Your head is spinning. Your palms are sweaty. Something is tingling—that weird part of your brain that you’ve dedicated to practicing diagramming and daydreaming about your 1L year.
You’re applying to law school—but where to begin?
We’ll start with the basics.
Plan Your Law School Admissions Timeline
First, plan your general attack. You might be a few months out from hitting submit on those applications, or, if you’re exceptionally organized, a few years out. Whichever the case, work backwards from when you hope to apply. Take a look at our handy suggested timeline to help you plan. How much time do you have to devote to LSAT prep, if you haven’t taken it yet? A year? Six months? Three months? Register for a test that fits your own ideal timeline, and be sure to account for the possibility that you might want to take it a second (or third) time to lock down a score that feels like it best reflects your abilities.
In addition to LSAT prep, how much time do you have to devote to your written materials? This calculation will likely be a little more loosey-goosey: some people knock out a personal statement draft in a day, go through a few revisions, and then land on their perfect draft within a week or so. More often, though, the drafting process unfolds over a few weeks or even across the span of several months. The same calculus applies for your diversity statement. You’ll find that supplemental materials, like addenda and school-specific essays, come together more quickly—but don’t forget to budget in time for them, too!
All in all, it’s probably not a great idea to dive in on your written materials at the last minute: they can take a surprising amount of time to draft and revise. A good rule of thumb tends to be three weeks as a bare minimum. Why? Because writing succinctly takes time. Although your personal statement will be less than a thousand words and your diversity statement about half that, you should expect to sweat for each one of them. You also want to give yourself time away from the drafting process to let the draft breathe or to allow a trusted reader to give you feedback.
Once you’ve got a sense of when you need to study for the LSAT and when you need to turn towards writing and revising, make yourself a schedule with set deadlines. If you want to get your apps in by Thanksgiving, for instance, you’ll ideally be done with the LSAT by September and drafting those essays by October at the latest. Procrastination is, of course, a tempting approach, but you’ll thank yourself when it comes time to hit submit on those apps and you’re ready to rumble.
And, of course, life can always get in the way. We’ve seen plenty of successful candidates taking (or retaking) the LSAT well into the cycle or even postponing their applications another year. They still make it to law school, and you will too!
Give Your Recommenders Time to Write Your Letters of Recommendation
Another important consideration is the letters of recommendation. In particular, you will want to make sure your recommendation letters are prepared and sent in time to be considered. This means reaching out to your recommenders as soon as possible. Professors and internship supervisors are busy and may need multiple rounds of reminders. Give them a deadline well in advance of when you’ll actually need your letter. You don’t want to be waiting on something outside of your control!
Clean Up Your Online Presence for Law School
We get it: that photo of you from freshman year of college climbing up the side of a building in a panda suit is a tough one to lose. Ditto the Facebook status update about getting wrecked at the concert last night. Or the hit Tweet (or whatever they’re calling it now) about how much you hate your neighbor’s stinky cooking. But it’s time to come clean: before you even begin to think about sending out your applications, take a moment to look through your social media with a critical eye and do some scrubbing. This isn’t about erasing your unique personality or sterilizing your internet presence: it’s about ensuring that nothing associated with you online risks counting you out of a spot at your dream school.
Make your accounts private or delete anything you wouldn’t want an admissions committee passing judgment upon. Use a professional-looking headshot for each profile. And, of course, take some time to update and polish your LinkedIn profile.
Get a Professional Email Address—That’s Not a .edu
Do you have a wacky email address, like corndoglover666@demonslayer.com? Make yourself a simple first name / last name email address and use it for all admissions-related correspondence, including your application forms and at the top of your résumé. We also recommend against emails with any extraneous words or phrases that aren’t your name, even if your first and last name are in there. We’ve seen a lot of “lovejanedoe” or “xxjanedoexx” or even “janedoedolphin,” all of which aren’t quite as professional as just simply using your first and last name.
And finally, we recommend not using your undergraduate email, which may disappear after you graduate and leave you at risk of missing summer correspondence from law schools, including potential waitlist emails.
That’s it for this installment of Inside Admissions! Next time, we’ll consider the three kinds of law school applicants: those who have taken a gap year or two, those who are returning after a long time away from school, and those applying straight from undergrad.