That is factually incorrect, Mr Banks. I am a practicing lawyer who graduated from a T6 school and I have many friends who graduated from T14 and all the schools below. Saying that no matter where you go to law school is perhaps the most telling statement about how little you know about this topic. Where you go to law school is the most important factor in career prospects. BY FAR! The best companies in Vault don`t usually hire, even outside of the best schools. A company that hires 100+ new employees per year can make offers to 1-2 students outside the top 25 schools. Values ethics will be important, but the problem with legal hiring is that your resume gets your foot in the door. Working hard and getting the job done will only come if you can find a job. It depends on where you were registered. If you have a choice between Michigan and Cooley, I would pay $20,000 a year because the chances of getting a good Michigan job are considerably higher. If, on the other hand, you have been accepted by two other schools that are a few places above Cooley and have similar placement rates, go to Cooley. Paying $60,000 more for a few places seems like a bad choice, unless one of those schools is located in the area where you want to work and people are placing there.
For example, if you want to work in Los Angeles, you`d better go to a low-ranking school that places a lot of people in Los Angeles. You may be aware that we do not currently comply with ABA 316 – the Barpass standard. Standard 316 was recently revised and reduces the time it takes law school graduates to pass a bar exam after graduation. The new standard entered into force immediately after its adoption. Many schools, such as ours, had accepted students according to the previous standard. These students will graduate and take a bar exam for a few years, which will make immediate compliance difficult for us and other schools in the meantime. Personally, I think this new standard is reasonable, but I believe that its immediate implementation has not been. Nevertheless, we are working diligently to meet this new standard.
While these numbers are to be expected for a lower-ranking law school, they seem particularly low given the debt that Cooley graduates are likely to carry. As a senior university aspirant considering law school, also very poor with standardized exams, I needed to know your opinion on all this. It would be very beneficial if I prepared for the lsat exam in September and continue to consider it as a possible career path. WMU-Cooley Law School has been named one of the best racially and ethnically diverse law schools in the country by U.S. News and World Report. If you are planning to leave law school directly on your own, I would try to find a job at a law firm so you can see how things go. While law school teaches you to think like a lawyer, very few prepare you to practice law. While you may stumble for a few years when you go out, you`re not doing your customers any favors. Having created two law firms, I think everyone should work in a firm for 3-5 years before hanging their own shingles. I will never judge anyone based on the law school they attended. The key is what you can do with this law degree.
It was this latter decision, combined with his commitment to maintaining an excellent class despite very poor job prospects, that earned Cooley the distinction of being the worst law school in America. In its September 2021 report, the national publication ranked WMU-Cooley 21st out of 199 accredited American Bar Association law schools, all of which were in the minority at one-third of students enrolled in fall 2020. U.S. News and World Report named the top 46 law schools in its ranking. The goal of the ATL Career Center is to reconcile publicly available employment data for the class of 2013, nine months after graduation. We compared data from the American Bar Association, Law School Transparency, National Association for Legal Professionals, and each school`s websites. If the information is inaccurate, please contact us at careers@abovethelaw.com. Cooley Law ranks #57 in terms of tuition fees among full-time law students ($50,750). We rank out of a total of 283 tuition fees from 194 law schools and rank twice as many law schools that have different tuition fees inside and outside the state. I have a 144 on lsat. Graduation rented in two years.
passed the bar for the first time. past Nevada Bar for the first time. and start at my first job. Cooley was the only school that accepted me because I`m terrible at standardized tests. But I excelled. Students should be informed of entry qualifications, graduation rates, bar pass rates and employment rates, and then be allowed to decide for themselves. If a student who has not done well at LSAT really wants to become a lawyer, who are we to say that he should not have the opportunity? I have a friend who attended a law school that ranks well below those in our region. He has a portfolio of $3 million and is a major shareholder in one of the top 10 companies in our market. Another friend went to a lower-level law school, but had family ties to get his first job.
Now he`s doing well at a medium-sized local law firm. Yes, he paid a lot more for his degree than our public school would have cost, but he got his foot in the door and made a name for himself as a lawyer. I sympathize with those who graduated, passed a bar and can`t find a job, but they should know that it`s not their fault that Cooley`s leaders made their degrees as useful as the breasts on a boar. For those in that position, my suggestion, and coincidentally what I`m doing right now, would be to find a law master`s program at a better school so they can just completely remove Cooley from their resume like I did years ago. (I actually went a little further and shredded my degree and sent it to them because I don`t want anything to do with this school) When choosing your school, it`s important to always consider where you want to work and what kind of work you want to do. For example, attending elite law school may not be as helpful if you want to practice patent law and have strong bachelor`s degrees, such as a degree in electrical engineering.