The Military to Law School series was written by the president of a veterans’ club at a T10 law school. Part II helps veterans evaluate and choose law schools that will help them meet their goals after the military.
Estimated reading time: 24 minutes
Remember in the first part of this series how I advised you not to move further unless you answered the question “Do you want to be a lawyer” with an unqualified “yes”? Well, here we go again.
The first two questions you need to ask yourself when you’re evaluating schools is:
“What kind of a lawyer do I want to be”
and
“Where do I want to work”.
Why are these questions so important? Because they determine a general outline of your career goals which allows you to determine a likelihood of actually meeting those goals which allows you to do a proper cost/benefit analysis. Up front I’ll just give you a numbered list of what I believe is the best way to approach this:
- Decide you want to be a lawyer.
- Research what kind of a lawyer you want to be.
- Decide where you want to live after school using a combination of available lawyer jobs of the type you want and other local market considerations.
- Find out what law schools the lawyers in your target market(s) attended, preferably the lawyers with five or fewer years experience in their careers.
- Make a list of those schools and research their ABA 509 Reports focusing on their undergraduate GPA/LSAT admissions numbers. – US News World Report also has a handy list of these schools but it’s behind a paywall (booo). You can google “202x US Law School GPA and LSAT Medians” to find a list for free. I’ll go more into the importance of these numbers in Part III. For now, it’s enough to know how to find them.
- Make sure your target schools have a bar passage rate that indicates those schools are not a complete tire fire. I would be extremely leery of any school with a bar passage rate below 70%. This can also be Googled using “XYZ Law School 202x Bar Passage Rate”
- Make sure your target school is NOT on any sort of ABA probation for underperformance of graduates. This is the absolute nightmare scenario, where you’re 2 years into your degree and your school loses its ABA accreditation and suddenly your degree becomes absolutely worthless. This happens. Again, Google the story of Charlotte Law or Thomas Jefferson Law.
- Search outside resources that do a good job of compiling information that matters, like employment statistics. A good place to start is lstreports.com.
- Make a list of targeted schools that adequately reflects the knowledge you acquired in steps 2-8.
- Work on getting YOUR admissions numbers, most specifically the LSAT score, above your target schools’ median scores that you found in Step 5.
- Apply broadly on September 1 the year before you intend to start school.
Law School Accreditation
Before we get into the nuts and bolts, it’s important to know what “accreditation” means in the law school world. This is super important to understand when choosing a law school.
The regulating authority for accreditation in America law schools is the American Bar Association. If a school is “ABA Accredited” that means you are able to sit the state bar in any American jurisdiction if you graduate with a J.D. from that school. There are other schools out there that are accredited in just one state – California is notorious for this – but those schools are, full stop, not worth attending in almost every circumstance.
It would be a phenomenal, tragic waste of money to spend your G.I. Bill at one of these non-ABA accredited schools. I recognize that it may make sense for like 1 person out of 10,000. That person is not you. Do not fall for this trap. If you do nothing else, make sure the school you attend is accredited by the ABA.
What type of lawyer?
Do you want to litigate?
Would you prefer transactional work?
Do you want to make a lot of money?
Are you more focused on “changing the world”?
Do you have political aspirations?
You likely have zero answers to most of these questions and may not even know what half of them mean. That’s okay, but the time to research and learn what you want should begin BEFORE YOU START LAW SCHOOL, not after. This has to be part of your calculus when choosing law schools.
Unfortunately, there’s no magic formula I can give you. It’s a personal preference. I would advise you, though, to do some soul searching. Think about what your specific career goals are. Talk to law students and lawyers. This is an important question with few applicable concrete answers other than “Google is your friend”. I have much more to say about everything else.
Mark’s note: If you’ve noticed, the author references “go Google this” a lot. My take: if you are afraid of research and the extra reading….maybe don’t be a lawyer.
What market?
Because the quality of law school that you choose depends on its strength in specific markets for its newly-minted J.D.s, we must talk about markets.
