The LSAC

The Law School Admission Council, basically everything you need to apply for law school. Personally I think it friggin' rocks, but I understand and have friends who think it's just there to make a profit and force law students to do things their way. It's kind of the Walmart for law students, but there aren't any other competitors, just the one-stop shopping experience. Basically, you sign up at lsac.org, fill out all your information and then it tells you what you need in order to apply. You'll have to get your undergraduate school to submit your transcript, all your letters of recommendation have to go to them with an official cover sheet, your resume and personal letter, you sign up for the LSAT through them and can check your scores after they have been submitted and you can apply for law school through the website. I say you can, but I'm fairly sure that you have to. You can fill out the paper form that each school requires, but all the other information has to come from LSAC, if I'm not mistaken.

What I thought was great about LSAC is that when you start applying to schools, it will autofill most of the information for you, so you don't have to type in your name and social and all that stuff a hundred times. Saves a ton of time, but I'd recommend reading over everything since it does tend to make a few mistakes here and there. There is a charge for each application you submit, even if you get a fee waiver from a school. I think it's like $12 for each application you submit and again, this doesn't go to the school, it goes to the LSAC for sending all your information to your chosen law school. If you need to pay to apply at your selected school(s), most will allow you to do that through this website and some schools will even waive the fee if you do everything through LSAC electronically. I'd imagine this is where some people start getting upset about the close connection between law schools and the LSAC, but at this point I don't really care any more.

I'll break down all the stuff I had to submit when I applied and the rough time frame that I had in my next post. Let me know if anything has changed since I did it all, I know the LSAC website itself is going through some changes, but I don't know if the requirements or anything have changed.