The post title is designed to get your attention, because here’s a secret:
Your personal statement is not meant to show off your qualifications for law school.
Here’s why:
You have only about two pages double-spaced for your personal statement, and for most people, it should focus on your motivations for going to law school: what experiences, observations, or insights from your past have led you to this decision? What’s the fire in your belly for getting a law degree? What problems do you want to help solve in the world with the benefit of your legal education? And, for some law schools, you’re also tacking on why that particular law school is a great fit for your goals. That’s a lot to cover in two pages, assuming you have reflected on why you have this goal and what kinds of problems you want to solve. Trying to squeeze into two pages why you’re qualified in addition to your motivations means you’re probably doing a disservice to the motivation part of your essay, which is really what you want to be featuring there. (Two pages double-spaced is short! You’re not writing Moby-Dick!)
Other parts of your application are well designed to showcase your qualifications: your resume, the application form itself, your transcript, and your recommendations. You do not need to use your essay redundantly to educate the admissions officer about your work history or your academic interests, for example. Redundancy is bad in an application. Redundancy means you’re taking up space for no additional value that you could instead be using to talk about something else that’s important and that you haven’t showcased elsewhere. Are there parts of the application that are inherently redundant in and of themselves? Absolutely! The application form itself is about 80% redundant — where you went to school, your work history, your LSAT history, etc. — that’s all stuff that law schools can get from other components of the application; the forms need a major redesign, because that’s a lot of make-work for you. But that doesn’t mean you have to be redundant on top of their redundancy! The art of completing a great application is using the space they give you most effectively.
What the non-essay parts of the application can’t do as well is give the important backstory, the WHY. Your essay can and should focus on the WHY. It’s fine to refer to various parts of your background that are relevant to your WHY story even if they show up somewhere else in your application, but don’t gobble up too much precious word count to do so. You can assume that the admissions officer will have your resume and all those other application components in front of them while they’re reading your essay. No admissions officer will read your essay in a vacuum! They review your application as a whole, and so all the pieces of your application need to fit together as a whole.
For all of those reasons, figure out your WHY before you start writing. 🚀