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hephaestus · Post by **hephaestus** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 11:39 am

This is perfectly acceptable. LORs have very little effect on the outcome of your admissions cycle as a general rule.

kimkardashian · Post by **kimkardashian** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 11:56 am

hephaestus · Post by **hephaestus** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 12:02 pm

kimkardashian wrote:
ImNoScar wrote:This is perfectly acceptable. LORs have very little effect on the outcome of your admissions cycle as a general rule.
Thank you. I was feeling nervous because I watched a webinar and went to a panel with law school admission officers from NYU, Harvard, UMich, and Chicago and they were all talking about how important they were, and I wasn't sure if that was actually true.

Admissions officers say things like this to create the illusion that the process is not 99% numbers based. In reality, your GPA/LSAT will be all that matters.

midwest17 · Post by **midwest17** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 1:23 pm

It's not quite true that LORs are worthless. Based on my understanding, a bad LOR will sink you at many places, but those are rare. Beyond that, they really just matter at Yale, where you should really have two academic letters.

altoid99 · Post by **altoid99** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 2:41 pm

midwest17 wrote:It's not quite true that LORs are worthless. Based on my understanding, a bad LOR will sink you at many places, but those are rare. Beyond that, they really just matter at Yale, where you should really have two academic letters.

It would have to be really bad. Like, revealing something you obviously left out of your application on purpose. Other than that, a neutral LOR (one that many would consider 'bad') is not going to hurt all that much, if at all.

bp shinners · Post by **bp shinners** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 2:52 pm

midwest17 wrote:It's not quite true that LORs are worthless. Based on my understanding, a bad LOR will sink you at many places, but those are rare. Beyond that, they really just matter at Yale, where you should really have two academic letters.

Yep - they're more disqualifiers at most places than qualifiers. Because they all read almost exactly the same.

That being said, selecting good ones can help your application by having equally strong letters to the rest of the application. You shouldn't agonize over the LoRs, but you should put some thought into them.

*Yale being the most obvious exception.

hephaestus · Post by **hephaestus** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 2:53 pm

midwest17 wrote:It's not quite true that LORs are worthless. Based on my understanding, a bad LOR will sink you at many places, but those are rare. Beyond that, they really just matter at Yale, where you should really have two academic letters.

True, but it does not sound like OP has these issues. Good point though.

midwest17 · Post by **midwest17** » Mon Oct 07, 2013 3:40 pm

altoid99 wrote:It would have to be really bad. Like, revealing something you obviously left out of your application on purpose. Other than that, a neutral LOR (one that many would consider 'bad') is not going to hurt all that much, if at all.

Yeah, I meant objectively bad, as in it's no longer really a letter of recommendation, because they say "I can't recommend this person for law school."

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