What's the ideal LSAT timeline? Your mileage may vary, and your LSAT instructor will be able to give you advice customized to your individual situation. But in a perfect world, here's how I like to work backwards from the end goal:

Plan to submit your applications in early November (or even sooner, but early November is plenty early).

Juniors – it is time to shift gears!

It's Tough Love Season* here Chez Ivey, and it's time for my annual public service announcement to applicants, wherein I say some version of "STOP ACTING LIKE A CRAZY PERSON."

I've written a whole blog post about how waiting is the hardest part, with a Tom Petty/Eddie Vedder video and everything! In that same spirt, I have a story to share.

I was talking to a law school admissions officer, among other things about applicants who feel compelled to check their online status every six minutes.

What's the fastest way to tank your legal career before it even starts? Being found guilty by LSAC of "misconduct or irregularity" in the application process.

LSAC has a helpful page on its website explaining what that means. In part:

What constitutes misconduct or an irregularity?

The submission, even by mistake, as part of the law school admission process of any information that is false, inconsistent, or misleading, or the omission of information that may result in a false or misleading conclusion, or the violation of any regulation governing the law school admission process, including any violation of LSAT test center regulations.

At a time when the media and even Congress are scrutinizing claims by law schools about their graduates' employability and earning power, these application questions caught my eye:

Student Indebtedness

1. Please list all of your outstanding educational loans. List amount, type, lender name, and total amount.

2. Have you ever defaulted on any educational loan?

Law school applications don't typically ask you to provide information about your indebtendess (except in the separate, optional financial aid application).

There is some very smart and forward-thinking advice from Professor Larry Ribstein in his response to the NYT article "What They Don't Teach Law Students: Lawyering."

My favorite line from Prof. Ribstein's piece: "[L] aw schools should teach law students how to be architects and designers rather than mechanics." After all, "[l]awyers now don’t draft agreements from scratch.

Take a walk down memory lane with me.

In hindsight, my biggest frustration when I applied to law school many years ago was something that should have been easy to check off the list: the Dean's Certification.

The economy is in the tank, things are down. Nobody was thinking about ‘transparency’ five years ago, because the job market was so rich there was no reason to quibble over statistics.

- Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School to the Wall Street Journal ("Congress Gives Law School the Stink Eye," Nov 14, 2011)

I have a lot to say about that, and it ties in nicely with a follow-up I want to make to an interview I gave recently to US News & World Report, which was nice enough to quote me yesterday in an article called 5 Tips for Current or Prospective Law School Students in a Difficult Economy.

It was election day here yesterday, and in the run-up I came home to a front porch blanketed with postcards and flyers from various City Council candidates (there were a whopping 18 for our hamlet of Cambridge — enough flyers to cover some meaningful real estate on my little porch).

Now that the election has passed, I feel free to post a picture of one them, the biggest in size.

Say you receive an email from an admissions officer inviting you to an interview. Or you grabbed someone's business card at a school forum and want to email that admissions officer with a question. What's the appropriate way to address that person?

Here are some guidelines to help you communicate with admissions officers in a professional way:

• If the person's recent email or recent business card clearly identifies him (in the email signature, for example) as having a Dean title, you can address him as Dean So-and-So.

I've written before that in your application essays, you must answer the question they're asking you, not the one you wish they had asked. Here's a related problem I often see: Rather than ignoring the question entirely, you might answer only part of the question and ignore the harder (and more interesting) bits.

Here are two examples, one from the MBA world, and one from the law school world:

• "What matters most to you, and why?

My applications are out, and already I have a couple of answers back (both admits, thankfully). Since I have no idea what I'm doing, I thought you could answer two etiquette questions for me: 

1. Is it acceptable to send a short thank you email to the admissions dean after receiving your decision? Or is that generally not advised?

 2.

I had an interesting conversation recently with a big-wig at an LSAT prep company.

Picking up where I left off (Big Rule #1 for writing your law school essays), and continuing with the larger theme of learning how to decode your application instructions:

Big Rule # 2: Identify the Right Essay Type and Stay True to It.

The second most important thing you need to know when approaching your required law school application essays is that you need to pay attention to the essay question and make sure you are answering that question—not that other school’s question, and not the question you wish were being asked.

It is interview season and I'm hearing from applicants across the land that interviews scare them.

Are the character count limitations in some of your law school applications killing you? If you are struggling with instructions that tell you to list your extracurricular activities or honors/awards (including description!) in 500 characters or less, you are not alone. Here are some real examples:

• List your important scholastic or academic honors including scholarships, fellowships, prizes, honor societies, etc.

Have you already sat down to start tackling your law school applications essays? Good! Now's the time.

You may notice that the essay questions tend to be very broad.

I've started filling out my applications through LSAC.