Anna: Hello and welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. I'm Anna Hicks-Jaco, Spivey Consulting's president, and today we're talking about how to make your school list. What counts as a reach or target or "safety school," where and how to find the most important and up-to-date information about various law schools, how many law schools you should apply to, how many law schools most applicants apply to, some of the factors you may want to take into account when making your school list, and much more.
I'm joined by three of our phenomenal consultants: Paula Gluzman, former Assistant Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at UCLA Law and the University of Washington Law; Sam Kwak, former Senior Associate Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at Northwestern Law and a former admissions officer at Stanford Law; and Joe Pollak, a former admissions officer at the University of Michigan Law School. All three of them have extensive experience, yes, working in law school admissions offices, but also advising applicants on how to create their school list and evaluate various law schools as a part of their consulting work. And between the four of us, we've actually been working one on one with applicants on their admissions processes for collectively almost 25 years.
This is a big topic, I'd like to get into it, so I'll go ahead and let them introduce themselves a little bit further.
Joe: Hi, I'm Joe Pollak. I'm a consultant with Spivey Consulting Group. I'm formerly an admissions officer at the University of Michigan Law School. I've been with Spivey Consulting advising applicants to law school for six cycles now, and I've been in the admissions world for over a decade.
Paula: Hi, I'm Paula Gluzman. I am a consultant at Spivey Consulting and also the Director of Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives. I have been at Spivey Consulting since 2018, so six years now, and before that, I worked in career services at a couple of law schools in San Diego, USD School of Law and Thomas Jefferson School of Law. And then before that was when I had my time in admissions working at UCLA School of Law and University of Washington School of Law.
Sam: Hello, my name is Sam Kwak. I've been at Spivey Consulting for three years, or in my third year now. I started in admissions over 10 years ago, but I also spent time at the ABA and LSAC. I started at Indiana University, went to Northwestern as well as Stanford in my admissions offices.
Anna: Well, thank you all for being here. I would love to just go ahead and jump right in. We are talking about making your school list, which is a very important part of the application process, of course. It's the beginning in a lot of ways.
First I'd like to talk about, when you sit down, you're an applicant, you are in front of a piece of paper, you're in front of your spreadsheet, and you are wanting to make your school list. What should your overall goals be with this endeavor?
Joe: I think you need to think about what schools you want to attend. There's not really much point in putting schools that you don't like or you don't see yourself attending onto your school list. So I think the top of the list is actually the easy part—it's whatever school you've been dreaming about, and you can start to think about, how do I flesh out this list? Which schools go in the middle of my list? Which schools go at the bottom of my list? But the easy part is just, which schools do you dream about?
Paula: And then I think a healthy balance to that, because I tell all of my clients, never self-select out. Let a law school say no to you. So even if a school is a dream school or a really big reach, you want to make sure that you have options at the end of the day. And so you want to find schools that are going to be a little bit more probable for you numbers-wise and also will have really strong programs that will still make it a great experience for you and a more relevant experience. So we'll talk a little bit about what those factors are, but a nice balance to having all the dream schools on there is having some schools on there that are going to be realistic for you as well.
Sam: Yeah, and then this time of the year, early September, when you're thinking about applications, I think you can be more broad than limiting the schools. It'll be a different conversation we'll have later on after you've received decisions. Where you're choosing to enroll, that'll be a more of a selective process. But when you're choosing where to apply, I think that's a pretty broad list that you can do and with the fee waivers that are readily available out there. There's pretty minimal cost to doing one or two more applications than whatever you had in mind. So, at this time in the process, I do encourage my clients to be more open and send it an application if you're kind of on the fence about it.
Paula: And speaking of fee waivers, if I can plug one of Joe's amazing three-part blog series on fee waivers, you can check that out on the blog, because it gives a really great comprehensive way of thinking about fee waivers and asking for them, and a lot of people have been really successful with that.
Anna: Yeah, that's a great blog post.
Joe: Yeah, and that blog post covers different ways to get fee waivers, including LSAC's need-based fee waiver, need-based fee waivers that you might get from law schools individually, but also merit-based fee waivers that you can get from law schools.
Anna: Yeah, it's very thorough. That was a great blog series, and thank you, Joe, for writing it.
So we've sat down, we're looking at our spreadsheet, we've put on our dream schools even if they're big reaches, and then we are fleshing it out; we're trying to get some balance in there, some schools that we can feel more confident that we're going to be admitted. So how many schools do most applicants end up with on this list, when all is said and done, and how many schools should an applicant be aiming for when they're making their list?
Paula: I feel like this is so subjective to every applicant, and it really is going to depend on their experience and also their LSAT and their GPA. If the applicant is looking at schools where their numbers are at or above the medians, they're probably going to need to apply to a few less schools than someone who might have a lot of variation between their LSAT and their GPA, whether they're splitters or reverse splitters. So I always tell my clients, in any kind of general fashion, you want to have a couple of really solid safety or backup schools, anywhere between 4 to 6, maybe 4 to 7 target schools—and again, we'll talk about what all these terms mean—and then as many reaches as you have the resources for. Don't self select out; apply to as many reaches as you would like. That way you get a really solid, solid result probability with the target schools. If for whatever reason, worst-case scenario, the cycle goes really bad for you, hopefully you have some really solid backup or safety schools. And then again, the reaches can be things that you can be really pleasantly surprised or excited about. So when you're looking at the numbers, it's anywhere between maybe 9 to 10, 15 schools. It just depends on your application and your particular situation.
