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Cream of the Law School Crop by James Burnett and Sasha Issenberg
A gallery of students at schools that are leading suppliers of graduates to our top 20 law firms, shown with their pinstriped futures beckoning.
Harvard, Georgetown, and Columbia each sent more than 50 graduates to our top 20 law firms last year. NYU, the University of Michigan, the University of Pennsylvania, UCLA, Duke, the University of Chicago, and Northwestern also ranked among the nation’s leading suppliers. We present a gallery of current students at the schools, with their pinstriped futures beckoning.
Rat On A Hot Tin Roof NORTHWESTERN ROBERT HART, 31 Most highly selective law schools run their admissions processes like online matchmaking services, basing acceptance mostly on an applicant’s vital statistics and written personal statement. But Northwestern prefers to meet suitors face-to-face before inviting them on a three-year, $100,000-plus date. The school requires students applying straight out of college to sit for an interview, and strongly recommends that all other applicants do so as well. This system suited Rob Hart just fine—the Californian certainly had a unique story to tell.
Caption: After graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s in economics, Hart signed up for a Peace Corps mission to the Dominican Republic, where he spent his days working on soil conservation and his nights falling asleep to the sound of rats skittering across the tin roof of his primitive hut.
After graduating from the University of California at Santa Barbara with a bachelor’s in economics, Hart signed up for a Peace Corps mission to the Dominican Republic, where he spent his days working on soil conservation and his nights falling asleep to the sound of rats skittering across the tin roof of his primitive hut. From there, he landed a position auditing money managers and mutual funds in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Los Angeles field office. That’s when what he describes as a “vague notion” of wanting to go back to school crystallized into a desire to study both business and law. He was attracted to Northwestern, where the joint J.D./M.B.A. curriculum links law students to the university’s much-lauded Kellogg School of Management. Candidates for the joint degree—including Hart, who was co-chair of the school’s J.D./M.B.A. Association—are the only U.S. law students who can simultaneously earn an M.B.A. without spending an extra year in the classroom.
Hart looks forward to practicing corporate law when he graduates next spring. For his first taste of life at a white-shoe Wall Street shop, he is working at Cravath Swaine & Moore this summer. “Somebody described Cravath as having a vertical learning curve,” he says, “which appealed to me, masochist that I am.” But after his experiences in the Peace Corps, it’s doubtful that the pitter-patter of white shoes will cause him to lose much sleep. -J. B. Click on a link below for more stories on PCOL
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