Ann K. Levine is the founder and chief law school admission consultant at Law School Expert. Each year, pre-law students rely on Law School Expert’s blog for advice on personal statements, letters of recommendation, LSAT scores and more, to help them get into reach law schools. She has been a law school admission consultant since opening LawSchoolExpert.com in 2004, and this is her fourth book. The following is an excerpt from the Amazon bestselling law school guide, The Law School Admission Game.

What Is a Personal Statement?

This is the piece of your application over which you have—at present—the most control. And it’s not to be taken lightly. A good personal statement adds to the application by tipping the scales in your favor. If someone with your numbers has a chance of being admitted to a particular law school, but not everyone with your numbers is admitted, the major deciding factor is the personal statement. A good LOR helps, but if you can’t advocate for yourself, someone else advocating on your behalf isn’t going to make your case for you. And, if the personal statement is unimpressive, the person evaluating your application may not even go on to read the LORs. Read more

A personal statement is really no more than telling a story—one that illuminates the “you” a law school would be lucky to have in its student body. In this series, “Telling Your Story,” a jdMission Senior Consultant will discuss how elements of storytelling can—and should—be applied to your personal statement.

Your personal statement is meant to be about you, not about how the world works. Of course, you may need to share some facts about the world around you and the people in your life to make your story clear and meaningful, but a good rule of thumb is that you should be writing much more about yourself than about anything else. Read more

In this series, a jdMission Senior Consultant reviews real law school personal statements. What’s working well? What’s not? If it were his/her essay, what would be changed? Find out!

Note: To maintain the integrity and authenticity of this project, we have not edited the personal statements, though any identifying names and details have been changed or removed. Any grammatical errors that appear in the essays belong to the candidates and illustrate the importance of having someone (or multiple someones) proofread your work. Read more

A personal statement is really no more than telling a story—one that illuminates the “you” a law school would be lucky to have in its student body. In this series, “Telling Your Story,” a jdMission Senior Consultant will discuss how elements of storytelling can—and should—be applied to your personal statement.

We all suffer from writer’s block sometimes, and it can be particularly brutal when the stakes are high…like when you are trying to get into law school. Read more

In this series, a jdMission Senior Consultant reviews real law school personal statements. What’s working well? What’s not? If it were his/her essay, what would be changed? Find out!

Note: To maintain the integrity and authenticity of this project, we have not edited the personal statements, though any identifying names and details have been changed or removed. Any grammatical errors that appear in the essays belong to the candidates and illustrate the importance of having someone (or multiple someones) proofread your work. Read more

A personal statement is really no more than telling a story—one that illuminates the “you” a law school would be lucky to have in its student body. In this series, “Telling Your Story,” a jdMission Senior Consultant will discuss how elements of storytelling can—and should—be applied to your personal statement.

A few years ago, I was at a wedding, and someone stood up to give a toast. If you have been to many weddings, you know that toasts can get pretty bad—awkward, drunken, sometimes mean. This toast was not bad in that sense, but it was not as good as it could have been had the person not been so determined to use perfect grammar. Read more

In this series, a jdMission Senior Consultant reviews real law school personal statements. What’s working well? What’s not? If it were his/her essay, what would be changed? Find out!

Note: To maintain the integrity and authenticity of this project, we have not edited the personal statements, though any identifying names and details have been changed or removed. Any grammatical errors that appear in the essays belong to the candidates and illustrate of the importance of having someone (or multiple someones) proofread your work.

Personal Statement

“Opening up” doesn’t come organically to everyone. The truth is, most of us have a very hard time finding a way to de-clog and allow oxygen to flow freely throughout our bodies. There are of course tools, but they are not always so easy to find. Sometimes you come across important tips in magazines or on television: They might be breathing exercises to help with circulation, or workouts to get your blood flowing, or even drugs to open up the blood vessels in your lungs as wide as they can open. Read more

A personal statement is really no more than telling a story—one that illuminates the “you” a law school would be lucky to have in its student body. In this series, “Telling Your Story,” a jdMission Senior Consultant will discuss how elements of storytelling can—and should—be applied to your personal statement.

When deciding what to write in your personal statement, do not make stuff up. First of all, doing so is wrong. That said, I have been around long enough to realize that this basic reason is not enough to stop everyone. So here are a few more reasons why it’s better to tell the truth in your personal statement.
Read more

In this series, a jdMission Senior Consultant reviews real law school personal statements. What’s working well? What’s not? If it were his/her essay, what would be changed? Find out!

Note: To maintain the integrity and authenticity of this project, we have not edited the personal statements, though any identifying names and details have been changed or removed. Any grammatical errors that appear in the essays belong to the candidates and illustrate of the importance of having someone (or multiple someones) proofread your work.

Personal Statement

I don’t think I understood about being black. Everyone in my world just was. Of course there were white people and black people, but race and its complexities seemed to play out mostly on TV, in movies, in newspapers. But in my world, and let me try not to sound cliché, there were just deepening and lightening shades of people. Read more

A personal statement is really no more than telling a story—one that illuminates the “you” a law school would be lucky to have in its student body. In this series, a jdMission Senior Consultant will discuss how elements of storytelling can—and should—be applied to your personal statement.

About a year ago, my sister called and asked what I was doing.

“I’m brainstorming ideas for my book,” I told her.

“With whom?” she asked. I was alone.

“I’m pretty sure if you’re by yourself, it’s just called thinking,” she said. Ah. Indeed.

Brainstorming, as we all know, is a term commonly (over-)used today in business, education and pretty much any environment to describe how a group generates as many ideas as possible. Apparently, some of us use the term for individuals as well.
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