When Elizabeth Samuels began applying to law schools in 2020, her highest priority was to get into a T14 school — one in the top 14 according to US News & World Report, the go-to source for such rankings.
“It was hammered in from the moment I started applying that it’s all about getting into a T14 school, if not a T6 school,” said Samuels, a second-year law student at fourth-ranked Harvard Law School. “I was told by many different people that if you go to those schools, you’re gonna have every opportunity in the world.”
That strategy may change, though, as a growing number of law schools say they will no longer participate in the rankings by providing internal data to the magazine. The exodus marks a significant shift for schools, students and law firms, potentially creating opportunities for small-school graduates to gain a foothold at marquee firms as well as changing the culture of work there.
“The lawyers are more than their numbers,” said Elizabeth Coreno, co-chair of the Committee on Attorney Well-Being in Law at the New York State Bar Association. “They’re more than their grades. They’re more than their own law school ranking or their ranking inside the law school. This is beginning to start a conversation about a more holistic, human-oriented approach to the profession.”
At least 11 of the highest-ranked law schools, including Harvard and No. 1 Yale Law School, have rejected the US News listings. One reason many gave is that the rankings don’t give enough credit to programs that train lawyers interested in public service and that they reward schools that give scholarships for high LSAT scores rather than a student’s financial needs.
Sixth-ranked University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School announced on Dec. 2 that it wouldn’t participate in the rankings, saying in a statement that the publication’s methodology is “unnecessarily secretive and contrary to important parts of the Law School’s mission, including Penn Carey Law’s increasing investment in need-based financial aid and public interest lawyering.”
The most prestigious firms have generally focused on attracting new talent from the most prominent law schools, enticing students who graduate at the top of their class with perks. That’s not likely to change overnight.
Drew Fishman, a first-year law student at New York University School of Law, said top law schools that have longstanding relationships with those firms will keep the connections that provide their students with unique interview opportunities.
“The legal world is so relationship-based that the institutional relationship with the law firms is enough to keep the wheels greased and keep the system churning,” he said.
And US News will continue to rank law schools, including those that choose not to submit their data, Chief Data Strategist Robert Morse wrote last month. The magazine said on Friday it had no further comment beyond that post.
But the law schools’ snub of the rankings may prompt some firms to open their doors to a wider pool of talent, said Kathryn Richardson, founder of Texas-based recruiting firm HR Legal Search. Though the frenzied hiring and pay bumps in 2021 and early 2022 have cooled off, there’s still a war for talent, especially in restructuring, labor employment, commercial litigation and construction litigation, she said.
“We consider it a breath of fresh air to be authorized to cast a wider net,” Richardson said. “The ones that branch out and look at night schools, smaller schools, regional schools and public law schools are at an advantage in this talent war.”
At the same time, the firms will have to deal with a new generation of lawyers who place more emphasis on work-life balance, flexibility, mental health and mentorship support in the workplace in a post-COVID era. Having experienced three years of the pandemic, young lawyers in particular consider it important to have flexibility to work remotely. Forty-four percent of lawyers practicing 10 years or less would leave for more latitude to work remotely, compared with 13% of those practicing over 40 years, according to a 2022 survey by the American Bar Association.
“There’s a growing segment of lawyers, especially the young lawyers, who may have, in their lifetime, had more conversations about mental health, have sought mental health treatment,” said Coreno. “They’re familiar with advocating for themselves — they understand their needs.” She added: “They’re the movement. They’re the change.”
Although financial security and stability continue to be a deciding factor when young lawyers look for jobs, work-life balance and ethics are gaining importance.
“A lot of Gen Z lawyers are motivated by pursuing things that are aligned with their ethical values, their morals,” said Jackie Bokser LeFebvre, a managing director at legal recruiter Major, Lindsey & Africa. “That’s a little bit different in this generation.”
To Cosimo Fabrizio, a first-year law student at Harvard, it would “leave more people to gravitate toward public interest careers early on” if law schools take the opportunity to provide more funding, loan repayment assistance and scholarships for low-income students in that area. The cost of going into public interest work would be reduced and the benefit would become more apparent, he said.
Justin Onwenu, a second-year student at Columbia Law School who supports the law schools’ rejection of the US News rankings, echoes that point.
“Dropping out of the rankings will give top law schools a little bit more flexibility to focus on other things that, I think, are important, like our mandate to the public, to serve as leaders, even social justice causes,” Onwenu said. “It will encourage students to think about a lot more than just the rankings. What type of person do you want to be after you graduate law school? What type of lawyer do you want to be?”
