How Long Does It Take To Hear Back From Law Schools After Applying?

How Long Does It Take To Hear Back From Law Schools After Applying
In rare cases, some applicants may receive an answer within a few weeks, but the process typically takes 2–4 months. If your application is placed on hold or if you are placed on a wait list then it may take several additional months to receive a final decision.

Do law schools send rejection emails?

@accountformerlyknowasvd1988 said: @”montaha.rizeq” said: Sometimes no news is good news! But yeah generally you’ll get an email from the school saying your application has been decided and to check the status on their website. Otherwise you’ll get a letter in the mail stating a rejection or a package in the mail stating an acceptance. All the best! Awesome! That sounds decent enough for me! @jyang72 said: Right now, the fastest acceptance letter is 3 weeks away from I submitted my applications, which were to GW law and William and Mary law. BU law and Emory law took roughly 1 month and a half. I am still waiting for Berkeley, UCLA, Vanderbilt, and Georgetown.

How long does it take to hear back from American law school?

The Admissions Process for Early Applicants – If you submit your law school application soon after admissions open in August or September, it will be evaluated based on admissions officers’ forecasts about how your application compares to their expectations for the cycle.

They will consider the competitiveness of your profile and how you might add balance to the class they are aiming to assemble.
For example, law schools don’t want to accept too many applicants with the same background, interests or work experience,
Typically, applicants will hear back within six weeks or so, although the most competitive law schools can take longer to reach a decision.

Some law schools expedite the process for applicants who apply early decision, since they have made a binding commitment to attend if offered admission. That can give them a leg up in the process. If admissions officers can’t come to a clear decision about your candidacy, they may hold your application for later consideration or place you on a waitlist,

These are not the same thing, but both mean that admissions officers want to see more of their applicant pool before making a final decision.
Some of this can come down to luck.
Maybe a law school is concerned about admitting too many candidates with a similar profile.
More cynically, admissions officers might worry you will decline their offer in favor of other schools.

Waitlisting you can be a low-risk way for them to gauge the persistence of your interest. Like airlines or concert venues that anticipate no-shows by selling more seats than they can accommodate, law schools typically accept more applicants than they can take, to account for applicants who decline admission due to competing offers or other reasons.

How do law schools notify you of acceptance?

Waiting game: What to do after submitting your application After working diligently throughout undergrad to earn high grades, forming relationships with professors for letters of recommendation, writing all of your application essays and preparing for months to take the LSAT, you’ve finally submitted your application(s)! Now what? The waiting game begins.

Before turning off your brain completely: a) confirm that each school received all the required documents and that your application is ready for review, b) double check that the letters of recommendation were properly submitted together with all of your transcripts, c) make certain you received an “application complete” e-mail from the law school or other documentation to verify your “complete” status before moving on to other things.

2. Take a well-deserved break. Admissions offices break for the holidays and you should too! While you wait for a decision, the best possible use of your time may be to spend it with family and friends. Go to the movies, volunteer, read a great book, or just binge Netflix all day.

Do anything that is engaging and that will distract you from the application process.
If you submit your applications mid-semester, this might mean only taking an afternoon off because you still have work and/or school.
Nevertheless, you should reward yourself for all of your hard work leading up to this moment! 3.

Utilize the online status checker, but do not overdo it. Most (but not all) law schools will send an e-mail with a link to an online status checker. This allows you to monitor the progress of your application as it moves from “complete” to “in review,” and finally, when a decision has been made.

This tool can be a blessing or a curse.
It can be wonderful because it allows you to see that your application is not just sitting idle.
For many, it may also be the first place that you see a final decision on your application.
The online status checker might update hours or days before your official paperwork is received via e-mail or through the mail.

However, you must refrain from compulsively checking the website. For many, the status checker leads to more unnecessary stress and anxiety when there is no apparent progress. This does not mean your application is not actively being reviewed. To help minimize stress, you can set up a calendar reminder every Friday to only check your status then, or (once you know your application is complete) simply ignore this tool altogether.

Whatever you do, don’t waste your day repeatedly hitting ‘refresh.’ 4.
Do not compare yourself to others.
Try not to read too much into other students’ decisions.
It can be difficult not to compare yourself to others who receive decisions before you, but that does not mean you will not be admitted! Schools generally will admit their strongest candidates first, meaning those that were above their 50th or 75th percentile for GPA and LSAT from the previous year (or for this year’s target).

Even if you are not included in the initial wave of admissions, rest assured that this does not mean you will not also be admitted. At the same time, remember to be sensitive about sharing your good news with others who may still be waiting on their decisions.5.

Focus on classes so you can submit additional grades.
Although it is incredibly exciting to think about your future law school dreams hanging in the balance, you still have work to do right now.
Remember that law schools will be interested in reviewing your final transcripts.
Throw your nervous energy into studying for exams and making sure you will be exactly what a law school is seeking in a future student.

