How to Get into a Better Law School

To get into a good law school most guides will tell you to go to a great undergraduate school, get a great score on the LSAT and do a bunch of extra-curricular activities. Although these are all true and will get you into a good law school, most students are weak in one of these areas. This is a step-by-step guide for getting into a great law school when you don't have all of these things on your resume.

First do all the typical things you've already read for getting into law school. Carefully review the schools that accepted you. You want to choose one of the better schools that accepted you but also take into consideration financial aid and the market the school is in. You want to select a school that will provide the best platform to transfer into a better law school your second year. Look for schools that have a few well known professors that you can work with (to get letters of recommendations from) and also schools that are in a geographical market that will allow you to work in the legal field while in school.

Attend the school you picked in step 2. Here is what you MUST do next. Get the absolute best grades you can. Work as hard as you can your first semester. Do not worry about anything else your first year (with the exception of obtaining outside legal experience). Second, try to get the most resume impressing legal job you can (usually a public service related job). This doesn't mean try and go out and get a job at a big international law firm. Get a job volunteering at a public aid organization. This is pretty important.

Research last year statistics on law student transfers. You should be able to find out exactly what top 25 law schools accepted the most transfers. Every few years there are anomolies. You'll have a school that accepts 5 transfer almost every year and then 40 one year. They might accept 80% of transfer applications that year. Often the reason for this is budgetary. For some reason the law school needs to bring in additional revenue. The reason they accept transfers rather than just accepting more new law students is that incoming transfers do not affect their reported acceptance statistics used in law school rankings. Law school rankings are the absolute most important thing to law school administration. They live and die by them. They celebrate a 1 position rise and mourn a 1 position drop. They are publized all over the place and talked about all year. Thus, the law school admission department would rather be more selective with incoming students (increasing average LSAT, GPA, etc.) than with transfer students. In fact, the standards for transfer students is often much much less than initial admissions. Thus, if you have good grades from law school you'd be surprised what law school you could get into. It is not unheard of at all for a transferring law student to go from a school ranked #200 to a school ranked in the top 20. You want to apply after first semester as that gives you the best chance, since that is when schools know what they need budget wise for next year and they want to get the transfers they want early. So again, most important is to get the best grades you can first semester and research what schools accept the most transfers (there are a couple notorious ones). If you want the best shot, apply to all of the top 20, because there is always one surpise in the group.