One way applying to law school differs from applying to undergrad is that many law schools often admit students on a rolling basis. Schools with a rolling admissions process evaluate applications as they come in rather than waiting for a hard deadline before reviewing applications.
Not every law school has rolling admissions, but those that do tend to offer applicants the opportunity for one distinct advantage: students who submit applications earlier often receive a response earlier. This gives you more time to negotiate financial aid and choose between schools. It can even give you an edge in the admissions process by applying to schools when their incoming classes are full of open spots rather than already mostly filled.
So you’ve figured out that you should apply early, but what does that mean? What about the various components that comprise your complete application? At what point in the year should you begin working on each? What’s the best way to maximize the time you have available while still managing to submit your completed application early on in the application cycle?
Having a clear plan is the best way to avoid sending panicked emails to your recommenders, making midnight rewrites to your personal statement, or squeezing in just one more LSAT attempt before the buzzer. To this end, we created an ideal law school application timeline that will keep you on track while keeping your schedule manageable.
If you decide you do want to go to law school, then you need a plan. The timeline of this plan will depend principally on its endpoint: when you want to begin law school.
You can apply for law school before the cycle you plan to attend (e.g., you can apply in December 2024 or January 2025 but plan to start law school later than August 2025). While this is possible, it is also true that unless the law school has a specific program for deferrals, they likely prefer that applicants apply during the cycle just before their anticipated matriculation year. If you feel very strongly that applying with a plan to defer is very important to your plans, then it is certainly an option, but if you are unsure about whether you want to (1) apply now and defer or (2) apply later and continue straight through, we suggest the latter.
Law schools like to plan out their 1L classes altogether when possible, and there’s less uncertainty when you start soon after applying. Some schools (for instance, Harvard) have specific programs for deferring; for these, there’s less likely to be any issue with it. However, for most schools, we don’t suggest you defer unless you feel very strongly that it is necessary.
Say you plan to start Law school in August of 2025. This means you plan to apply in the 2024–2025 admissions cycle. Working backward, you’ll want to submit your applications, if possible, by the end of October 2024. This is considered early for submission and is the best option if you can manage it.
On the other hand, submitting your applications near the end of December would likely be “on time.” Submitting your applications after January 1, 2025, would be considered somewhat late but would by no means equal a death sentence.
While submitting your applications earlier is ideal, you should not sacrifice quality for timing.
If you have the time to prepare and are planning to submit your application by October 31, then you will need:
We created the timeline that follows to apply by October 31. If you want to give yourself more of a buffer (or aim to submit your application by October 15 or even September 30), feel free to bump up the timeline by two to four weeks as applicable. The important thing is to keep a manageable, effective pace throughout.
Before the application cycle is even in sight, there are a few things that are good to keep in mind.
Many law schools indeed allow you to take the GRE instead of the LSAT for admissions. However, this is somewhat risky. The GRE has not been around long enough in law school admissions for anyone to have a good sense of how it matches up with the LSAT in terms of admissions effectiveness. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to think that law schools are at least more comfortable with the LSAT than the GRE. The LSAT is specifically designed around the thinking skills that law schools require and has been shown to correlate well with 1L performance. The GRE is newer to the law school space and has less specific research relating it to law school outcomes. For these reasons, it is advisable to take the GRE only if you have reason to believe that you would perform markedly better on it than on the LSAT. To understand roughly how LSAT and GRE scores compare, you can find a GRE-LSAT conversion table here and here.
There’s no real last month to remain competitive—applying early is a marginal, not absolute, benefit. It’s a benefit in competitiveness, but also a benefit in stress and bargaining. If you apply early, that is an advantage in getting into a school, but just as important is the advantage of not running up against a hard deadline and having more time to research schools and bargain with them for more aid.
There are three factors to consider about LSAT timing. The first is that you can use an LSAT score to apply immediately after taking it. The second is that it takes about four weeks to get a score back after your LSAT. The third is your score progression. Your practice LSAT scores will likely increase before plateauing in a specific range. You might have a few more points to eke out, but the most important thing is gaining consistency. Once you have a consistent score band, you can confidently take an official LSAT.
We suggest applying by the end of October. This means you need to take your LSAT by the end of October to use it. However, to see your score before applying with it, you would need to take your LSAT by the end of September. In addition, because your scores will never be entirely consistent, it is often good to give yourself a second chance in case your first LSAT score is lower than you are comfortable with. So, taking your first LSAT in August is advisable, if possible.
While this is ideal, what is most important is getting the best score possible. Law school applications are on time if you apply by December 31, 2024 (which would imply a November LSAT or an October one if possible). You are still competitive in applying after then, but competition will be stiffer, and it will be more likely that your application will have to be above average for the law school to consider it.
It’s advisable to give yourself at least three months between starting to study for the LSAT and taking your first official test. A thorough test prep plan will likely include at least 250 total hours of preparation. There is no way around learning the LSAT: it’s its own test, and buying practice books, using tutor services, and doing the problems and practice tests required is the only way to be fully prepared for the test. The LSAT is unlike the MCAT or SAT in that there is no quantitative or scientific section that requires you to know specific theorems or pieces of information. Instead, the LSAT tests your logical reasoning and reading comprehension skills.
There aren’t any college courses that prepare you for the LSAT specifically (or law school generally). Although, if you are dead set on trying to prepare for law school admissions in undergrad, don’t take classes on law or legal studies (at least not for that reason specifically), but rather a symbolic logic class. This will prepare you more for the LSAT than other commonly taught undergraduate courses. The basic rules of logical argumentation and implication are the core of the LSAT (and much of legal thinking). Internalizing them fully before even beginning to prepare for the LSAT will give you something of a head start in your LSAT prep.