Remember, if you are waitlisted or have not received a decision by January, you can send in your fall semester transcript for additional consideration to help boost your chances of admission. A high fall semester GPA might be just what you need to receive an admissions letter.6.

Respect the timelines given. Respect the timelines the admissions office gives you. If they inform you it requires 6–8 weeks to return a decision, do not start emailing their office in week two inquiring about your status. The admissions staff is incredibly busy this time of year processing and reviewing all the applications submitted.

Rest assured, they did not forget about your application and you will get a decision back as soon as they are able to make one.7. Schedule a school visit. Be proactive about researching schools. Scheduling a visit is one of the best ways to determine if a school is right for you.

Most schools offer a tour, a meeting with an admissions counselor, and the opportunity to sit in on a 1L class. Know that this is not a back door way of securing an interview for yourself and you should not treat it as such. The visit is intended to be insightful and beneficial to your decision-making process (not theirs).

Overall, waiting to hear back from law schools can be a very long and stressful process. There are things that you can and should be doing to put your mind at ease and help make your final decision on which law school to attend when you receive your admission letters.

Rachel Margiewicz is the director of Pre-Law Services with JD Advising, a law school and bar exam preparation company offering services ranging from LSAT tutoring and application assistance to bar exam tutoring, courses, and seminars. She is a licensed attorney who spent five years working in law school admissions, successfully coaching applicants through the admissions process.

You can follow Ms. Margiewicz and the JD Advising team on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Additional resources, including daily blog posts, are available at, : Waiting game: What to do after submitting your application

Is 180 good on the LSAT?

One of the most frequently asked questions we receive is, “How hard is the LSAT?” Most students have heard the test is difficult, but unless they’ve taken an LSAT already, they don’t have a good idea of whether the test really is hard, or whether it’s just like any other college test.

So let’s take a look at some numbers and see what the real story is here.
First, we have to understand the scores that are produced by the test, because those scores help us measure difficulty.
Our LSAT Scoring Scale discussion explains how the 120 to 180 scoring scale works, and the key discussion points relate to how many questions you can miss to achieve certain scores, as well as what percentile is represented by each score.

Let’s start by looking at the number of people who score a 180, which is a perfect score. In theory, the easier the test, the higher the number of perfect scores. Think about what would happen if you gave a very basic, first grade level spelling test to a group of college-educated adults, a test that included words like “cat” and “dog.” That should be pretty easy (right?), and you’d expect a large number of perfect scores! On the other hand, if you gave an advanced calculus test to fourth graders, it would be pretty amazing (inhuman, almost) to see even one perfect score.

Again, the easier the test relative to the test takers, the more perfect scores you should see. With the LSAT, the percentile for a 180 is 99.97%. Thus, in numerical terms, if you have a 180, then in a room of 10,000 people you have one of the three highest scores. With roughly 100,000 LSATs administered in the past year, that would suggest that about 30 people received a perfect score.

When only 30 people achieve this score out of 100,000 test takers, the inference is that this is a very, very difficult exam! Achieving a 180 is also interesting in that to do so does not require perfection. That is, you don’t have to answer all of the questions correctly in order to receive a 180.

This page contains a brief overview of scoring scales for the LSATs from June 2005 to the present, and it shows that to get a 180, you can typically miss around 2 to 3 questions per test. So, to produce a 3-in-10,000 score, you don’t even have to be perfect; you can miss a few questions and still make it happen.

Next, let’s focus on a score of 170, which is a highly desirable LSAT score, and one that almost every LSAT taker would be thrilled to receive. A 170 represents a percentile of 97.4%, meaning that test takers with a score of 170 have a score higher than 97.4% of all LSAT takers.

So, that’s pretty good! But what does it take to achieve that score? On the most recent LSAT, you would have to answer at least 89 out of 101 questions to receive a 170. In other words, you can miss 12 questions, and still be above 97.4% of testers (alternate view: you can miss 11.88% of the questions but still be in the top 2.5% of scores).

Considered alone, this suggests you have some latitude in missing LSAT questions, and that missing a few questions still allows you to achieve a very high score. That by itself is a sign of the difficulty of the test, but to bring the point home a bit more, let’s compare it to a grading scale that most people are familiar with: the scales used in college.

At most colleges, if you were to get 89 out of 100 on a test, you’d be looking at a B+, or perhaps a B. That’s certainly a solid grade, but it isn’t one that is considered outstanding or highly desirable. But, on the LSAT, getting 89 right results in a score that is considered highly desirable, and this too indicates that the LSAT is, in general, a very difficult test.