Joe: I always ask my clients why they chose the schools, what's the unifying strategy behind picking the schools? And sometimes the answer to that is just "these are the schools I've heard of" or "these are the schools that are highest in the U.S. News ranking" or something along those lines. Those are fine ways. No way is a bad way to make your school list, but at the same time, I often hear from clients who say "these are schools that are on the east coast or on the west coast or in big cities" or "these are schools close to where my family is, or close to where I want to practice law later on" or "these are schools which have a specialty that's intriguing to me." Even if you start a list that is dream schools and schools that you'd love to attend, most people have some other criteria in their life. It's not just "here's a list of schools." It's "here's where I want to live; here's where I want to be" that lends you towards a certain group of schools. If I have clients who say "I only want to go to law school in New York, I live in New York, I have a family in New York, I really do not want to move away from New York," sometimes those clients only end up applying to three or four schools. And that's lower than I would typically see, and for an average client, that's low. But it makes sense for them.
I think you have to understand what you're doing if you're limiting yourself to only a few schools. I had a client before who had a custody arrangement which did not allow her to move out of state. So she really needed to go to law school in the state where she currently was, which was also where her child was and where her ex-partner was. And that makes sense. That's life. That's real life. So the challenge for that client wasn't "do I find ten schools," because there were only three schools in her state. It was pretty easy to make the school list at that point, but she was worried that she wouldn't have enough options. It's important to think things through, but also to acknowledge that there's real life that's involved here, too.
Anna: Yeah, that's a great point, Joe. Sam, you actually have an interesting perspective on this that the rest of us do not, because you worked for LSAC in data. So to the extent that you can talk about it, what did you see at LSAC in terms of the numbers of schools that applicants were applying to?
Sam: Sure, Anna. So LSAC going back as far as 10, 20 years, I believe, produces the number of applicants each year as well as the number of total applications submitted. So you would think that you would just divide the total applications by the number of applicants and get your average number of applications that each applicant submits. That number typically ranges around 6 to 8 on a given year. It fluctuates, but there's no magic number to this process. My applicants or clients typically range about 10 to 12. In my role, as what Joe was alluding to, if an applicant had that number as too low, on the lower side, let's say three to four, I think that is a little low. I would encourage those clients to consider a few more schools. If I have a client who's wanting to apply to 20, 25, 30 schools, at that point I would try to have them cut back a little bit. At some point, they do become redundant, and if you're going to get into this sort of range of schools, you're going to probably face similar decisions from it, so you don't need 10 safety schools.
And the most surprising thing that I learned from LSAC was that the most popular or frequent number of applications submitted is actually just one. So it's not a perfect bell curve that lands at six or eight of the distribution. The tail starts at the left and goes down from there. So any fans of Legally Blonde out there where Elle has that meeting with her pre-law advisor, and she says I'm only applying to Harvard, and she gets asked by the advisor what about your safety or backup schools, and she doesn't have any... that's not such an abnormal scene, right? Because there's many students applying to just one school out there. And we looked at a variety of factors—geography, in-state, private schools—and we couldn't find any correlation or any kind of cause that would lead to somebody applying to just one school.
None of our Spivey clients would obviously apply to just one school. Even if you had a client like Joe's who's interested in just New York schools so you apply to the 3 or 4 schools there, if I was in that situation, I would encourage that client to consider schools in Chicago or Penn or whatnot, because later on when you're trying to negotiate or seek reconsideration of scholarships, having that admission plus the scholarship offer from those other schools, even if you're not interested, ultimately would help you perhaps gain some additional funding and provide you with that leverage as well.
Just think more broadly. What you're looking at now in September may not be what you're thinking about later in March, April, and so on. Things change, and where we can add value and help you with this process, looking at it on more of a holistic level than just where you are individually on a micro-level.
Joe: Sam, I've actually had a client apply to just one school before. I've had a couple of them. I had a few of them who applied early decision and just waited it out, and they won early decision, and so they didn't apply to any more schools. Which, you know, if it was me I'd have a lot of anxiety about that process, but it worked okay for them.
I've had a couple of other clients in special situations. I had a client who was in an equity situation where he worked for a company, he was in line for a payout from a stock transaction, and if he stayed one more year at his job, he'd get an even larger payout. And what he decided was that, if he was admitted to his absolute top choice school, he would go this year, but if not, he would try again next year. And it's a high-risk process, and it's annoying because who wants to apply to law school twice? Who wants to go into the process imagining that you'll apply to law school twice? But he talked it out and he had a good idea there. It worked for him. It was a very specific situation. Shouldn't we all be so lucky as to be having a stock payout coming our way? But again, it worked. In the end, he was admitted to his top choice school. I did not recommend this strategy to him. He came up with it. And I remember saying, "It makes sense, but it makes me really nervous." But that's the point is, it made sense to him and it worked. So it looks great in hindsight.
Sam: Even early decision clients, I always encourage to, "let's just—you've already done the bulk of the work; we can easily put together a few more applications. So if you hear from early decision, great. But if not, now you're in the running with the regular decision with all these schools and you're not starting from scratch at that point."
