After you have completed one year of law school, you will be eligible to transfer to another law school. If you transfer after your first year, you will get the degree from the new law school that you go to instead of your old school. If you transfer after your second year, you will get the degree from the school that you went to for the first two years. I attended Brooklyn Law School for my first year and then transferred to Harvard Law School. As such, I received a law degree from Harvard Law School that did not indicate that I went to Brooklyn Law School for my first year.
There are two primary reasons for transferring. First, people transfer because they have a personal change in their lives such as a spouse that gets relocated to a different city. The second reason that students transfer is to “upgrade” schools. This upgrade is done because a law school’s ranking is very important and students will often try to move from a second, third or fourth tier school to a first tier school. (or move from top tier school to an even “better” top tier school) For your reference, here are the school rankings. www.top-law-schools.com/rankings. Moving from tier 2 to tier 1 was what I did when I moved from a school with a rank in the mid sixties to Harvard Law School, ranked number 2.
Many students attempt to transfer to a top school and this can generally be a smart move as a top school will afford you more opportunity. This is especially the case in this competitive job market where many lawyers cannot find a job. There are some downsides however to transferring and these will be discussed in a subsequent post. A move is especially advantageous if you upgrade to a top 5 school from a second tier school or make a significant jump in rankings (greater than 35 points). For those of you in third or fourth tier schools, transfer is something to consider but generally speaking it is very difficult to transfer to a top 5 school. When I transferred to Harvard, of the 25 or so students that transferred there, there were only two or three other students that went to second tier schools (all others went to first tier schools) and none came from third or fourth tier schools. The next blog post will deal a bit more with how much of a jump you should make to make a transfer worth your while.