The final piece of evidence regarding test difficulty relates to the guessing policy enforced by LSAC. Unlike many other standardized tests, there is no guessing penalty on the LSAT, and you are strongly encouraged to guess on the questions that you cannot finish.

There is no penalty for missing a question, but if you guess correctly, you receive full credit. Think about that for a second, because what it suggests is that this test is so hard that the test makers don’t even care if you guess; they don’t think it will materially change your score! Their view is that even someone who performs extremely well on the questions they do answer will still not be able to blindly guess their way to a very different score.

The conclusion in all of this is that yes indeed, the LSAT is a very hard test. From any objective measure, it’s a challenge to score well on this exam. But there is good news here because in difficulty lies opportunity! The LSAT is a learnable test, and you can improve your performance by studying and preparing properly.

Why haven’t I heard back from law school?

If you haven’t heard back from a law school that means you are still in consideration for a spot, but you aren’t at the top of their list. They are waiting to hear back from others that they have accepted. As they have a better sense of how many vacant seats they have, they will get back to you.

Is 3.47 A good GPA for law school?

75th: 75% of first years were accepted with a GPA that is at or below this number. GPA For All Admitted Applicants 2020.

Law School	New York Law School
75th percentile GPA (all applicants)	3.66
50th percentile GPA (all applicants)	3.47
25th percentile GPA (all applicants)	3.21

Is waitlist a rejection law school?

How Does the Law School Waitlist Work? – Many students who are placed onto a law school waitlist see it as a complete rejection of their application and may give up hope on admissions. However, you should not see a waitlist as a rejection of your application, but as a chance to continue to impress the admissions committee; being placed on a waitlist does come with hope, though it may not feel like that at the time.

Admissions committees only place students on waitlists that they would be happy to admit into the school at some point if the need arises.
There is no general rule about which students get accepted and which get added to waitlists, as this process largely depends on the school.
Nor is there an algorithm that you can crack in order to understand exactly how to get off of a waitlist.

That being said, you may be able to turn your position on the waitlist into an offer of admission if you effectively navigate the school’s requirements and acceptance process. This is something that can be confusing at first and doesn’t necessarily guarantee your admission, but it can greatly boost your overall chances of being selected off the waitlist, and that’s what you want to work toward with a waitlist.

Can you reapply to law school if rejected?

It will not count against you to you reapply to a law school that previously rejected or deferred you, as long as your application shows positive changes, additions, and growth. This can be in the form of additional course work and improved grades or continuous employment or internship experience.

Alumni of Johns Hopkins University undergraduate institutions have access to our office resources, including individualized advising via phone and in-person appointments.
Also, email inquiries may be made.
Contacting the office to schedule an individual advising appointment is the recommended first step in the application process for alumni and re-applicants.

Alumni should refer to the italicized portion of the Junior Year and Senior Year links under “Your JHU Years” for pertinent details and a timeline for the application process.

What percentage of law school applicants are accepted?

Law School Admissions Statistics in 2022 Law school admissions is notoriously competitive in the US, and law school admissions statistics reflect this. The median acceptance rate for all law schools in the US sits at 40.8%, which is already a fairly competitive rate.

The top 15 law schools in the US, with acceptance rates below 15%, are even more selective. Their median acceptance rate sits at 11.1%. The toughest law school to get into,, has an acceptance rate of just 6.9%. Conversely, the to get into are, Dartmouth University’s law program and, To get accepted to law school, you’ll need an excellent application and good scores.

To start, you’ll also need to take the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT). The average accepted LSAT score is 150, but to get into the top law schools, you’ll want to score above 162 out of 180. If you score below 145 on any practice tests, work on improving your score before you take the real exam.

Or you can retake the test to submit stronger scores on your law school application.
A can help guide you on the requirements to apply to law school.
They can help you figure out, too.
On average, students will need a relatively high GPA to get accepted to law school as well.
Students should aim for a GPA of 3.6 or higher to get into the best law schools.

Some law schools will accept students with lower GPAs, but realistically, you’ll need a GPA of at least 2.5 to have a fair shot of getting accepted to less selective law schools. The table below summarizes the latest admission statistics data for US law schools.

Getting into law school in the US is undeniably challenging, but it is possible.
With many excellent law schools to choose from, including some of the most well-known such as, and School, there are many opportunities for students to get accepted.
If you’re concerned about or below average LSAT score, don’t worry.

Students can also take the LSAT multiple times without hurting their chances or take courses to improve their GPA. With good preparation, a strong application and high scores, students stand a fair chance at getting into any of the law schools in this list.

Do law firms send rejection letters?

What Does Silence Mean When a Law Firm Fails to Respond to Your Application, or Interviews You and Then Goes Dark? How Lateral Legal Recruiting Is Done Inside of Law Firms Law firms do their recruiting in two ways. The first way is through a recruiter or a recruiter’s candidate making contact with a law firm’s recruiting department.

