When you are ready to apply to law school, one of the first things you’ll need to do is think about who you will ask to write your letters of recommendation (LORs). These letters carry considerable weight, and the adcoms read them very carefully. A convincing recommendation can be the icing on the cake of an already compelling law school application. 

Table of Contents

• Four Ways Strong LORs Can Boost Your Candidacy
• What Should LORs Cover?
• Identifying the Right People to Write Your LORs
• Deciding How Long to Give Recommenders to Submit Their Letters
• Supporting Your Recommenders in Writing Their LORs
• Responding to “You Write It, and I’ll Sign It” 
• Sample LOR #1: The Environmental Policy Analysis Major 
• Sample LOR #2: The Social Worker

Four Ways Strong LORs Can Boost Your Candidacy

Compelling LORs can enhance your candidacy in four key ways: 

1. They help reassure the adcoms that you are capable of managing the rigorous academic work required at a top-tier law school, especially if your professor and/or thesis advisor wrote them.
2. If written by employers, strong recommendation letters can attest to your ability to get a job, keep a job, relate to clients, and get along with your bosses and colleagues. LORs can also support your commitment to a specific field of interest. A recommendation from any employer builds the reader’s confidence that you can succeed in a rigorous academic environment and/or a busy and challenging workplace. 
3. They reveal a more complete picture of you – beyond the numbers – by providing a complementary (and complimentary) perspective on your intellectual abilities and personal qualities. This helps adcoms see you as a well-rounded person of high academic ability and good character – one who will fit well with the school and its community. 
4. They affirm that what you have claimed about yourself is true – because a third party has corroborated your assertions. 

Beneficial LORs are ones that are written with genuine enthusiasm and highlight specific academic, professional, and personal strengths. Conversely, lackluster LORs – letters written by recommenders just going through the motions, without adding any new insights about you or your career potential – will do little to move the needle in your favor.

What Should LORs Cover?

Effective LORs highlight a range of qualities that adcoms look for when assessing an applicant’s potential to succeed at their law school, such as the following: 

• Intellectual abilities, particularly analytical, verbal, and writing skills
• Commitment to academic excellence
• Leadership potential
• Good character and strong ethical grounding
• Discipline
• Collegiality
• Work ethic
• Maturity 

Identifying the Right People to Write Your LORs

Choosing the right people to write your LORs is crucial. Only certain individuals will be qualified to do them justice, so you need to be thoughtful when selecting your recommenders. 

Academics

Nearly all law schools require at least one and often two LORs from professors or other college instructors who can attest to your academic promise. Some programs require two academic recommendations even if you have been out of school for more than two years. Ideally, you will have cultivated a relationship with at least one professor with whom you have taken two or more courses and who can discuss your intellectual and personal growth and performance over a longer period of time. A strong recommender also could be an advisor on a research project or someone who can offer evidence of your success in completing advanced coursework. 

The professor you choose should also know you well enough to be able to compare you favorably with other students they have taught. They should be absolutely convinced of your academic abilities and potential.

Employers and Supervisors

Unless the law school you’re targeting wants only academic recommendations, you have other options. For example, if you’ve been working for several years, served in the military, or even had an interesting summer internship, one LOR could be written by your employer or supervisor. Again, your recommender needs to be able to write knowingly and enthusiastically about your intelligence, focus, character, leadership, research and writing abilities, and other relevant skills and qualities. 

If you are working currently but don’t feel you can afford to reveal to your manager that you are applying to law school, go to the next-best source, such as a former supervisor. Try to avoid seeking a recommendation based on a position you held more than three years ago – but if you have to, it’s better than having no recommendations at all. 

Other Options

If you’re self-employed or run your own company, you can choose a partner, consultant, major client, vendor, supplier, attorney, or accountant to write an LOR. You should have a long-standing relationship (of at least two years) with anyone you select. Additionally, that individual needs to have had opportunities to witness your intelligence, integrity, professionalism, and other strengths. The same holds true if you work in a family business. However, don’t make the mistake of asking a relative to write your LOR, especially if the relative shares your last name. 

