When you submit your recommendations and your transcripts as part of your law school applications, you’ll be using LSAC’s Credential Assembly Service, also known as CAS.
The recommendations part of CAS is, in my experience, the logistical part of the whole application process that trips up the most people, so I’ll focus on the process of submitting recommendations in this post. The logistical stuff is really boring and a bit tedious by definition, but it’s very important, because if you don’t follow the logistical instructions precisely, your applications will get held up.
Here’s what you need to know:
Read the instructions on the LSAC website carefully. Seriously, all of them. There are a LOT of very specific instructions there, and you need to know them cold. Many applicants don’t bother to read the instructions on the website or even go look for them. (If looking up picky details and mastering them is not your strong suit, now’s the time to get good at that, because that’s what law students and lawyers do all… day… long.) In order to be successful as an applicant you have to take ownership of this process and it starts with LSAC. Here are the pages with their instructions for CAS accounts, CAS FAQs, and for recommendations in particular. Master this general FAQ page as well. And here are their very precise rules for transcripts. Really, read the whole site. It’s important.
You have to sign up for CAS separately, even if you have already created your LSAC account. CAS is not automatically bundled into your LSAC account.
When you sign up for your CAS account, you have to take two steps: you have to create your CAS account, and you have to pay for it. Do not forget to pay for it. I’ve heard from people who say, “I don’t know what the problem is, I had my transcripts sent to LSAC but they’re not being processed,” and I ask, “Did you pay for your CAS account?” and nine times out of ten they didn’t realize that it wasn’t sufficient just to create the CAS account, and that they had to pay for it as well. Make sure you complete both steps.
LSAC will not send your recommendations to School X until you have (1) listed School X as an intended recipient for that letter and (2) you have submitted your application to School X. Until you submit your applications anywhere, your letters just stay parked in your LSAC account. So if you haven’t decided on your list of law schools yet, and you want to enter a recommender into the platform, you can put any random law school down for your recommenders (or better yet, a school that you’re pretty sure you’ll be applying to no matter what), just to get those recommenders into the system. Then you can go in again later and update the list of schools so that it reflects the schools that the recommendations are actually going to get sent to. You can even do it school by school over time; you don’t have to enter the complete, final list of school in one go. Just add other schools for that recommender when you know you’re submitting to that particular school. Obviously take out whatever school you just put in there originally as a placeholder as needed.
If you end up with more recommendations than you end up wanting to use, or you want to use some letters but not all for certain schools, or mix and match them for different schools, you can do that. Again, they just sit there in your account until you are ready to submit your application to a given school AND you tell the platform which letters should be sent to that school. And if there’s a recommendation that you never end up sending anywhere at all, the good news is that your recommenders will never know if you used their letter or not.
You will have to tag each recommendation letter that is being uploaded as either a general letter or a targeted letter. General means that the letter will be sent to the law schools you tell LSAC to send them to without being written specifically for any specific school. In contrast, a targeted letter is written specifically for School X and is addressed specifically to School X and gets sent only to School X.
If a recommender is writing a targeted letter, but it would also make a good general letter if the school-specific stuff were stripped out, and that recommender is feeling generous with their time, they can upload both a general and a targeted letter; you’ll just have to enter that person twice (same name in each, but two different letters) and tag each letter differently (one as general, the other as targeted).
Most people submit only general letters. You’d only submit a targeted letter if that recommender has some kind of special relationship to that law school — maybe they have taught at that law school, or they are an alum of that particular law school. That is usually not the case for law school recommenders, so don’t panic if you have only general letters.
Give your recommenders a deadline. When a letter has been uploaded and processed on the LSAC side, you’ll see the status change in your account, so you should keep an eye on which letters are still outstanding. It’s always good to give recommenders a deadline so that you can put that date on your calendar in order to nudge them if their letters haven’t been received yet by that date.
And do make it a fake deadline, because you want to have some cushion in your timeline if any one of your recommenders flakes on you. (That happens more often than you would think.) If you build in some cushion, then no single recommender will be holding up your applications.
Ask for one letter more than the minimum required number. That way, if a single recommender takes their sweet time submitting their letter (or never submits it at all for whatever reason), that person isn’t holding up your applications. Most schools require two recommendations. If you ask for three, you might end up using all three, or you might not. But your applications will be good to go once you have received two.