Law Schools Recommendation Letter Requirements

How letters of recommendation generally work for law schools

Most law schools ask for 2 letters of recommendation, with a minority requesting or allowing up to 3–4. Academic letters from professors are generally preferred, especially for applicants closer to undergraduate graduation.

Submission is typically handled through LSAC's Credential Assembly Service (CAS), which stores and forwards letters to every law school on the applicant's list. Strong recommenders are usually a professor who taught the applicant in a rigorous, writing- or discussion-intensive course, and, where relevant, a supervisor from legal, research, or professional work experience.

Law schools are the most uniform category here because nearly all U.S. JD programs route letters through the same LSAC Credential Assembly Service, and most ask for a baseline of two letters. The meaningful differences are in how strongly each school prefers academic letters: Yale Law explicitly prefers two professor letters and is less enthusiastic about employer letters, while Harvard Law and Stanford Law require at least one academic letter but are more open to a professional letter for the second slot, particularly for applicants who have been out of school for several years.

Maximum letter counts also vary — Harvard Law and Yale Law generally cap around two to three, while Stanford Law allows up to four. Submitting more letters than a school accepts does not strengthen an application and can read as not having read the instructions carefully, so it is worth confirming the cap before assembling a longer letter packet.

Because LSAC processes letters centrally and forwards them to every school on an applicant's list, the practical bottleneck is usually how early letters are uploaded and matched in the LSAC system — not how many schools an applicant is applying to.