This is a wonder what I am definitely that a lot of people care about most, especially the students, below are some useful information to help you understand more clearly about it:
There are several factors that any law school, including top-tier law schools, evaluate when looking at candidates. Chief among these factors is the LSAT score. You can look up the average LSAT score for admitted students at all top-tier law schools. For a school ranked in the top six (Columbia, NYU, Chicago, Harvard, Yale, Stanford) admitted students probably have an average LSAT score of 170 or higher (out of 180). So if you write the LSAT and get a score over 170, you will probably be in the running for a top-tier school, depending on the other aspects of your application. The next most important factor is your GPA from college. Admitted students at top-six schools have an average GPA of around 3.85 or higher. The difficulty of your major and your program may be a factor but not as significant as some people think, i.e. even if you are studying at Harvard and majoring in the most difficult major, it won’t matter if your GPA is well below their averages, for example, a 3.3 or a 3.2. This goes for the LSAT as well. In other words, if you score well below the average for a top-six school for either LSAT or GPA, it is unlikely that you will be admitted to a top-six school, regardless of your other credentials.
Schools do consider other factors such as reference letters, essays, and work experience. However it is impossible to “weigh” the value of certain types of experience over others. I will say that when I was at Harvard I met a lot of former bankers, consultants, and Teach for America people. It is standard for most law students to have spent about one or two years after graduating from college working and gaining experience. It is also helpful to have a compelling story in your essay, although this is not a requirement. If for example you are from an underrepresented minority group (i.e. black or Hispanic or Native American) or if you had difficult socioeconomic conditions growing up the schools may put this into consideration if you have less than stellar LSAT and GPA scores. Since this is inherently an arbitrary and subjective analysis, however, keep in mind that LSAT and GPA are still weighed more heavily than any other factor and having so-called “mitigating circumstances” does not mean that you will be admitted in any case. Finally there is no need to have any particular connection to the legal profession or any experience with the law. Most students in top-six schools do not have any background in the legal profession and this did not hinder them from being admitted.
In my case, I had a GPA of 3.83 and a LSAT of 179. I had no work experience and I graduated in three years from a relatively unknown Canadian university. My major was English Literature, and I did not really have any outstanding recommendations or achievements. Thus, I was below most of the top-six schools in terms of average GPA but above all of them for average LSAT. I had no other factors that would help me get admitted. I was eventually waitlisted and rejected at four of the top six schools (Yale, Stanford, Chicago, and Columbia) but admitted at Harvard and New York University, which also happened to be the two biggest top-six law schools by the number of admitted students. These bigger schools tend to play the “numbers game” more prominently and they may have just seen my near-perfect LSAT score and admitted me on that basis alone. However admissions can sometimes be a crapshoot, as you can see with my uneven results. Some of my friends by contrast got admitted to all top-six schools. I can’t fully explain why this is the case, but I can say that if you are like me, and you have no work experience and a relatively mediocre GPA, even a near-perfect LSAT score will not guarantee admittance, but it will certainly help out tremendously. There is no doubt in my mind that Harvard admitted me based on my LSAT. There is nothing else about my application that would have convinced them otherwise.
So, final lesson is, if you have already graduated, you can’t change your GPA or your major and you can’t change your background. You probably can’t change your work experience in a way that will be a game-changer for law admissions. But you can most certainly get an amazing LSAT score. And to get admitted to a top law school, a great LSAT score (above 170) is a must if your other factors are not outstanding and exceptional. So if you haven’t written the LSAT yet, study for that test as if it was the most important test in your life.
Additionally, Get good grades, get a killer LSAT score, be involved in school activities (demonstrating some long-term commitment to a couple of them), write a decent admissions essay, and get your applications in on time. That's basically it.
Here's what you don't need:
- You do not need a specific course of study. I went to law school with not only poli-sci, history, and English majors, but dance, mathematics, Greek studies, and chemistry majors as well.
- You do not need to participate in a pre-law program.
- You do not need any specific activities. I never did mock trial, or model U.N., or any of the other lawyerly type activities. I did lots of theatre and I worked 20 hours per week for a professor, doing research, and I had a few other activities along the way.
- You do not need to go to a specific undergraduate institution. Do not think that you need to have gone to Harvard undergrad in order to have a shot at one of these schools. I went to Hope College, a small school no one outside of Michigan knows exists, and I went to NYU Law, which was ranked number 4 at the time (it's now at 6). I was wait-listed at Stanford, despite applying too late (by a couple weeks). I didn't apply to either Harvard or Yale, so I have no insight there.