The personal statement you submit during the law school admissions process is the “soul” of your application.
It’s the single most important document you will submit. The rest of your profile—LSAT, work experience, GPA—strongly predicts your odds of getting into each school, but the personal statement is your main opportunity to articulate who you are; where you come from; what your experiences amount to; what drives you, and why; and what is meaningful to you.
It seems like a lot to fit into two pages. And it is. That’s the difficulty: How do you tell a dense, passionate, authentic, and unique story that answers all these questions while also working strategically to maximize your chances?
Law school admissions committees care about your core values, your moral character, your past experiences, and the passions that motivate you. They also care about why you want to get a JD, and what you hope to do afterward.
Keep in mind that especially at T14 or T20 schools, every single accepted candidate will meet the “minimum threshold” of what constitutes a great profile—great undergraduate program, great GPA, excellent LSAT, community service and extracurriculars, and often a year or two of strong work experience. Many candidates will have tailored their application in consultation with a pre-law advisor.
The personal statement is your main chance to differentiate yourself from a crowd of highly qualified candidates.
These law schools look to recruit people whose worldviews align with their own philosophy, and it’s your job, in your personal statement, to make sure that comes across. They are also seeking candidates who will make great lawyers—meaning those who are articulate, smart, ambitious, and very good writers.
Luckily, you can write about almost anything in these personal essays. Applicants will often discuss relationships with friends and mentors; hardships they have overcome; or defining experiences that motivated them to apply to law school in the first place.
At its core, your law school personal statement should illuminate who you are as a person and demonstrate that you live according to a code that’s in line with your target law school’s own values and educational philosophy.
But again, always keep in mind that the first step to being selected from a pool of similarly smart and talented people is—stand out!
The usual advice applies to law degree admissions too: Aim to stand out, tell your best stories, give the reader a sense of your experiences and values. But the personal statement here also tests something more specific to law school: your ability to write well.
This is because the practice of law itself—whether you enter the public domain or big law, whether your goal is to become a litigating lawyer, corporate lawyer, politician, or judge—is all about reading and writing. For the rest of your life, a large portion of your professional success will depend upon your literacy, eloquence, and rhetorical ability.
That’s why you’ll be judged on your ability to write with precision, density, and clarity. Writing in an articulate and intelligent manner, beyond highlighting who you are and what you want, is also a chance to showcase this core skill.
The most successful lawyers will master the art of rhetoric, and the personal statement is your first chance to show off how well you write. The best personal statements of all will accomplish all three requirements of rhetoric as defined by Cicero: to instruct, persuade, and move your audience—the admissions committee.
On the surface, different universities’ personal statement prompts may seem effectively identical. They ask similar questions, and the recommended length is typically around two pages. Once you have your story down, you may be tempted to call it a day, sending the same personal statement out for all your law school applications.
Think about it, though: When applying for a job, you wouldn’t send the exact same cover letter and resume out to every potential employer, would you?
That is why here too, for your JD application, it’s crucial that you take into consideration the specific wording of each school’s prompt (think of it like an LSAT reading comprehension question), consider what is emphasized, and adapt your core story toward each school.
Ideally, each admissions committee will feel that you have written this statement only for them, even though they know virtually everyone applies to multiple schools.
Let’s take a look at actual prompts from four of the top law schools in the US—Yale, Stanford, Harvard, and Chicago—and compare them.
Yale’s prompt appears relatively open-ended and generic, simply asking for the qualities you would bring to Yale Law and to your career as an attorney:
Applicants must submit a personal statement that helps us learn about the personal, professional, and/or academic qualities they would bring to the Law School community and the legal profession.
This prompt leaves you with a lot of options: You could write about your personal life, family, background, experiences, motivations, volunteer work, legal experience, and so on.
But do note that Yale specifically asks about your potential contribution to both the Yale Law program and the legal profession as a whole—so aim to place some emphasis on the impact you want to make with your legal career.
Stanford Law’s prompt is also fairly broad and standard:
Please describe what aspects of your life experience, interests, and character would help you make a distinctive contribution to Stanford Law School.
But we can note several key differences.
First, note that Stanford doesn’t explicitly ask about your legal career, but rather places strong emphasis on what you would contribute to the school itself. Does this mean you can’t write about your long-term ambitions? No, but it does mean that when you rewrite your stories for Stanford, you should give far more weight to what the prompt asks for: what you can bring to Stanford Law.
Second, there’s a stronger focus on your “soft” qualities—the aspects of your interests and character that would inform your contribution to the program. Again, this doesn’t mean you should focus on these qualities to the exclusion of everything else here (or fail to mention them at all in your Yale statement). But pay attention to these shifts in language between prompts, and adapt your statement accordingly in each case.
Does this mean coming up with a different story for each school? No—it’s likely you’ll tell basically the same stories in each application—using the most impressive and telling anecdotes from your life—but in each case, you’ll take a unique angle on those stories, emphasizing different details to tie them to different themes.