The second way is through a recruiter or recruiter’s candidate making contact with a partner, associate, or someone else at the firm that the recruiter or candidate personally knows.
If you are applying to a large, important firm, you should almost always use the first way, and go through the firm’s recruiting department.

However, if you are applying to a smaller law firm without the resources for a recruiting department, then you should go through someone you know. A resume that goes to the designated recruiting person in the recruiting department will almost always go to a partner anyway.

See the following articles for more information: Law firms with recruiting departments want everything to go through them.
Candidates often ask me “who I know” inside of the law firm and similar questions to see if I have any power that can help them and push them forward.
The answer to this is that in most major law firms I know partners because they are my candidates and at different stages of the recruiting process I may have placed them or I may be involved in recruiting them.

Nevertheless, just because I know partners does not mean it is a good idea for me to call them about given candidates. Most recruiting departments want to be “in control” of the situation when lateral talent is being recruited. They get very angry when they are not the first “touch point” in the process. How Long Does It Take To Hear Back From Law Schools After Applying Certainly, it is important to have a partner send your materials to the recruiting department if you send them to that partner. I know of countless instances where an attorney sent his or her resume to a partner or friend and never heard anything. —and in several cases hired.

The law firm did not have the candidate’s resume, and the candidate’s “friend” (for whatever reason) did not forward the resume.
You need to be careful about who you approach.
Friends may be jealous and competitive with you, or they may simply be disorganized—you do not know.
Partners may feel that the firm does not need any more associates in your practice area (they may be competitive with partners in your practice area and not want to help you), the partner may be uncomfortable with you working in the firm due to your personal relationship, or the partner may not like you as much as you think.

One time, when I was younger and a law student, I forwarded my resume to a partner I knew well growing up. He lived in my neighborhood and I was dating his daughter’s best friend. After I sent the resume, I called him a few months later to follow up. I expected a warm reception.

But instead, he was very cold with me.
I have nothing to do with this.
I sent your resume to the recruiting department.” Needless to say, I did not get a good feeling from this; however, this is what most partners are expected to do in the most organized of law firms.
One thing I have noticed in my 20+ years in this business is that when a law firm does not have a good legal recruiting department, this is often a reflection of things that are not going right inside of the law firm.

In almost every instance in which I have encountered a bad legal recruiting department, over time, the law firm has gone out of business or merged. You can often ascertain that a law firm has internal problems by the way its recruiting department behaves towards recruiters and candidates.

The Recruiting Department Is Not Respected by the Firm – If the recruiting department is not respected by the firm, then the people within the recruiting department may be angry, do the minimum required, not pass along applications to partners, not follow up, not respond to applications, not respond to phone calls, and more. This creates all sorts of issues. I have had people within recruiting departments tell me in private conversations how much they hate their firms. One recruiting department at a major AmLaw firm recently told me “Who likes it here? No one likes it. Everyone would leave if they could.”
The Recruiting Department Is Not Needed by the Firm to the Extent It Should Be – If a recruiting department is not needed to the extent it should be, this means that the firm is slow and does not have enough work, or the recruiting is being handled by another department.
The Recruiting Department Is Simply Not Being Managed Properly by the Firm – Recruiting departments, like people, need to be managed properly. If a recruiting department is not being managed properly, it can get away with a lot. A non-managed recruiting department might not forward applications, might manage their email improperly, might not respond to applications, might lose things, might not pick up phone calls or return calls—and more. This creates issues where even the best applications go unnoticed. Our recruiting firm always sends applications via email, letter, and fax to make sure nothing escapes the firm.

The recruiting department of a law firm is a very important part of the law firm. It is the public face of the law firm and helps set the firm’s reputation in the marketplace. The recruiting department is also responsible for responding to applications and keeping things organized.

The people who work inside of a recruiting department are thus expected to have certain characteristics to make them effective from a public relations and efficiency perspective. To understand what happens to your application when you apply to law firms, you should understand the recruiting department inside of most law firms.

You should understand what a recruiting coordinator is expected to do and what a recruiting coordinator is expected not to do. What do you think makes an effective law firm recruiting coordinator?

Recruiting Coordinators Are Expected to Be Interested in People

The job of a is to be interested in people. Recruiting coordinators are expected to be interested in everyone around them and be liked. The recruiting coordinator should be liked by the staff of the firm, the partners in the firm, and the people whom the recruiting coordinator encounters applying to work in the firm.

Most recruiting coordinators are very outgoing and people-oriented. This makes them interested in the people calling and sending applications, in partners requesting certain types of attorneys to assist them, in meeting new people, and in going to conferences. Being interested in people means that the recruiting coordinator can see what makes each person interesting.