Finally, any prospective law school applicant should know that historically, the LSAT has had three different section types: Logical Reasoning, Logic Games, and Reading Comprehension. Beginning in August 2024, Logic Games will no longer be a section of the LSAT and will be replaced by another Logical Reasoning section. Depending on your specific skills and preferences, you may be able to use this information to decide for yourself whether you would like to take the test with or without a Logic Games section.
There technically are, but none are expected. You could read about the law, but law schools expect to teach you the law. The mild benefit of a couple of months’ head start is not worth the risk of increasing your academic burden unnecessarily or even getting exhausted early into law school because you didn’t take advantage of a break when you needed one. If you are just raring to go and need to think about some law right now, go for it! But know you’ll be satisfying a personal interest, not gaining a leg up on your classmates.
Figuring out which law schools to apply to is very important. The first year of law school (1L) is generally pretty regular across schools. However, beyond 1L, law schools’ opportunities, resources, and particularities vary wildly. There are a couple of very easy filtering mechanisms to start with. First is your application strength. It will be somewhat difficult to know early on where you stack up regarding raw numbers since you haven’t taken your LSAT yet. However, once you have seen your section scores and have taken a few practice tests, you can get a sense of what band of scores you will likely end up in. If a school you want to go to is somewhat of a reach for your LSAT/GPA mix, you can definitely apply! However, if it is very important to you to begin law school at the end of the application cycle you are applying in, it’s good to have a mix of schools that you are more and less likely to get into.
The second major filter is location. Even more so than in applying to undergrad, it is important to go to law school with a basic idea of how the law school you’re going to connects to the sort of job you want as a lawyer. Only the top 15 or so ranked law schools have truly national reach, where a degree from that law school is pretty similar to getting you a job in any state or city in the US. Once you start getting outside the top 20 or 30 ranked law schools, their influence and relationships with law firms become much more regionalized. This does not mean they are not a good deal! However, if you want to work in entertainment law in New York City, a degree from Stanford Law School will likely be able to give you a connection with at least some firms in the area. Meanwhile, even though Loyola Marymount University has a very respectable entertainment law program, its connections and reputation are much more concentrated in the southern California area. The region becomes a much more important consideration here.
Beyond application strength and location, deciding which law schools to apply to means learning about the specific strengths and focuses of their academics, culture, and networks.
There are three types of resources that you can use to learn about law schools: third-party aggregation, first-party websites, and in-person experience.
Third-party aggregation websites like US News and Above the Law rankings can give a (very rough) shorthand for the relative quality of many law schools. Above the Law takes US News’s data and strips out all the ‘input’ data (e.g., LSAT and GPA medians of incoming classes) to focus merely on the ‘outputs’ of the schools — their occupational placements, bar passage rates, and so on. This is meant to make the ranking more specifically about where a school can take you, not what kind of students a school admits. If you are trying to find out which school is the best rather than which has the best students, then this is at least somewhat less confounded than the alternative. Princeton Review has more granular data and top rankings for specific qualities, such as how easy it is to get a federal clerkship from a school or how good the professors are. These aggregation websites can be good for getting a list of schools that fit the basic characteristics you’re looking for: Are they in the right region? Do they have a specific clinic or specialty you are particularly interested in? How much aid do they give? Once you have that rough list, though, you should look for more granular information to choose between them.
The first-party websites of law schools have specific information on the clubs, clinics, courses, and faculty that a school has. They are also great ways to find out more about how law schools see themselves and what they choose to emphasize. Law schools will all try to make themselves seem as impressive as possible, but you can learn about what the school focuses on by seeing what courses, faculty, clinics, and sectors get the scarce area on their website. No law school will say that their law school culture is bad, but some will emphasize cooperation while others emphasize rigor. You aren’t going to find out whether a law school is better or worse than another by looking at their websites, but you will be able to see how they are different — and that is often just as important.
The most honest and specific information you can find is face-to-face, in-person interaction with the law school, its students, or its faculty. Sitting in on classes and talking with students provide the most particular information, where law schools don’t have the ability, and students don’t have an incentive, to sand the edges off of life at that law school. However, this is also the most costly (both in terms of time and money) type of information, so it’s best to try to get as much information as you can before deciding that a school is worth the trip.
An addendum is a place to explain any circumstance which deeply affected a part of your application, but is not itself reflected in your application. An addendum should be matter-of-fact and sound like an explanation, not an excuse. There should be (1) a part of your application which you feel is unrepresentative of your actual quality as a student, (2) a story explaining why it is unrepresentative, and (3) a reason why such a situation will not derail your academic career again. In some cases this third addendum component is self-explanatory and it is not necessary to spell it out yourself. Nonetheless, it still might be good to explain how you have grown since the time in question.
An addendum should be an explanation, not an excuse. It should explain why a part of your application does not reflect your underlying abilities as a student—fundamentally, the key is (3), which will show a law school that who they will be admitting is not the student who did the part of your application the addendum is for, but rather the student who did the rest of your application.
The answer to this question varies between law schools. Some law schools have their own, special prompts, like Harvard’s Purpose and Perspective prompts. Most law schools, however, give you fairly free reign on your personal statement (though they may ask for additional written essays which are more specific). However, under this heading of a general personal statement, there are still distinctions. Some law schools will want you to just tell them something interesting about you, and may even prefer that it not include references to law and law school, while other schools want to hear more specifically about your interest in law. This changes school to school, so the only way to find out what schools you like are which is to look for how they explain the personal statement and what they ask for specifically on their website.