And from LSAC, we did look at early decision, and that did not explain all these number of single applicants, as well as those 3+3 type programs where some undergrad students are only applying to their one school, and very small fraction of the total to explain all of this. And we looked at gender, geography, age, and we couldn't find anything that was discernible, pattern-wise, why somebody would apply to a single school.
Joe: What's the most number of applications you've seen from an applicant?
Sam: What, we have 200 law schools in the country—very close to it. So 190, 180+.
Anna: Oh my goodness.
Paula: I cannot imagine. Holy cannoli.
Sam: I think our record at the firm, it was one of our consultants sharing that it was, what, 50 or 60 or something like that.
Anna: And even that is mind-boggling.
Sam: Yeah.
Anna: Well, I'm guessing that all of those unexplained people who only applied to one school were doing it to chase the love of their lives. That's just my guess, but who knows? (Editor's note: this was stated in a joking manner and is not a serious guess!)
It's interesting, though, because that average is 6-8, but that's being weighed down significantly by all these people applying to only one. So I think probably, you're a sort of regular applicant who doesn't have special circumstances like that, the average just mathematically is higher than that. So that's really interesting insight Sam, because I do think that six is a little low for most people.
Paula: So we talked a little bit about different individual strategies and we had mentioned already some subjective factors—location, necessities. We talked a little bit about probability. I always like to talk to my clients about creating the law school list in two different categories, one being objective factors of whether you can actually get into the school, or the probability of your numbers being the anchor to the decision at a school. And this would involve creating a reach, target, and a safety list. And then the other category would be those subjective factors—personal preferences and priorities that are going to be important to you as the individual about where you want to go.
So if we wanted to talk first about the objective factors, how would you all talk to your clients about creating their reach, target, and safety school list?
Joe: Yeah, the first thing I would say—I don't like the term "safety school," and I don't use it. I talk about schools where you feel very confident and schools where you feel less confident. So if we're talking about schools where you feel very confident, that's good, but we're still just talking about a feeling of confidence. This applies no matter what sort of ranking of school you're looking at. If you are a really high numbers applicant, really high LSAT score, high GPA, and you might feel, "Hey, I've got great numbers for every law school in the country," and if you do, good for you, that's a really nice place to be. But at the same time, your expectations go up. And if you're only really hoping to go to top 10 schools, I don't think you can call any one of those top 10 schools a safety school. All those schools have the luxury of choosing their applicants based on things other than just numbers.
At the same time, I think for most applicants, the normal range, or if you're a splitter or reverse splitter, you want to feel confident about schools where at least one of your numbers, LSAT/GPA, is above the median. And if both of your numbers are above the median, you can feel even more confident.
It's not the whole game. You still have to apply to law school. You need to do a good job with your resume, personal statement, interviews if they have interviews, and other parts of the application. But in terms of, like, confidence level, if you're applying to schools, you should probably have one, two, maybe three schools where you feel very confident based on your numbers.
Sam: Yeah, and the easy way to think about it—there are no guarantees on both ends. So just because your numbers are above the medians, you know, even with these quote-unquote "safety" schools, you're not guaranteed admission. And on the opposite end, just because you're below the medians does not guarantee denials. It kind of works both ways; otherwise admissions offices, all they would have to do is sort you on a spreadsheet, admit the numbers, and then deny the rest. That's not how it works. And we're here to help clients come up with their narratives, the stories, the whole entire package so that we present more than just the number, both ways.
Anna: That's a great point, Sam, and to your point, Joe, we actually have a whole podcast from years and years ago, from before we even named ourselves "Status Check with Spivey," with one of our wonderful consultants, Danielle Early—she's a former admissions officer at Harvard Law—and she hates the term "safety schools." Like you, Joe, she just doesn't like to call it "safety schools." In blogs and things that I write, I do tend to use that terminology just because automatically people know what I'm talking about when I say a "safety school" versus having to explain another concept. But I always use it with quotation marks to hopefully assuage Danielle's concerns! But you should go listen to that episode if you're interested in learning more about what your backup plan could look like, even if it's not a "safety school." Because if you look at schools where you should feel very confident that you're going to get in, and none of them are schools that you're actually interested in attending, you can't really see yourself going there even with a big scholarship, then it probably doesn't make sense to apply there at all, and maybe there's another backup plan that makes more sense for you. Maybe it's going out and taking a year and working. There are lots of things, but I highly recommend that episode. I'll drop a link in the description if you're interested. I think that's a really great point about "safety schools," quote-unquote.
Paula: And there are so many different resources out there that you can plug in your LSAT and your GPA and it'll spit out a probability for you. LSAC has a really great one. There's other websites that are out there that we can possibly link to, or it's in the blog post that we wrote about this topic.
But all of that should be taken with a grain of salt most of the time. That information is a year behind; it doesn't take into consideration new or current medians, 25th percentiles, or 75th percentiles, and I wouldn't necessarily base my decision on whether to apply to a school with regards to what that probability says or what that response says. But it's a great way if you just are a numbers person.
