Career Files, Pre-Law

All You Ever Wanted to Know About LSAC

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So you’ve decided to shelve your dream of headlining a boy band/starring in a reality television pageant show and attend law school instead. You type in “applying to law school” and Google obligingly directs you to LSAC.org.

While most people know that LSAC is somehow involved with the LSAT, it actually offers a range of services. As a prospective law student, it’s a good idea to know what the LSAC is, what it offers, and our recommendations for how you can best utilize its resources. Without further ado:

What is the LSAC, anyway?

LSAC stands for Law School Admissions Council. It is a non-profit entity located in Newton, Pennsylvania that facilitates the law school admission process, including the creation, administration, and scoring of the LSAT.

A great deal of money is channeled to LSAC in the form of LSAT and CAS (credential assembly service – more on this in a moment) fees, as well as money garnered from selling LSAT prep tests. It’s not immediately clear where this money goes, as it takes approximately three weeks to receive your LSAT score even though the answer sheet is a scantron, which takes the rest of the industrialized world about three seconds to score. But we digress.

What services does LSAC provide?

In addition to overseeing the LSAT, the Law School Admissions Council provides a number of important services for prospective law students:

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1. The Credential Assembly Service (CAS) puts together a report to send to each law school to which you apply. This includes an academic summary report, LSAT score(s) and writing sample, transcripts, letters of recommendation/evaluations if applicable, and other relevant information such as prior matriculation. American Bar Association-approved law schools and many other law schools require that you use CAS.

There is also an electronic application component to CAS that allows users to apply to law schools online from one system, rather than filling out each application for law school individually.

What we recommend:

You have to use the CAS to apply to law schools, since it’s required. It also costs money to use this service, but hey, that’s what parents, significant others, and extra shifts at Starbucks are for! Though you can apply to law schools through their own websites, we strongly urge you to utilize the electronic applications CAS provides. This will allow you to apply to law schools from one database rather than filling them out piecemeal across schools. In addition, CAS makes life easier for your letter writers since they’ll only have to write one letter of recommendation, rather than printing out multiple copies and sending them individually to law schools.

2. The Candidate Referral System (CRS) allows you to share your academic and biographical information with prospective law schools for recruitment purposes.

What we recommend:

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Do it! It’s free and sometimes law schools contact you with fee waivers and other incentives if you’re a promising prospective student. Did we mention that it’s free?

3. Law School Forums (sadly, no acronym here) are events hosted by the LSAC in cities throughout the United States to give potential law students the opportunity to speak with representatives from ABA-approved law schools and to learn more about the admissions process, the LSAT, legal education, etc.

What we recommend:

Go! These forums are free and provide applicants with the ability to meet with admissions personnel face to face. This is an invaluable opportunity to express interest in the law school, ask questions about personal statement topics and explanatory essays, and eat really bad packaged turkey sandwiches in a hotel ballroom.

What else does LSAC do?

The LSAC oversees a number of other activities, including providing research on the LSAT and law school admissions, conducting a number of diversity initiatives to increase enrollment of minority groups in law schools, and publishing test preparation and law school guides.

In addition, LSAC has a GPA/LSAT-based law school predictor, which gives the probability you’ll be admitted to each of its member law schools (with some exclusions) based on past admissions data. You have to take the results with a grain of salt, however, as there are additional considerations for law school other than your LSAT score and GPA.

What we recommend:

As the makers of the LSAT, you can purchase past prep tests from LSAC, typically in books of ten, which is a good way to go if you’re studying on your own. LSAC also sells the SuperPrep, which is a book of three LSATs only available through them (even LSAT prep companies can’t license the SuperPrep tests), along with explanations of particular question types. Despite a somewhat lame name, the SuperPrep is a good investment.

In addition, the law school predictor is an excellent way to figure out whether or not you’re in the ballpark for a particular law school. Applying to Harvard with a 120 and a 1.0 GPA is probably not going to go well for you, and the database lets you know if you’re spending your $80 on applying to a particular school wisely, or if you should use that money for tapas, instead. It’s also free, so you’ll get your dose of law school reality without having to pay for it.

So although LSAC may initially seem to be a nefarious scheme cooked up to make pre-law lives a walking nightmare, they actually have some great services. If you haven’t already, go to their website and give it a whirl. It’s a thriller.

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