I cannot understate how important the professional market you’re targeting matters when choosing a law school. Remember, as a rule there are far more law school graduates each year than available jobs. This creates specific challenges for each market. I’ll begin with the challenge that is, in my opinion, least understood by the vast majority of law school applicants.
Insular Markets and their affect on choosing a law school
Some markets, especially those that are viewed as “hip” or “trendy” can suffer from a serious lack of opportunity. Consider Seattle. Seattle has a powerful regional law school, University of Washington School of Law (not to be confused with Washington University which is in St. Louis) as well as another institution (U of Seattle Law) whose combined alumni base undoubtedly forms a good portion of the professional cohort in Seattle. Additionally, thousands of new graduates “consider” markets like Seattle because they want to live in a desirable city.
However, Seattle doesn’t exactly have a ton of legal work in the market, and the firms where the work is consolidated don’t have many openings each year. Using my 10th-Grade Economics level supply and demand analysis, it makes sense that Seattle is a tough market to crack.
The firms in the market can choose from a ridiculously large and qualified pool of applicants for an extremely limited number of jobs. Seattle hiring managers, thus, can be super picky. A firm may literally want to know where you attended high school. If it wasn’t in the Seattle area, sorry. Next applicant.
Furthermore, even if you do manage to go to UW and end up in the top 20%, you may find yourself competing with applicants who went to high school in Seattle, matriculated to undergrad at MIT/Princeton, went to law school at Harvard or Stanford, and they’re looking to return and willing to plant roots in Seattle because (1) it’s their home and (2) it’s considered a trendy place to live. You can see the problem here if you’re an out-of-towner looking to move in.
Now substitute Seattle with Denver, Portland, Nashville, Miami, and San Diego. Even “less hip” cities like St Louis, Indianapolis, Jacksonville, and Raleigh may screen you out because they aren’t convinced you’re an investment worth making and they have hundreds of candidates in the job applicant pool who would do unspeakable things to get a job offer. You can see how the idea of “I think I’ll get a law degree and then move to Denver, I’ll be able to find work once I get there” is a nice idea in theory but a poor one in practice.
If you want to end up in Denver, you better know it before you start law school, you better be choosing a school that feeds into the Denver market, and you better be actively networking and targeting Denver constantly while you’re in school. These jobs are harder to get than a generic firm job in NY or even DC.
Big Law Markets
The flipside of this coin are the markets where firm jobs are plentiful. New York is, by a good margin, the largest landing spot for new graduates going to law firms. The other “major” markets are, in some order: DC, LA, Chicago, SF/SV, and some classification of Texas with Houston being a bigger market than Dallas but combined, they qualify.
Why do these locations all qualify? Curiously, it’s not only because of the size of the market. Additionally, it’s because of pay. Large firms in each of these markets adhere to “The Cravath Scale” which is a lockstep salary structure for large firm attorneys. You can Google how much that is.
Several large law firms have an office in each one of these markets and that pushes salaries up across the board. The most prestigious firms are so concerned with attracting less than the top-tier talent that they’re forced to match rates when one firm raises its salary structure. The competition for the top graduates is fierce. The demand is, thus, reversed from the “insular market” example above. If you’re top 15% at Columbia, you could theoretically have a choice between any of 20 firms in NYC. If you networked hard enough, maybe more.
If your goals align with going to a large firm in New York, you’re relatively safe from any one of the T-14 (minus maybe Georgetown) from the middle of your class as long as the general legal market hasn’t tanked.
To read an interview from a vet who is a Georgetown Law grad, click here.
If you’d rather be in one of the “other” major markets listed here, it makes sense to target and network in those markets even if you’re at a T-14. Each of these markets is slightly different. If you want to be in Texas, for instance, you need to be aware of the fact that these firms hire 1L Summer Associates at a much greater clip than any of the other markets. As such, you will actually be applying for your first firm job halfway through your Fall Semester of 1L! Crazy right? This is just another reason why you need to decide your market preferences early. If you decide you want Dallas after you finish 1L year, you’ve already missed out on a significant number of openings.