The best recruiting coordinators are always able to put together a few sound bites about each person in the firm that makes them attractive to lateral candidates. They can do the same with the partners about the candidates. They do this because they are interested in people.

HOW BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH HELPS THIS ALONG To make our candidates interesting to law firms and recruiting coordinators, we always write letters that contain summaries of our candidates as well as longer letters laying out their qualifications and backgrounds.
We also ask our candidates (through questionnaires and interviews) to tell us more about themselves, including personal details that can make them interesting to the firms.

This makes the and partners feel like they know the candidates before they even see them and this helps the candidates. Legal recruiters like this information because they are interested in people. This sort of information makes our candidates (more than the candidates of other legal recruiters, who do not do this) better able to get hired.

WHERE THINGS GO BAD Some (but very few) legal recruiters are not interested in people and view their jobs, candidates, and others as annoyances.
They will often have issues that will cause “communication breakdown” to occur.
They will not pass on important details about you.
They will have a bad attitude and this will prevent them from understanding what the firm wants and from passing on helpful information about you to the people making hiring decisions.

How can be interested in people also help you when you apply to a law firm?

See for more information.

Recruiting Coordinators Are Expected to Be Able to Connect with People (Partners, Associates, and Outside Recruiters)

In addition to being interested in people, the recruiting coordinator needs to be able to connect with people. Recruiting coordinators should be able to understand people, appreciate their positive characteristics, and get more in-depth insight into people than is revealed on paper.

This ability to connect is important because it makes lateral interviewers comfortable and makes the partners working with the comfortable as well. The ability to connect with lateral talent and partners is a skill. The recruiting coordinator needs to be able to ask questions and show a level of understanding of a given candidate that might not otherwise come out in interviews.

Some of the very best go so far as to give lateral candidates the impression that they are their friend and connect on a level that they can get the information they would not otherwise get—good and bad. This is very helpful for the firm. The best also connect with outside legal recruiters.

I have had several legal recruiting coordinators call me when their firms had dire needs for certain types of lateral candidates and spend a good deal of time buttering me up. Other lateral legal recruiting coordinators (and firms) regularly invite me to their offices and make close contact with me that way.

This is their job, and the better this is done, the more effective the law firm becomes. This is because they can get candidates faster and they can get candidates they might not get otherwise. Connecting with people applying to the law firm also makes it more likely that these people will say good things about the firm in the market and also that they will be more likely to go there (over other firms) when an offer is extended.

I have seen many strong carry the day when a candidate had multiple offers. It is a very important job. HOW BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH HELPS THIS ALONG To connect with legal recruiters inside of law firms, our company tends to gravitate towards hiring recruiters who are also interested in connecting with people.

Most of our legal recruiters like talking on the phone and are able to connect with many personalities. While many legal recruiting firms brag about the qualifications of their legal recruiters (such as the schools they went to and the law firms they worked in), this is only an important component for potentially connecting with similarly-situated attorneys.

In reality, the best legal recruiters need to be able to connect with the people inside of the law firm. This is as—if not more—important than connecting with attorneys. One year, I connected with a legal recruiter in Los Angeles who took a liking to me. In the space of two months, she hired four candidates from me and told me she did so because she liked me so much.

This can make a difference. It is important that a legal recruiter can be more of a connector and less of a professional when working with candidates. WHERE THINGS GO BAD Things go bad when the is unable to connect with people in his or her firm and the people he or she is bringing in.

This gives the coordinator an unoptimistic attitude about their jobs and creates unnecessary tension in the hiring process.
Legal recruiting coordinators are also often unable to connect with outside legal recruiters, and when this happens, outside legal recruiters will often be turned off.
The worst legal recruiting coordinators do not connect with candidates or partners.

As a consequence, they are unable to bring in the best candidates and often ignore the best candidates when they do come in. What are some ways you can make connections with attorneys in the law firms you apply to? See the following articles for more information:

Recruiting Coordinators Are Expected to Be Smart Enough to Understand The Needs of the Firm and What the Firm Likes and Does Not Like in Its Lateral Candidates.

This is a very important skill, and one that most (but not all) get. Recruiting coordinators need to understand not only the needs of the firm, but also the sorts of candidates that the law firm is most likely to be interested in (regardless of whether or not the firm has a position).

They need to make a careful calculation as to when there might be a business case for hiring certain candidates as well as reasons for not rejecting candidates who seem otherwise qualified.
Most went to respectable colleges (many these days are former attorneys from large law firms), and some did not go to college.

Most often, however, the legal recruiting coordinator is hired for his or her social, people, and administrative skills and is paid accordingly. Because of this, they often look for very well-defined sorts of people and perform a screening function where mistakes can be made and not made.

