By Thane Messinger
The best lawyers are artists. They draw a picture for a client or a jury, and in that picture they paint the facts and the law in such a way that the outcome is favorable to their side. In your application to law school, the “side” is you. It is the artistry with which you craft your statements that might make the difference that changes a Rejection into an Acceptance.
Personal essays might be the only form of cruel and unusual punishment never raised to the Supreme Court. How to find your soul — and then package it just right — for some unknown admissions committee? How to do so when you’re already busy with part-time jobs, classes, crushes and the occasional all-nighter?
What the admissions committee is looking for is some indication of what type of lawyer you will be — the type of person you are. While this might seem like a tall order — how can thousands upon thousands of essays be “unique”? — in reality it’s a taller order for them than for you. After all, you need to write just one.
So, writing an essay about a childhood experience with, say, a grandparent’s involvement in a lawsuit and the effect it had on you, and how it affected your thinking about what the law should be — that might be more effective than a fluffy “I wanna save the world” (which is easy to read as “I really wanna make a lot of money, but I’ll pretend to want to save the world”).
Now, don’t everyone write about your grandparents. It should be something unique … to you. Something that, while it should strike a chord in anyone who reads it, is intensely personal. No one other than the committee (and whoever you ask) will read it. As with the LSAT, this is something you should take exceedingly seriously, and it is something you should want to be proud of. It should be an essay that will knock your socks off when you find it 50 years later.
It’s not much of an exaggeration to state that, aside from your LSAT score, your personal essay is the most important part of your application. It almost goes ahead of your GPA. Despite a stellar LSAT score and GPA, a bad essay will kill your application. If there’s anything that can save a mediocre score, it’s your personal essay.
The result should be an essay that you read, re-read and re-re-read many times over, smiling as you wonder: Who on Earth wrote such a lovely piece? My goodness, how can they not let you in?
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Thane Messinger is the author of “Law School: Getting In, Getting Good, Getting the Gold.”
Find more application tips in the Back to School issue of preLaw magazine.
