Who is Eligible?
In order to apply for a transfer to another law school, you must go through the same application process that you went through to initially apply to law school. There are some minor differences but for the most part the process is the same. For most schools, you can use the LSAC process and fill out the transfer application (which is very similar to the original law school application) online. You will require everything that you needed to apply to law school including a resume, a personal statement, letters of reference, transcripts and the completed application. You must also provide your LSAT score but the schools will not place much, if any, weight on it. The most significant factor that the schools will consider are your grades from your first year of law school. Like everything else, the higher the better.
While most schools will want a complete picture, some are only interested in your first year grades. For example, at New York University (NYU), the personal statement that they request is quite short and it does not have to talk about anything specific. Moreover, they do not require (or want) any letters of reference. To contrast, Harvard, Yale and Columbia all require a comprehensive application complete with letters of reference, a resume and two page personal statements.
How Do Schools Select Who They Want?
In order to transfer to a top school, you will need top grades. Harvard accepts around 25 transfer students a year and boasts that many transfer students could have been admitted if they applied there for their first year or are students that were waitlisted when they applied to Harvard in their first year. You may know, Harvard’s entering class has a GPA very close to an A average and a LSAT score in the top 2%. Yale only admits around 10 transfer students and the competition is very stiff. In fact, many of the transfer students that were admitted to Harvard the year I was accepted were not accepted as transfer students to Yale. (I did not apply to Yale so I will never know)
As a rough guide, you should be in the top 10% of your class if you are applying to a top school. This is by no means a cut-off and the number could change if you have some other compelling characteristics or you are transferring from a highly or lowly ranked school. The higher the ranking of your school, the lower your grades can be. For example, if you are transferring from Columbia to Harvard, you could likely get away with an A- average (top 30%). If you are transferring from Brooklyn Law School (ranked in the sixties), you will generally have to be in the top 5% of your class with other significant accomplishments.
In addition to top grades, most of the transfer students at Harvard had a second Masters or Doctoral degrees or some other significant accomplishment. Also, law schools will look at other symbols of excellence such as success in Journals or Moot Court Competitions. Moreover, work as a research or teaching assistant and participation in student groups during law school demonstrates that you can juggle classes along with other activities. All of these accomplishments will help your application but the main thing the admitting school will look at is good old high grades.
