Letters of Recommendation - Guide to Writing Letters of Recommendation for Law School - 12 - Introduction

Sep 16, 2026

A guide focused on writing effective letters of recommendation for law school applications, emphasizing the writer’s effort, its impact on students’ opportunities, and the importance of accurate, well-informed content. It explains how to prepare by collecting application materials, transcripts, resumes, deadlines, and course or activity reminders, and how to coordinate responsibilities with the student. It outlines the strategy of aligning with reader needs, giving concrete facts, avoiding unsupported adjectives, and ensuring the letter supports admissions evaluation of academic ability, communication, and ethical potential.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLetters

FormatPDF

Pages8

Reading Time3 min

AccessFree to download

Introduction

Getting Ready to Write

The Strategy of the Letter

Goals of the Letter

Letters of Recommendation Guide to Writing Letters of Recommendation for Law School (12) Office of Career Services and Off-Campus Learning Harvard University Successful Letters of Recommendation Andy Cornblatt Georgetown University Law Center Guide to Writing Letters of Recommendation for Law School Introduction Writing letters of recommendation is hard work. It demands time that may otherwise be spent on teaching and research. But it can be a rewarding activity which greatly affects the lives of students by helping them gain opportunities for the study of law . Most of us have been beneficiaries of letters of recommendation and we should look forward to repaying the favor by helping someone else, particularly since letters of recommendation are now quite important. The opportunities of today are sought by a much larger group of intelligent and well-educated applicants, most of whom seem to have excellent grades and test scores. The real choice among qualified applicants, therefore, is now often made on the basis of the content of a carefully written letter of recommendation . If you have any doubts about the student's qualifications for the opportunity sought, or negative impressions which you would understandably want to include in any letter, you should discuss these reservations with the student. Not only will the student gain valuable knowledge about himself or herself in this process, but an opportunity is provided for the student to clear up your reservations. In one recent case a professor's strongly negative opinion turned out to be based on a confusion of student identities. When a student understands your reservations, you can decide together whether or not you should write a letter. It may be that some other teacher has experienced a relationship with the student in which the student's more positive qualities were exhibited. In a certain sense writing letters of recommendation is a form of teaching, providing an occasion when we can review with a student his or her own strengths and weaknesses. Letters of recommendation do three things: I) provide facts about the applicant 2) render a judgment as to the applicant's ability and 3) make the applicant come alive, stand out against other applicants so that he or she will be remembered in the decision process. Getting Ready to Write Having agreed to write a letter, you first need to assemble information about the student and the opportunity for which application is being made. Here the student might help by providing: -information about what is being applied for; a copy of the student's completed application form with a copy of any essay that he or she may have written; -a copy of the his/her transcript; a copy of his/her resume; -the deadlines by which the letter must be mailed. The student might also write out a brief reminder recalling the courses, tutorials, or extracurricular activities in which you worked together, and the subjects of particularly important discussions, including copies of any papers on which you made extensive comments. It might be a good idea, after deciding what information should be transmitted, to consider with the student how to divide up the labor: who should write what. Selection committees can tire of reading the same anecdote in several different letters, wondering if that is all there is to tell about the student. Extracurricular activities are often subject to this repetition . The Strategy of the Letter Good letters of recommendation must take into account the character and concerns of the subjects, the writer and the reader. What will the reader want to know? Together with the student you might jot down the criteria you think are going to be important in the selection process and decide what views of the student you have that might speak to these issues. Applicants for law school will be judged on their ability to do academic work, their intellectual capacity and motivation, their abi

FAQs

Why is writing letters of recommendation considered difficult but valuable?

Writing requires significant time, but it can strongly influence students’ lives by helping them secure legal education opportunities.

What information should a recommender assemble before writing?

The recommender should gather details about the student and the opportunity, including the application materials, transcript, resume, mailing deadlines, and reminders of courses, tutorials, extracurricular activities, and key papers with comments.

What is the main strategy a good letter of recommendation should follow?

A good letter should address what the reader wants to know by aligning with selection criteria, using concrete illustrations grounded in facts, and responding honestly without commenting on areas not supported by the recommender’s knowledge.

Sep 16, 2026

Upload by Sophia Brooks