The screening function can often prohibit people who might otherwise be brought in from being interviewed.
This is not always the case, of course and legal recruiting coordinators much, much more often than not know what to look for than what not to look for.
I should note that each year numerous legal recruiting coordinators pick up on and bring in candidates for skills and talents that I even missed – in fact, I am grateful for the times this has occurred.

Here are some recent examples of when the process has failed. These are not an indictment of any firm in particular and more often than not these mistakes are made by smaller firms that put people in a position where they are not able to distinguish between different types of attorneys.

A third-year patent associate from a major law firm who attended an Ivy League law school was rejected for poor grades in chemistry as an undergrad. The recruiting coordinator in Boston had been told to look for people with only the “top grades” in undergrad and law school and from big firms and, Had the partners in the firm seen the candidate’s resume (which I made sure they did), the candidate would have gotten an interview off the bat. I got him an interview with the firm and a job.
A fourth-year litigation attorney who graduated at the top of his class from, who did a circuit court clerkship, and was coming from the US Attorney’s Office in Hawaii was rejected for not coming from a law firm by the ten law firms he applied to in Los Angeles. This was done on the grounds that he did not have law firm experience. The recruiting coordinators had been told to look for people from top firms. None of the recruiting coordinators were former attorneys and they did not understand the value of a circuit court clerkship and how remarkable it was to have gotten a position with the US Attorney’s Office before ever working in a law firm. Had the partners in the firm seen the resume initially, the candidate would have gotten interviews and offers. I ended up getting him interviews at four of the firms and he got offers from three of them.
An ERISA candidate from a major law firm who graduated at the top of his class from a top-10 college and then attended in Chicago and graduated in the top-5 students in the class was rejected from several major New York law firms because of the “quality” of his law school. The legal recruiting coordinators had been told to only look for people from top law schools. I ended up getting him two interviews and an offer from the same firms that rejected him initially.

HOW BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH HELPS THIS ALONG When we represent you, this conveys to recruiting coordinators that we would not be wasting our time on you unless there was something in your background that merited our involvement. Also, because we do not just send resumes, we typically can make a case for you and explain your background in a way that would otherwise not be made if you were not being represented by us.

If you were to approach the firm on your own, or through a legal recruiter who did not take the time discuss you with the firm, or did not understand your strengths, you would likely get rejected more than you would with us.
We can also say lots of things about you and your background that emphasize your strengths in a way that would look bad coming from you—but that look good coming from us (for example, we can call you “remarkable” and “one of a kind” and similar things that would be an instant turn off if coming from you).

We also take the time to call the legal recruiting coordinators and elevate things to partners if we feel you are not properly understood. WHERE THINGS GO BAD What all of this means is that some (not all, but some) do not have the skills to adequately review resumes and reach conclusions about whether or not you belong in the firm.

Recruiting Coordinators Are Expected to Be Efficient and Organized

You can imagine how difficult it is for recruiting coordinators to be efficient and organized. They are presented with a constant stream of applications from law students, attorneys, and legal recruiters. They need to arrange interview schedules, send out rejection letters, respond to phone calls, go to meetings, and respond to texts.

It can be a very stressful job requiring a high degree of organization.
Applications are often lost.
At times, recruiting coordinators even forget that they have scheduled interviews with people until the day they show up for an interview.
I have had numerous instances where I called a law firm about a candidate and the recruiter indicated that he or she had “lost” the application I sent—despite the fact I sent it three times (by email, fax, and letter).

When prodded, they always say something like: “Oh, yes I see it now. It’s right here. I will pass it along right away.” This occurs with such regularity (and has throughout the years) that it seems pretty clear to me that it is quite difficult for many to keep track of all of the applications that are coming into them.

I’ve seen other instances where I called to follow up with a recruiting coordinator a couple of weeks after sending an application.
I see it right here.
Yes, they told me they wanted to interview her a few weeks ago and it just completely slipped my mind.
When can she come in?” Some legal recruiting departments are extremely well organized.

The best I have ever seen is —a New Jersey-based firm. This firm is “on it” and knows exactly what is going on. Not only does the recruiting department respond to all applications quickly, but they do it with a personal phone call. There are countless very efficient recruiting departments in the United States; however, I have never seen one that is consistently so on top of things.

Some are very, very bad, of course, but it is nice when some are so good. The organization of a recruiting department is often an indication of the organization of the firm. HOW BCG ATTORNEY SEARCH HELPS PUSH THIS ALONG We make sure applications are seen three times (by email, fax, and letter). We send reports to law firms every two weeks showing their pending candidates.

We call and follow up with each application in an attempt to get a response. We keep very good records. Because of everything we do, our candidates typically get far more interviews and jobs than they would with competing recruiting firms. WHERE THINGS GO BAD If the legal recruiting department is disorganized, your application may never get seen.

