lexlaughlove '23–'24 app cycle Class of 2027 class year

Don’t get to held up on the “name” of the school, just go where you can be successful and achieve your specific goals. My main goal was to pay as little as possible for law school/COL while still attending a non-predatory school. Due to this motivation, I turned down schools with bigger names, higher ranking, and frankly better programs in order to pursue a debt-adverse JD. Granted, I don’t have ambitions to go into Big Law, but I knew that when going into it all this cycle. Main point is: do your homework to find schools that MOST LIKELY help with your goals. No point in wasting time/energy sending apps to schools that don’t help with your goals and/or you already know that you wouldn’t attend. Law schools can be run very differently from each other, and even with my extensive research, I still missed out on schools that operate in ways that would have been preferable. For example, if you are petrified about the law school ranking system or your grades, look into the GPA curves for each school. Generally, T-14/20 schools tend to have the easiest curves (to the point where you really can’t get below a C even if you tried) but there are also other schools like Northeastern or CWRU that don’t have traditional grades or rankings. If you are most concerned about coming out of school with little-to-no debt, than look at the ABA 509 documents for each school. Some schools just don’t give full rides or near-fulls, and if that’s the case, save your money and don’t bother applying. Some schools give an insane amount of money, and your focus should be on applying to those ones. Penn State, Nebraska, Minnesota, Rutgers, Duquesne, Michigan State, and others tend to be very generous with grant money, so if you are very debt-adverse, look into them and others that give lots of cash, every year. If you really want to end up in a certain city or region of the country, and you aren’t necessarily set on Big Law, then look into the regional law schools. A brief glance at firms of any size in a city will give you a very clear idea of where they hire from, and a majority of the time it will be the region’s law schools. No point in applying to schools in states or cities that you would never want to live in. If you aren’t going T-14/20 then you have to be OK with the likely possibility that you live and work in the area surrounding your school for at least the first couple years. You would probably be able to shift eventually to the area you want, but it rarely will happen immediately unless of course you go T-14 or get lucky or rare circumstances. Understand that trends are going to be a very helpful tool, but nothing is guaranteed. Every year people get accepted, waitlisted, and rejected by schools that “should have” acted differently according to the numbers. Softs are important, and you never know what the admissions team is specifically drawn to in a certain app. Just try and maximize your reach and don’t get hung up on a specific school because anything could happen. You got this!

Special Note for other people from out west: Unfortunately, as you are probably aware, there are significantly more law schools out east than where you are from. Competition can be very steep in the intermountain west/PNW due to the very small number of schools and very small class sizes. Even Cali is crazy competitive, and all of these schools not only have to be like the one option if you are in-state, but also appeal to all the random people from the midwest or east coast that are drawn to the appeal of the west or the mountains. It’s tough when you have few options, and honestly you might have to make a move to the midwest or east to actually have multiple options. I’ve had to do that, and though I miss the mountains and forests of my home, it isn’t all bad when you have more educational options. Good luck and know that if you are having to leave the region for more opportunities, you aren’t alone in that.