Tips for Submitting Your Law School Recommendations

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 theLSAC websitecarefully. 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.