Law school letters of recommendation: how CAS handles them, and who to ask

Letters are the part of the application you do not write and cannot revise, which makes the mechanics worth getting right the first time. The good news is that the system is built so your recommenders only have to do the work once.

How the mechanics work

So the default is one general letter per recommender, designated to your whole list. A school-specific letter is only worth asking for when there is something genuinely school-specific to say — your recommender taught there, or knows the clinic you are applying for by name.

The step people miss is the assignment. A letter that has arrived at LSAC but has not been assigned to a school does not travel with that school's report. Uploaded is not sent.

How many, and from whom

Academic letters carry the most weight for applicants who are recently out of school, because law school is school and the question a committee is answering is whether you will do the reading and hold your own in a seminar. A professor who taught you in a small class and can describe your actual work beats a famous professor who cannot.

If you have been working for several years, a supervisor who can speak to judgment, writing and reliability is a legitimate and often stronger choice. What does not work at any stage is a letter from someone impressive who barely knows you.

Making the letter good

• Ask early — six to eight weeks before you need it, and earlier if you are asking near the end of a term.
• Ask in person or on a call where you can, and make it easy to decline. A lukewarm letter from someone who felt cornered is worse than no letter from that person.
• Send a packet: your resume, your transcript, the papers or projects you did for them, and two or three specifics you hope they can speak to.
• Say what the letter is for, and when it is due. Recommenders miss deadlines they were never told about.
• Follow up once, politely, about ten days before the deadline. Then follow up again if it has not arrived.

The packet is the highest-leverage item on that list. A recommender writing from memory produces generalities; a recommender looking at the paper you wrote for them produces the one concrete paragraph that makes the letter worth reading.