Interesting, one of the top tier schools in my area has a little trick: they give you a ring. The idea being you wear the ring to interviews, so that they know you're from the school. Of course, if they looked at your application form they would know your school, but for other areas where they cannot ask for your school this gets around that. I personally find that very elitest but people will go to lengths to make their reputation known (they ban wearing school uniforms, but rings are exempt for example_

In reality, there's no good path to a career in the law that doesn't go through a small subset of the big law schools, because there's a huge glut of lawyers. A starting point for looking into this is the Google search "third tier toilet".

The thing that unlocks legal professions from the grip of $200k law schools is going to be something that reimagines the role of a lawyer, creating a new kind of legal professional that makes radically less money than a BigLaw lawyer.