Negotiation Direction/Order

[capnobvious123]

So I’ve been doing my best to lurk and google and read up, but I wanted to float a question regarding negotiation strategies with multiple offers already on the table.

In my specific case, let’s say I’m working with something like the following:

School A
Rank ~12
90k scholly

School B
Rank ~15
100k scholly

School C
Rank ~20
145k scholly

School D
Rank ~25
135k scholly

Now most approaches that I’ve read about have talked about working up the ladder, starting with C and using D’s offers to leverage C to a new offer, and then moving forward to use C’s new offer to leverage B and so forth.

In this case, where all schools have already made offers, would it make sense to attempt to use all available offers to leverage D first, including school A’s offer? And then presumably work up the ladder, using all available offers including the new offer from D to leverage C, etc?

Or, alternatively, would I be better off first using A to leverage B, getting B to make a new offer, and then using B’s new offer to leverage C & D, and using the final new offers to leverage A?

[cavalier1138]

Without names, this is a pointless exercise. Is school A Berkeley or Cornell? What’s the point of obfuscating the name?

Different schools have different values in negotiations. If school C is WashU, then their offer is probably not a strong negotiating chip, because other schools know how much money they’ll throw at a high LSAT. But if school C is USC and school A is Berkeley, maybe that number carries more weight, since you’re in a position to reasonably say you’d go to another good CA school.

So short version: no idea unless you start naming institutions. Ranking is less important than the actual schools and their negotiation power relative to one another.

[capnobvious123]

@cavalier1138

Without names, this is a pointless exercise. Is school A Berkeley or Cornell? What’s the point of obfuscating the name?

Different schools have different values in negotiations. If school C is WashU, then their offer is probably not a strong negotiating chip, because other schools know how much money they’ll throw at a high LSAT. But if school C is USC and school A is Berkeley, maybe that number carries more weight, since you’re in a position to reasonably say you’d go to another good CA school.

So short version: no idea unless you start naming institutions. Ranking is less important than the actual schools and their negotiation power relative to one another.

Fair enough. By eliminating names, I was hoping to make this thread more helpful for people besides me.

In my case, the top school is Cornell, then UTexas, then Emory, then George Washington. I don’t suppose that Emory and GW really have much weight against even Texas, but I was just curious about whether it’d be better to try GW against Emory first, or Cornell against Texas then Texas against the bottom two.