Questions and Answers About Applying to Law School (Follow-ups to the 10 Tips to Succeed in Applying to Law School)

This document answers 9 specific questions I was asked about applying to law school.

1. What characteristics of an applicant make up for a lower than average LSAT score?

Hopefully, despite a lower than average LSAT score, the applicant has a high GPA. If so, you want to convince the school that the student they would be admitting is reflected more in the high grades than in the lower LSAT score. That can be done by strong recommendations from faculty members, participation in academic activities outside the classroom, and equally low standardized test scores on tests like the SAT and ACT and a history of outperforming those test scores in your academic performance. If a school has a specialty, an applicant with a strong interest and relevant experience in that specialty also may be able to overcome a weak LSAT.

2. What characteristics of an applicant make up for a lower than average GPA?

This question is the flip side of question 1 above. Both questions focus on applicants who have what are called disparate indicators, meaning the two numerical indicators, LSAT and GPA, are inconsistent. One indicates a student with more academic potential than the other. If you fall into this category, you have to convince law schools that the better of the two numerical indicators is the real you, the student they will be admitting, rather than the weaker of the two indicators. If it's your GPA which is low and your LSAT that is relatively high, you want to either emphasize areas where you have shown academic achievement or demonstrate that your situation has changed since college and you are now ready to devote yourself to law school and prove that you are capable of being an outstanding student. For example, if your grades were lower in the first two years, but improved considerably in your last two years, you want to focus the school's attention on the higher grades in the last two years. Perhaps there is an explanation for the difference. Maybe you had a personal circumstance, such as a need to work full time or significant family responsibilities, that made it difficult to focus on your classwork in the first two years. You would want to reinforce this message with letters of recommendation from professors from your later years in college who would be able to talk about your accomplishments as a student. If all of your college grades were low throughout your college career, you may have taken a few years off since graduating and had a responsible job during those years. In that case, a recommendation from your employer praising your work and your work ethic would be valuable. You might also consider taking a few courses to supplement your undergraduate record. You might then be able to obtain a letter of recommendation from a professor of one of the recent courses who could talk about your superior performance in the course. All of these methods are designed to reinforce the conclusion that you are likely to be a law student who will live up to the potential shown by your LSAT. At the law school where I taught the admissions committee was often willing to take a chance on students with disparate indicators if we were convinced that the better indicator was the more reliable indicator. I can think of numbers of students we enrolled in that category who were very high achieving law students who went on to very successful legal careers and it made the admissions committee feel good that we had given the student a chance to live up to their potential and it encouraged us to take the same chance with students in similar circumstances.     

3. What stands out most about an applicant’s personal statement?

First, it should be well written. A poorly written personal statement is a warning sign a student will have difficulty in law school. Second, the personal statement should focus on very specific things you have done that have developed your interest in law and not general statements like “I’ve always wanted to be a lawyer because I want to help people.” Third, the personal statement should communicate authenticity, speaking from the heart. Usually, if a student follows my second piece of advice about focusing on specific things the student has experienced, the authenticity requirement will be satisfied as well.
                                 
4. What kind of recommendations carry the most impact?

That’s an easy question for a faculty member to answer. My answer is a professor who has had you as a student one or more times. You want it to be someone who has had a real chance to evaluate your academic work and has had the opportunity to form a strong and positive impression of you. Ideally, it shouldn’t be someone who just gave you a high grade in a large class taught by lecture where the only thing the professor knows about you is the grade you got. The strong and positive impression could be because you contributed to class discussions or wrote a paper for the course that required several office visits to discuss the paper topic or because the professor was a faculty advisor to an extracurricular activity you participated in or any number of other reasons. The subject the professor taught you is less important, but in a best case scenario it should involve analytic thinking - a subject more like philosophy and less like a studio art class. When I was on the admissions committee at the law school where I taught, from my point of view, the most effective faculty recommendation letters were ones that made me conclude that the applicant was someone I would want to have in one of my classes.
   
