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With help from
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by Charlton D. Rose
and David Chang

How & When to Apply

Starting Early -- the 3 R's

Most law schools don't have their applications ready until September or October. As a result, applicants put off preparing, and then find themselves suddenly behind schedule. But this need not happen. You can begin working on your personal statement in the summer before your senior year. Think about the important events in your life, as well as the ones you have to explain. Plan what you can say to make yourself stand out -- how to show your diversity.  

Focus on Your Writing Skills

While you're thinking about what to say, pay some attention to how you'll say it.  The easiest way to "waste" your opportunity to wow them with your essays is by having poor writing skills.  Boy, am I sick of telling people about their poor grammar.  Kids, your grammar sucks!   Instead of spending hundreds of hours reading the chat boards, how about learning how to write like a pre-computer-generation literate person?  You'll have to, to succeed in law school.  Better to learn now than after you get a "C" in legal writing.   Click here to see whether you're guilty of some of the things I'm sickest of.

In 2005, Michael Santana was beta-testing an online legal writing prep course, and kindly offered it to my clients for free.  Both of the clients who took it thought it was very helpful, and I noticed a marked improvement in their writing.  So if you aren't positive about when to use an apostrophe, or if you get lost in complex sentences, look up his course. 

Once you've given both the content and style of your personal statement some thought, you can begin working on the 3 R's -- résumé, recommendations, and requesting applications.  

Résumés

No matter what your résumé says right now, it will need revising. Law schools don't need to know the same things as an employer does.  Begin reviewing your résumé now.  Make sure to save it on more than one computer disk. Then if you add a job or an award before you apply, you can easily amend it whether you're at home, work, or school..

For hints on what admissions committees need to know about you, see our section on résumés.

Recommendations

You can begin deciding whom you'd like to write your recommendations as early as the spring of your junior year, and contacting the instructors as soon as you make your decision. In fact, asking instructors to write a recommendation shortly after you complete a course with them is an excellent idea. If you wait until later, the instructor's memory may be less sharp. Even worse, the teacher may be on sabbatical, an archeological dig, or have left your college. These people often enthusiastically agree to write your recommendation, but they're just too busy. And it's hard to gently pester a professor who's in Ethiopia.

For advice on who should write your recs and what they should say, hop over to our section on recommendations.

Getting the Recs to the Law Schools

Since 1998 there has been a recommendation forwarding service offered by LSDAS. You'll be able to get one copy of a rec and send it to Law Services. They'll send it to the law schools for you, along with your transcripts. In 2004, Law Services made this system much more sophisticated (and accordingly, much more confusing).  

The advantages of this service to you are:

• It increases "one-stop shopping." You'll be able to get your recs sent from the same source as your transcript, instead of having to negotiate a new office at your school as well.
• Lag times will be no more than that for transcripts unless the school requests that recs be sent later, so you'll hardly ever be told that a school is waiting for a rec.
• You'll save money over the school's rec service. The increase in LSDAS fees to cover this service is about $6 plus $2 per school. That's much cheaper than most schools' rec service fee.

The disadvantages to you are:

The only possible disadvantage is the complexity of the system, so I've tried to explain it to you.  Here goes:  

Researching Law Schools

In this wonderful Internet age, there is hardly a reason in the world to use paper apps.  Every school has a web page.  (Of course, if you're not part of this wonderful internet age, you might disagree, but then you wouldn't be reading this web page!)  But here's my solicited advice:  

You still want to request paper catalogs!

Why, you ask?  Because the online application often doesn't have info about personal statements, optional essays, resumes, etc., that you can only see by reading the instructions printed in the catalog.  Even the online instructions frequently differ from the paper ones.  So get the catalog!

You can request catalogs from the school's web page in a number of instances. In fact, we recommend this method.  Messages left on an answering machine often get lost or mistranscribed; the information you send over the computer is more likely to be entered directly into a data base.

How many catalogs should you get? As many as seem interesting to you from your reading or web-crawling.  In fact, that's a great way to begin requesting catalogs. Browse the law schools on the web through the links we've provided. When you get to an interesting site, ask for a catalog. If you proceed in this manner, be sure to keep some record of where you've been. Otherwise you run the risk of getting too haphazard and missing a great school.