12/12/05
Law School Numbers
LawSchoolNumbers.com (http://www.lawschoolnumbers.com) is a wonderful resource for Pre Law Students in the “research” phase of their application process. It’s basically a user-updated site that indexes all national Law Schools and records users’ GPA and LSAT information and their acceptance, rejection, and wait list data. All of this is then thrown into a graph that links applicants with their numbers and their status at that school. It’s anonymous, so applicants submitting information needn’t worry about confidentiality concerns, yet the information provided here will certainly be of use to students. This type of site functions on user-submissions (and accuracy) so I would certainly encourage UB students to participate but ensure you also keep your personal information private.
While there are also official, law school submitted matrices concerning specific LSAT and GPA information for each school (http://officialguide.lsac.org/docs/cgi-bin/home.asp), some law schools choose not to submit this type of specific data (X-Y coordinates of actual applicants and their status based on GPA and LSAT information). Hence, a website like LawSchoolNumbers.com can really fill in some much-needed blanks. (However, the Official Guide to ABA-Approved Law Schools should remain your number one data research tool as that database is entirely accurate with no fear of fudged-numbers or anonymously-submitted data!)
So when browsing this site, first click on the “All Law Schools” link to have a look at specific schools. Then click on “Top Users” to actually track folks who are currently in the admission process. This is usually quite interesting and some students provide some “blog” like information tracking their progress. Other things to look at are the indices for the Law Schools. That is the “magical number” that combines your academic information. Keep in mind that any “stat” site like this should be just used as a research tool, but certainly not “gospel” as far as where you should apply necessarily. I think I’ll have a podcast tutorial on this to walk people through it at some point, but for the time being, happy browsing!
