GSU Pre-Law

You should apply in the fall of the year before you wish to attend, as soon as applications open. This is usually in October, but varies a bit by school. 

DO NOT PROCRASTINATE! 

Most law schools use what is called “rolling admissions.” They open their applications in the fall, and leave them open until the late winter or spring. However, they do not wait until all applications are in before admitting students. Shortly after applications open, they begin offering students admission. They continue offering students throughout the application cycle until their class is full. What this means is that if you apply in March (as opposed to October) the school(s) you are applying to has probably filled half or more of its seats, and has received far more applications. This means you’re fighting with more people for fewer spaces. Statistics on law school admissions show that applying at the end of the cycle as opposed to the beginning can reduce your chances of admission by as much as 40 percentage points. Meaning that a student who has a 60% chance of getting in if they apply in October might have as little as a 20% chance of getting in if they apply in March.

For a full answer, see our section on Your Pre-Law Timeline.

For a short answer, here are some rules of thumb:

1. You are preparing for law school the entire time you are in undergrad. You should be taking pre-law classes, attending pre-law events, and making sure law school is right for you. You should also be building relationships with professors and others who can write letters of recommendation for you.
2. You should plan to apply 1 year before you wish to attend. So if you wish to attend starting in Fall of 2028, you should be submitting your applications in the fall of 2027. Do not plan  to apply in the spring semester. Get your applications out in fall!
3. About 1 year before you plan to attend, you should take a mock LSAT and get a baseline score for yourself to see where you are. Then begin studying and investigating tutoring programs based on that score.
4. You should take the LSAT early in the summer (May/June) before you wish to apply. This way you can take the LSAT at second time in August/September without disrupting your timeline if you don’t score as high as you like.
5. The Summer before senior year – prepare your application. Write and edit your personal statement (multiple times!) and gather all of your materials so you are 100% ready before the semester even starts.
6. Sept/Oct the year before – submit your applications!

Obviously the strongest candidates for law school will have both strong GPAs and strong LSAT scores. To the best of your ability, you should work hard to do well on both. However, having a very strong GPA or a very strong LSAT can help to offset the other being lower. Generally, a high LSAT score will help a mediocre GPA more than a high GPA will help a mediocre LSAT score.

“Splitters” are applicants with high scores on one factor, but middling or lower on the other. Depending on the year and how a school’s incoming class is shaping up, they might be willing to accept a lower GPA to boost their incoming class’s average LSAT score, or vice versa.

To get a better idea of how being a splitter will affect your chances check out online law school admissions calculators. Links on this page.

Both are very important. Which is more important for each application depends on the school and the cycle. Schools want strong LSAT and GPA scores for their incoming class, so as the class is shaping up if one of those numbers is lagging behind, schools may give it more weight on remaining applications. For example, if a school is working on its incoming class and their average incoming student’s LSAT score is high, but their average incoming GPA is a bit lower, GPA will become more important, and vice versa.

Overall, LSAT is probably more important on average.

No. Internships are great experience to help you decide if law school is right for you, but they will not meaningfully affect your admissions chances directly. They might be helpful in building a network, and they’re definitely helpful in adjusting to law school and learning if you like the law, but they’re a very, very small part of the admissions decision. The effect of having an internship or not is close to negligible. 

I generally advise students to ask faculty at least 1 month before they need the letter. It can also be helpful to ask at the end of the semester that you have taken a class with the professor even if you don’t need the letter right away – that way their memory is still fresh.

In a survey of pre-law faculty, they gave the following answers to this question:

• At least two week’s notice
• A couple of weeks, depending on the timing
• A month to three weeks
• 3 months for the initial request, and then provide details and materials (such as writing samples) 1 month in advance
• Students who request late in the cycle (spring) or shortly before they need the letter make me think that they have not thoroughly thought through their decision to attend law school and are not good candidates

Most students will not benefit from an addendum. An addendum will not make up for a low GPA or LSAT score, and risks drawing more attention to it and making the student seem unprepared for law school.

You should file an addendum only if you have a specific and exceptional reason to. Many students have challenges they have overcome (such as working in school, being first generation, struggling with mental health challenges, etc.) which do not warrant an addendum. The vast majority of students should not file an addendum.

Addenda can be useful in very limited circumstances. Addenda are most likely to be helpful when you experienced a significant disruption to your studies that affected your application (usually your grades) but for which you have a good explanation and good evidence that it will not be repeated. For example, perhaps you experienced a significant medical diagnosis in your undergraduate career, and you were forced to withdraw from study, or your grades dropped significantly. Addenda are most likely to be helpful when events like this were out of your control.

The most important thing is this: it is not enough to make excuses for poor performance in your addenda. You need to demonstrate that whatever caused the disruption was not something that will be repeated, and that you have taken steps to improve yourself and recover from it. This is most likely to be helpful when you have evidence that this strategy worked – that your grades after the incident did significantly improve once you returned to study.

If you avoid taking responsibility and suggest that your grades were out of your control due to stress, working, or other similar problems, your addendum is probably hurting your application. For example, writing “I had a very stressful experience in undergrad, I struggled with mental health, and my grades were not as high as I would have liked” is a bad addendum because there is nothing there that suggests things will be different in law school. If anything, the admissions committee is likely to worry that the even more stressful environment of law school is not a good place for you. Simply adding “I will work hard and make sure this doesn’t happen again” is not enough – you need to show them that you are already doing that and have proof that your strategies are succeeding.

If your professor expresses hesitation (or outright refuses) to write a letter for you, you should move on immediately. Insisting that a professor write you a letter after they have declined once is a pathway to hurting your application by getting a bad or sub-par letter.

Your professor refusing or hesitating to write a letter does not necessarily mean that you are a bad student or a bad candidate for law school. It might simply mean that their memory of you has faded, or they don’t feel they can write a strong enough letter for you for a variety of reasons that may just boil down to not knowing you well enough, or not having the time.

If you insist that a professor who has hesitated or declined to write you a letter go ahead and do it anyway, the best case scenario is that you get a middling letter that does not help your application. The worst case scenario is that the professor tells the university they are writing to that you are not a good candidate for law school. Never insist once you’ve gotten a no.