Always choose a recommender who is authentically supportive of you over someone who simply has an impressive job title. A teaching assistant or internship supervisor who can write about you with genuine enthusiasm and deep familiarity with your background and strengths is a better choice than the chair of the political science department, a family friend who is a lawyer, or your brother-in-law’s stepmother who’s a judge you met once at a summer picnic. 

Factors to Consider When Selecting Recommenders

Good writing takes time and thought, and this is especially true of meaningful and beneficial LORs. Writing a recommendation is a lot to ask of someone who is generally a busy person, so you might feel a little hesitant about asking – but you won’t know whether your professor, boss, or mentor will be available for the task or receptive to the idea unless you make your request. 

College instructors are accustomed to being approached for recommendation letters and will readily understand what you need. Still, it will help your professors if you explain your career goals, why you have chosen to attend law school, and what you’d like them to highlight in their letters. 

However, people who work outside of academia might be less familiar with the recommendation process, so ask them if it would be helpful for you to send them some material to guide them. Some supervisors will be very familiar with the law school LOR and will require little from you besides an updated resume and some bullets about your plans and reasons for attending law school, but others might need more information. Assure them that you’ll make the task as easy as possible by providing a resume along with a list of highlights from your work/internship experience that will help reinforce your abilities and skills.

Once you’ve delineated your goals, ask your potential recommender whether they feel they are the right person for the job. If they admit that they cannot endorse you enthusiastically, or if they’re hesitant about being able to give the letter the time and attention it requires, they will probably politely decline. If that happens, just move on to the next prospect. 

Deciding How Long to Give Recommenders to Submit Their Letters

You don’t want to annoy your recommenders by putting them under a tight deadline. Doing so is unlikely to bode well for you. However, if you give them too much time, they will likely write the letter toward the end of the time frame anyway. So, we recommend giving them a soft deadline of three to four weeks from when you send them the information they need. When working with students, we advise starting your LOR process at the beginning of the application process so that even if your recommenders are delayed, they won’t hold up your applications. 

Supporting Your Recommenders in Writing Their LORs

Now that you’ve secured commitments from your recommenders, your next task is giving them what they need to write strong letters on your behalf.

Provide your recommenders with as many of the following as are relevant:

1. Your personal statement – assuming that it’s ready to submit or at least close to being finalized: If your personal statement focuses on a personal topic and does not highlight your academic or professional achievements or aspirations, you should also provide your recommender with a note detailing your reasons for attending law school and what you hope to do with your law degree. 
2. A description of your short- and long-term goals
3. Your resume
4. Your college transcript
5. Any significant work or reports you completed for the recommender, with the associated grades and/or their comments highlighted: These documents will further underscore your academic strengths, analytical abilities, collegiality, creativity, maturity, personal or academic growth, and integrity. To the extent possible, the examples you suggest should be different from those you wrote about in your personal statement.
6. A deadline for submitting the letter on the Law School Admissions Council’s (LSAC’s) Credential Assembly Service: Once you input your LOR writers’ contact information there, they will receive a link from LSAC where they should upload their letter.  
7. A copy of this helpful Accepted resource: Ten Tips for Writers of Letters of Recommendations

Responding to “You Write It, and I’ll Sign It” 

It’s possible that your recommenders might doubt their ability to fulfill their commitment because of time constraints – or maybe they just don’t like writing these letters. In either case, they might ask you to draft the letter on their behalf and say they will then approve and sign it. Resist this. Law schools want an honest assessment of your capabilities, and writing the letter yourself is not what they had in mind.

Also, from a practical standpoint, it’s very difficult to succeed in sounding like someone else, no matter how hard you try. Your distinctive voice has come through clearly in your personal statement. That’s a good thing and was precisely your goal. But you don’t want that same style to come through in an LOR and raise a red flag that you wrote the letter yourself. I worked with a student who was asked to draft a letter. While it was a good letter, I could tell it was written by a 25-year-old woman and not a 70-year-old professor – and law school admissions committees would be able to tell too. 