You can do this on your own too, if you are looking at the medians of a school—and we have a checker that we are updating that you can actually look at all the aggregate information for the new numbers as they're coming up. If you are below the medians of the schools, they're going to tend to be more reaches for you, meaning it's going to be more of a reach or a harder path to get there, right? It's going to be less probable that you're going to be admitted to the schools just based on numbers. If you are above the medians, you're going to be, now, more of it being a safety school for you or a backup school for you. And if your numbers are split, I would always look at the lowest number that you have and compare it to the 25th percentile or the median of a school and know that you're going to get somewhat of a boost in probability with the other number if it's higher or closer to that median.
So there's a little bit of a sliding scale. A little bit of a give and take when you're thinking of your chances, but that is hopefully going to be a way for you to be able to create a solid list of target schools, ones where you feel confident some reaches—there are going to be reaches for anybody, regardless of their numbers—and then again, some really good backup schools.
If I may, in defense of the word "safety," I don't necessarily think that it is a derogatory term where school should feel bad that they're somebody's safety school. To me, I imagine a safety net, right? A school that you know you feel really confident in that maybe doesn't have every quality that you want, but has some other really relevant, important factors for you, and because they are a viable option. It's going to be a school that you're going to be really happy and really proud to attend. So if you end up going to a safety school, anyone who's listening, that's not necessarily a bad thing or a failure in your application process. It could be the most strategic option for you. And in making a school list that's really versatile like that, it gives you the option when it's decision-making time to wait it out on a waitlist for a reach school and potentially go for maybe no scholarship, or have the option of going to a really great regional school that's going to provide you everything that you need and maybe some scholarship assistance, and at the end of the day, that might be the better option for you. So in defense of the safety school topic, I love safety schools.
Anna: I think some of the negative feelings toward the notion of "safety schools" comes not from when they are used appropriately and how they should be, but from, some applicants will apply to schools that they are calling "safety schools" that they just have no interest in attending, but they want to have some schools on their list that they're definitely going to get into. And I think that's where it starts to get a bad reputation is when applicants are maybe not applying to schools as "safeties" as you and I, as all of us here would talk about them.
Joe: Paula, you mentioned some of the resources that you think are good that are out there. And I'd just like to say that I have an opinion on this, which is, the two resources I would use if I was going to use data-focused resources would be number one, our Spivey Consulting Group tracker of the latest median GPA and LSAT, which we're collecting. It's crowdsourced—Anna, I know you spend a lot of time verifying that.
Anna: Only official data!
Joe: Only official data. It's always pretty accurate. I would use that because it's the most up-to-date information. And the other resource I would use is the one that you mentioned, Paula, which is LSAC's Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Programs, and the reason I'd use that one is, there's a bunch of different predictors out there. None of them are very good. None of them give you very much information. But what LSAC's Official Guide has is, they have information not just on the data about people who matriculated to law school, that is the people who chose to attend that law school, but they've got information about the people who were admitted to that law school. And that's really valuable information. If you're looking at this from a data perspective, I guess the individual schools have it, but they don't like to release that data. So LSAC is the only one who has it. So I would use that Official Guide judiciously.
The only downside with Official Guide is it's only as current as the data is that's put in there. So that's why I'd use the two of them together. I'd use the Official Guide and our Spivey Consulting Group tracker.
Anna: The Official Guide—that admitted student data—is fantastic, and you can't get it anywhere else, but it is only for some schools. So I think schools can opt in or opt out; a number of schools have opted out, but I would definitely check out the pages for the schools that you're interested in, because some of them probably do have that data.
Sam: As with all data, use it responsibly. And I would, you know, recommend that be a starting point perhaps, but nothing dispositive, and you should not choose to not apply to school based on some percentage that is spit out. Just read through the fine print—LSAC's data does seem to say that they're using 2021 incoming fall data, so that's almost two, three years removed from that. A lot has changed in those two, three years in terms of LSAT, GPA, and the rankings.
And there's a lot of emphasis on GPA and LSAT, but it's not just random; the law schools are using it to predict the applicant's first-year performance. So they're using it to see how they'll do. Of course, the higher the better, but LSAT and GPA places you in three buckets. So "presumptive admit," "presumptive deny," and sort of somewhere in the middle where it's "further review." If you're in the presumptive admit category, they're looking through your file to see if there's any red flags that they're trying to look through to make sure everything checks out. They'll interview you, they'll invite you, and so on. But if you're also in the presumptive deny, now this is the area where you can really stand out and show that you can perform above the numbers. Perhaps you outperformed your SATs in college, and a lot of disadvantage underrepresented students of color and such show a history of over-performing their GPA or standardized testing numbers. So these are all just starting points, and I wouldn't use it as where you choose to decide where to apply or not apply. You should just kind of use it as just the very beginning of this process.
Joe: Yeah, what do you say to clients who you speak with where the data is not favorable to them? Either they're splitters where their LSAT score is relatively high, above median for schools they're targeting, but their GPA is low, or they're reverse splitters, which is the opposite; their GPA is high but their LSAT is low. What do you tell those folks about how many schools they need to have on their list?
Paula: I love that you mentioned the fact that when we're working with clients and they might just see their numbers, we see the whole client and we see the potential for what that holistic application review is going to look like. This is such a great question because it allows me as a consultant to always be my clients' cheerleader and find all the gold stars and all the brownie points and all the amazing experiences and "softs" that they have while also calibrating expectations of the reality of how important numbers or other application aspects are.
