Do Law School Grades Matter at IB firms?

If you want an associate gig, get rid of shitty formatting, check to make sure you don't have HTML peppered throughout your shit, and spell/grammar-check your work. Coming from law school, there is an expectation that you can at least write well, even though you suck at math (this may or may not be true, but it is the assumption).

Law school grades are not hugely important if you're at HYS, however you will be asked about them. Some banks care more than others.

Typically banks are looking for some clear story about why you are dropping a ton of cash on a degree you're never going to use. You should have answers prepped here. You should also demonstrate an interest in investment banking - get a sense of what it's about, reach out to the alums from your law school who work at the banks that will be at OCI/EIW/whatever you call it and grab coffees with them before you head into on-campus recruiting. As far as I know, the only banks that seriously recruit law school candidates are GS, CS, Barc, EVR, MoCo and LAZ. From folks in my law school class (I was a dual degree student and recruited through the MBA process) who went to banking, the interviews were definitely less technical, but you need to be able to convince people that you are reading up about markets, deals, and that you've done at least some preliminary work on your own to understand accounting, valuation and finance. My recommendation would be to buy Wall Street Prep and at least have a good command of the Basic questions for the Valuation, Accounting, DCF, Enterprise Value guides. If you can't figure out how to walk through the 3 statements by yourself, I am not going to bring you aboard just because you made the moot court team.

I would also take a strong look at restructuring advisory work if this is a route you want to go down. Lots of lawyers in that space.

For lawyers/law students jumping to investment banking, there are basically two big worries:

1) You are so technically useless that you cannot even teach yourself the basics. You need to dispel this.

2) You are a bookish academic type who cannot go out to a bar without getting into an argument with your friends about whether Chiarella was decided correctly. You need to dispel this as well.

Other than that, the fact that you go to HYS means that you have some type of raw intellectual horsepower that MBA recruits do not necessarily have going for them. That would assuage me on that end, but you still need to deal with the two concerns I identify above, and make clear that you can be a future leader in the investment banking group, despite not having done an analyst stint or gone to business school.

Associates are recruited not simply for their technical ability but for their ability to lead teams and manage up/down the chain. The learning curve is steeper than for analysts and having not touched a calculator in at least a year, you will be leading with your back foot. My honest advice to you is to interview with law firms this fall, pay down your debt after law school, and then go to business school, make the jump that way. Best to work in a practice group that matters for banking: M&A, securities, bank finance (if you're into leveraged finance), or bank regulatory if you want to do FIG work.

If you work at a good enough firm and do well on the GMAT, you will be a shoe-in at an MBA business schools ">M7 school. Even with your low grades, given that you are at HYS, unless you are totally socially incompetent you really should not end up at any firm lower than V30. And if you are not socially competent to do better than a V40 gig, concern #2 that I identify above applies and you're not getting a job at a "T10 investment bank" anyway.