Should You Transfer Law Schools?

Transferring after your 1L year is a big, complex, nerve-wracking decision. It can also be a great move. So the first questions you should ask yourself are: What do you hope to get out of it, and will transferring really help you get it?

For some students, this is straightforward. They have an urgent personal reason for pursuing a transfer—maybe a parent is ill and they need to be close to home. If that’s you, you probably already know where you hope to end up, and you can skip to the section of this post about how to build a transfer application. Most students, however, are motivated by more nebulous professional considerations. They want access to better jobs, or a certain kind of job, or a job in a certain place.

Under what circumstances might transferring be the right strategic move? In an extreme case, transferring from a T-50 school to a T-6 school (and doing well at that T-6 school!) is going to open lots and lots of doors. (Read more about building a transfer school list). But sometimes rank isn’t the primary consideration, and students may decide to transfer in order to maximize their employment opportunities in certain practice areas or legal markets. In those cases, it might make sense to transfer to a peer school or even a slightly lower-ranked school.

Getting a job depends on much more than the name of the law school on your résumé, however. Let’s consider the biggest issue: if you transfer after your 1L year, you’ll be an outsider in a community of students who have already formed, dissolved, and then reformed study groups, shared outlines, celebrated after exams, been shredded by their moot court experience, and endured the trial of their first year together. You’ll have to establish new connections and prove yourself to professors and program directors.

This isn’t just a social problem. Your peers will become the foundation of your professional network, and faculty and administrators can be indispensable resources when it comes to networking, securing interviews, getting a coveted placement in a clinic, or making an introduction that leads to a job opportunity.

There are other challenges. Some schools may offer limited funding to transfer students, while others may even expect you to pay sticker price. You might also be sacrificing a merit scholarship and assuming a much larger debt burden. You may also be coming from a school where you were one of the strongest, most active law students and transferring to a more competitive school where it will be harder to succeed and stand out. If you transfer to a higher-ranked school and your GPA collapses, those professional opportunities aren’t going to materialize.

How to Build a Transfer School List

A degree from a T-14 school is not a prerequisite for a good job and a happy life. Changing your environment doesn't necessarily mean you'll like your new one better. Still, if you’ve carefully considered the challenges ahead and you’re certain that a transfer is the right move, let’s talk about how to build a transfer list.

While schools do have different priorities for their regular JD pool from year to year, there is more variance in the transfer process. A given law school may take no transfer students one year because the most recent incoming class was unusually large, but the same law school may see a number of 1L students withdraw or drop out the next year, which means they’ll need to fill those vacated seats with transfer students. Another law school may decide to admit transfer students as a revenue source because it’s gone over budget on scholarships. You can’t predict what factors may affect your application in a given year, so you should avoid putting all your eggs in one basket.

As you consider which schools to target, it’s best to start with your desired career outcomes and work backwards. What do you want to do, and where do you want to do it? Which schools provide a clear path to those opportunities? For students who want to maximize their chances at a selective position like a federal clerkship, an academic job, or a job in Big Law at a top firm, attending a highly ranked law school makes sense. For students who know where they want to be long-term, local schools that feed into that particular market might be a great choice.

But you don’t need to guess which schools might help you get where you want to go. The American Bar Association (ABA) requires schools to disclose a great deal of information each year, and you can find those disclosures here. What’s especially helpful is that every school’s reports are formatted in the same way. Instead of hunting for certain stats on each school’s website, you can pull up the forms and immediately find the stats you’re looking for.

The 509 reports contain admissions and enrollment information for any ABA school going back to the 2011 academic year, and schools have to report data for transfers. If they enroll 12+ transfer students, they have to give GPA quartiles, and if they enroll between 6 and 11 transfers, they have to give a GPA median. (They don’t have to report anything if they enroll 5 or fewer transfers, but in that case your chances of admissions are low no matter what your GPA is.) Schools that enroll 6 or more transfer students also have to report the law schools the transfers came from.

Often, law schools will post their ABA 509 reports to their websites on the same page that features relevant employment data reported to the National Association of Legal Professionals (NALP). NALP reports give detailed breakdowns of where a school’s graduates end up 10 months out from graduation. You can see whether they’re employed or not, what industries employed graduates work in, the categories of jobs they’ve taken on, the types of salaries they earn, the regions they’re located in, etc.

Spend some time with these reports! You can use them to answer some important questions:

  • How many transfers does a school typically enroll?
  • Is your GPA realistic for that school?
  • Does that school typically enroll students from schools like the one you’re transferring out of?
  • Does that school offer the job opportunity or path that you’re looking for?

Let’s consider some big differences between three top schools:

  • Georgetown enrolled 120 transfers in the 2022 academic year. The median GPA was a 3.69 and a plurality of the incoming students came from DC-area schools (American, Baltimore, Catholic, George Mason, George Washington, Howard, and Maryland).
  • Harvard enrolled 50 transfers. The median GPA was a 3.95 and a majority came from T-30 law schools. Only nine came from other Boston law schools.
  • Per their ABA reports, UVA hasn’t enrolled any transfer students in several years.

Based on this data, it looks like a lot of DC-area law students target Georgetown. You can also tell that even though UVA places lots of graduates in the DC market, Georgetown is a far better bet for a transfer—UVA probably isn’t worth applying to at all. Harvard, by contrast, is more focused on the ranking of the 1L school and GPA.