I think for me, it's not a hard-and-fast rule, but the more variation and the more outliers or variables there are in the applicant, the number of applications that they're going to have to submit will be more, because you want to cover a wider net. I want you to have options, and I want you to have different strategy ideas of why you would pick a school based on all the options that you have, because what's important to you as the applicant during the application submission stage is going to be different or will evolve when you're actually making a decision. So usually, the more that's going on, the more applications you'll most likely have to submit.
But that leads me to think of, what factors have you seen in clients or just in general in your time in admissions that helped applicants punch above their numbers? I know right now there is a big pull for employability as employment outcomes become more important, so of course work experience is going to be really important. Diversity factors are still incredibly important for law schools, regardless of what the Supreme Court might say with regards to race-conscious admissions.
What else have you seen in your clients or in applications that, regardless of the numbers, you went to bat for those people applying to your law schools? And bonus points if you can talk about how they excelled and how your predictions were correct with their aptitude and their ability to succeed.
Joe: When I was in the admissions office, I had contact with a lot of different applicants because I was one of the people who would meet with applicants when they came through to take a tour or to visit the law school. And as you can imagine, I'm sure this is the case for you guys too, you don't remember very many of those interactions after they've happened, especially now that they're a few years in the past. But the people who I remember were really great. Part of it was that was my job. There was a person in the admissions office, and it was me whose job it was, to look at the applicant pool and say, "Aha, I found one that might get overlooked."
I can remember some people who just had very strong reasons for why they wanted to attend law school, and when I met with them, I remember thinking, yeah, this person's going to do it. They're confident. They understand their topic area, they know what they're talking about, they seem like they have a good reason for why they want to go to law school, and the numbers are qualifying, meaning that the numbers aren't so low that I'm worried that they're going to academically fail their classes. So the numbers are good enough, and they've got something else going on.
I certainly remember one particular applicant who had about two years of experience as a paralegal in the kind of organization that did the kind of law that she wanted to pursue, and she also spoke a foreign language that was very relevant to the area of law where she wanted to work. She wanted to work with refugees, and she spoke a language that was going to be useful for her in working with refugees. And I remember thinking, okay, the grades are a little bit low, the LSAT score is a little below our median, but she's going to do it. She's already been doing it for two years, and she's got the other things that are going to make it work for her.
At the same time, if one of those applicants was my client, I would probably still tell them to apply broadly. We would play that game with that strategy of saying, here's the soft skills, let's present the best possible thing we can, let's dream big, but I would still tell them to apply broadly, because exactly what you're saying, Paula, like you just can't be sure. You want to have the options in April and May. And so that means that, in the fall when you're submitting your applications, you want to—especially if you're a splitter, or if you're below both medians—you really probably do need to apply broadly.
Sam: It was "diamonds in the rough" were my favorite parts of the application. When you're reading them and arguing, advocating for them with the admissions committee, high LSAT and GPA students never took too long, but it's these students that you really understood and you're trying to understand their whole story; they may have a low GPA, but they had to take care of their parents and had to travel back and forth, or they had to hold three, four jobs just to get through college—everything is in context. And if you can explain and show the maturity, the professionalism, and all these other soft factors that would make you successful in law school, that's how I would answer to those clients who may be a little bit below the numbers. But those are the kind of students who do well in law school and are going to be successful as lawyers down the road. And the numbers are just the starting point even for admissions committees. So don't self-select out, just like Paula said at the beginning. I feel like that's our job to help our clients see that and broaden and expand their horizons if they're so focused on the numbers.
Paula: I always tell my clients, I'm a hopeless optimist, but I'm also very cautiously risk-averse. And so it just helps me cover our bases but also not say "no" to ourselves when we are doing anything in life. Right? Be prepared, but also don't sell yourself short for all the amazing things that you have to offer. And again, a lot of those brownie points in your application in aggregate can add up to helping you punch above your numbers and get into a school, especially if you can distinguish yourself strategically in your application and show all those things that you bring to the table.
Anna: Before we move on, I love that we're talking about some of the positive factors and ways that applicants can rise above their numbers, but I think another important part of this discussion of chances and determining which schools you should put on your list that you're going to actually be able to get into, and figuring out how realistic different options are, is when someone has a really negative factor on their application as well. I think the biggest and most common one is character and fitness. The vast majority of character and fitness, as we all know, are no big deal. You have a speeding ticket, maybe you, you know, were caught with alcohol in your dorm when you were 18—that stuff is not going to make a huge difference on your admissions chances. But there are some character and fitness issues where it does, and those are things like academic dishonesty, maybe there's a plagiarism charge or you were caught cheating on an exam. Maybe it's a significant criminal history; that can also be an issue, especially if it's not that long ago.
If an applicant is in a situation where maybe they have really strong numbers, but they have some other element of their application that they worry is going to be a real negative, what is your advice to those types of applicants on what they should do with their school list?
Joe: Yeah, that's a great question. The scenario that I see more often with academic misconduct is that, in addition to having the character and fitness issue of academic misconduct, often the process has really taken a toll on my client's GPA; either they took an F for that class where they were found responsible for something, or the mental health implications of going through the process of an active misconduct investigation had reverberations into the next semester and maybe the next semester after that. So I sometimes see applicants who show up with both a character and fitness problem and also an affected GPA. And that's not great; none of us want that to happen, so we can acknowledge that.
