What to Avoid in Your Law School Personal Statement
Your law school personal statement is one of the main places in the application that you get to directly talk to admissions and let them know who you are, and that is a space that you need to be taking advantage of.
We’re a few months away from the end of September. Generally speaking, you want to make sure you’re pressing submit on your applications sometime in the fall. We’re really getting to the place where if you haven’t started thinking about your essays, you need to start thinking about them.
As you start working on your personal statement, I want to give advice on some of the things that you should be avoiding in your personal statement to make this process easier for you. Let’s talk about it!
Would you rather listen to this blog post? Listen to our recent podcast episode, 3 Things to Avoid in Your Law School Personal Statement, on Spotify or whatever your favorite streaming service is.
Avoid Centering Your Trauma
The first thing that you should avoid in your personal statement is centering your trauma. This mistake is easy to make in your personal statement, because much of the advice out there looks like this: “Your law school personal statement should be about a challenging obstacle, how you overcame it, and how the qualities you have that helped you overcome it make you a good lawyer.”
I don’t know who started that trend, but I would be in favor of getting rid of that trend. Yes, that description can be helpful, but it may also completely miss the point of the personal statement.
Especially for minority and first-generation students, when we get the advice to talk about overcoming obstacles, it leads us to talking about something that is heavier than originally contemplated. It’s not to say that you can’t talk about something that’s heavy, but you don’t want that to be the entire statement.
A trauma, an obstacle, a hardship can be a part of your story, and you shouldn’t be afraid to tell your authentic story, but I want you move from that and tell me how you’ve made impact in that area. Talk to me about your strengths.
Personal statements should have at least three anecdotes or moments that show me who you are lead me to understanding the development of your passion for law school. In those two or three anecdotes, one of them can be a heavy trauma or obstacle, but that should be paired with not only something that happened to do, but something that you’ve done positively to make impact or change.
Oftentimes when we’re talking about trauma, we are in the receiving seat. We are not the actor. When you make it a page and a half, admissions is reading more about your life circumstances, but not about how you are already trying to effect change.
When you think about being a lawyer, you think about change-makers. There are so many different kinds of lawyers and ways to make change, and once of the best examples you can put in your personal statement is how you have tried to make change even before you became a lawyer.
I love to read essays where I can see that someone is go-getter, is in their community, is making an impact. I love seeing that this person is already making change, so I know that when I give them this law degree they’re going to continue to make change.
Take your experiences outside of yourself. Show me how you have been a change-maker and impacted other people positively. Law school should be the next level of bringing your influence in that sphere.
Vague & Unfocused Reasoning
There are a lot of you who are applying to law school and you really have no idea why. I am definitely of the mindset that your law school career is much more effective and efficient if you know why you’re going.
If you come in with a plan, you will know what you think you want to study. You will know what jobs you may want to look at and what courses you may be interested. That may change as you have new experiences in law school, but you’re coming in with that sense of direction.
What does this have to do with your applications? The people reading your application want to make sure that they’re going to have a good retention rate. They don’t want you to come to law school and realize it’s not what you want and leave. They want you to graduate and get a job.
When they read an essay and it is apparent that you either have no idea why you want to go to law school or you have listed seven different areas of law that you want to practice, I realize that you have not really thought about this. Maybe you think that you have, but you haven’t done enough research.
You need to research: What does it actually look like to be a lawyer? What is my life going to look like after graduation?
I ask people a lot what job they want the first one or two years out of law school, and so many people have no idea. Law school is not the destination, and for so many people it shows in their application that they think law school is the finish line. Law schools is the starting block, and I want to know where you expect this finish line to go.
It is different from undergrad, because most people end up changing their major or go to some type of graduate school anyways. But this is professional school, it’s not undergrad. You need to think about law school as the starting block and what that finish line is.
If you have several interests, it’s also important to try to find places that they intersect. Lots of time that is a really interesting space to be in. If you are interest in criminal law and intellectual property law, what are the ways that they intersect? What is interesting to you about the marriage of those two spaces?
It is still important to remember that you will not be a public defender and doing corporate IP litigation. You have to choose one of them, and realize you will probably be doing one of them for more than one year.
I know that it sounds like you have to be put in a box, but that is the reality of being in the legal field. There are some areas of law that you practice in a big law firm. There are some areas of law that you’re doing more direct services work at a government agency or a non-profit. All of these different types of law aren’t even housed in the same area.
It’s also important to realize that being a lawyer is an apprenticeship. When you graduate law school, you are not going to know how to practice law. It is an unpopular fact that law school doesn’t teach you a lot about practice, it teaches you the laws and the theory. You learn how to practice through clinics and practical experience.
A lot of times right out of law school, you’re not going to know how to go to law school. Which is fine! You’re going to spend a lot of time learning how to do a particular type of law, and it’s going to take a couple of years. Someone once told me it takes about five years to feel like you know what you’re doing in any kind of practice of law.
It’s so important that you understand that, because if you say you’re going to do seven kinds of different law in your application, that tells me that you have no idea how this works.
You need to start with that level of understanding. Do informational interviews, look at people’s job experiences on LinkedIn, do internships, shadow. Learning how to be a lawyers is watching and talking to people who are doing it.
When you’re applying to law school, they know you don’t really know. But if you can figure out one or two areas of law that you’re really passionate about, can connect with stories in your life, and you’ve already made impact in those areas, that will be a much more coherent and compelling story.
Avoid Not Having Focus
We are all about outlining here. There is a quote from Mathiew Le, Assistant Dean for Admissions at University of Texas at Austin School of Law that I love:
“Writing an essay with no outline is like getting in your car without an address or a final destination.”
Whenever you start writing, you want to have a plan. You need an outline that is going to help you connect your two to three anecdotes. You need to understand your transitions and how you’re getting from beginning to middle to end. It should feel really smooth.
Your writing quality is so important in your law school applications, and it is the thing that students often leave for last. Your essays need to be well-structured and have direction.
I can always tell when I look at an essay that has not been outline. An outline gives you that structure, and if you write an essay without one, it’s impossible to reverse engineer it. With a strong essay, I can make the outline in my head as I read it.
If you don’t have an outline and your essay is all over the place, I am confused, distracted, and annoyed. These aren’t the emotions you want admissions to have as they are reading your essay. You don’t want them to think that your essay is poorly written. That’s how you don’t get into law school.
Sometimes people who have high LSAT scores don’t think this matters, but it does. I know people with 180 or 179 but sloppy writing and don’t get in. Your LSAT score and GPA is not enough if your writing is poor.
Final Thoughts
To recap, the three things you want to avoid are:
Centering your trauma
Being directionless
Being unstructured
You want admissions to have only positive thoughts as they read your essay. If you’re distracting them by not focusing on your actions or with sloppy writing, you’re taking away from this amazing opportunity for them to get to know you as an applicant better.
The team at Barrier Breakers® Admissions Advising is here to support you through this law school application cycle! Whether it's through discounted advising for BIPOC, first-generation, and LSAC Fee Waiver applicants, our essay review services and courses, or just downloading our free Essential Guide to Applying to Law School, we're here to help make this process easier.
As always, feel free to reach out to us at hello@barrier-breakers.org with any of your questions! You can also submit a question to be answered on our weekly Break Into Law School® Podcast, streaming wherever your favorite podcast service is.