(Reuters) - Lawyers tend to care a lot about where other lawyers went to law school. Decades later, it's still not uncommon for members of the bar to ask each other where they earned their JDs.

Sure, it can be a way to make connections and find mutual acquaintances. But it can also be used to take someone's measure – and to justify denying opportunities to those with lesser credentials.

"Oh, you went to Harvard Law School?" You must be a formidable practitioner who belongs at a white shoe firm.

"Oh, you went to (insert name of "third-tier toilet" school)?"

Sniff.

Except President Joe Biden went to a third-tier law school – Syracuse University School of Law, currently ranked No. 111 by U.S. News and World Report. He still managed to make something of himself.

True, Biden didn't have much of career as a lawyer. He earned his law degree in 1968, graduating 76th in a class of 85. He worked briefly as a public defender, and then launched his own firm, Biden & Walsh, in Wilmington.

By 1970, he'd won a seat on the New Castle County Council, and was elected to the U.S. Senate in 1972. So much for practicing law.

Still, given Biden's less-than-stellar legal pedigree, I have to wonder: Might he have actually faced fewer barriers to becoming president of the United States than getting hired by an elite law firm?

As for Kamala Harris, she graduated in 1989 from University of California Hastings College of the Law, a tier-two school. She was a serious and successful lawyer before entering politics, working first as a local prosecutor in Oakland, California, then district attorney of San Francisco and ultimately as attorney general of California. Now she's the highest-ranking woman ever to be elected in the U.S. government.

Both Biden and Harris stand as powerful examples of why law school prestige is a flawed proxy for evaluating someone's talent or potential.

As the legal profession continues to struggle with diversity, especially in the Big Law ranks, it's a good reminder. According to a June 2020 report published by the American Bar Foundation, Black students and Hispanic students are disproportionately enrolled in lower-ranked schools – ones that Big Law firms may not deem worthy of recruiting from.

Earlier this month, I moderated a panel discussion on diversity at the Reuters Next virtual forum that included Microsoft general counsel Dev Stahlkopf, who zeroed in on the law school fixation.

Lawyers tend to "focus on pedigree and network and things like that in a way that other professions might not," she said. "Where you went to law school is critically important. I still today, more than 20 years in the profession, get asked that question. 'Where did you go to law school? When did you graduate? Did you know so-and-so?'"

Such questions "play into the structure we create as a business model," Stahlkopf said, influencing how "work is assigned (and) clients chose lawyers they're working with, reinforcing the status quo."

William Henderson, a professor at Indiana University Maurer School of Law, agrees.

Henderson, whose research centers on the empirical analysis of the legal profession, told me that law firm partners tend to "spin a theory to themselves about why they should stick to pedigree" in hiring and mentoring associates, even if doing so comes at the expense of diversity.

As Henderson wrote in a 2016 article for the National Association for Law Placement, "these academic filters tend to have a negative impact on the ability of law firms to recruit more diverse entry-level candidates. Yet, a more fundamental question is whether heavy reliance on academic proxies truly produces a better candidate pool."

His answer? No.

Henderson noted that to become a licensed lawyer, someone must typically obtain a four-year college degree, do well enough on the LSAT to get into an accredited law school, graduate from law school and pass a bar exam. Compared with the general population, lawyers – all of them, not just the T14 graduates – are an intelligent bunch.

But he found that within the lawyer population, "marginal gradations on a handful of academic measures" such as law school ranking and GPA don't reliably predict someone's potential to become a superstar. Other factors, like motivation, the quantity and quality of work assignments, training and mentoring are also key.

"The proportion of law school graduates with the requisite aptitude to become high-performing partners is probably larger than most law firm partners would tend to believe," Henderson wrote. "Reducing a firm's reliance on academic proxies will increase the number of candidates who could be considered for hiring, which in turn expands the number of diverse applicants who might be eligible for an interview."

NALP in its 2020 diversity best practices guide urges all firms to cast a wider net in recruiting and to add predominantly minority law schools to their recruitment programs.

According to NALP's most recent diversity report, law firms remain overwhelmingly white. Just 4.76% associates are Black, 5.17% are Latinx and 12.17% are Asian. At the partner level, the numbers are even more minuscule, with 1.97% of law firm equity partners who are Black, 2.52% Latinx and 3.89% Asian.

But there may be an opportunity on the horizon for change. As my Reuters colleague Rick Linsk reported earlier this month, law schools in the U.S. are reporting an unprecedented surge of applications for the fall 2021 cycle, and students of color are fueling the spike. Black applicants, for example, are up 39% compared with last year.

Let's hope law firms will finally drop their excuses and embrace what stands to be an expanded pool of diverse candidates from law schools of all ranks. And in the process, let's flush the term "third-tier toilet."