Regarding taking a few years off between school, that's very normal and will not disadvantage you at all. The average age of my 1L class was 27, so clearly a very large number of people were getting the degree long after graduation. In professional life, I have never seen any preference for attorneys based on age. If anything, being younger probably hurts you more than being older.
Regarding less-prominent law schools, like St. Mary's, location is a very big factor to consider. State and local law firms and corporations tend to be biased towards hiring 'local' graduates. So, even if a school isn't a top tier school, it can still give you good employment opportunities within the local job market. The key is to make sure that is a job market that is both healthy and one in which you want to work on graduation. If a school is not well-known outside of its state or local community, it will be hard to get a job with a degree from that school elsewhere in the country. So, if you want to increase your odds of being able to be hired anywhere in the country immediately after graduation, you should try to go to a school that is well-known on a national level. However, if you're perfectly happy working in San Antonio, a place like St. Mary's is perfectly fine even if it's lower ranked. Keep in mind as well that where you graduate from law school becomes far less important after you've gotten some legal experience under your belt. Once you've been employed for a while, future employers only care about your work experience. Your old law school is pretty much irrelevant to getting a job at that point, unless you happened to go to someplace like Harvard or Stanford.
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