While there will always be firms that consider themselves elite because they only hire people from Harvard or Yale, there are a growing number of students, clients and private practice lawyers who do not consider those firms elite but rather elitist. The Law Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for legal professionals, students, and others with experience or interest in law. Gurley is a divorce and family law attorney who has been representing clients in San Francisco and the Bay Area for more than 20 years. There are few doors that a Harvard law degree doesn't open for you, even the oval office.
We know that every Fortune 500 general counsel who hires us cares so much about their company that they are willing to take a chance on an unnamed law firm that is aggressive and that may be the best possible option for that company to win the case or close the deal. They have been forced to compete against their peers to rank at the top of their law and university classes. The premise of the TV show Suits is based on a New York law firm so elitist that it only hires graduates of Harvard Law School and rejects all other applications. Keep in mind that while there is a movement to recognize indirect discrimination (where non-discriminatory policies have unequal effects on protected groups), there are safe havens for discrimination out of necessity, such as following other laws or regulations.
News and World Report law school rankings, although the magazine doesn't officially rank schools on “levels. For major law firms to attract the brightest students, they must also demonstrate that in recent years all candidates received job offers. This model appeals to most motivated law students, but especially lower to middle class students who are not going to let anything stand in the way of achieving financial success. All students enrolled at Harvard Law School receive an implied grant from the School's endowment and the annual donations that generous benefactors make to the School of Law.
For example, BigLaw firms such as Wachtell or Cravath hire *almost* exclusively Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and some law graduates from Columbia and New York University, and some investment banks and other financial firms hire only at Harvard, Wharton, and Princeton (or any combination of the three). In a blog post published this week in The Huffington Post, Adam Leitman, attorney and founding partner of the Adam Leitman Bailey real estate law firm, P.