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    Wisconsin Lawyer
    June 01, 2001

    Wisconsin Lawyer June 2001: Employers Look Beyond Top 25 Percent

    Employers Look Beyond top 25 Percent

    "Send me your top 25 percent" is a request law schools often hear from employers hiring new graduates, points out Howard Eisenberg, dean at Marquette University Law School. It's not only that employers seek the top students, but "I think there's a perception," Eisenberg says, "that people in the lower half of the class shouldn't practice law, that they're incompetent. That is flatly wrong. Maybe for some in the profession that was true when they were in law school. If that ever was the case, it's not true now."

    To understand that argument, you have to look at the qualifications of the students entering law school today. The difference between the top and bottom of the incoming students at Marquette, for example, is slight, Eisenberg says, "and the difference between the middle of the class and the top quarter is virtually nothing."

    Still, legal employers receiving a flood of applications from new lawyers have to rely on some sort of criteria to narrow the candidate field. Law school academic performance is one valid bit of information to use. But employers should avoid focusing solely on high GPAs, law school administrators advise. That may seem a paradoxical suggestion coming from people who themselves use grades and LSAT scores to screen law school applicants. But administrators say that's not all they use.

    "We try to look at those things buried in the files," says Alta Charo, U.W. Law School faculty member and admissions committee chair. "We look for that spark - the ones who write personal statements that talk about their passion, not just why they deserve to go to law school. It's that kind of fire and engagement in the world that comes through, or some special skill or talent that you just know is going to fit well."

    With that approach, law schools say they try to recruit people who show potential for both law school and the profession. "If hiring employers say, 'Send us only your top 10 percent or 25 percent by grades,'" Charo points out, "they're cutting themselves off from what they know in their hearts to be the criteria by which they actually evaluate and retain their own lawyers every day."


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