<p>How much does work experience and outside certifications weigh in on law school admissions? A friend of mine works for a "big 4" cpa firm. In his law school admissions essay he wrote about how he is a cpa and how his work ethic is different than that of someone who has just come out of college due to his strenuous work schedule and professional experience. He is 27 years old and has worked for 4 years in public accounting. He feels his resume, qualifications, and experience helped him get into schools he normally wouldnt have gotten into.</p>
<p>Is this true and how much does it weigh if any?</p>
<p>One of my college friends became a CPA before he went to law school. It didn't prove to be a huge boost for him in law school admissions; the law school he attended was about what he would have expected with his GPA and LSAT score. </p>
<p>That was more than twenty years ago. Others may have more recent data.</p>
<p>Law school admissions aren't the whole story, however. Your friend's work ethic augurs well for his performance in law school. And future employers are likely to find his combination of accounting and legal credentials to be very valuable.</p>
<p>A significant percentage (often 35-60%, with more at Northwestern) of students at top law schools have post-college full-time work experience and/or graduate degrees under their belts before beginning school. That said, no amount of work experience is going to make up for poor LSAT scores or GPA. I would look at work experience as a very signifcant soft factor. In other words, once a law school has determined that your LSAT scores and GPA put you in the pool of people from which they will choose their class, work experience may be give your application a boost. I would suggest that to the extent that you have excellent recommendation letters from colleagues who know you well over a period of years, those recommendations can actually be even more meaningful than recommendations from professors who typically only know you from a class or two. </p>
<p>It has also been my experience that students with work experience prior to law school often do extremely well in the hiring process during on campus recruiting. To the extent that law schools care about their placement statistics (and I believe that most do), they likely realize that students who are a bit older and who have worked in the "real world" may have a leg up when applying for jobs.</p>