If a potential recommender asks you to draft the letter, let them know that you can’t do that but you can provide bullets summarizing your experience and background. Doing so is both allowed and helpful to your letter writer. 

Sample LOR #1: The Environmental Policy Analysis Major 

Daniel is a 22-year-old recent grad who majored in environmental policy analysis. Although he had two internships in the field of environmental planning and research, after much thought, Daniel decided to devote his personal statement to the life lessons he learned from more than 14 years of studying piano and performing in music competitions. Daniel is counting on his LORs to prove his capacity to handle challenging academics. 

The following letter was written by one of his professors: 

It is with great pleasure that I recommend Daniel R. for admittance to your law school. I have been a professor of public policy and environmental law for the past 18 years and first met Daniel during his sophomore year, when he took a lower-division course in environmental law, a challenging topic in which he earned an A–. This course doesn’t lend itself to a lot of class participation, and I appreciated that Daniel seemed thoroughly engaged during every class. He also approached me during office hours for clarification on points he had not understood to his satisfaction. I was pleased to have him return to an upper-division course of mine during his junior year, in ethics in environmental policy. This was a much more participatory class that involved not only class discussions but also cooperative student projects. In class, Daniel’s questions and comments were always thoughtful and to the point. When responding to others who made comments with which he did not agree, Daniel debated them respectfully and often won over classmates with his logic, pleasant attitude, and command of the facts. 

Because Daniel is extremely bright and very personable, when my research assistant graduated, I offered Daniel the job. He seemed both flattered and enthusiastic about the prospect, and with his help, I was able to expeditiously collect research on a paper I am now finalizing on the performance of incentive-based policy instruments as they relate to industrial greenhouse gas emissions. My trust in Daniel’s abilities was not misplaced. He was organized and responsible, and he showed a refreshing ability to conduct extensive literature reviews with little direction from me. These included data-driven literature reviews and small-scale studies from which he extrapolated the relevant data. His analytical abilities, organizational skills, and sense of responsibility will help him perform at the top of his game in law school and beyond. 

I’d also like to point out that Daniel’s major in environmental policy analysis is highly demanding. It requires coursework in both hard science and social science, including biology, chemistry, physics, and calculus, as well as environmental and natural resource economics, ecology, spatial and dynamic bioeconomic modeling, and policy analysis. This makes Daniel’s 3.8 GPA in the major that much more impressive. 

This past year, I supervised Daniel again for his senior thesis on water quality planning and public policy. He asked me for feedback on the critical analysis of his data collection methodology a good month earlier than most of his classmates, and he also asked me for advice on whom to approach to learn about the latest research on the topic that hadn’t yet been published. His thoroughness and planning showed: his thesis was an outstanding and incisive analysis of this complex issue, particularly his focus on the long-standing issues of water shortages and political turf wars over water in the state of California. 

In addition, he has a friendly, collegial personality and many interests, including piano, which I understand he has played at the competitive level for many years. His written and verbal communication skills are of a very high level. Daniel’s training in environmental analysis and public policy will serve him well in the field of environmental law, and I give him my highest recommendation for admittance to your program. 

Let’s look at some of the aspects that make Daniel’s evaluation letter so effective. His professor established his credibility as a recommender from the start, noting his tenure as a professor at the university and offering examples of interactions with Daniel that substantiate their long-standing relationship. These include the following: 

• Distinguishing Daniel from his peers on a comparative basis by detailing the rigors of his major and his impressive GPA in that major
• Quantifying Daniel’s organizational, verbal, and analytical strengths, evidenced through his work as a research assistant and how he planned and carried out his senior thesis project
• Noting his class participation, which also underscores his respect for others and personal warmth

All in all, Daniel comes across as not only extremely capable but also likable and well-rounded. 