The ABA disclosures and NALP reports also enable you to see clear distinctions in employment outcomes. You can see how many graduates end up in Big Law, how many in public interest, how many in government service, and so on. True to its reputation, for example, Columbia places a larger number of graduates in Big Law than NYU does, while NYU places more students in public interest positions than Columbia does.

Once you have a sense of which schools to target, check out the websites and look for information about the transfer process. You may want to look for answers to questions like these:

  1. Do they allow incoming transfers to participate in On-Campus Interviews (OCI) during their 2L year?
  2. Can incoming transfers be part of the journal write-on competition?
  3. How are transfers integrated into the 2L class? Is there a transfer liaison as part of the Student Bar Association or Student Government?
  4. Are transfer students eligible for scholarships?
  5. Are transfer students included within class rankings once enrolled?

No doubt you’ll have questions that relate to your own individual interests. If you can’t find the information you’re looking for online, reach out to the admissions office and ask. An earnest, polite, credible inquiry might be an opportunity to make a connection with someone in the office.

And finally, be especially mindful of preferred dates and deadlines. Some schools open their transfer apps in February, while others wait until April or even May. This will vary more than the incoming 1L process. And remember that schools will need your complete 1L grades before they can consider your application.

How to Build a Transfer Application

If you’re applying as a transfer applicant, then you’ve already been through the law school application process once. What fun: you get to do it again. Transfer applications are different from regular JD applications in a few key ways, though.

Your grades

During the regular admissions process, undergraduate GPAs and LSAT scores are useful (in principle, at least) because they are reasonably accurate predictors of a student’s ability to succeed in law school. 1L grades, however, are actual evidence of academic success. Since the LSAT scores and undergraduate GPAs of transfer students don’t factor into a school’s rankings, your 1L GPA is the single most important metric, and a strong GPA is essential if your application is going to receive serious consideration. The best thing you can do now to improve your odds of transferring is work as hard as you can in your 1L classes.

Letters of Recommendation

Academic LORs matter more in transfer applications as well. Your 1L professors can speak directly to your engagement with your law school community, your performance in class, and the likelihood that you’ll pass the bar and get a job. They can also speak to your sense of humor, your integrity, your kindness, your flexibility, your leadership, and how you collaborate with your peers—they can reassure admissions officers that you’ll be able to transition easily and smoothly when you arrive at your transfer school. You should do everything you can to cultivate good relationships with them. Visit them during their office hours, impress them with your wit and charm, do your work on time and do it well, and be a good community member. Make sure you speak with your recommender about why you want to transfer and what you hope to find at your transfer school.

Important note: Some law schools have policies restricting faculty members from writing LORs for students intending to transfer out. If you attend a school with such a policy, it is imperative that you reach out to the law schools on your transfer list to ask whether they will allow LOR exceptions. You may need to have your dean of students write a letter confirming such a policy exists.

Your résumé

While the thought may be chilling, given how busy you are with coursework, you should pursue some law-related activity during your 1L year so you can add something to your résumé. Maybe that’s a club, a school-based legal advocacy group, or a student bar association. You could also shoot for a legal internship/externship during your winter break. Admissions officers want to see that you have been actively engaged in your professional growth, not just trying to get through all the readings and survive the cold calls in class. This may also provide another opportunity to secure another letter of recommendation.

How you spend your 1L summer

By the same token, one of the best ways to distinguish yourself in a competitive transfer pool is to secure strong employment for your 1L summer—for example, a 1L summer associate position with a Big Law firm. These types of jobs are hard to get, and because Big Law will interview candidates on the basis of first-semester grades and you need to begin applying for them as early as November of your 1L year, securing one of these jobs demonstrates planning, initiative, and strong academic performance. Strong paid internships, externships clerking for judges, and jobs with high-profile legal non-profits or government agencies may also be regarded favorably. A summer clerk position at a small firm or a volunteer position won’t be considered as high-value from an admissions perspective.

The personal statement

Your transfer school wants to know that you have well-considered reasons for transferring and a full understanding of what transferring means. You should write a new personal statement that articulates your ambitions in clear-headed, unambiguous terms. If a school doesn’t give you a more specific prompt, consider addressing the following:

  • Your first-year experiences.
  • The factors that made you pick your original law school that you now see were not right for you.
  • Your motivations for seeking a different environment for your legal education.
  • Why you think the target school would be better for you personally and professionally. (Like those Why essays during the regular admissions process, these need to be sharp and specific! Do your research!)
  • What you would have to offer your new law school community.
  • Your short- and long-term professional goals.

In sum, you need to explain to admissions officers how you came to the decision to apply for transfer to their school, and anything that’s irrelevant to that story should be left out. Many topics that might have been appropriate during the regular JD admissions process will not be appropriate for a transfer application. Maybe you worked as a journalist and covered Formula 1 racing. Great! That’s a fascinating subject for a personal essay. But if it’s not immediately and obviously relevant to your legal ambitions, leave it out.

Thinking about transferring but feeling stuck? Our team of law school admissions experts have helped people transfer law schools for all kinds of reasons—from wanting to go to a higher-ranked school to needing to move closer to family. Set up a free consult to learn more about our transfer consulting services.