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: 1) How many transfers does a school typically enroll? 2) Is your GPA realistic for that school? 3) Does that school typically enroll students from schools like the one you’re transferring out of? and 4) Does that school offer the job opportunity or path that you’re looking for?

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

a) 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).

b) 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.

c) 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.

Looking for help with your transfer applications? See our services.