Sample LOR #2: The Social Worker

Now, let’s look at another applicant. Sonya is 27 and has worked for four years at a nonprofit agency serving immigrant, refugee, and low-income women and children in need of housing and other social services. 

Her direct supervisor wrote the following letter of recommendation: 

I have known Sonya D. for the past four years, since she joined our agency as a case worker straight from her MSW. Last year, during a management shake-up, Sonya was promoted from case worker to housing specialist, and I became her direct supervisor. Sonya brought an abundance of enthusiasm to both her roles, successfully going to bat for clients who were entitled to housing and other publicly funded benefits but whose applications had fallen into the quicksand of government bureaucracy. She is firm and unyielding on behalf of her clients, a trait that will make her a very effective legal advocate on behalf of the underprivileged. 

In my eight years as a supervisor in the world of social services, I would rank Sonya in the top 1% of the dozens of case workers and volunteers I have worked with. Most people enter this field with a strong emotional commitment to helping underserved communities, but far fewer also have the ability to see the bigger picture and the strategic vision to make their efforts most effective. For example, Sonya joined the agency during a rocky time when finances were perilous, employee turnover (including management) was rapid, and morale was low. Despite her youth and relative inexperience, within her first year with us, Sonya had suggested creative initiatives to streamline and improve our services and to boost morale. 

Sonya caught my attention in particular when she documented the inefficiencies in our client intake system and made specific recommendations for streamlining that system. She gently but firmly advocated for these changes, which were approved and have allowed us to save countless hours of paid staff time each month. Notably, it has also saved as much as two weeks from the time a client registers with us to when she is transitioned into safe, appropriate housing – a dramatic difference in the life of someone who might lack any adequate or safe housing at all. Sonya also offered to manage several volunteers to work on staff-initiated projects, freeing up the time of employees for other casework and reducing administrative costs. Although she is much younger than nearly all our volunteers, she was granted approval. Because of her dedicated efforts, she was able to earn respect from our much older volunteer corps. She is a young woman who is clearly eager to improve her performance in every task she undertakes. 

In addition to these achievements, Sonya organized a series of community events in collaboration with our local police precinct to raise our profile in the community, engaging social media and local media outlets to spread the word. Two other community events are already on the calendar for next year. 

When Sonya joined our agency, we desperately needed to increase our client base to secure more government funding. Within nine months of implementing her initiatives, we more than doubled the number of clients we had served from the year before – to well over 300 a month. Her ability to see the bigger picture and think creatively and with a business mindset has made our agency more stable and better equipped to fulfill our mission of helping a vulnerable population find safe housing. 

Sonya’s outstanding performance as a case worker and her significant contributions to improve workflow agency-wide resulted in her becoming the first staff member to receive a raise during the two years our agency hobbled along during a severe financial crisis. Last year, she also earned the Best Employee Recognition Award for her service. 

I can easily imagine Sonya bringing the same commitment, drive, intelligence, and initiative to her studies in law school that she brought to this agency. 

Sonya’s evaluation is chock-full of impressive achievements. Although none are related to academics or research, it’s clear that someone with this level of intelligence, foresight, determination, organizational and problem-solving skills, and creativity is also likely to excel in law school. Let’s look at a summary of her achievements:  

• Pushing to get clients desperately needed safe housing
• Diagnosing problems and conceiving solutions to streamline client intake processes and other efficiencies, improving agency functionality and staff morale
• Helping the agency double the number of clients served and thereby earning more government funding
• Raising the agency’s profile through community events and a targeted social media presence
• Leading volunteers to ease the workload of the paid staff 

After reading this blog post, you should now be ready to supercharge your law school applicant profile by choosing the right recommenders and giving them the tools they’ll need to write a powerful LOR. 

If you need further guidance on law school recommendations or the application process in general, schedule your free consultation with an Accepted admissions expert today!

Related Resources

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• Answering Character and Fitness in Law School Applications
• How to Approach Optional Essays to Strengthen Your Law School Application