How to Write a Law School Personal Statement?

A law school personal statement is a concise and straightforward descriptive essay that is written after a careful reflection of your life experiences, challenges, and achievement to show the law school admission committee your abilities and interest, personality.

A law school personal statement is expected to highlight your attributes that are not captioned in your curriculum vitae, resume, cover letter, and recommendation letters. It also shows the law school admission committee the strength of your legal writing ability.

Writing a law school personal statement can keep you running all day, only that you’ll be running on a treadmill. Even when you take the best law school personal statement examples from your seniors, you may still be stuck because only you experienced your most appealing life story.

Nevertheless, how to write the right law school personal statement gives you all the tips. It will show you some law school personal statement topics, and the best law school personal statement tips.

How to Write a Great Law School Personal Statement?

1. Reflect on your life, and Chose a Specific Story or Two. 

A lot of things have happened in your life before now. Your life is already filled with both excellent and awful memories. The challenges you faced—the obstacles you overcame—the events that shaped your current beliefs—the people you met—and the experiences you captioned in your diary and photo album.

The entire story of your life is a compendium of many stories. Please choose one or two stories that will appeal to your readers, and show why you intend to come to their law school. 

Read More: Top 10 Ways to Make Effective Personal Statement for College Admission

2. Review your Law School Personal Statement Requirements

Most law schools have their own rules or requirements for writing a law school personal statement for their admission process. However, a few law schools don’t have any specific requirements for writing a personal statement. Generally, these rules are set to address technical.

They state things such as the word count, and page number limits. Some show a specific outline to follow. Note that these rules won’t change the intent of a personal statement.

3. Choose a Topic and Write an Outline

Find the best law school personal statement topic for your story. If your preferred law school has a template outline, you should follow their shape and begin to write your drafts. However, if they don’t have a template outline, you will need to create your framework.

Remember that you’re writing a descriptive essay. So, you need to write a shape that will guide your writing and help you capture everything. 

4. Draft and Write Your Personal Statement

Use your framework to write a rough draft of your story. This allows you to put all your ideas in sentences and paragraphs. It will enable you to write your account in a personal way—expressing everything that comes to mind without any restriction.

Writing a topic sentence for every paragraph is one of the best ways to write your rough draft. Your rough draft should end with a conclusion that connects all the topic sentences. 

Read More: 5 Ways to Improve Personal Statement

When done with your rough draft, you can start the formal writing of your personal statement. This where you become mindful of your grammar rules and the requirements or guidelines of the law school you’ll be sending your application to. 

5. Proofread your Personal Statement

Proofreading is the final step in your law school personal statement writing. It will help you identify typos and grammar errors that you may have made when writing your personal statement essay. You can use some online tools like Grammarly to check for grammar errors. Proofreading also helps you review your article and refine your story. 

6. Subject your Statement to Peer Reviews 

You can mimic the law school admission committee by giving your law school personal statement to a few experts or seniors to read and give you objective feedback. We recommend that you do this with people that are not too familiar with you. This will help you get accurate reports that will help you do a perfect finishing touch. 

7. Finishing Touches and Submission

Once you get the descriptions of your peer reviewers, you can then look at their recommendations, and do some finishing touches on your law school personal statement. Review the submission requirements of your preferred law school, and ensure that you’ve completed everything. Now, you can hit the submit button. 

10 Law School Personal Statement Writing Tips

• Spend more time reflecting on your life—your experiences, past projects, volunteering opportunities, awards, leadership roles, work, background—and everything in-between. 
• Write in active voice language. 
• Be precise, concise, and leave no loose end sentence. 
• As much as possible avoid secular philosophies, clichés, and quotations.
• Obey your preferred law school rules—keep to their personal statement writing requirements. 
• Start with an outline, and let your first writing be a rough draft. 
• Thoroughly proofread your personal statement—where possible, use an online grammar checker like Grammarly. 
• Have a mock review of your personal statement—subject it to a peer review.
• Write in the first pronoun tone—make your personal statement strongly personal.
• Write with an excellent flow of thought—connect your story to your present abilities, the purpose of seeking a law school admission, and why you’re choosing that particular law school. 

If you’re studying Law in college or you intend to have a law degree, you will need to go to Law School, it earns your law degree. Your college tutors will most likely tell you that a good GPA and high LSAT score helps you secure admission into your dream law school. No doubt: a good GPA and a high LSAT score increase your chances of getting admitted into a law school.

However, your preferred law school will receive many applications from other students who obtained excellent and high GPA and LSAT scores, respectively. How then do they handle the competition, and select the best candidates for their few admission slots?

The personal statement is the document to be examined. Your law school personal statement can be your Trump card to securing your dream admission. Write it diligently, and scroll up to see how best you can do that.