On-campus considerations when choosing a law school
You’ll notice I haven’t talked about the “education” or the “fit” of your chosen institution. That’s mostly because I don’t think these things matter at all. Since some of you care about this, however, I’ll say a few words on it.
Education
Every school teaches the same stuff. Seriously, you may have a few more targeted clinical opportunities at one school over another, but they’re still teaching the same material.
All your professors will have earned their degrees from the same places (mostly Harvard, Yale, Chicago, Columbia) no matter if you’re at Yale or Tuoro. The only difference usually lies in what specific aspects of that material are covered.
At T-14 schools, you’ll most likely be exposed to more general concepts of each subject. The school knows its graduates are dispersing to the four winds after graduation, so it prepares you in this way. If you’re at a regional school, say a state flagship like Montana or Arkansas, you will likely be exposed to more locally-focused law. Those schools want their graduates to pass the bar, and almost all of their graduates will take the bar in the same state where they attend school. As such, a curriculum more focused toward the specific law of the state makes sense.
But otherwise, there is ZERO marked difference in the material you will learn from Harvard than from Hawaii. You’ll read and discuss the same points from the same cases. Thus, the quality of the education itself should not be on your list as a determining factor when deciding which school to attend. This includes any sort of “specialty rankings” which are BS and have no value to employers. When School X tells you they are “Number 4 ranked in Environmental Law” it’s a recruiting tactic that holds no real sway in the notoriously classist legal hiring community. Don’t fall for it.
Fit
This one can be a bit trickier.
I say again, if you’re regionally focused, this probably doesn’t matter. If you want to work in Omaha, I don’t care if you “fit” at Nebraska School of Law, you need to go there. If, on the other hand, you’re choosing between Duke, Columbia, and Michigan (three schools in the T-14) you do have a bit more luxury to make a choice.
If you want to end up in Chicago, it might make sense to go to Michigan because it may be easier to network out of Michigan. If you can’t stand the thought of needing to drive a car, Columbia makes the most sense. If the idea of spending 3 years going to school in New York City makes you want to reconsider all your life choices, you won’t suffer markedly by attending Michigan or Duke.
If you’re in this spot, talk to students at the school. Try to reach out to admissions offices there and ask to be connected to a veteran who is currently attending. I guarantee you’ll get better answers about fit from that individual than you will from any brochure. But again, markets and jobs matter 100x more than any “fit” considerations.
Bar Pass Rates
This number is also fairly misunderstood by prospective applicants. I realize that an applicant is an applicant. That is, I personally have the same relative chances of passing the bar whether I’m at Yale or Santa Clara. We’ve established that you learn the same law in pretty much every school. So why is this number important? Two reasons.
The nuclear reason has to do with the American Bar Association. The ABA, as mentioned before, is the regulatory authority that the government trusts to judge whether law schools are adequately performing the mission for which they charge so much. The easiest quantitative metric by which to do this is by examining the number of students from each school who pass a state bar exam.
The ABA has been known to pull accreditation from schools and, when it does, it almost always cites the school’s failure to get its students to pass the bar exam. If that happens, the school becomes ineligible for government loan money which strips the funding for the vast majority of their students. The school inevitably closes. This is the worst case scenario. You don’t want to choose a law school that isn’t accredited. The nuclear option has been used recently, so it’s not like it’s some boogeyman that never appears. You’ve been warned.
The second reason comes back to the elitist nature of the legal profession. Think about what low bar passage numbers really mean. The inference drawn from employers is that your graduating cohort is poor. So even if you pass the bar, employers are leery of your pedigree because of your bad school. They’re worried that one of their clients may Google you, find a lower-tier school on your educational profile, and pitch a fit. Is this fair? Probably not. Does that matter? Definitely not. You WILL be judged in legal hiring by the name on your law school for this reason, whether you pass the bar or not. The school’s passage rate, therefore, gives you as an applicant a proxy view for how employers view you as a job applicant. It’s not the only consideration, as I’ve outlined above, but it’s certainly one.
