Prelaw Advisers and their Responsibilities

The most knowledgeable individuals available to you are the prelaw advisers who are found on every college campus. They are usually professors of subjects related to law-such as political science, history, or business-who spend part of their time advising students about applying to law school. (In some cases, a committee of professors shares the burden.) On large campuses, prelaw advisers may be full-time professionals with degrees in counseling.

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Prelaw advisers should be "facilitators," according to their national organization; they "bring . . . together in an appropriate mix knowledge of the advisee's needs and ambitions with information on various law schools and legally related careers." They often run prelaw clubs and similar voluntary organizations; publicize and make available application materials for the Law School Admission Test (LSAT), law camps, and similar programs; make available application materials for the private proprietary schools that offer cram courses to prepare applicants to take the LSAT (or, in some cases, run such courses themselves); maintain libraries of law school catalogs and similar materials; and sponsor programs that bring lawyers, legal educators, and law students to campus.

They may also review and critique filled-out applications, write letters of recommendation or arrange for other professors to write them, and help candidates interpret the often cryptic messages they receive from law schools about the status of their applications.

But their most important function, from your point of view, is that they give advice and hand out information on a one-on-one basis. Prelaw advisers regularly speak to law school admissions officials, and receive and distribute posters, leaflets, catalogs, videotapes, and reference books describing law schools, prelaw programs, scholar-ships, and other things that you need to know about. They communicate with Law Services, the organization that administers the LSAT and compiles statistics on the application process; Law Services passes on to advisers the information it has accumulated, including some data on the application process that is not generally released to the public. Consequently, prelaw advisers know a great deal about how selective various law schools are and about what kinds of applicants are likely to succeed at which schools. Finally, prelaw advisers speak to students and alumni; that is, people who are now seeking admittance to law school and people who have previously succeeded in gaining admittance.

As a result of this constant interchange of information, prelaw advisers know what works in the application process. More than anyone else, they can provide detailed, practical, and up-to-date answers to your questions; they can critique your application strategies, review the list of law schools you intend to apply to and advise you whether these schools are within your reach, and in general give you useful and accurate information and assistance.

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Everything I know about the application process I've learned during my twenty-one years of service as prelaw adviser at Bradley University, a medium-sized school with a good reputation for pre-professional placement. I know that the tips I'll give you will be helpful because successful applicants have used them in the recent past. My experience qualifies me to write this article. But no book can be as specific or as up to date as a conversation with a knowledgeable and concerned individual. If you have trouble applying my general advice to your own unique situation, your prelaw adviser is the person to ask for help. In general,

When you have specific questions that this book doesn't answer, consult your prelaw adviser.

If you're still an undergraduate, don't wait until the last minute to make the acquaintance of your prelaw adviser. Your adviser will best be able to help you if he or she knows you well. Ideally, you will get to know your adviser in the course of carrying out your routine undergraduate activities; perhaps you'll take one of your adviser's courses, or see your adviser at meetings of the prelaw club. If nothing else, it's a good idea to visit once a year for a chat.

The danger is that on today's overcrowded and underfunded cam-puses your prelaw adviser simply may not have the time to work closely with you. You may have to compete with other students to get your adviser's attention. You'll have to make do with occasional fifteen- or twenty-minute visits, for which you'll need to make appointments well in advance. Therefore, it's important for you to know how to make the best use of the limited time you will be allotted. Because prelaw advisers are most useful when they can give precise answers to specific questions, you should prepare a list of questions before each appointment and bring it with you to the adviser's office.

At various points in the articles that follow, I'll indicate the kinds of specific information that you should seek from your prelaw adviser.

Consequently, most law schools now enroll large numbers of non-traditionals. In some freshman classes, as many as 40 percent of the students have allowed some time to elapse between leaving college and entering law school. At Vermont Law School, two-thirds of the students are non-traditionals. Some big-city law schools have always run night and part-time programs designed to attract older students who cannot study law full time.

Like traditional students, you must have attended an accredited undergraduate college or university for at least three years. If you made good grades as an undergraduate, you have an advantage. Your GPA remains an important admission criterion. But if your undergraduate grades were poor, law schools will look for some other predictors of law school success-some other evidence, that is, that you can do the rigorous intellectual work that law schools require. If you present it properly, your work experience may partly compensate for poor grades; indeed, the more distinguished your career has been, the less important your undergraduate record will be. Like traditional applicants, you'll have to take the Law School Admission Test and do well on it, and you'll have to submit various other pieces of evidence for the admissions committee to evaluate.

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