I think your making a mistake that many 0L's do by considering U.S. News law school tiers as the most important thing. A 3.7 and 161 are probably good enough to get into low tier 1 or tier 2 schools, but at some point the tiers don't matter. Also realize U.S. News is nothing more than a for-profit, unregulated, magazine offering an opinion. The schools ranks change drastically year by year. I graduated in 2007 and my school was in the 70's when I started then went into the 90's then went into the 90's my second year out of tier 2 for my 3rd year then back to the mid 80's a year after graduation.
I will tell you nothing changed at the school when these drops and rises occured. I guess techincally it went down every year I was there so maybe I was single handedly responsible for it, but it's more realistic that nobody cares and knows about the difference between 70-80.
Location and Cost are usually more important to consider than what the tier of a school unless you are dealing with Harvard, Yale, Stanford those type of schools, which with a 3.7 & 161 are probably out of range.
I noticed you can go to school for free, which is great, but I assume you have a scholarship and if that is true you need to very careful about the conditions on them.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/01/business/law-school-grants.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all this article does a good job of explaining it. Essentially a school will say all you need is a 3.0 to maintain your GPA, which you assume is easy you got a 3.7 in undergard after all, which is what most law students received. However, you are not familiar with law school grading and usually only 35% of the class can maintain a 3.0 after first year. This means there is a 65% chance of losing the scholarship, because about 99% of ABA law students are smart and hard working. 100% of them are sure they will be in the top 35%, but your an accoutning major and you can see how the math works on that. So just be careful about conditions.
Reality of legal education is that realistically it is all the same. You literally take the same courses, use the same textbooks, from school to school. The prestige makes some difference in finding a job, but not as big as many think particulalry when distinguishing between low tier 1 and 2/3/4 schools. Nobody cares the location matters much more in those situations. For example University of Washington is a fine school, but New York, San Francisco, L.A, Chicago employers aren't going to reach out to Washingotn. New York already has NYU, Columbia and 5 other schools in their own backyard, and they might go out of their way for Harvard, Stanford, Yale, but not University of Washington.
The same logic applies for all of those San Francisco has Boalt and Stanford plus 5 other bay area schools. L.A. has USC and UCLA, Chicago has University of Chicago and Northwestern as well as an abundance of schools. The list goes on so if you wanted to work any of those locations you would be better of going to school in those locations. If you wanted to work in Washington then go to Washington. It really is that simple.
Good luck
Also remember I am only an anonymous internet poster as is anyone else on this board or others you may read so don't take it to seriously.
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