law school rankings

[Mellski]

Hey! I'm not sure if this has already been discussed, however, I had a general question regarding law school rankings and class rankings. I know if you want the BigLaw job, they say you should graduate top 5% or 10% of your class (assuming your in a lower tiered school). But, if you get into a top 10 or 20 school, who gets the BigLaw jobs? For example, I know UCLA doesnt offer students class ranks and hasnt since 1970. So how do they decide who gets the biglaw jobs? or good jobs for that matter?

Thanks in advance for anyones help!

[Tetris]

GPA determines what firms you can get into, generally speaking.

Although my school doesn't release class rank until after graduation, its pretty easy for potential employers to figure out your approximate class rank based on the curve of your school.  At Michigan, the 1L curve is about 3.25, with 10% below a 3.0, and so forth.  So the prestigious firms might only accept people with a 3.6, the normal run-of-the-mill Big Laws might take people with at least a 3.1, and if you are 2.9 or lower (bottom 5 ish %)  you might be SOS even at a T14 for market rate Big Law at least.

Those are just numbers I'm pulling out of my arse, but I think they would hold up as pretty representative generally speaking.

At a school like UCLA, I would think you need to be in the top half of the "curve" to get Big Law, and maybe more like top 1/3rd if you want to have a solid/near guarantee chance.  Again, these are just water-cooler impressions I have and I don't possess any hard statistics to back this up.

[vap]

At Michigan, the 1L curve is about 3.25, with 10% below a 3.0, and so forth.

Is a 3.5 top 10%?

[Tetris]

At Michigan, the 1L curve is about 3.25, with 10% below a 3.0, and so forth.

Is a 3.5 top 10%?

I think, but I'm not sure, that a ~3.8 might be Top 10%.  I think 25% are 3.6 or higher.  I'm sort of just ish-ing these numbers from water cooler talk around the school though.  There are some graphs somewhere on the inter-tubes but I'm too lazy to find them right now.

[k0em9u]

Don't worry about the top 10%, there's a 90% chance you won't be one of them.

At my school the cut-off for 10% was 3.6. This is going to depend a little bit on the curve's school, even though schools generally have a similar curve basis (2.9-3.1 seems to be the general), the outer limits will depend a lot on how steep or flat curve the professors use. Some professors will like to give a ton of As and Cs and thus still somehow manage to stick it to a B curve, whereas other professors give almost all Bs etc.