Law school applications: Personal statements

After your LSAT and GPA, your personal statements is the most important part of each law school application. You should plan to spend a significant amount of time on it. While every personal statement is, by its nature, different, there are a few basic points to keep in mind as you write.

First, read the prompts carefully! Each school poses a somewhat different set of questions, and they are looking for essays that are responsive to their specific prompts. In Fall 2023, most law schools revised their prompts, and you may find you need to write different versions of your core statement for each school. Indeed, you may need to write entirely different personal statements for some schools.

Second, consider your audience. Admissions officials read every single personal statement they receive. At some schools, this literally means that one person is reading hundreds or thousands of essays; at others, the committees or admissions offices split up the stack. Either way, your statement is one of a very large number the reader will be reviewing, perhaps late into the night.

But here’s an important thing to know about admissions officials: they are the idealists in the process. They really do want to create an interesting and diverse incoming class. They know how much students learn from one another during the three years of law school, and deeply appreciate the value of having a range of different experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives in the law school mix. They also want people who will succeed in law school and beyond, thereby reflecting well on the law school.

Your grades and LSAT score provide one aspect of what you bring to the table. Admissions committee members are eager to round out their view of you with something more meaningful and three-dimensional.

And, like most people, they appreciate good writing.

Keep this picture of the admissions official in mind as you consider the following tips.

Develop a cohesive narrative for your statement

You don’t have to tell a story, but the essay should cohere—it should make sense, such that when the reader reaches the end, they feel that they understand a little of who you are and why you are heading to law school. Ask yourself a couple of key questions: What are the insights, perspectives, qualities, or background experiences that you are trying to convey to the admissions committee? What are the core life lessons that have shaped who you are today, and how do they connect you to your future legal career? And then answer those questions, in the context of the specific prompt.

Do not waste space trying to convince the committee that you really want to go to law school – the presence of your application in their stack is ample evidence of that desire. Do, however make the explicit connection between your theme and your reason(s) for applying.

Show, don’t tell

This basic principle of good writing is the most important one to follow in drafting your personal statement. Conclusory statements — like, “I’ve always been very hardworking” or “I have the ambition to excel” or “I really want to help people” — don’t really give a feel for who you are. Rather, show the reader an example of your hardworking nature – tell the story of how you single-handedly reorganized the stock room into an efficient operation at your otherwise boring summer job. Relate your experiences tutoring underprivileged middle school students. Describe what it was like training for the big game, meet, or event. Don’t just tell them, “I became committed to working in health care law when my grandmother was in the hospital.” Instead, describe your family’s experiences during that time. Let the reader see not just what you went through, but the insights or transformations the experience inspired in you.

One caution though: if you write about something that happened when you were a child, keep it brief, and balance it with a story about you as an adult. Don’t leave the reader with an image of you as a child — that’s not who’s applying to law school, and that’s not who they want to welcome into the legal profession.

Get feedback on early drafts

Don’t wait until your personal statement is polished and almost ready to submit before you show it to anyone else. Ask friends, family members, professors, or the Pre-Law Advisor to review an early draft to make sure you’re on the right track.

Prepare to write several drafts

Your personal statement is a crucial element of your law school application. It is worth spending a lot of time drafting, honing, and polishing.

Answer the question(s) asked

It can’t be repeated often enough: Each school asks a slightly different question or series of questions for their personal statement. Make sure you are answering the question(s) asked. This may mean making some fairly serious edits to your basic statement for each school.

Pay attention to grammar and spelling

One purpose of the personal statement is to gauge your writing skills. Bad grammar or misspellings will leap out at the attentive reader — and not in a positive way. This is another good reason to prepare multiple drafts and to have others review your work.

Make it legible

Do not get clever with your margins, font or line-spacing. Many law schools provide explicit instructions on their websites or on the LSAC application — read and follow these carefully! If the law school doesn’t provide specific instructions, use a basic, readable font in a normal size (12 is usually best, but many schools explicitly allow for 11). Even though most personal statements are read on screens these days, your readers will nonetheless expect one-inch margins and double-spaced lines. If you are going over the page limit, then you need to edit your work, not make your font smaller.

Proofread!

Look not just for the typos and spelling errors, but also for that bane of personal statements everywhere: the forgotten mention of School A in the statement for School B. This particular error can occur very easily if you are using and editing a boilerplate statement (which, see above, you want to be very cautious about doing in any case), and it very definitely irks admissions officers. Also, don’t forget that spell check will not catch everything: trial and trail are both spelled correctly, but mean very different things.

Common errors to avoid

Do not read other personal statements. This personal statement is about you, not about somebody else. Inevitably, reading other people’s personal statements makes you feel bad about what you’re not rather than good about what you are. It’s also a good way to lose track of your own voice. There is no single ideal personal statement, and the genuineness of your own story is one of the most important things you need to convey in this statement. Get those other people’s stories out of your head, or, better, don’t let them come into your head in the first place.

Do not use your personal statement to explain a negative GPA or other “bad” information unless it is your central theme (e.g., “flunking out of college was a turning point for me”). Use an addendum for explanations of this sort.

Do not write about how fascinating the law is or how you find it intellectually stimulating. Of course it is – the law school admissions committees already know that.

Avoid clichéd phrases and sentences like “Growing up, I….” or “I have always wanted to be a lawyer” or “My mom always said I’d make a great lawyer because I argue so much” or “Law school is the next logical step for me.”

Do not write a point-by-point essay on why you’d be a stellar law student or lawyer. That is really not what the admissions committee is looking for. Let your resume and the rest of your application speak to your accomplishments, making the case for your capacity to be a good student. The personal statement is for helping them understand what you’ll bring to the legal community apart from your potential for academic excellence.

Do not include meaningful quotations from famous philosophers (or anybody else). Not only is this a very tired ploy, it says nothing about you. And it uses up valuable real estate that could be filled with your own words about you.

Do not get too clever – good writing speaks for itself. You do not need to develop some quirky approach to get your statement read.

How can the Pre-Law Advising Office help?

Reviewing personal statements is the first priority for the Pre-Law Advising Office in the Fall. Feel free to make an appointment to brainstorm about your theme. Email or drop off a draft for comments. Seek out assistance early in the process—you don’t want to drop off what you think is a finished product only to hear that it’s way off base.

In addition to one-on-one assistance, the Pre-Law Advising Office offers workshops in the Fall on personal statements.

More about Statements, essays, resume, and addenda

See an overview of the entire application process

(Photo by Alexander Smolianitski is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)