At the same time, I ask them to think about it like this. If you're going to be admitted to your law school, what had to happen in order for them to admit you? And usually the answer is, "they had to understand my explanation of the character and fitness issue. They had to believe me when I said this is in my past, or whatever the situation was." If we're hypothetically imagining that the admissions office accepts that explanation, then why wouldn't they accept that explanation for the GPA too? That's one of the ways I encourage my clients to think about it. There's a lot of hypothetical in there. So you can still not be sure. But I think that's the right way to think about it. If there's one explanation for everything, and the admissions office accepts that explanation, you do a good job explaining it, then why shouldn't they admit you?
Paula: I like that a lot, and I think it just emphasizes the importance of a really well-written C&F addendum, and if anything, you're listening to this and you fall in the category of having some sort of conduct or record that you think is going to influence your overall application, do your research on how to write a really good character and fitness addendum. I have had clients deal with topics just like you said of academic dishonesty or other types of dishonesty, and a very well-fleshed-out explanation that is objective yet also shows taking accountability and responsibility—and showing what has happened since that has shown your own growth in fixing the problem in your own world or sphere, that it's not an issue anymore—goes a long way. And I think that all of us have had experiences like that with clients where they come in thinking they're completely out of hope, yet they can get past it and get into schools.
But with regards specifically to making a school list, I think the higher your numbers are compared to a school's median, with a good character and fitness addendum, they're going to be apt to give you some more leeway than a school where your numbers maybe are at the median or not quite at the median. It's just going to be another easier reason to add onto maybe why not to admit you if there isn't enough of the positive stuff on the other side of sort of the scale or the spectrum. So if you are looking at a situation where you have a serious character and fitness addendum—don't underestimate how important it is to write a really solid, strong addendum—but add in a couple more schools that are going to be ones where you feel confident in your numbers, because they're going to be more often than not willing to overlook that a little bit more because there are other factors, your numbers, that they're going to be really after. Would you say that's a fair assessment?
Joe: I think there's some truth to that, but I wouldn't tell a client who had a character and fitness issue, like, well, what you need to do is go retake the LSAT. I don't think that's the takeaway here. Sure, having high numbers is always helpful. But I think it only gets you so far. I think that if you don't have a good explanation, it doesn't matter how good your numbers are.
Paula: Absolutely. No, I agree with that.
Anna: Yeah, certainly. The only thing that I would add is to apply a little bit more broadly, especially for those schools where you're not necessarily way above their numbers. A school might be somewhere that you think should be a "safety" for you or you think should be a solid target, but if you have something really significant and negative on your application, a lot of your decision could depend on the individual person reading your application, and that varies from school to school. So I think you're giving yourself a better shot if you apply to more schools in this type of situation.
Joe: And that's a scenario where working with an admissions consultant, or a good pre-law advisor, or someone else who you trust to review your applications in an objective way can be really helpful.
Paula: Absolutely.
Yeah, alright, so going back to the second category of subjective factors or things that are going to be personal preferences for you, Joe talked about a need for location. I work with a lot of clients where scholarship and funding is one of the first priorities, and then of course, everyone is applying to law school with an idea of some direction or focus or area of study that they want to explore further. How do you guide your clients to think about the factors that are out there and help them prioritize that? So as they're looking at their probabilities, they're still finding factors of the school that are going to give them a little extra for their legal education and their law school experience?
Joe: Yeah, I see this two ways. In the way that you mentioned, Paula, about looking for scholarships. And I understand that strategically, maybe you want to apply to a school because they'll give you a scholarship; if you don't want to attend that school, then I don't think that there's much point in applying just for the scholarship unless you just want the ego boost. Counterproductive to me. When I have clients who come to me with that, what I want to respond with is, let me look at my data, and I think I can give you a pretty good idea of whether you're going to get that scholarship that you are thinking about. Or, what's your magic number? I think you might get it, I think you might not get it. I realize that's pretty hard for people to do on their own. When I work with clients as a consultant, I do have that knowledge, and I've got access to that data, so that's how I would do it. If you're on your own, that's fine; you might end up applying to more schools.
The other scenario that I see is clients come to me with a big list of schools, and they're saying, I'd like to make this list smaller, but I just don't really know how, and often that has to do with, they need to get more of an idea about what they want to do with their law degree and what they want to do in law school. And I suggest that my clients go out to talk to any lawyers who they might know. If they work, go try to have lunch with the general counsel of their company. Obviously this depends on the culture of the company that you work for, but that works a lot of times. If you're the intern, nobody wants to say no to the intern. If you have family members who are lawyers, if you've got friends who are lawyers, if you're at some kind of party somewhere, just find the lawyers in the room and say, "Hey, tell me about what you do. How did you get involved in it?" Even if it's something that you think isn't that interesting, it might be helpful.
And getting that a little bit more focused in would be a helpful way to start crossing schools off your list or adding schools to your list. I would say that for people who don't have access to a lot of lawyers in their family or in their friend group, there are some other really good podcasts out there, like the How I Lawyer podcast is a really good one.We've had a couple of people from our firm who've been on that podcast. But there's a hundred episodes out there of different lawyers talking about how they approach their practice areas. This is kind of a long-term project, but if you're listening to our podcast today before you're going to apply to law school, maybe you can plow through some of those episodes, and before you even start to make your list, you'll have a better idea about what you want to do with your law degree, and that might tell you where to apply.
