Scholarship:

UVA (15K),
UChicago (10k plus educational loan available),
CLS (none)

Main areas of interest: m&a, capital markets, private equity funds, corporations.

Desired area of work: private practice (with a strong international approach).

Options: better CLS next year (if deferral granted) or UChicago/ UVA now and way cheaper.

Any ideas?

if you can wait for next year, make a deferal. by next year, you have more experience and may eventually get more funding. and the competition for all these ll.m. progams won't be that fierce as it is this year due to the economic recovery.

The different between Columbia and Chicago is not that great. Chicago is an alma mater for finance and PE (Eugene Fama, Miller, Milton Freedman). I am a PE person, by the way. Do not waste your year and go to Chicago. Do not bother with UVA

if you can wait for next year, make a deferal. by next year, you have more experience and may eventually get more funding. and the competition for all these ll.m. progams won't be that fierce as it is this year due to the economic recovery.

you should go to chicago. 10k plus educational loan is an excellent offer.

you should go to chicago. 10k plus educational loan is an excellent offer.

One thing you should be aware of - Chicago is well known for being the most quantitative school in the USA (well, maybe MIT or Caltech), even for law - very numbers oriented. Of course, I am talking about corporate finance law, tax law, PE and bankruptcy law classes...Hence, if you are not into reading balance sheets and financial projections and pouring over tax structuring diagrams maybe this is not the choice for you despite we are talking about LLM not MBA. In UVA and, perhaps, Columbia it might be easier for you to get better grades...

thank you for an interesting comment, I have actually checked this with a friend of mine pursuing currently LLM degree at Chicago and he claims the same and states that in CLS you can get better grades. To be honest, I dont really like numbers, but Chicago cuts some tuition and the city is so cheaper, so maybe it would be good to save some money and just travel around US and/or be comfortable with living costs during NY bar review exam preparation.

Hi Spylog
Would like to dissapoint you...you will not have much time for travelling if you are doing finance law courses in Chicago, you WILL BE pouring over B/S and P/L. For the best travel opportunities you should go to...sorry to say..Yale, Harvard, Stan etc. That's why PE firms and IB banks love Chicago LLMs and MBAs. The view is: give these guys jobs and they will do them, they know how. Harvard and Yale is more about pure prestige and connections but do not expect these guys to do much work :-) Columbia is somewhere in the middle...hence, prepare for the grunt year...

Hey,

I am surprised to hear that University of Chicago is very finance oriented. There website states that they do not offer a specialized LL.M so that I did not expect them to be strong in a certain field in regard to law.

I am going to apply for 2011/12 and I am first of all looking for a good program in regard to finance & m&a. I am not looking for lots of traveling time but for good quality studies. I was thinking of Columbia as my best option but reading this post I am unsure this assumption was correct. Any recommendations?

Hi, here is what's going on the finance side
1. Chicago, the best university for finance and economics
(Corporate finance, M @ A, PE)
2. UPen (because of Wharton, but mostly strategic finance/consulting)
3. Columbia (IB and M @ A again)
4. MIT (mostly new media oriented or real estate)
5. Harvard (strategy)
6. Stanford (similar to MIT)
7. Michigan (accounting, financial reporting)

Chicago produced the largest number of Nobel price winners in Finance. Your capital asset pricing models, derivative valuation models etc were created in Chicago (with some input from Columbia and MIT).
The best way to check, go to MBA ranking and then zoom into the best unis for finance, not the general ones, otherwise you get Northwestern with Kellog, which is great for marketing but not much as far as finance is concerned.
Why check MBA ranking? Because teaching is multi-disciplinerary and you will share teachers with your MBA friends. Obviously in MBA programmes they will teach a bit more pure finance and a bit less pure law, in LLM case the situation will be reversed.
Hope this helps

full ack.