Resources for prospective law students

On March 24, 2009 · Leave a Comment · In Blaw, blaw, blaw

When I first started (seriously) looking into law school, I felt like one of those little white mice trapped in a maze that it had never been in before: wall, wall, wall, ooh, opening! wall, wall, ooh, something shiny! I had no point of reference, and with no point of reference I was easily distracted by the Internets.

I mean, I had seen Boyfriend go through the whole LSAT prep course, applications and waiting period, but when it came to the minutiae of applications – the best time to submit, what to expect, etc. – I was clueless. So I did one of my favorite things there is to do in the world: research! (seriously. I’m a total nerd) And while poking around and burrowing into the little caves that make up the Interwebz, I found some interesting sites that made me feel better and a lot more comfortable about the whole process.

Law School Admission Council. This was one of my first stops during my law school application journey. Here you can register for the LSAT, register for law school forums (basically, where you can meet representatives from different schools), find out about funding for law school, etc. Be sure to take a look at the ABA-approved Guide to Law Schools. Though the schools listed are unranked, the guide is helpful in that it discusses the strengths of particular schools and also allows you to see how your LSAT and GPA fit in with applicants from previous years. The site’s handy dandy UGPA (undergraduate GPA) and LSAT calculator also allows you to see what your admission chances to individual law schools are.

U.S. News and World Report. On recommendation from Boyfriend, I registered for online access to America’s Best Graduate Schools. The registration allows you to see the rankings of individual schools, and narrow down choices based on LSAT percentiles, GPA, state, and the like. A great feature is the ability to save schools you are particularly interested in so you can compare them later. Note: Some have challenged the validity of the law school rankings found on the site. You can read about that here and here.

Brian Leiter’s Law School Rankings. The site, by Brian Leiter, John P. Wilson Professor of Law and Director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago, independently compiles lists of rankings according to specific areas of interest. These include ranking schools according to faculty scholarly impact and where current law professors went to law school.

Law School Numbers (LSN). This networking site aggregates user-submitted LSAT, GPA and school application information into easy-to-read databases and graphs. You can search for people with “numbers” (LSAT/GPA) similar to yours and can see how well they’re doing at specific schools. You can see if applicants listed themselves as URMs (underrepresented minorities) or Ns (nontraditional students). You can look at individual schools and see exactly who they are admitting based on numbers. Sometimes applicants even list their “softs”, factors apart from numbers that are also listed on their application. If the users are diligent, you can see the progress of their applications from sent, complete (when their package is ready for review at the law school), and when a decision was made. The admitted, waitlisted, and rejected users can then be plotted on a scatter plot graph. I don’t like this graph. It’s scary, but it could be useful for some people.

www.hourumd.com. You can input your LSAT score and GPA into this site, and your probabilty of admittance into individual schools is calculated based on information gathered from the LSN database. I’ve been reading that LSN statistics tend to be on the higher end, so I’m uncertain of how much weight you should put in this probability thingy. I say, if you feel good about submitting your application to a particular school, just send it in. It won’t hurt and you won’t be asking “what if?” later on. Also, if you find out what “hourumd” stands for, let me know.

Chiashu. This site is similar in concept to LSN, but may have a different set of users. It’s not as pretty as LSN, but it does have a function that allows you to see decision and rejection numbers, and how many of each there were per month, plotted on a line graph.

Law School Discussion. If you have questions for current law school students, or other prospective applicants, this is a great resource. There are individual forums for law school applications and preparing for the LSAT. Once you’re admitted (yey!), there are also individual boards for admitted students in general and for specific schools.