A firm that wants to interview you may never do so. Is the recruiting coordinator at your law firm organized and efficient? Why or why not? See the following articles for more information: In my experience, the most organized law firms—the up and coming ones and (often) best ones—are the most responsive.

The recruiting department of a law firm and everything that goes on there will determine to a large extent whether you get silence after you send your application. The times that you hear silence are as follows:

You Apply (on Your Own, Through a Recruiter, or Friends) and Hear Nothing

When this happens, it is generally due to the following reasons:

The Firm and Recruiting Department Is Disorganized and May Have Reviewed Your Application But Is Uninterested and Too Lazy to Respond

Many hate receiving applications because they have to respond to them. Some send letters rejecting people and others call on the phone or send emails. Most do nothing. They may do nothing because they do not want to do anything, or because the firm does not require them to do anything.

Regardless of the reason, you may never hear anything. If you call the firm, you may get a rather uncomfortable blow off. The reason we spent so much time discussing recruiting coordinators above is that it all depends on them and what the firm requires of them. If the firm has high standards and is willing to spend the time and money to hire and train good recruiting coordinators, then you will hear something.

When we send reports to our BCG Attorney Search candidates each week of the firms that have and have not responded to their applications, it is almost always the best and most successful firms (and those that are on the way up) that are responding to applications.

The Firm Never Reviewed Your Application and May Not Have Received It

I hate to say it, but many times when you ask a friend at the firm (or a legal recruiter) to send your application, the firm never receives it. In fact, this is such a common occurrence that I would say it may be near crisis proportions because far too many candidates get rejected and do not get the jobs they are seeking because firms never see the applications coming in.

First, the may be so disorganized that he or she never showed it to people in charge of making hiring decisions. This happens all the time. Things get lost. Recruiting coordinators do not show the application to partners. Who knows? This happens all the time. Second, when you have a legal recruiter send your resume to a law firm, the law firm also may never receive it.

These days, recruiters send a ton of spam to the law firm, and because there is so much spam coming in, IT departments block their emails. Law firms thus miss tons of applications because their recruiters are blocked. To avoid this issue, we always send applications by email, fax, and letter and have a 5+ person IT department that makes sure our IPs are always white-listed with law firms.

These resources give us (and our candidates) a major edge.
Legal recruiters also are the salesman and often do not send applications when they say they are going to.
They may have a better applicant for the position, or may simply be working on something that is more high priority for them.
Working with legal recruiters can be frustrating for many attorneys.

To address this issue, we always make sure that we send our candidates a weekly report that discusses the status of their applications. In addition, we keep internal records to indicate whether or not the applications were received and opened. We also create an online profile for our candidates that is specific to each law firm and private that they can view online and that we track.

I have worked with countless candidates throughout the years—and encounter them almost every week—who thought they had applied to a given firm through a legal recruiter but found out the recruiter never sent their resume when I or our recruiters got involved. You need to be careful whom you trust with your career.

When you submit your resume through a friend who works at a firm, or someone you know at a firm, the odds are not as much in your favor as you might think. The issue with this is that friends are often competitive with one another and, as such, do not pass along the resume when they say they will.

See for more information.

The Firm Reviews Your Application and Is Interested But Hesitant

This is common. The law firm may see a need for you in the future but does not have one now. In this case, the law firm will put your application in a “later” file and may or may not respond later. In most cases, the firm will not respond. The firm might be interested and may bring you in later if it has the work or the need, but not right now.

Your qualifications are good, but not outstanding, This simply means the law firm is going to wait to see if it gets someone with a better fit in the future.
The firm is waiting for more work to come in and thinks it will need additional people, The law firm may be expecting things to pick up. The firm’s attorneys are not overworked at the moment, but the firm anticipates this may occur in the future and will wait.
The firm is already in the process of hiring and interviewing people and wants to see these people through first, Law firms like to jump at the first people who apply. The firms bond with these people. We try and get our candidates out to new positions within hours of them becoming open for this reason.

The Firm Reviewed Your Application and Did Not Want to Reject You Because You Might “Come Around Later,” and the Firm Wants to Leave Open the Potential for a Relationship Later

This is extremely common. If you have the sorts of qualifications that make it look like you could work in the firm in the future, the law firm will not reject you. It will not want to upset you and it will want to leave the field open for you to apply again.

The Law Firm Is Already in the Process of Interviewing Someone—or May Have Made Another Offer—and Is Not Ready to Interview Anyone Yet

When a law firm has an opening, it typically will interview the first people applying. The firm will interview these early people and bond with them. This means that applications that come later often get less attention (or ignored altogether). People are humans and bond with other people, and when this occurs the firm is often in the position of deciding between different people it already knows and likes.

At BCG Attorney Search, we make a huge deal out of new openings and do everything we can to get our candidates into these openings as quickly as we can. We immediately alert them with emails and a formal request for them to approve the firm. Nothing is more insane in your job search than sitting around and thinking if you want to apply to a given firm.