Examples of military to law school applicants
Now that I’ve covered the basics, let me give you three examples, each based on real people I have informally advised, that demonstrate how this process can go both right and wrong.
Example 1
Applicant “Good Guy” is reasonably confident that he wants to be a public defender. Good Guy knows that public defenders make very little money, but he’s dedicated to the idea of public service and helping those who don’t have the money to afford attorneys.
He’s also quite comfortable, indeed excited at the prospect of, working in his hometown of Des Moines, Iowa. In Des Moines, his lower salary is not a barrier to an acceptable quality of life.
After some research, Good Guy learns that he can probably achieve that goal from any of the T14. But does he NEED a T-14 to land a government job in Des Moines?
Good Guy does more research. He finds that the local schools in Iowa will almost assuredly be just as good (and possibly better) placing him in his target jobs as would Northwestern or Georgetown. Good Guy notices that many Des Moines lawyers went to The University of Iowa so he Googles “University of Iowa Law School 509” and sees this, University of Iowa’s Standard 509 report.
He notices that Iowa’s median LSAT is a 161. He realizes that he doesn’t NEED a 170 LSAT to go to Iowa, like he might to go to Michigan or Northwestern. He then Googles Iowa’s bar passage rate and finds out it’s great, over 90% for first-time takers. He now knows that Iowa is a top school in the state and that he will likely have a good chance to achieve his goals from Iowa.
Good Guy is doing the right thing in going through how to choose a law school.
He calls the admissions office at Iowa and asks them to connect him to someone on faculty or staff who has experience placing Iowa students as public defenders. The Career Services staff member he talks to is great, and even informs Good Guy of some specific scholarship opportunities for potential public service students like himself. He studies hard for the LSAT, gets a 163, applies to Iowa, is accepted, attends on full GI Bill, and emerges from Iowa with a public defender job and no debt.
Good Guy may only make $45k a year, but he’s happy. He has government vacation time, a generous benefits package, and an eye on picking up some extra work when he can and making upwards of $75k after a few years paying his dues. More importantly, he’s doing work that he wants to do and is excited to get up and get after it each day. This was his goal and he’s achieved it. Good Guy has done this right.
Example 2
Applicant “Big Brain” never really applied herself during her first attempt at an undergrad degree. She failed out of community college because she never went to class, and that prompted her to join the enlisted Navy. But she’s a big brain, so once she got a bit more discipline in her life she utilized her enlisted education benefits and graduated with a BA in criminal justice.
Unfortunately, her undergraduate GPA/uGPA (which includes calculations of her previous grades from failed community college) is only a 3.1 even though her degree GPA was a 3.95. But she also now has 6 years in the Navy and realizes that there’s no way she’s sticking it out another 14 years for the promise of E7 retirement pay and benefits.
She decides, “screw the poor life.” She wants to be a corporate lawyer and make big money working for a “biglaw” firm. Unfortunately, most of the corporate biglaw jobs are in NY/DC/SF/SV/TX and they are some of the most competitive positions in America. They don’t hire exclusively from the T14, but Big Brain knows that if she wants at least a 50% shot at getting one of those jobs she really needs to be at a T14 school. She’s choosing a law school at the top of the heap.
Since she doesn’t have CLOSE to the uGPA she needs for these schools, she decides to take LSAT prep seriously. She’s going to put an LSAT score on record that T14 schools are going to have to take notice of. After all, this is an arms race for them and they need to maintain their medians. Big Brain decides she’s simply going to study LSAT for 1 hour a day until she is practicing at the level she needs.
