Are you using the wrong law school rankings?

If you’re a grad-level scientist relying on the US News Best Intellectual Property Law Programs rankings, you may well be.

Don’t confuse these IP rankings with the critically important US News Best Law Schools rankings. It’s quite honestly almost impossible to overstate the importance of those general rankings to law firms and lawyers in general. This is a commonly accepted truth that generates periodic gosh-oughtn’t-we-wise-up laments from the profession. (For instance, the ABA Journal in its July 2012 cover story The Pedigree Problem complained that “[t]his near obsession with pedigree is not only paralyzing to the career prospects of individual lawyers; it is damaging to the entire profession.” At this, lawyers nodded sympathetically before reverting to precisely what they were doing before, which was probably shredding resumes from graduates of modestly ranked schools.)

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