"World renowned schools like Harvard, Yale, Stanford are at the top and that doesn't change, but to any 0L choosing a mid-level school please do not use the rankings. Nobody cares whether a school is in eight way tie for 94th or 4 way tie for 82nd."
While I agree, for the most part, with the post, I will slightly disagree with this statement. IME, the rankings are a useful guideline to *roughly* breaking down the law schools. As the post indicates, the difference between, say, 82 and 94 is non-existent. Heck, the difference between 50 and 92 is non-existent. But the rankings do provide some useful help.
Roughly speaking, there are national schools (often referred to as the T14), regional schools, state schools, and local schools. And slight variations within those. And the rankings roughly reflect those divisions.
A national school (the Harvards and Yales) will allow you to almost guarantee a BigLaw job (if that's what you want) and a choice of where you want to practice nationwide, if you are able to relocate anywhere. In addition, if you want to follow a certain track (Fed Clerkship-academic, for example), these are the schools that you should be most interested in. These are also the only schools where paying full tuition might be worthwhile.
After that, as you descend in the ranking, you get the regional (schools that place in their state, and to a lesser extent, within their region), schools that place within their state, and schools that, for the most part, place within their city and locality. There are always exceptions (I often cite U Maine, whose rankings show it to be a local school like Suffolk, but places state-wide as the only law school in Maine), but it's a good heuristic.
Also, as a general rule, the job placement options become better the higher in the rankings you go. That said, they don't become good enough (outside of the very top national schools) to justify significant differences in tuition.
So, rankings can be useful as a rough guide and a starting point. But the most important thing, outside of the T14, is cost and location of the school you plan on attending. In addition, do not choose a school just because of the ranking- a school that is less expensive and in the location you want to practice, but ranked 60 spots lower than another school, will likely be a better choice.