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So I met with the prelaw adviser at my school a while ago to discuss the application process. I told him I was planning on asking my professors way in advance so they would have enough time. He told me that more than four weeks is excessive, and I absolutely shouldn't give them more than four weeks notice because they have other things to worry about.

I took his advice instead of reading up about it on here, and now I'm starting to freak out because all my professors said that they won't have the letters completed until very close to the deadlines. My earliest deadline is Cornell's EA completion date (November 15th). I'm not necessarily worried that my professors won't get them in on time - what I'm worried about is LSAC processing times. If I get them faxed by the 7th of November, will I have any issues with LSAC? I've read some conflicting information about LOR processing times so any advice would be greatly appreciated.

P.S. I found out after that my prelaw adviser went to cooley. He was crapping on me for having penn as my top choice...I am very skeptical about his credibility as an adviser now.

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sf88 wrote: I absolutely shouldn't give them more than four weeks notice because they have other things to worry about.

If anything, that's even more of reason to ask them way in advance. Grrr, what nonsense!

People actually go to their pre-law advisors?

Yes, yours gave you terrible advice.

Luckily, LSAC is (USUALLY) pretty quick. I faxed one letter at like 4pm Pacific Time and it was processed by the end of the next day. The others were mailed and they were processed within 4-5 days including snail mail time from the west coast.

Pre-law advisors still exist?

I'm not a "prelaw" major or anything like that. Unfortunately, my school wants all prospective law applicants to meet with the adviser. It's not a strict requirement, but a pretty strong suggestion.

I really want to warn other students about going to see him because he didn't give me a single bit of good advice. Maybe his advice is more applicable to students applying to lower ranked schools, not T14 and the like (I go to a big state school, and most people here are science/business/engineering focused anyways) but he certainly didn't help me at all. I wish I made better use of the tls forums

You're in a bind. Like other have said, faxing is much quicker. However, LSAC doesn't want you to do it because they run into a lot of trouble with the bar codes scanning and the letters being legible enough to easily read. You also don't really know if they went through without calling..which again, LSAC doesn't want you to do because they're swamped. Mailing letters takes transit time, sitting in a pile time, and then time to scan and process. It took two full weeks from mailing to processing for one of my recent recommendations.

I would press the professors to speed up the writing process. It shouldn't take more than an hour to do one. Many even have a template laid out where they just put in names and specific experiences. Explain the situation and beg for their accommodation.