Chapter 1: Preparing to Write Your Statement
Your LSAT score has been tallied, your undergraduate grades have been earned and recorded, and your recommendation letters have been requested. To complete your law school application, you must write an excellent personal statement, one that sets you apart from a sea of outstanding candidates with similar academic qualifications. Like an interview, your personal statement introduces the application committee to the values, qualities, and accomplishments that make you unique—and uniquely qualified to excel in the legal profession. It is not an overstatement to say that your personal statement may determine the future course of your law school admissions. Admissions committees at top law schools feel that if you will not invest the time to write an exceptional personal statement, then you will probably not excel in their programs. Discussing the personal statement in an interview with Top-Law-Schools.com, Ed Tom, Dean of Admissions at UC Berkeley’s Boalt Hall School of Law, stated that “the personal statement is the first thing I look at when I open a folder, even before viewing the GPA or LSAT score. . . . The personal statement is the applicant’s opportunity to distinguish himself from hundreds of other applicants who have the same numbers, and the same major, and come from a similar school.” Your personal statement could, in other words, mean the difference between an acceptance and a rejection from your preferred law school.
This book is designed to give you the tools to write your best law school personal statement possible. The commentary and revision advice outlined here will explain how you will be judged in relation to other prospective students. You will learn not only how to avoid common mistakes but also, and more crucially, how to write what admissions committees consider to be the very strongest kind of personal statement. To write this book, I have drawn on my own experience and expertise as a lawyer with... [continues]

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