This topic has been hashed out at length, but generally speaking, with lower tiered schools, they usually (or at least frequently) enjoy a little bit of home-field advantage.
For instance, a law school may be 4th tier in the national scheme of things, but in the town its located, there's a good chance that a lot of people in the profession went there. So, it's regarded as being a competent local school, versus a not-very-good national school.
If you are sure you want to practice in a specific part of the country, and you aren't going to go to a top tier school, your best bet is always to attend a school in that part of the country.
If you come to that part of the country with a degree from a comparably-ranked school from across the country, it's likely that they'll just view it as you went to a school that's poorly regarded. It's not likely they'll make the link and say, "Well, we like hometown U and faraway U is ranked about the same, thus they're equivalent".
To their way of thinking, hometown U is a good school. Faraway U is a not-very-good school with a poor reputation.