Transferring after your 1L year is a big, complex, nerve-wracking decision. It can also be a great move. So the first questions you should ask yourself are: What do you hope to get out of it, and will transferring really help you get it?

For some students, this is straightforward. They have an urgent personal reason for pursuing a transfer—maybe a parent is ill and they need to be close to home. If that’s you, you probably already know where you hope to end up, and you can skip to the [transfer applications] lesson. Most students, however, are motivated by more nebulous professional considerations. They want access to better jobs, or a certain kind of job, or a job in a certain place.

Under what circumstances might transferring be the right strategic move? In an extreme case, transferring from a T-50 school to a T-6 school (and doing well at that T-6 school!) is going to open lots and lots of doors. But sometimes rank isn’t the primary consideration, and students may decide to transfer in order to maximize their employment opportunities in certain practice areas or legal markets. In those cases, it might make sense to transfer to a peer school or even a slightly lower-ranked school.

Getting a job depends on much more than the name of the law school on your résumé, however. Let’s consider the biggest issue: if you transfer after your 1L year, you’ll be an outsider in a community of students who have already formed, dissolved, and then reformed study groups, shared outlines, celebrated after exams, been shredded by their moot court experience, and endured the trial of their first year together. You’ll have to establish new connections and prove yourself to professors and program directors. This isn’t just a social problem. Your peers will become the foundation of your professional network, and faculty and administrators can be indispensable resources when it comes to networking, securing interviews, getting a coveted placement in a clinic, or making an introduction that leads to a job opportunity.

There are other challenges. Some schools may offer limited funding to transfer students, while others may even expect you to pay sticker price. You might also be sacrificing a merit scholarship and assuming a much larger debt burden. You may also be coming from a school where you were one of the strongest, most active law students and transferring to a more competitive school where it will be harder to succeed and stand out. If you transfer to a higher-ranked school and your GPA collapses, those professional opportunities aren’t going to materialize.

A degree from a T-14 school is not a prerequisite for a good job and a happy life. Still, if you’ve carefully considered the challenges ahead and you’re certain that a transfer is the right move, let’s talk about how to build a transfer list.

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