Harvard Law is relatively unique in that it actually requires you to submit two statements. Naturally, since most other schools require only one personal statement, the content of each of these statements will differ from that of your other statements. In other words, Harvard asks you both to expand your thoughts and stories and to divide them up based on the two prompts:
Statement of Purpose: What motivates you to pursue law? How does attending law school align with your ambitions, goals, and vision for your future?
The “Statement of Purpose” quite explicitly looks at your candidacy from a professional perspective—it all revolves around your ambitions, desires, and goals.
Statement of Perspective: The Admissions Committee makes every effort to understand who you are as an individual and potential Harvard Law School student and graduate. Please share how your experiences, background, and/or interests have shaped you and will shape your engagement in the HLS community and the legal profession.
The “Statement of Perspective,” meanwhile, is clearly where you should write about more personal matters. Since you have ample space to cover your professional aspirations in the first statement, this essay should focus solely on stories outside the context of your day job: childhood experiences, community service, extracurriculars, interests, points you might cover in a typical diversity statement, experiences as a first-generation college student, etc.
Chicago Law’s personal statement prompt, although similar to those of the other schools, also differs from them in some important ways:
The personal statement is an essential part of every application, and it’s your opportunity to introduce yourself to the Admissions Committee. It should demonstrate your contribution to the Law School community beyond academics and should demonstrate your ability to communicate your thoughts effectively. The Admissions Committee often finds that a personal statement focusing on a unique personal attribute or experience is usually the most informative (as opposed to a restatement of your qualifications or resume).
As you will have noticed, the prompt here makes a point of asking for your personal experiences and excluding the points already covered on your resume—i.e., your professional and academic achievements. That means that if you discuss your qualifications in other personal statements, you may want to leave them out here.
As we can see from the survey above, each statement will need to be whittled, honed, and tailored to the specific prompt—not only for maximum effectiveness but also to give each school the feeling that you wrote the statement exclusively for them.
An implicit part of the application is projecting your “fit” with the school. Sometimes it’s even explicit: How will you “make a distinctive contribution to Stanford Law School?” If you don’t know Stanford, or its professors, or its characteristics, or its approach to law, you can’t effectively answer this question.
Which means that pretty much every personal statement and application must be tailored to a specific school. This involves understanding the academic and professional strengths of the program and the specific perks and opportunities each school offers that line up with your specific goals—e.g., trips, moot courts, pro bono opportunities, clerkships, professors, or clinics.
Part of it is also simply cultural “fit.” What is the atmosphere and nature of the program? What kind of students attend this particular JD? What’s the vibe in the classroom and on campus? And how do you fit in? These topics should be addressed in some form by most personal statements.
Although cultural and academic fit are crucial, it’s not a good idea to pander to (what you perceive as) the school’s perspective. That means, for example, that just because you’ve heard one school particularly loves lawyers who do public or NGO work does not mean that you should throw it in just for the sake of increasing your appeal.
For one thing, the admissions committee members have read thousands of applications and will see at once who’s just pandering and who really wants what they propose. Second, if you write about a goal you’re not actually passionate about, it tends to weaken your application since you won’t come across as sincerely motivated. Third, if you shape your story only according to what you think the school is looking for, you might miss out your strongest stories—a strategic error.
In fact, law schools are very happy to take on candidates who are financially motivated and want to go corporate; they’re happy to take on candidates who want to enter litigation; any legal specialization is potentially interesting. This is especially true because one goal of any admissions committee is to build a diverse class.
Even a “boring” proposal to enter big law and work your way up to partner is a great goal for law school, provided it’s actually what you want.
So be authentic! In Shakespeare’s words: “To thine own self be true.”
There are a few pitfalls we often encounter in law school personal statements:
Law school admissions committees want two things for you after you graduate from their JD programs. They want you to pass the bar; and they want you to get a good job. This is because law schools are aiming for
All this is to say that the AdCom will seriously assess the career goals you express in your personal statement. They’re looking for a balance between inspiration and realism:
The point is to convince the school that your goals are meaningful, grounded in your past experiences, sincere, and considered enough that you are likely to achieve them.
To decide what stories you’ll work into your personal statement, you should think first about the qualities you want to highlight. A big portion of this will be highly personal—we all have different strengths. There’s no “wrong” quality to highlight, within reason (although there are some we particularly recommend—more on that below).
If you’re struggling, another approach to try is the reverse: Think of any compelling stories from your life that come to mind; what do they say about you? It’s only natural that your strongest qualities should come from your best stories.
Once you’ve settled on which stories are your best and which qualities you will highlight, aim to produce a first draft by including all the specifics you can think of. You can cut it down to the essentials later.
Here are some questions that can help you to identify stories highlighting different qualities (you needn’t answer all of them—they’re just a starting point):
Although your best qualities tend to emerge from your most interesting personal stories, there are a few qualities that are universally desired in law school:
These qualities are useful to any professional, but they’re particularly crucial as an attorney. An attorney necessarily deals with clients and has a public-facing role; they must work with others regularly; the job inevitably makes significant intellectual demands.
