Pre-Law

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"Peer assessment score" – the opinion of deans and certain faculty about the overall quality of a law school – accounts for 25% of a school's score in the U.S. News ranking. It is the most heavily weighted item. Bar passage, for comparison, is just a bit over 2%. When told this my pre-law students almost inevitably say — "why would I care what deans and faculty at other schools think?"  

Below are the 25 schools that have the lowest peer assessment relative to overall rank and the 25 schools with the highest peer assessment relative to overall rank. Tier 2 schools are not included because they do not have a specific overall rank. TaxProfBlog provided the data. 

I am not unbiased here. I teach in the business school at Belmont University, and our law school has the biggest negative gap between peer assessment and overall rank. There are some reasonable reasons for this gap — e.g., the school is young (the law school founded in 2011, though the university was founded in 1890) and a lot of deans/faculty may not know that the law school is doing well on incoming student credentials, bar passage…

In college, I majored in business administration with a concentration in finance, but I learned next to nothing about personal finance. Thankfully, my father provided some advice, and I did a bit of reading on the subject before I graduated law school. But I am still learning, and have dug deeper this summer.

More universities should instruct their students on matters of personal finance. As I mentioned a few months ago, I spoke on personal finance for a group of students at my university last school year,  and I hope to bring Joey Elsakr to speak at my university this school year. Joey is a graduate student and is the co-founder of the blog Money and Megabytes.

Last week, Joey graciously invited me to guest post on his blog. As I mention in the post, I don’t think I have that much to add to his many useful and detailed posts on personal finance, but I do think personal finance gets a lot more difficult after you have a family (namely because there are so many more non-financial factors to weigh in most financial decisions). I pose some of those difficult questions in the linked post below, and…

Joey Elsakr, a PHD/MD student at Vanderbilt University, has teamed up with his roommate for a blog called Money & Megabytes. The blog covers personal finance and technology topics, which I think may be of interest to many of our readers and their students.

Last year, convinced that students need more guidance on personal finance, I gave a talk at Belmont University on the topic. Given the very limited advertising of the talk, I was surprised by the strong turnout. The students were quite engaged, and some simple personal finance topics seemed to be news to many of them. I plan on asking Joey to join me in giving a similar talk next year.

One post that I would like to draw our readers' attention to is Joey's recent post on his monthly income/expenses. You can read the entire post here, but here are a few takeaways: 

  • Know Where Your Money Goes. How many students (or professors!) actually have a firm grasp on where they are spending money? While creating a spreadsheet like Joey's could be time consuming, the information gained can be really helpful (and just recording the information — down to your nail clippers purchase!

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This summer, I have met with a few of my pre-law advisees who will start their 1L years in a few weeks. 

While I have blogged on general advice for students before, I decide to memorialize some of my specific advice for 1Ls.

Of course, every student is different, and this advice may be amended a bit, depending on the student's situation and goals. This advice, for example, assumes a desire to perform well academically. I encourage my co-bloggers to chime in through the comments or in separate posts. My co-blogger Josh Fershee (West Virginia) has already authored two 1L advice posts, which are worth consulting, here and here. It should go without saying that I did not follow all of my own advice, but I wish I had. 

  • Move into your house or apartment a few weeks early. Moving in early may not be possible for every student, but it is worth doing if you can. Getting settled before the work starts to pile up can help you avoid getting behind early.  
  • Live alone or with friends with similar schedules. I had some law school friends who lived with non-law students, usually people they knew from college who

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Paul Caron (Pepperdine) reports that Wake Forest Law has become the 10th law school to accept the GRE. The law school will continue to accept the LSAT.  

Those ten law schools (in chronological order, from earliest adopter to most recent adopter) are:

This shift to accepting the GRE at Wake Forest Law has, apparently, been in the works for over 18 months, and Christine Hurt (BYU) had a nice post on some of the early discussion. Around that time, in February of 2016, Arizona became the first law school to accept the GRE.

Like Christine Hurt, I think this move to including the GRE is probably a good thing, especially if the GRE is shown to be just as predictive as the LSAT. The GRE is offered much more frequently than the LSAT and some pre-law students will have already taken the GRE. Also, I am generally in favor of competition, and the LSAC/LSAT has had a monopoly on law school admissions tests for quite a long time.  

It looks like U.S. News is already converting GRE scores into…

Belmont University starts classes on Wednesday. Below I share a few tips for new students. Josh posted a good list earlier this week, but my list is a bit different, perhaps because I teach primarily undergraduate and graduate business students. None of these is new or earthshattering, but, like many simple things, they remain difficult to put into action.

  1. Be Professional. As I often tell my students, you start building your reputation in school. I have declined business opportunities from former classmates because I remembered how they conducted themselves in school. Be on time, be prepared, be thoughtful, and be honest. We should recognize that people change over time and be open to giving second chances, but, unfortunately, not everyone will be quick to change an opinion they form of you while you are in school.
  2. Get to Know Your Classmates and Your Professors. Building relationships is an important aspect of personal and professional life. It is tempting to just put your head down in school and not spend time trying to form strong bonds. An incredible number of students never meet with their professors or only meet with them right before a project or an exam. Professors and classmates are

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This year, I will be teaching undergraduate, MBA, and law students at Belmont University.  As an undergraduate professor, I often advise students considering law school.

I focus on helping prospective law students make an informed decision.  Formally or informally, I usually walk the students through a simple cost/benefit analysis.  Even with all the information about law schools out there now, most students still need some help navigating.    

Usually, I ask prospective law students a lot of questions, including at least some of the ones below.

If readers have constructive additions to my list, please e-mail me or leave a comment.  I am always trying to improve my advising. 

  • Why do you want to go to law school? (The student’s answer can be illuminating. Answers that are essentially – to please my parents or because I don’t know what else to do or because I want to get rich – should cause the student to think a bit harder. I think there is now enough data out there that students can see that there are much better avenues to getting rich than going to law school.)
  • Do you understand the total financial cost of going to law school? (See

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