5. How should an applicant decide which law schools to apply to? How can we determine “best fit”?

That’s a very difficult question because there are a lot of factors to consider. I think I would start by making some geographic decisions to narrow your choices. If you need to remain where you are living now for personal reasons, that factor right away constrains your choices. Some students specifically want to leave where they are now living. If so, would you prefer a city or a less urban campus? If you know where you want to practice law, that could influence your geographic choice as well. If you have the opportunity to attend a top tier law school with a strong national reputation, location is less important because employers everywhere will be interested in students who attend that law school. By contrast, if your choices are less highly ranked, less well known schools, students who attend such schools will have a better chance of getting a job they want in the state where they attend law school since the law school is likely much less well known the farther away it is from the place where you want to work.

Once you’ve made some geographic decisions, you can move on to other factors. I won’t rank the other factors since the ranking will vary from student to student. Some students have a strong idea about what kind of work they want to do as a lawyer and that could be a factor in decisionmaking. However, some areas of the law are ones where suitable preparation is provided by every law school. You can be a prosecutor or a defense attorney no matter where you go to school. You can practice law in various areas such as family law, trusts and estates, business law, and numbers of other general fields without going to a law school with a specialized program because every law school has a number of classes related to each of those subjects and faculty with expertise in those areas. By contrast, if you’re interested in a more specialized area of law such as international law, intellectual property law, education law, or immigration law, you should check to see if schools you are thinking of applying to have a number of courses in the specialty in their curriculum, faculty members with a strong interest in the area, or any special programs such as a clinic that allows students to help to represent clients in the field of law or a journal where students write articles about the area of the law.

Another obvious and important factor is how likely you are to be admitted based on your LSAT and GPA, but particularly your LSAT. You probably don’t want to only apply to schools where you have little or no chance of being admitted and you may not want to only apply to schools where your credentials are considerably higher than the school’s average credentials. That second group are schools where you will obviously be admitted, but many students are interested in learning what the "best" law school they can be admitted to is rather than only applying to safety schools.

Another important factor is financial. Some students need to find a school where the tuition is low or where they will receive a substantial scholarship to avoid borrowing large amounts of money to pay for their legal education. Law schools generally offer merit scholarships rather than scholarships based on financial need. Therefore, students with strong credentials may decide to attend a less prestigious school because they have received a substantial scholarship and forego the chance to go to a more prestigious school for financial reasons. If that is a choice you must make, be assured that there are opportunities to challenge yourself as well as distinguish yourself at every law school.     

6. What are common mistakes that students make on their applications?

This is a question that I can try to answer based on what I’ve observed as a member of the law school admissions committee. The mistake I saw most frequently was that students were not careful enough. That could take a number of different forms including not providing all the information a school requested or failing to carefully edit all written material submitted. I often reacted to other negatives in a student’s application, but I have no way of knowing if the student could have made better choices. For example, some students submit letters of recommendation that don’t improve their chances for admission. However, students don’t see those letters so they don’t know whether a letter is likely to help their chances. In addition, I don’t know whether a student had better choices of who to ask for a letter of recommendation and failed to ask that person or not. Another area where student applications are not always impressive is in the writing of personal statements. Many seem too generic and don’t tell the reader enough about the student. However, without knowing what choices of subjects to write about were available to the student, I can’t judge accurately whether the student made a mistake or not.

7. Your 10 Tips to Succeed in Applying to Law School were very helpful - is there any one tip that students often forget/disregard?

Beyond my answer to question 6 above, this is a question I haven’t had enough opportunity to observe to be able to answer. I don’t usually know whether students have followed my tips or not. When I was reading law school admissions files as a member of the law school admissions committee I didn’t know what other schools a student applied to, whether they had adequately researched those schools, whether they had spent enough time studying for the LSAT, and numbers of other tips on my list. Now that I’ve been teaching college students, I still don’t know how many of my tips my students have followed. I have a better idea with students who ask me to read and comment on a draft of their personal statement or their resume, but that doesn’t happen often enough for me to generalize from my experience. 

8. Should the diversity statement and personal statement have similar aspects/characteristics?

Since both of those statements are about you, they may well have a bit of overlap, but that should be kept to a minimum. Since you get the chance to write two different statements, you want to make the most of that opportunity. Let me give you an example. A student of mine came to the United States from Columbia seeking asylum. Going through the asylum process successfully was quite difficult, but it taught her about the U.S. legal system as well as gave her the chance to go to school in the United States and start a new life here. She used that experience in different ways in her two statements. In her personal statement she focused on how the experience made her want to attend law school and help other immigrants. In her diversity statement she talked about her cultural and racial background and the difficulties of moving to the United States and both retaining her identity while also learning to succeed in the U.S. and the ways she tried to do both of those things. The two statements were consistent, but the emphasis of each was different.