After seven months of study, Big Brain gets a 172 on her third official attempt at the LSAT. She’s pumped but doesn’t have much idea of what to do after that. She doesn’t really care WHERE she goes to school or WHERE she eventually practices law, but because she knows she wants a biglaw job she is trusting her LSAT score to get into the T14 or, as a backup, one of the super regionals that still feeds a decent percentage of graduates into biglaw.
She “blanket applies” to schools 4-14 on the USNWR list and adds a few super regionals (Texas/UCLA/USC/WashU). She takes advantage of the “early decision” option to apply to Virginia since they guarantee a 3-week answer on her application. She doesn’t get in, so they release her from that contract. She then applies “early decision” to Duke and she DOES get in. Immediately her cycle is over since this early decision is a binding contract; if they accept you, you will agree to attend Duke or else not attend law school at all the next year.
Big Brain withdraws all other applications and spends the next 8 months preparing to move to Durham, NC. She gets there and she loves it, graduates in the middle of her class, and lands a spot in a white collar litigation section of a New York V20 biglaw firm – she networked hard and used her vet’s advantages to her best outcome. All because of one silly LSAT test and a ton of motivation.
Mark talking here: I personally used The Princeton Review to prep for the GRE and found their test service truly be second to none. At first glance, the price tag on these services can appear hefty, but when you factor in the difference that a good LSAT score can make on your career outcomes, the ROI is WELL worth it. To check out The Princeton Review’s LSAT 165+ prep course, go here and use code “LSAT165” to save $200. You can also check out their self-paced course.
Example 3
Applicant “Academy Andy” was a high performer all his life. He graduated from the Naval Academy with a 3.66 GPA and has done his time enough to earn a 100% GI Bill rating. Andy is pushing 30 so he’s anxious to get going on his next career, but officers don’t have such an easy time leaving the military.
Andy only finds out in January of 2022 that he’s going to be able to separate in June of 2022. Even though he understands that he probably should sit out a year to prepare a good application, he insists to himself (nobody else gives a crap) that he must start law school in August of 2022. Andy is a hard charger, after all, and a year delay is just not in his DNA. Surely he can accomplish, in six months, what these grubby civilians take a year+ to do.
Andy has dreams of politics, ideally he’d run for Congress before he’s 40. So he decides the best way to do that is to get a regulatory biglaw/fedgov gig in D.C. to build his credentials. But Andy hasn’t started studying for the LSAT yet and he knows that the application deadlines for the fall are coming up in April.
Andy buys an expensive LSAT prep program and dedicates 40 days of his life, cutting his sleep schedule in half, and amazingly he does bring his LSAT score up from a 151 diagnostic to a 165. Unfortunately, unlike Big Brain, Andy does not have either a T14-level GPA or LSAT score. Unlike Good Guy, he’s not targeting a school where his 165 is above median. He’s below both medians.
Andy, undeterred, whips up essays, gets great letters of recommendation, and spends $1,500 applying to the entirety of the T14 plus George Washington, another good-but-lower-tier school in D.C., and waits. Andy is unsurprisingly rejected at 10 of the T-14 and waitlisted at the other 4. George Washington sends him an email asking him to defer a cycle and guaranteeing him admission next year if he does, but they’ve run out of space for this cycle. Andy is convinced he’ll get off of one of the waitlists, applies to American Law School in D.C. as a backup and waits. American grants him a seat. They’re happy to have someone of his caliber (and his guaranteed tuition from the federal government).
Andy knows he should sit out a year, get five more points on the LSAT, and apply again for the next cycle. But his stubborn nature wins out. Andy decides that he’s going to law school this fall no matter what and when he doesn’t get off any of the waitlists he starts at American. He plans to do so well there that he will either grade himself into the job he wants or else transfer after his first year.
Unfortunately, because American only places about 10% of their graduates in the jobs that Andy wants, and because in order to transfer you need an absurdly high GPA, he has to absolutely bust his ass at his schoolwork. He does, but so does everyone else, and the brutal law school curve means that Andy still only ends up slightly above median, right around the top ⅓ cutoff of his class.
