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If you're thinking about going to law school, no doubt you have lots
of questions. Where can I get in? How do I get in? How will I pay for it?
What's the LSAT all about? Everyone, it seems, has answers. Professors,
pre-law advisors, friends, law school representatives, books, and the Web
all offer well-meaning but sometimes conflicting or, worse yet, wrong
information. No one has all the answers, and I do not pretend to. What I
will do is provide answers to the questions most often asked by those who
hope to someday be law students. I'll also try to point you in the direction
of more answers and additional information. If you are serious about going
to law school, though, you must understand this: getting into law school is
a process, one that involves planning, persistence and patience. What you
learn here will help you create a plan and will tell you what you must do to
carry the plan out. The real work is up to you.
Ideally, the process starts at the beginning of your undergraduate
career. You should focus on building a well-rounded course of study and
making good grades. As you will see, getting into law school is, in large
part, a numbers game. One of the most important numbers is your
undergraduate GPA. If your GPA is weak, you are at a huge disadvantage. In
truth, a poor undergraduate GPA can be fatal to your law school hopes.
Work begins in earnest during your junior year, when you should start
investigating law schools, register and study for the LSAT, and register
with the Law School Data Assembly Service (LSDAS). During the summer after
your junior year, you take the LSAT. In the fall of your senior year, you
get and complete law school applications, arrange for letters of
recommendation, apply for financial aid, and if necessary, retake the LSAT.
Once your applications are submitted, you must monitor them to make sure all
the law schools get all your information. Then the waiting begins.
By the spring of your senior year, if you've done everything right, you
will have acceptance letters in hand, and then you can pick and choose. To
get to that point, though, your work is cut out for you. We'll start at the
beginning, and take it step by step. Or, if you prefer, you can link to
specific topics from the Table of Contents to find the answers that are most
important to you.
Before Application
Applying
After Applying
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