Top Honors

If you’ve scoured the web for law school rankings lately, you will have noticed there is no consensus for which school should take the top spot this year. After more than 30 years dominating the US News ranking, Yale had to share the #1 spot with Stanford, while Harvard leads the pack in another global ranking, and UChicago receives Top 3 honors in two instances:

US News – Stanford, Yale, Chicago
QS – Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge
THE – Stanford, NYU, Cambridge
Shanghai – Yale, Harvard, Chicago

Yale, Stanford, and Harvard’s reputations and brand strength place them perennially at the top of the “T14,” the creme de la creme of US law schools. The name “T14” caught on due to US News publishing law school rankings beginning in the 1990s with the same 14 law schools claiming the top 14 spots on a routine basis. Schools swapped ranking slots here and there, to be sure, but the habitual reappearance of 14 schools eventually led to the “T14” moniker. In recent years, that number has flexed to 15-18 schools as US News awarded ties in some cases, but the concept of a handful of highly selective schools holding more cachet than others remains powerful.

The T14 retain their staying power, in part, due to the Big Law recruiting gravity they have maintained for decades. Lawyers-to-be know that acceptance to a T14, alongside stellar academic performance the first year of law school, unlocks opportunities to command a mid-six-figure starting salary at globally recognized firms like Kirkland & Ellis, Skadden, and Cravath. The other draw of the T14 is their track record of judicial clerkship success. Perhaps the most sought-after accolades law students can earn, judicial clerkships with US Supreme Court justices and judges on other prestigious federal courts are a requirement for JDs who dream of climbing to federal judgeships or law school professorships themselves. Earning a clerkship is no easy feat. In 2022, only 3% of the 35,000+ JD grads in the US secured one, and of that 3%, 25% were Stanford JDs, 24% were Yale JDs, and 12% were Harvard JDs.

Acceptance Rate

The clerkship dominance of the T14 goes hand in hand with the difficulty of gaining acceptance to them. 2022 saw 60,000+ applicants vie for the roughly 4,400 fillable seats at T14s, all aiming to be within that elite 7% securing spots at Yale, Stanford, UChicago, Columbia, Harvard, UPenn, NYU, UVA, Berkeley, Michigan, Duke, Cornell, Northwestern, and Georgetown. Selectivity is even greater when considering Yale, Stanford, and Harvard in isolation, since candidates will need to stand out within that already impressive 7% of successful T14 applicants. In 2022, the competition curve at each was particularly steep:

Yale – received 4,129 applications for 197 seats
(4.7% accepted)

   Stanford – received 4,882 applications for 178 seats
(3.6% accepted)

   Harvard – received 8,170 applications for 559 seats
(6.8% accepted)

The long odds of admission at top schools have led many to zero-in on academic stats being critical for application success. “Law school applications are an LSAT and GPA numbers game–the higher the better.” If you haven’t heard this declaration yet from a current law school student, it may have been told to you by a family friend who practices law, or your university’s prelaw advisor. When we look at the T14 data-points highlighted in this article, the Fortuna team agrees, but with a caveat. While it is true that a top LSAT and strong GPA are necessities for consideration at the most prestigious law schools, another number ultimately matters even more: the scarce number of seats available at T14 schools.

Gaining Admissions

You might be wondering, “How do law school Admissions Committees decide who receives these coveted Yale, Stanford, and Harvard seats? How do they break ties between applicants with equally stellar GPAs and LSATs? The answer is compelling application narratives. At the end of the day, a competitive LSAT and GPA are need-to-haves, but strong and memorable Personal Statements, Diversity Statements, and glowing letters of recommendation are the key difference makers when 30-40 other applicants with equally strong LSATs and GPAs are also in the AdCom review pile vying for the same seat you are.

Former NYU prelaw advisor and Fortuna coach Scott Brownlee’s direct experience working with candidates reinforces this idea. “I’ve had clients with LSAT scores at the bottom of a T14 school accepted range,” he notes, “who gained admission by telling vulnerable, compelling Personal Statement stories about their “why” for law school that created separation between them and other candidates on the application bubble of acceptance / rejection. The best way to break statistical ties and gain a slight edge over other candidates is to tell an impactful story that makes your application difficult to place in the ‘no’ pile.”

Fortuna coach and former Kellogg JD/MBA admissions insider Jayne Mulcahy shares Scott’s view. “It’s easy to forget,” she emphasizes, “that the final arbiters for law school admissions are flesh-and-blood humans rather than algorithms–and a good, memorable story is going to stick with anyone who reads it and help make a case for acceptance that numbers alone simply cannot.”

If you’re interested in telling your story to AdComs as persuasively and thoughtfully as possible, schedule a free consultation with us, during which we will dive into your candidacy, look for narrative threads that can help your application rise from the slush, and ultimately secure that sought-after T14 seat you are vying for.