Justification for going after those deny/weak consider options

In my numbers set the ceiling post, I mentioned that I knew of a few comments by people in the know on how a graduate degree can help in the admissions process. Here is one of those comments. It's from an interview with Edward Tom, Dean of Admissions at Boalt (Cal-Berkeley) that is posted at TLS:

TLS: Boalt has a high percentage of students who already have a masters or Ph.D. Does a graduate degree increase an applicant’s chance of being accepted?

Dean Tom: “Having a graduate degree is a plus in the process. 18-20% of our students have at least a master’s degree. If you have a previous graduate degree, you should also send in those transcripts. Your graduate GPA is not factored into your undergraduate GPA, but it is definitely looked at.”

He says it helps. There is no mention of how much it helps, but it has the potential to help. (I recommend reading the entire interview. It is full of very useful information.)

There is a nice couple of pages in Montauk's book about credentials in the application process. He quotes deans from several schools who all say that a graduate degree or other soft factors can have a significant impact on how an application is evaluated. I'm not going to spend the money on the book, but I will try to get a few of the quotes written down so I can post them here.

Finally, if you watch the tutorial video for lawschoolpredictor.com on YouTube, they give a little guide for how to interpret the results of the accept, various consider, and deny results provided by the site. For deny, they say that you will likely be an auto-reject unless you have a compelling non-LSAT or non-GPA characteristic. Surely a PhD is a compelling characteristic (ie, soft factors) that would give what would be an auto-reject application a second look.

My brother is an illustration of the power of compelling soft factors. He is a rising 3L at BC. When I put his numbers into the law school predictor, BC was a deny. While my brother does not have a PhD, he does have a graduate degree and some interesting experiences (he spent quite a bit of time in Kenya). Those factors clearly worked in his favor during the admissions process. He's doing very well at BC. He's in the top 25% of his class, he's the Editor-in-Chief of a journal, and he's a summer associate at a top DC firm. This second look at people with some experience is justified.