The Best Way to Choose a Law School? Carefully.

Law school is booming again. Applicants surged nearly 20% in the last full admissions cycle—the largest pool in more than a decade—and this cycle opened hotter still. The drivers, this time, appear to be a churning political environment pushing in the idealists, a soft entry-level job market pushing in the pragmatists, and a big law pay scale—now starting first-year associates at $235,000—pulling in everyone else. Whatever the cause, the effect is familiar: thousands of bright people tempted to attend law school—any law school—at any price. They should resist that temptation. Every applicant needs a financial plan, lest they wake up one day under a crushing mountain of debt with little memory of why they took it on.

And law school debt is rarely the kind you repay quickly or easily. In the American Bar Association’s most recent survey of young lawyers, conducted with AccessLex Institute in 2024, the median respondent who borrowed for law school owed $112,500 for the degree alone—$137,500 once undergraduate loans were counted—and 85% borrowed to finance their education. Where I live, in Cleveland, $137,500 buys a perfectly nice single-family home. More troubling still, a 2021 Wall Street Journal analysis of Education Department data covering roughly 200 law programs found only a dozen schools whose graduates, two years out, earned more per year than they had borrowed. And the terms of the game just got harsher: as of July 2026, Congress has eliminated Grad PLUS loans and capped federal borrowing for professional students at $200,000—a ceiling that, at the 39% of law schools where median borrowing already tops $150,000, will push many students toward private lenders at whatever rate the market will bear. Against that backdrop, you could be forgiven for concluding that law school and solvency are incompatible. They are not. But reconciling them takes deliberate effort, and it starts earlier than most applicants think.

Prelaw students who treat law school, above all, as a financial investment can minimize their debt well before they fall asleep reading Pennoyer v. Neff for the first time. (If that reference went over your head, consider yourself lucky…for now.) The single most consequential act of debt minimization is the choice of school itself. There are countless ways to choose a law school, and each has its merits. Mine borrows from Benjamin Graham: apply a margin of safety.

 A Margin of Safety

In his foundational works on investing, Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, Graham taught that the gap between the price you pay for a stock and the value you receive in return—judged by the business’s future earnings power—should be wide. With a wide gap, you can be wrong without being ruined. Seth Klarman, an influential Graham devotee and founder of the investment firm The Baupost Group, notes that a sound margin of safety “allow[s] for human error, bad luck, or extreme volatility in a complex, unpredictable and rapidly changing world.” Graham’s most famous student, Warren Buffett, puts it more vividly: “When you build a bridge, you insist it can carry 30,000 pounds, but you only drive 10,000-pound trucks across it.”

In law school terms, driving the 10,000-pound truck over the 30,000-pound bridge means attending the least expensive school at which you would be reasonably happy with the job you could get after graduating in the bottom half of your class. Find that school, and you have tilted the odds of financial success in your favor before 1L orientation begins.

This approach, plus some luck, let me attend Ohio State for free. In my years at law firms afterward, I built a financial foundation for myself rather than digging out from under loans. Law school and firm life were stressful enough on their own terms; without debt, I felt like I was playing with house money. The real pressure—not the pressure to bill hours, but the pressure to repay a quarter of a million dollars compounding at eight or nine percent while also trying to save—never existed for me. I want more people to know that feeling.

The Long Odds, Itemized

Two facts make financial caution essential for anyone applying. First, it is hard to know in advance whether you will be good at law school—three years that can feel, at times, less like an education than a hazing conducted in Latin. Second, even if you are good at it, a job may not be waiting when you finish. And a third fact lurks behind the second: even if you land the lucrative large-firm job that repays loans fastest, nothing guarantees you will like it, be good at it, or last in it. Each of these can materially reduce the earning power your degree was supposed to buy.

Will You Be Good at Law School? Nobody Knows, Including You

On paper, I should have been good at law school. Ohio State awarded me the Michael E. Moritz Merit Scholarship—the school’s highest award for incoming students, and one of only four in my class of roughly 200. I had strong undergraduate grades from Northwestern and an LSAT score well above Ohio State’s 75th percentile. My first-semester grades placed me solidly in the bottom 20% of my class, producing sleepless nights and a crisis of confidence. The second semester was not much better. Perhaps I should have seen it coming: at 1L orientation I was assigned locker number 666—in retrospect, a clear foreshadowing of the beastly year ahead.

I found the Socratic Method opaque and frustrating. I kept waiting for professors to deliver the “punch line” that explained the law. But in the Socratic Method, that is not the professor’s job. It was my job, I realized belatedly, to weave together concepts that often read like a foreign language in the casebook—in a setting, it is worth noting, where faculty are rewarded far more handsomely for publishing than for teaching. Nothing in my political science and history education had prepared me for it.

The low grades stung because I had not wandered into law school. As an undergraduate, I enjoyed multiple constitutional law courses and researched for a prominent Northwestern Law professor, and after college I spent nearly two years as a paralegal at the U.S. Department of Justice. I was not there out of indecision about what to do with my life. I wanted to be in law school, and to succeed there.