9. Your 10 Tips let us know that some law schools will allow students to submit GRE scores instead of LSAT scores. Do you think that's advisable?

First, accepting the GRE is a relatively new development for law schools. Therefore, exactly how the GRE is weighed is likely still a work in progress for many schools. Second, not all schools accept the GRE. In looking at the schools in or near NYC, the list of law schools accepting the GRE is as follows: Brooklyn, Cardozo, Columbia, Hofstra, NYU, Pace, and St. John’s. This list does not include CUNY, Fordham, and New York Law School. Overall, there are 200 law schools, but only 50 accept the GRE so relying on the GRE limits your law school choices substantially. The list of the 50 law schools currently accepting the GRE is available at https://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/accept/law/jd_programs/.

In terms of comparing the LSAT and the GRE, the GRE has a calculator called the GRE Comparison Tool for Law Schools that identifies your predicted LSAT score based on your score on the GRE.  It is available at https://www.ets.org/gre/institutions/admissions/interpretation_resources/law_comparison_tool/. The tool allows you to enter both your GRE verbal reasoning and quantitative reasoning scores in order to predict your LSAT score. According to the GRE, "the GRE Comparison Tool for Law Schools provides an LSAT score that is derived from the optimal statistical weighting of the separate GRE Verbal Reasoning and Quantitative Reasoning scores.” This means that the calculator does not count the verbal and quantitative scores equally in computing the likely LSAT score. I would imagine that the tool weights your score on verbal reasoning ability more than your score on quantitative reasoning in calculating your predicted LSAT score, but the GRE site does not say that specifically. The comparison tool does not use the percentage provided by the GRE to show you how you did compared to other GRE takers. The GRE website specifically rejects this method of comparing the two test scores in its explanation at https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_lsat_comparison_tool_faqs.pdf, and says:
    Percentiles represent how a test taker performed relative to other test takers who recently took the same test. The current test taker populations for the GRE General Test and LSAT exam are likely different in terms of background and ability, so the percentiles calculated for each test based on those different populations are not directly comparable. Additionally, reported percentiles for any test vary over time as the test taking population changes. Both GRE and LSAT scores are meant to be consistent across time and changes in test taking populations, so the most consistent and accurate comparisons are based on the statistical relationship between the reported scores, as provided by the Comparison Tool.
This comparison tool is useful if you’ve already taken the GRE and want some idea of how you’re likely to do on the LSAT. However, it isn’t clear it is useful in showing you how a law school will calculate the LSAT equivalent of your GRE score. That’s because it isn’t clear that law schools use this method of comparing the two scores, despite the fact that the GRE recommends it. While I couldn’t find a current description of the method used by law schools, I did find a blogpost on that subject from 2 years ago that interviewed law school admissions deans. It suggests that numbers of law schools were comparing percentiles even though the GRE site doesn’t recommend that method. Here’s the link: https://blog.spiveyconsulting.com/gre-vs-lsat-answers-from-the-deans/. I don’t know if things have changed at law schools now that they’ve had more experience with GRE scores, but it is a cautionary note about exactly how the GRE is being used. If you want to see the GRE percentile ranks for the parts of the GRE exam, that information is available at https://www.ets.org/s/gre/pdf/gre_guide_table1a.pdf.

A website called 7Sage that offers LSAT preparation has a discussion of the GRE vs. LSAT issue on its website at https://7sage.com/should-you-take-the-gre-instead-of-the-lsat/. My view is that in general, if you have no reason to take the GRE other than to apply to law school, I would recommend you take the LSAT instead. If you have already taken the GRE or plan to for graduate school applications, this presents a closer question. You should consider the law schools you want to apply to and whether they accept the GRE. If you’re satisfied with the schools on that list and you have a high GRE score in both verbal and quantitative reasoning, there is a good argument for using that score. On the other hand if you are not satisfied with your GRE score, you should at least consider the LSAT. However, you should know that if you take the LSAT, that score will be reported to the law schools you apply to whether you want it to be or not. Law schools don’t allow applicants to only send them a GRE score if they have taken the LSAT. Therefore, you can’t take both tests to see which test you do better on and only use the higher score if that is your GRE score.