Countdown Ranking Methodology

Our ranking of the top 20 law schools treats faculty quality, student quality, firm placement, and clerkship placement equally and averages them together to give you a sense of the overall quality of a particular school. We at lawschoolcountdown.com want to stress that no ranking is perfect, including our own, and we readily admit that our ranking omits any assessment of placement in the government and public interest sectors, among other shortfalls. Quite simply, we are working with data already available and believe that of that data, each of the four components we have included are of utmost importance in evaluating a particular school.

"Faculty Quality" reflects University of Chicago Professor Brian Leiter's Scholarly Impact studies (based on faculty citations).

"Student Quality" reflects the methodology used in Brian Leiter's Student (Numerical) Quality ranking by averaging the 75th and 25th percentile LSAT scores for the most recent entering class, with class sizes serving as a tie-breaker (larger classes receiving priority, since they have a greater number of high scoring students) and GPA affecting the result only if an otherwise similarly sized and performing school has a GPA of 0.1 or more higher than its peer(s).

"Firm Placement" is an average of the National Law Journal's annual ranking of schools which place the highest percentage of graduates at the country's largest 250 firms and Brian Leiter's ranking of schools from which the most "prestigious" firms (according to Vault) hire new associates.

Finally, "Clerkship Placement" reflects Brian Leiter's ranking of schools by the number of clerks they place on the Supreme Court. We would have preferred to use a ranking of schools by federal clerkships at every level, but we could find no accurate and complete list.