Letters of Recommendation: The Basics

A HUGE part of your law school application comes down to your references. Your GPA and LSAT score only tells schools so much; admission committees want to know how you do in an actual class environment. Even if you're the smartest person in your undergrad class, if your references write in saying that you were always a jackass difficult student who had trouble with focusing and distracting others, that doesn't look good.

For better or for worse, you can't go back and change your last four years of behavior. Luckily, the way you ask for a recommendation can really help you (Or hurt you if you do it improperly).

The most important thing to keep in mind is that you're asking this person for a favor. So be polite. I'm not saying that you have to be overly formal, particularly if you already have a good working relationship with the recommender. There's no need to send an engraved letter along the lines of:

Dear Sir/Madame,

I would cordially request that you submit a letter of recommendation on my behalf to the following institutions, to facilitate my application and assist me in attaining admittance to a higher level of graduate education.

But on the other hand, you can't be too casual either. No professor wants to open their inbox to see:

What up teach? I need a letter of reccommendation for my law school app thats due at midnight tonight can you help me out? Id have asked yesterday but it was two-for-one tequila shots down at the Blue Pickle so I sorta forgot. Anyways   Im gonna need an extension on my final essay too. Your the best! K thx byee!!

I'm here to help you strike a balance. For starters, the professor you pick matters a lot here. They should be someone you've known for a while and have a decent relationship with. I know that sounds like a no-brainer, but there are some people out there who ask professors from their massive lecture courses, where the professor barely could pick them out of a crowd. Even if you got an A in that class, there aren't going to be many personal details a professor like that can write about in their letter. You should at least ask someone whose office hours you've been to.

Once you know who you're asking, it's a good idea to figure out when you should ask, and the answer is always as early as possible. If you expect your recommender to sit down and write out a thoughtful, complimentary letter, you need to give them enough time to do it. I'd say that you should ask at least a month before you want to start sending out your applications.

If you wait until the last minute, your professor is well within their rights to say no, that they don't have enough time. Even if you come across someone who is benevolent enough to agree, do you really want a letter that they wrote with one eye on the clock, trying to just throw something together so you'd at least have something to mail in?

After you've asked, and the professor has (hopefully) agreed, here's a tried-and-true trick that's worked for me over the years: Ask the recommender if you can sit down with them and talk about your application. You want to tailor each piece of your application, and this gives you the opportunity to do that.

It's not exactly a bad thing if a recommender focuses mostly on your strong writing skills in their letter, but if you were hoping that they could talk about how you improve as the semester progresses, and that you're a dedicated and hard worker, it's not the best possible outcome. Talking to the recommender gives you the opportunity to explain what you're hoping the admissions committee learns about you from this letter.

Talking to your recommender also means that you can help them write about why you're specifically interested in a particular program as well. If you're only applying to schools with great clinical programs, your recommender can add a tidbit about that, which can make you stand out from a pile of standard 'He/She was a delight to have in class'. 

All these little things add up, and an admissions committee can definitely tell the difference between a boilerplate, basic, "I send this out for every student that asks" letter, and a carefully crafted letter about you specifically.

Once you've gotten your letter sent in, there is one more, very important task that you have to do: WRITE A THANK YOU NOTE! Yes, it's big and red because it's just that important.

I'm not just telling you to write a thank you note because to not do so will lead to the death of polite society (Even though it will), I'm also telling you to do it because it's the best way to prevent yourself from accidentally burning a bridge. A professor might not automatically hate you if you don't write a thank you note after they write you a recommendation, but they will remember you much more fondly if you do. And they put the effort in to write you a letter. You owe it to them to at least let them know how your applications turned out.

Three basic rules: Be polite, give plenty of notice, and write a thank you note. It's not a perfect recipe to success; you still need to find professors who thought highly of you in the first place. However, it's a very good place to start.