Paula: I think even if you just Google legal practice areas, I mean, there's career advising websites out there that tell you all the different kinds of practice areas that exist. And you can start Googling "day in the life of an employment law lawyer," "day in the life of a family law attorney." If you look up one of the big, giant law firms like Paul Hastings or Cooley, look at their practice area page, and it'll give you a laundry list of the different areas of law that they practice, because they're huge firms that have a comprehensive coverage of almost every area of law. That's a great way of connecting to the different types of law that you can do. Also, just look into your own background. You're going to law school for a reason. Connect to what you've already done, what you've already learned, and see if there's a connection point through that as well.
But that assessment is going to help you so much in the future, because you can be more self-actualized in what you're doing, talking about "why law" for you and your applications, which schools love, but also it makes it easier once you get into law school to figure out where you're going to explore further and what areas of law you're going to look into when you're getting your classes and looking for jobs and whatnot.
For the sake of time, some of the other factors that people look at are the different kinds of areas of law or concentrations or tracks that you can go into—so if you are a person who knows what you want to study, you can look on the websites of schools and see what specific areas of law they already have curricula for. This is almost like a mini-major or a way to focus on a specific area of law, even though you don't need one of those when you're going into law school. It's just nice to know if you are interested in, say, immigration law or international law, you can find a school who offers a whole program in that.
Experiential learning is a huge component of your legal education. So outside of what you're going to learn in the classroom, it's the skills-building, the training, and the practical experience that you get. So look at what clinics they have; look at what centers or institutes they have that you can participate in. See if you can find what kind of internships or externships you can do through that school. And a lot of people will make a school more of a priority for them because there's a specific experiential opportunity that they can do while they're in school in the area of their interest.
Some people care about faculty and who is teaching the classes that they're learning. Are they experts in the field? Are they known in what it is that they're doing?
Faculty/student ratio is important for some people. How many students per faculty member? So that gives you an idea of the direct interactions and the relationships that you can have with your faculty.
Class size and the length of the program—that could be of interest to people. Other extracurriculars and environmental things at the school, like what student organizations exist and how does the school foster belonging, community, and diversity? Alumni involvement is another one. Of course, employment outcomes is a huge thing. And bar passage rate and other things that might be important to you.
So really think for yourself what's important, and prioritize that for yourself as you're thinking of, "how do I envision my law school experience in conjunction with my probability and confidence of getting into that school?"
And My Rank—I think we plug this almost in every podcast that we have—but it's a brilliant resource that allows you to actually choose what is important for you and in the priority that it's important for you, and it'll actually spit it out law schools that you should look into based on the things that are important for you. So this is something that Spivey came out with, and I look at it every single time I work with a client because I think it's so important to be introduced to schools that you might not be privy to.
Joe: Paula, do you tell people to visit law schools before they're making their list or as part of making their list?
Paula: If they can, yes. I understand that resources and time and availability is going to hinder that for a lot of people, but to the degree that you can visit a school, it's only going to give you an idea of whether you could actually go there, whether you are impressed with the school. If you can't go, I recommend talking to somebody who has been there, in addition to reaching out to admissions or going to a law school fair or having some sort of contact other than just website research, So you can get a little bit of a feel of what a school is going to be like for someone like you. So yes, if that is possible, 100%. If it's not possible before you apply, I highly recommend not making a decision on a school until you have visited. Because again, you never know whether it's a good fit for you unless you can show up and stand there and be around the people and see how it feels for you.
Anna: Yeah, I think it's lovely if you can visit before applying, like that's great, but it is unrealistic for a lot of applicants. But I totally agree with you, Paula; the most important time for you to visit is when you're deciding on which law school you want to attend.
You briefly touched on employment outcomes. One thing I'll flag there is that you may or may not be looking at a variety of schools that significantly differ in terms of their overall employment outcomes, like how many of their graduates are employed. It might be the case that you're looking at a set of schools and all of them have really strong employment outcomes. In that case, I do think that it makes sense, especially if you have a really clear goal, to look at the breakdown of where those new graduates are going. You might find that a school is really biglaw-focused, and you're more interested in public interest. You may find that one school has ton of people going into public interest or into government, and that's what you're more interested in. Those are some things that I might look at.
If you're not looking at a set of schools all of which have really great employment outcomes, it's definitely a good idea to delve into that employment data and see, okay, which of these schools that I'm looking at have the most students, the most graduates, who are obtaining a job as a lawyer after graduation? Which is, for most people, the goal.
Joe: Yeah, and all that information is required to be disclosed. So every law school has to have a link on their admissions website which goes to their previous year's employment data.
Anna: It's all also centralized on abarequireddisclosures.org. We'll link that in the description. That is a great resource for any applicant.
Paula: I wanted to ask you how you recommend your clients to organize all this information and all this data as they're researching, as they're diving into the numbers, as they're dreaming big and thinking about what they want to do. It helps so much to stay organized in this situation, not only to know what the application requirements are, but also what is it about the school that is of interest to you, so maybe you can talk about it in a why specific law school statement. How do you coach your clients to stay organized?