He doesn’t land an early employment offer at on-campus recruiting – his grades simply aren’t competitive enough. He’s denied transfer to everywhere in the T14, another $1,000 in application fees down the drain. He pounds pavement searching for a job – any lawyer job – that will allow him to work after he graduates. He interns with a few fed offices but graduates American without an offer.
He takes and passes the bar and the offers do start coming in, but they’re nowhere near what he wanted when he set out on this journey. His weak law school pedigree shuts him out of almost all upper-tier jobs.
While clerking for a local judge, Andy sees “Big Brain,” who used to be an unremarkable Petty Officer on his ship, sitting third chair in a trial, making the money and connections Andy wants. What the hell?! Andy can barely pay his rent and this schlub with a University of Phoenix undergrad degree is making $250k a year?! Andy is bitter and rails at the system. How has someone with his ability and pedigree been lost in the wash so immediately?
What’s the Lesson Here?
I want to underscore this:
All three of these applicants are in some way special as potential law students. They each have a story to share that’s going to present opportunities and open doors.
Good Guy is a special kind of selfless, willing to invest in a community in middle America for little salary.
Big Brain completely turned her life around, she’s the ultimate enlisted success story.
Academy Andy has busted his ass his entire life without fail. That kind of dedication will take you far.
So why are the former two satisfied while the latter is bitter? They prepared differently.
The former two didn’t convince themselves of their special talents. Instead, they did the research and spent the time, just like everyone else. Good Guy and Big Brain, in other words, did not act like or think they were special even though they clearly are.
Mark’s note: If you read this site you know that no one owes you shit.
Academy Andy, on the other hand, was well aware of the things that make him special, and he relied on them to his detriment. Instead of taking the one extra year and putting in the extra work to succeed – Andy was probably a favorite to gain admission at Harvard if he listened to the advice here – he thought he could rewrite the rules of the game. The poor decisions he made in that short period of time closed doors that scuttled his ambition before he had a chance to walk through them.
It’s important to note that none of these outcomes are the same.
Iowa was an ideal choice for Good Guy but would have probably been a poor choice for each of the others. Conversely, Good Guy may have actually struggled getting back to Des Moines from Duke. He may have had trouble convincing the local Des Moines PD office that he wasn’t a flight risk.
Think of it from an employer’s perspective, would you waste valuable time interviewing and training an intern who could, theoretically, jump to a gig paying him 4 times your offered salary at any moment? Things to consider when choosing a law school and a career path.
I would argue that American would’ve been a poor outcome for all three of them, which is why I stated in Part I that most law degrees are “lower class.” The fact is, the lower down the totem pole you get, the more the competition increases.
As long as you graduate from Harvard in good standing, your opportunities as a vet will be huge. Conversely, in order to be competitive for the most-selective gigs, you may not even have an opportunity at American from the Top 10% of the class. Remember, if nothing else, T-14 or Regional power. It’s not QUITE that polar a decision, but that’s a good place to start.
Conclusion
Knowing what kind of law you want to practice and where you want to practice it are concerns 1 and 1(a) for any potential law student. Be honest with yourself. If you’re looking to make a lot of money, that’s fine.
Your law school options are very limited, but that’s not really a bad thing in choosing a law school. You know what you need to do. You either do it or you don’t go to law school. If you’re tied geographically to one area, that limits your options as well. Everything else is ancillary.
Find schools that match your goals, learn the requirements for admission to those schools, and then meet the requirements. In Part III I’ll discuss your status as an applicant, what makes you attractive to schools, and the biggest weapon you have in your toolbox (hint: it’s the LSAT)
Next: Military to Law School: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the LSAT (Part 3/7)
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100 Things Veterans Should Know Before Leaving the Military
16 Ways Veterans Can Buy a Small Business
Military to MBA (Part 1/7): Is It for You?
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