By far, the biggest group of law school applicants are those applying after a year or two in the workforce. Applicants use this time to beef up résumés, dive into work experience, make connections, and work on their LSAT scores. But does intentionally delaying your law school plans for a year after graduation make sense?
When Taking a Gap Year Doesn’t Make Sense
If you absolutely know you want to start practicing law sooner rather than later, and you already have a strong application—above median quants with killer internships and campus involvement or volunteer activities and compelling written statements—delaying law school may not make sense. For one thing, the cost of law schools tends to increase each year, so your overall expenditure on all three years will be more by waiting the extra time to start. You also won’t be receiving your lawyer’s salary upon graduation for an additional year. Life, of course, has a tendency to get in the way, and it’s easy for a planned gap year to extend itself into a longer period away from school connections, professors, and peers who are also on the law school path.
The Potential Benefits of a Gap Year before Law School
On the other hand, delaying for a year with good work experience (not hanging out on your parents’ sofa playing video games) will make your application a bit stronger—all other things being equal. Also, it will give you a chance to experience working full-time and gain skills that may translate to your first legal job.
You can work in a legal-related job to give you more insight into what being a lawyer is like, which may provide more material for your written statements and buttress your application’s “why law” argument. You could also use the year or two to work in something completely not law-related—things that might enhance your life for reasons not related to your law school applications (but which just might end up making you more interesting to admissions officers anyway).
All things considered equally, admissions statistics show a slight advantage for those who have taken a gap year over those who have not—but it is slight.
Should I Take a Gap Year to Ace the LSAT?
If you want a significantly higher LSAT score, it can sometimes take a year or more to get there, depending on where you start out. Extra time to study can make sense, but we strongly discourage you from taking a year off only to prepare for the LSAT and write your law school applications. Admissions officers frown on this since many applicants manage to be full-time students or full-time employees while studying for the LSAT. That’s not to say that taking a year to get a better score isn’t an overall advantage, but make sure you avoid an unnecessary gap on your résumé by getting a job, internship, or volunteer gig, even if it’s part-time.
A final note: different application cycles are different! Interest in attending law school fluctuates year by year, and so a following year’s cycle may be less—or perhaps much more—competitive than the current one.
That’s all for now! Next week, we’ll dive into an applicant we see a lot of in our admissions consulting service: the nontraditional student.