Sam: So it starts with the general simple spreadsheet that lists the schools and the requirements. And what appeals, like, kind of notes on their end. But I actually work with each of my clients on a private project management board where we put on their five schools, 10 schools, or 15 schools that they are choosing to work with us on, and then each of those cards have the school's application requirements and dates and materials that we'll work through. So that helps them keep organized, and it helps me too, right? Because when we're working with multiple clients it helps me see where they are on their progress, a checklist, and a to-do list and all of that. So it's immensely helpful, and it just shows the progress that each of them are making. It makes them feel good when they can move it from one column to the next and so on and keep organized.
And Paula, you mentioned a litany of items for consideration, but I also don't want to freak out any of our potential applicants or clients out there. You do not by any means have to have answers to all of those questions that Paula just asked at this stage. Time is sort of on your side. There will come a time when you have to choose one school, then those kind of factors will come into play. But when you're applying, as I said at the beginning of this podcast, be as open as possible. There's very little downside to applying one or two more schools or even more than that. So if you can't answer all those questions or items that Paula listed, it's okay, alright. We're here to help you and it's our job to help you focus and narrow down your list or expand it, so don't worry if you don't have answers to all of that at this time.
Paula: You bring up such a good point, because I was actually working with a student who, she was looking at all the factors of importance, and she was thinking, "There isn't one law school that has every factor that I want. I can't find a perfect law school." And I'd actually never heard of it, thought of it, that way, but I think it's a great thing if you can't find a perfect law school for you, because it takes the pressure off of getting in or not getting into that one school. It really forces you to look at the different things and make a cost-benefit analysis at the end of the day of what school has maybe more of the factors that you want.
I think with anything in life, there isn't one perfect partner; there isn't one perfect house; there isn't one perfect school; there isn't one perfect friend. And that's okay, right? There is beauty in imperfection, or there is beauty in not having everything that you are looking for. It gives you room to maybe expand on that when you're a student, and it gives you an opportunity to maybe leave your legacy when you're there if something is missing. So don't look for perfection. Look for things that you know are going to jive and flow with what you know your priorities are. And that will also help you expand your list and to be more broad and open-minded when you're looking for a law school that's going to be a good fit for you.
Anna: I was going to ask you each for a final piece of advice that you would like to leave our listeners with. Paula, frankly, what you just said strikes me as a wonderful thing to end on, but do you have any additional final pieces of advice you'd like to offer?
Paula: I feel like it's a very daunting experience to feel like you're creating a law school list that's going to officially determine eventually where you're going to go, and that pressure of, "Have I left a school off? Am I doing this correctly?"—I think that pressure is real. And so to the degree that you can trust your instincts—and again, being cautiously risk-averse but also hopelessly optimistic—you'll be in pretty good shape in making that school list.
No one is invalidating the lack of resources to be applying to 30 schools or 40 schools. And quite frankly, you shouldn't have to do that. But there are ways that you can be very judicious and very strategic about creating a list that's going to give you all sorts of strategy opportunities at the end of the day. Just listen to this, take what you can from it, and be confident in the list that you're creating.
Anna: That's great advice. Sam?
Sam: It's an evolving list, right? You'll start with an initial list, and until you're done applying, you can always change it, add to it, subtract from it, you know, take the stress away from the entire process of having to come up with the perfect list in September and then having to stick with that.
We were talking about, you know, reach/dream schools, target schools, and "safety" schools. One advice that I like to leave my clients with—no matter where a school may be on that list, a school cannot tell where they are on your list, right? So by that I mean, you cannot treat a "safety school" with less respect or less, you know, due care, or get sloppy with them because you think that they're a safety school, and you only treat the reach and dream schools with your utmost respect, timing, and everything like that. So at some point you may have these schools and these kind of buckets or groups, but they're just your school list. You can't distinguish and you can't really treat the schools differently based on where they fall on your list. So I think that's kind of an important takeaway. So if any of them reaches out to you, you should respond right away. Interviews, always say thank you, please, and whatnot. You can't ever treat somebody like they're a "safety school" to you, because they may be on your list, but they can never find out.
Anna: That is really, really solid advice, Sam, because we have all seen many, many applicants write themselves out of a school where they almost certainly would have been admitted if they had just shown a normal amount of respect, just a regular amount of respect. But some applicants make it very, very clear that they don't care about your school, they don't care about their application to your school, and they are not a safety net for you anymore if that is how you're treating them. So, very, very important piece of advice there, Sam.
What about you, Joe?
Joe: My best piece of advice is to shoot your shot and force that law school to tell you no. Don't limit yourself. If you have always wanted to go to a particular law school since you were six years old, you should apply to that law school. I tell some of my clients that the main thing is, I never want them to have the "what-ifs." I never want them to feel like, "What if I had applied to that law school? What if I got admitted there? What if I attended there?" If they tell you no, that's okay. I mean, sure, like nobody likes to be told no, but that's all it is. But if they said yes, think how awesome that would be. So that's my advice. Shoot your shot.
Anna: I think that's a wonderful place to end. So thank you to our listeners. Thank you to you three for joining us for this episode. I think it was great, and I hope it was very helpful. If you found it helpful, if you'd like more information about law school admissions, more strategy, more advice, feel free to like, feel free to follow us, subscribe to our podcast. We'll be doing episodes all cycle long. Thanks, everyone.
Paula: Bye
Sam: Thank you. Bye.
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