets. </p>

<p>Everyone is aware that law school tuition has gone up substantially in real dollars, but it seems to me that people don’t think about the widening gap between BIGLAW pay and other lawyer pay and its implications for law students. Which is to drastically narrow their options and create a big risk of problems if BIGLAW doesn’t work out for them.</p>

15

<p>Some interesting info on how the on-campus interviews are going at the different schools:
[Legal</a> Employment - (On Campus Interviews, Summer Associate positions, Firm Reviews, Clerkships, Tips, …)](<a href=“Legal Employment - Top Law Schools”>Legal Employment - Top Law Schools)</p>

<p>It seems people at the median of their T10 are still struggling. What a scary world out there.</p>