law school personal statement examples

law school personal statement examples

Analyzing Effective Law School Personal Statement Examples

1. Introduction to Law School Personal Statements

In addition to your grades and LSAT score, the components of your law school application are crucial in shaping your overall profile. These are tools for representing the many different pieces of you as an applicant. Law school personal statements provide an opportunity for you to present your unique qualities to admissions committees in a way that’s easy to follow, learn, and know. Some might be specifically regarding why you want to attend law school. When it comes to personal statements, main themes may include writing about how you have evolved, beliefs that have shaped you, and issues that have influenced you.

The first five sections of this page contain explanations and examples that will help you create the majority, if not all, of your law school personal statement. The final page of this part describes formal use. After reading the application, adcoms may see the personal statement differently. Some focus on nuances, while others like intriguing links to the applicant’s file. Avoid repeating the file or extensively stating your law experiences, such as internships in law firms. Show off the rest of you: writing skills, habits, ideas, aims, and background. Keep it real. Avoid trying to tell each other what you think they want to hear.

2. Key Components of a Strong Personal Statement

A personal statement can be an essential aspect of your application to law school because it provides the admissions officers a chance to understand the experiences and ambitions that constitute your application. At their most fundamental, personal statements often tell the story of why a candidate desires to attend law school and become an attorney. This offers admissions committees the perspective they need to distinguish whether the applicant is a good fit for their institution and whether the school can help them get where they want to go. A powerful personal statement is especially critical because law is a field that mandates interpretation and involvement with the complex life experiences of a diverse group of people. It is only natural that an admissions committee should prefer to accept candidates who excel at articulating their inspirations and experiences.

A successful law school personal statement combines the applicant’s personal motivations and demonstrated engagement with law and legal analysis. It begins with personal narratives and develops into the candidate’s specific academic, intellectual, or professional pursuits and interests. Your personal statement should help the admissions reader appreciate your motivation, capacity to undertake the study of law, and future direction in the legal field. Admissions committees consider personal statements to be superior when the writer combines personal experience with a thorough understanding of the subject they will be studying. For law school applicants, a compelling personal statement will combine thoughtful reflection on and an understanding of contemporary legal issues with the intellectual motivations for studying law. Optimal personal statements will explore what brought the candidate to the study of law and prepare them for the intellectual and professional challenges of law school.

3. Examining Successful Personal Statement Examples

Read on to see how the key components are well presented in some effective law school personal statement examples.

Personal Statement Example 1

These educational and personal experiences have led me to law school, and they will help me become a more committed law student and a more caring lawyer. I am excited about the opportunity to bring my unique skills, experiences, and background to your law school. I am strongly opposed to the sentiment “that’s just the way things are.” In response, I work for fairness in the community. Throughout high school, I devoted myself to political and social action in the hopes of creating a more equitable society. Experiences in Bolivia strengthened my understanding of and commitment to justice.

Personal Statement Example 2

When we grew up and changed schools, new friends would always ask us if we were really twins or just joking with them. Rosalind has followed me to LIM because she has always admired and respected me. I am a mentor, a leader, and a part-time philosopher. I have supervised between 20 and 30 staff members at a time while I worked full-time or part-time at Berklee College of Music. In addition to supervising my direct staff, I create work for 20 to 30 workers. One of my favorite parts of my job is problem-solving and staff development.

4. Strategies for Crafting Your Own Compelling Personal Statement

How can you craft your own compelling personal statement for law school admissions? Here are several techniques to get started and some advice in case you need a jumping-off point from an example:

1. Brainstorm your skills and values. What are the major components of your interest in studying and practicing law as a career? The best law school personal statements integrate your knowledge of the law and the profound reasons for your decision to attend law school. 2. Find a structure that works for you. Most personal statements fit into a “before” and “after” structure, which helps to underline a significant change or change of heart in the writer. You can also use a single anecdote or group of anecdotes to argue a point about yourself, or a “fruit salad” approach that allows you to move deftly between different aspects of your personal and professional life. 3. Be sure your whole application supports an application to law. It’s fine to talk specifically about past or future contributions to the field, but it should be a unifying theme of your diversity statement, resume, and letters of recommendation. 4. Imply your qualities. Work in experiences or examples of your leadership, event planning, writing, and other skills during your career and education without directly summarizing your resume. 5. Write simply. Answer the prompt and use straightforward language. Avoid flowery language; adjectives like “complex,” “diverse,” “deep,” or “problematic” rarely comfort the reader. Use a professional tone. A few short anecdotes are fine, but your personal statement should not read like a short story.

If you want a little bit of inspiration, our Admit.me staff went ahead and read all of last year’s U.S. News & World Report top 14 most popular law school personal statements and wrote annotations and advice based on what we saw. We found a wild variety of (really good) submissions, from a highly original narrative designed to evoke the top 10 of a TV quiz show to a self-deprecating narrative that was just a downright appealing read. Let us know if you applied last cycle and would like to know the result by commenting.

5. Conclusion and Final Tips

To write law school personal statement examples like the ones we have examined, you must draft, self-edit, and revise several drafts of your personal statement. You should also choose an appropriate subject matter, use a dash of creativity, present yourself in a positive light, express your enthusiasm, quantify your experience, and conclusively introduce a sense of humility. Your law school personal statement examples should be creative, positive, and enthusiastic. It should not emphasize policy analysis, exchange, or problem-solving. It must give every single reason to accept you at once. It should also be free of ideology, cause, religion, ethnic group, sex, sexual orientation, or political party mention, reference, and reliance.

In your concluding paragraph, you should bring your message full circle and provide a sense of closure and completion. Law School Personal Statements are written by law school applicants to present a narrative of their background and character, as well as to express their reasons for pursuing legal education. It seeks to expose motives, core values, and objectives to encourage and validate the application. Acceptance as a candidate is a chance to offer the strengths that will enable one to be the best attorney that they can be. You should use the power of brevity by keeping each word in your writing purposeful. The reader should get a 30-second reading of who you are as a person and as an attorney. Conciseness is not the same as brevity; instead of getting it over with, get deep into the narrative that is packed with what you can do uniquely offered to the law school by the features of your personal character.