So it’s a good idea to consider what stories you can tell to highlight these three qualities in particular, as well as any other positive qualities you wish to reflect.
Besides highlighting your good qualities, one of the best ways to make your personal statement interesting is to address a significant challenge, failure, or setback in your life or career.
Why? Because, first of all, these challenges can become pivotal and defining moments of our lives and careers. Your response to failure can say more about who you are than a list of achievements.
Second, there’s the narrative advantage: A story in which the “hero” doesn’t face any difficulties is never interesting. Discussing a setback is a great way to create drama and engage the reader.
Finally, the greater the challenge, the greater the achievement of overcoming it ultimately. As we tell our clients, it’s more impressive to “climb Everest” (figuratively speaking!) than go around.
Of course, it can be difficult or unpleasant to write about your failures. But don’t be tempted to “cheat” by discussing a so-called weakness that’s really just a boast. (“My greatest weakness? I care too much.”)
Although it may seem tempting to tell a story in which your own failures are minimized, this type of response is unlikely to be effective, because it wastes your chance to display self-reflection and personal growth. Moreover, the story of a “faux-failure” is much less likely to engage the reader than that of a genuine setback.
It’s OK to have “sinned,” because only a real regret leads to self-reflection and to change. By selecting a genuine failure to drive your personal statement, you show that you’re honest and able to reflect critically on your past, and you give yourself a strong segue into the lessons you learned from the experience.
Let’s talk about another persistent error law school applicants make when preparing their personal statements: using example essays and templates.
It’s tempting to think that you can model your law school essay off of someone else’s successful personal statement. People spend time and money searching for “the perfect JD personal statement” to emulate—hoping to avoid the full effort of going through the writing process themselves, and indulging in the sort of cargo-cult thinking that says, “If I copy what a successful applicant did, I’ll succeed too!”
The truth of the matter is that following a template, or trying to produce your own take on someone else’s statement, doesn’t work.
People are admitted to JD programs for many reasons; a strong personal statement is one factor, but not the only one. That is to say, the fact that some example statement was part of a successful application doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a great statement. Indeed, many of the sample essays online are simply terrible.
Even if you try to follow the lead of a genuinely great statement, there’s no reason to think the story that works for one candidate (applying to a particular school, with their own career aspirations, personal history, strengths and weaknesses …) will work for another.
A candidate who tries to mimic someone else’s best story will tend to get boxed in and miss the chance to tell their own best story.
The worst thing about ChatGPT and tools like it is that they produce adequate, but never exceptional, writing. If you lack confidence in your writing, then the prose that large language models (LLMs) produce may well, at first glance, appear more polished, confident, articulate, and grammatically correct than your own.
But in fact, these are its great weaknesses. We help people write applications for a living, and it takes us seconds to identify a personal statement that was written using ChatGPT. Law school AdComs can easily pick up on this as well.
A generic story that contains little trace of your real thoughts and experiences is, obviously, exactly what you want to avoid, so having ChatGPT write your personal statements for you is foolish. But what’s so bad about “improving your language” with an AI tool?
First, these tools scrub away the linguistic quirks that make you you. You end up exchanging what is unique about your thought and expression for the lowest common denominator of superficially fluent writing.
Think of people who use too many Instagram filters on their photos and no longer look like themselves—that’s what personal essays put through ChatGPT look like to the reader.
Secondly, LLMs have a terrible habit of using a lot of words, unnecessarily showy words, to say nothing. They tend to produce long-winded texts consisting largely of “fluff.” In a context that asks you to pack a lot of meaning into a short space, this is counterproductive.
Finally, what makes a great personal statement actually great is the effort you put into it. As an individual spending hours and hours thinking, brainstorming, and writing, going through draft after draft on your quest to express yourself authentically and engagingly, you’ll always attain much better results than anything a machine can provide.
It should go without saying, too, that writing well is an important skill in your legal education and in the legal system, and not an inconvenience you should be trying to dodge.
So resist the temptation to use ChatGPT—it’s a good way to end up with a statement that’s about average, grammatically correct, totally forgettable. Trust us! AdComs invariably prefer your authentic voice, quirks and all, to frictionless AI text that tells them nothing about you.
The best personal statements communicate an authentic and maximally compelling narrative, using your best stories and your own language and addressing the specific prompts of different schools in a way that’s deeply tied to your personal experience and motivations.
It is your voice, your thoughts, and your authenticity that the law schools are looking for. But an outside perspective, particularly that of an experienced law school admissions consultant, can help you to identify the approach that will work best for you.
Wondering how you can set your law school personal statement apart from the crowd? Request a free consultation with a Menlo Coaching law school admissions consultant now.
Yaron Dahan
Expert Consultant & Director, BD
Education: BA, MA
Since 2006, Yaron has been using his narrative knowhow—honed through his work as a screenwriter and formal training at the Sorbonne—to pull out the most compelling details from an applicant’s background. He’s helped applicants win admission (often against the odds) to top law schools including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, and UC Berkeley.
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