I assumed I was an anomaly—the guy who got the full ride and squandered it. Then I learned that other Moritz scholars, in my class and in prior years, had stumbled the same way. Many, to be sure, excelled from their first semester and went on to top international firms and federal appellate clerkships. But others struggled with the instructional approach just as I did. That performance could vary so widely—even among students the faculty had anointed as stars before they enrolled—shocked me.

Eventually I rallied: law review, cum laude, a federal clerkship, a major firm. All’s well that ends well, I suppose, but the recovery took every ounce of intelligence and grit I could muster, and my 2L and 3L years were one long slog of catching up. I should also note that latching onto a firm after law school, as I did, is atypical. Firms fill their incoming associate classes almost entirely from their 2L summer programs, and summer offers are awarded almost entirely on first-year grades. The window to impress the highest-paying employers, in other words, is very narrow—and it closes at the end of the very year you may spend, as I did, still learning how the game is played.

If disaster could strike me at a school I was, on paper, extremely well qualified to attend, it could strike anyone. Think pessimistically—90% of your class will not graduate in the top 10%—and entertain the worst case before you choose.

Surviving Law School Is Only the First Step

Suppose you perform well. Jobs can still be scarce; I know Order of the Coif graduates (the top 10% of a law school class) from top-50 schools who struggled to find work. And suppose you land the lucrative firm job. Even then, three things can cut your loan-repaying years short.

First, you may not like it. As a student, you might relish pondering legal questions that interest you intellectually; you might even enjoy being tested on them. Those same questions are rarely as interesting at a firm, and less so still at 1:00 AM, under intense time pressure, after a week of four-hour nights. And what’s more, “interesting questions” are the exception, not the rule—a fact you will learn all too well by about the third time you draft an officer’s certificate.

Second, you may not be good at it—a fate that carries no shame in a large firm and can befall very smart, hardworking people for countless reasons. Perhaps your heart is not in the work; perhaps the practice group you chose turned out to be the wrong one. And even if you think you are doing fine, a senior lawyer may have other ideas, delivered in an unexpectedly lukewarm performance review. Between reviews, feedback at law firms is notoriously scant and cryptic even when you seek it out. Unless you are a superstar—and, as a rule, far more associates are average than are superstars—it is hard to know exactly where you stand in the partners’ eyes.

Finally, you may not last for reasons that have nothing to do with the work itself. Burnout and the family strain of long firm hours are all too real; law firms’ attrition rates speak louder on this point than I ever could.

Your loans, in short, can easily outlive your law firm tenure. Banking on a five- or six-year firm career to retire a large debt is not prudent. Time is not on your side.

Putting the Rule to Work

So how does the rule work in practice? Even before the scholarship arrived, I favored Ohio State because the degree held real value in the bottom-half scenario. I care about government, politics, and policy in Ohio, my home state, and jobs in those fields are generally not rationed by class rank the way firm jobs are. I was reasonably confident, therefore, that I could find meaningful and interesting—if not immediately lucrative—work no matter where I finished. (For what it is worth, I suspect the more public-spirited and less financial your reasons for attending law school, the happier you will be with your choice—assuming you are not buried under unrepayable loans. But I digress.) I also knew I would be happy living in Cleveland or Columbus, where most Ohio State graduates land. So, I entered law school confident, even in an uncertain job market, because I had done everything I could to limit the downside.

Walking Away from the Table

What if there is no such school among your acceptances—no option offering a decent bottom-half job at a debt you could comfortably repay? Then treat the admissions process as your first important legal negotiation, and do not fear walking away from the table.

No one is making you go to law school; the decision is entirely yours. If you do not like your financial options, end the negotiation and return later as a stronger candidate. As Buffett likes to say of investing, there are no called strikes; the same is true of law school admissions. Within reason, you can stand at the plate as long as you like, waiting for your pitch.

Waiting for mine was the most important thing I did. The first time I applied, I was an average candidate who would have received very little merit aid anywhere—certainly not a full scholarship. After a few years of working, saving, raising my LSAT score, and accumulating better experience, I was a scholarship-caliber candidate. You might be too, if you are patient and aim at the right schools.

Caution Is the Only Appropriate Posture

For the right person, law school and law firm life can be deeply fulfilling. Both are also almost always full of stressful, frustrating stretches, and extreme debt makes each of them worse. A wide margin of safety in your school choice keeps the debt low—and leaves you a decent landing even if school goes badly, which, to my lingering chagrin, is neither rare nor hard to do.

My method is cautious, to be sure. But caution should be the order of the day when you are signing for $200,000 in loans and forgoing three years of income to enter a profession you may know only from the outside. So as visions of Atticus Finch, Gandhi, Jerry Springer, or whoever inspired you dance through your head, save a thought for Benjamin Graham. At the start of a legal career, a margin of safety is your most important asset.