The Wall Street Journal’s Law Blog posted an interesting study of how the US News rankings impact law school behavior.  The short answer is: a lot.  Readers will be interested in browsing the whole thing, but what stood out to me is the contention that law schools, in order to raise their rankings, are offering more merit-based aid to attract students with outstanding LSAT scores.

This goes to a point that I sometimes have trouble communicating to students.  Even if you know what law school you’d like to attend, and even if you have a score good enough to give you a high chance of admission, you should still work very hard to maximize your LSAT score.  Getting in is only Step 1.  Step 2 is to bargain for the best possible deal you can get.

Especially as the legal hiring market falters, it’s incredibly important to minimize your debt load going into law school.  Merit-based aid can go a long way.

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Related posts:

1. The financial rewards of maximizing your LSAT score
2. 6 questions with law school admissions expert Ann Levine
3. Should you really go to the best school you can?
4. Interpreting your December 2009 LSAT score
5. On transferring law school

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 3rd, 2009 at 9:34 am and is filed under Application Process, World of law. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.