Transferring to California

Email Question:

I'm a 1L at a mid-30's school outside of California. I really want to get back to California for personal reasons unrelated to school. I've seen a ton of information about transferring to highly ranked schools, T14, etc; but not much about transferring to lower ranked schools.

If I get the grades I'd love to transfer to the top schools in CA. But I'm willing to transfer to some lower ranked schools just to get back there. I've been thinking Loyola, Pepperdine, San Diego, Santa Clara, etc. might be good targets. What kind of class ranking do you think this might take? I assume I'd be good most places with a very high ranking. But what's the minimum I would need to make? top 30%? top 50%?

Any information you can provide would be great. I'm kind of interested in doing some work in a non-legal field as well, any details on that?


My Answer:

I’m going to try to institute a little more brevity in my upcoming posts. The one yesterday got a little out of hand. I shared the same problem as the questioner in that much information exists about transferring to Harvard and top 30 schools but not much about tier 2 or tier 3 schools. A lateral transfer (on paper) should be much easier than moving up in status. Doing very well at a mid-thirties school should put you at least in contention at some of the higher ranked schools.

The kicker comes from higher ranked schools in California. Almost everyone wants to transfer to California or NYC so it makes it a little more competitive. Loyola and Pepperdine were the two schools that I wanted and neither worked out but granted I was coming from a tier 4 school. I get the impression that Pepperdine thinks that they are the best school in the nation, and on average they’ve taken less than 10 transfers a year. Loyola takes over thirty and it usually seems that many of the people who get into Loyola also get into UCLA or USC. So it kind of screws over the people that really wanted Loyola and knew they didn’t have a chance at the higher ranked schools. Definitely go over to lsac, click on the school you want to transfer to, and go to ABA data. There they will have the number of transfers in and out of each school. It should give you an idea of how many people they usually take. Click on the link in the sidebar to take you there.

As far as the minimum you need to make, there’s really no good answer to that. I would venture to say that the two biggest factors in transfer are the prestige of the school you are coming from and your ranking in that school. The better you do the more your chances go up, but you are already ahead of the game by being in a mid thirties school to begin with. If those personal reasons that you need to be back in California are something that would seem to provide a legitimate need to an admission officer, I would definitely address them in your personal statement.

I’m going to do a post eventually on non-legal careers, but the best thing to remember for now is that you have to do the work yourself. Career service offices are bad enough with assisting to get legal jobs so you can only imagine their level of assistance at a non-legal job.