I seem to get asked quite a bit what law school someone should attend. My immediate answer is always the law school that accepts you. If more than one law school accepts you, then you have options. But, I have been through this process with my daughter and I have experienced it with the children of friends and collages, as well as the staff of law firms who decide to go the extra step. One great resource I have found is the DeLoggio Admissions Achievement Program. I do not mean to say we have ever employed or paid the DeLoggio group to advise anybody, but the website, although not overly slick, contains very important insider-type of information to help you consider your possibilities.
Let me give you two that I like. In a section of the website entitled What's Special About...? the program reviews all all of the ABA law schools in the country and provides you the qualities of the school according to the school, the program's thoughts on the law school and comparable law schools to this one. These ascetics might be important to you.
The site is choked full of useful insider infromation and analysis that can direct your opportunities. But, my favorite is Where Can I Get In? section. Most law school select applicants based upon a grade/LSAT ratio or GLR. This is where the law school takes your GPA, multiplies it by some figure, adds the LSAT score to it, and then based upon its historic applicant pool determines who gets automatically accepted and automatically rejected, with the remainder having some chance. The site goes down each ABA school and tells you, as best it can estimate, what this GLR is for each school based on 2003 figures, which was a record high year for applications. So, for example, you can look at South Texas College of Law, where I went to law school, and see that they routinely multiply your college GPA by 9.4 and then add your LSAT score to that figure to get their GLR. There GLR for automatic admit is likely 185.6 and automatic rejection is 176.2. From this you can see that if you had a GPA of 3.5 in college you would need to achieve about a 153 on your LSAT to absolutely get accepted. With this GPA any LSAT below about a 144 would almost guarantee rejection. If you fall in between there is still a possibility, but the closer you are to a 185.6 the more likely it is you will get accepted.
You can do this with any school and figure out better what your actual chances might be. I followed this when my daughter applied to a slug of schools and it proved amazingly accurate. I have followed it when others I have know have applied and it has proved almost as accurate. So, I would advise your to spend a lot of time on this site.
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