Well, if you are being sincere, I suggest you hold off even trying to apply to law school, because your other posts here give a very strong impression that you still lack the maturity and focus for law school, and would have similar results to your first attempt. A friend of mine once described law school as all the drama and hormones of high school, but without the restraint of living with your parents. And I can understand not being mentally there yet. That was me as an undergrad. Had painfully average (if not worse) undergrad grades. Thought about law school, but one of my proffs suggested I take some time off, dabble in the real world, and make sure it was what I really wanted to do, rather than get into a middling law school, get middling grades, and if I'm luck, get a middling job, and perhaps practice for 3 years before looking for something different. So I started a career, got a masters in some liberal arts field just for personal enrichment, and then applied for law school in my early 30s. Only ended up getting into a tier 2 school, ranked top 5 in my class after the first year, and transfered to Georgetown, and graduated cum laude. So yes, I can understand lack of maturity being an obsticle.
Now for your other factors, and getting into a top tier school. As I said earlier, you are not strictly a 1L, nor are you a transfer. You can kiss that LSAT score from 2005 good bye, because every law school is going to require you to have current LSAT scores. Anything older than 5 years is not current. You will have to take the LSAT again. Your 2005 LSAT score won't even be reported. For all intents and purposes, it doesn't exist. Hopefullly, you will do just as well. However, to pretend that it is a given is to delude yourself. Your attending USC doesn't help you in the least, because you failed out. It might as well have been a top 5 law school. Failing out of a great law school is not a selling point to an admissions board. If anything, this is probably your biggest hurdle to get into a decent school. Perhaps you can try to explain it away in a personal statement, but you can't just pretend you are only relying on an undergrad GPA and LSAT score. If you didn't have that giant 0.0 on your law school transcript, your magna cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa would certainly mean open doors at top14 schools, but you shot yourself in the foot. As for your "soft factors," sorry to tell you, they aren't that impressive. You held down some jobs that didn't require physical labor, and managed to work your way up to assistant manager. Congratulations. But it really isn't that much of a big deal. It's not like you joined the Peace Corps, organized a successful non-profit that distributes clothes to homeless vets, became a lobbyist, worked on a congressional staff, etc. You held a pair of retail positions. It really is no big f'en deal. It's not a strike against you (as if you had been living in your parents' basement for the past 8 years playing video games), but I'd be very surprised if it made a difference one way or the other.
If you really want to go to law school, first and foremost...grow up. If you manage to get into a top tier law school, everyone will have similar credentials as you, so you can't afford not to take things seriously. Even if you only get into a second tier school because of your failing out, you will still encounter folks with solid academic backgrounds. You will be graded on a strict curve, so even if you put out a really solid final, it might still only get you a B- (mercifully, the higher tiered schools have much easier curves than the lower tiered schools, and the top 3 don't even report grades). With the legal market as tight as it is, do you really want to take on a quarter of a million dollars in non-discharable law school debt if you are only going to screw off, "sowing your wild oats" and finishing with an unimpressive GPA that will leave with no job prospects when all is said and done?
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