This is a recipe for not getting a job.

You Speak with Someone on the Phone (a Phone Interview) and Then Hear Nothing, You Have a Screening Interview and Hear Nothing, You Have One (or a Series of Live Interviews) and Hear Nothing, or You Are Told You Will Receive an Offer and Hear Nothing

This happens to attorneys all the time. When this occurs, generally it is for the following reasons:

The Firm Needs to Discuss You and Has Not Yet

In many cases, law firms go through very formal processes when discussing who to hire and bring in for interviews. Firms need to arrange meetings, discuss individual candidates, and get everyone together. Sometimes this process can take some time, and law firms lose a lot of good potential candidates in the process of arranging all of this.

Needs and Work May Have Changed

This is extremely common as well, and there is not much you can do about it. A law firm’s needs can change very quickly when (1) a case (or series of cases) settles or (2) a major client is lost.

The Attorney (or Attorneys) You Spoke with Do Not Want to Reject You

The attorney you see initially may be someone you know socially, or in some other capacity, or bonded with during interviews. Rather than reject you, the attorney is hoping you get another job in the interim, so he or she does not have to reject you. They will delay and delay so they do not have to give you the bad news.

The Firm Is Considering Other People

After you interview, the law firm is still receiving applications for the position. If a better applicant comes along, the firm may bring that person in as well. That person may even get an offer, and the firm will wait for the other person to respond before rejecting you.

The Firm Has Concerns about You and Wants to Take Time to Figure Them Out

This is also very common. While there are multiple concerns that the law firm might have, one of the most common concerns is that you may have been fired from your existing job. Law firms want to hire people who are currently employed. This suggests commitment and that the attorney is doing good work and not experiencing problems.

If a law firm sees any warning signs you may have been fired from your job, the firm will often delay for weeks or months to see if you are still there.
This sounds strange, but it happens all the time.
Firms will also delay pulling the trigger if one of your interviewers did not like you or there are other concerns.

If there is anything you can do about those concerns, then you should do your best to do so. In one case, I had a candidate that the law firm reported to me on a Friday did not seem that interested and that “in all probability” the firm would be rejecting him on Monday.

See the following articles for more information:
Conclusions
See the following articles for more information:

The most frustrating thing for attorneys applying to law firms is hearing nothing. While there are countless reasons for this, it happens to everyone. My best piece of advice for candidates is to make sure to apply to as many places as possible. While you cannot control individual law firms and their recruiting departments, you can control how often this happens to you.

Do universities send rejection emails?

1. Do Colleges Give Rejection Letters? – Yes, colleges send rejection notices to students who weren’t admitted.

Do you get an email if you get rejected from college?

6 Tips While Waiting for College Acceptance Letters – It is that time of year again: college admissions offices have started sending out both their acceptance and rejection letters. Your student’s stressful application process is finally going to come to fruition this month.

Today many letters of acceptance are sent through email. This means that students may receive their college acceptance letters or rejection letters at any time of day, even potentially at school. One year a student received 3 of their rejection emails while at school. Students should be aware and supportive of their peers during this time of year. Parents should prepare their students to receive this information at school. If accepted, students need to know that other students may be receiving rejection notices at the same time. If a student receives a rejection email, they should have a plan for how they will handle it when surrounded by their peers. Not all colleges send their letters at the same time. One year, the University of Washington in Seattle sent out a large number of acceptance letters, then a week later they sent out a second group of letters. For those students that did not receive their letters until the second bundle, that previous week was incredibly stressful. Students falsely assumed that they did not get into the UW because their letters were in the second batch. Families need to be sensitive to those students who may have to wait a little longer for an answer. Parents, think about what you post on Facebook. As you are posting your child’s acceptance letter, other students could be getting their rejection letter. This is an exciting and sometimes difficult time in student’s lives. When it comes to posting, be thoughtful about what you’re saying and how you’re saying it. Parents, let your students open their own letters and emails. I know it can be tempting to just take a peek at the letters but this is your student’s experience. Parents, let your student have a few minutes to process. Make sure that your reaction is one of support, not judgement. If you get upset over a rejection, it will not help your child. It will just make them worry that they let you down. Stay neutral and supportive. Be Positive! At the end of the day, there is not just one college that can make your student happy. If they did not get into their favorite college, they may find that their second or third choice is actually a better fit for them.

Ultimately, the best advice is to just be supportive no matter what happens with your student’s college acceptance letters. You and your child are not the first nor will you be the last to go through this process. I am always happy to help advise you and your child on how to proceed with their college career.

Do colleges email you rejection letters?

If you are rejected, you may still receive a decision letter by mail. When you are accepted, most college will send you a package with an acceptance letter and also additional information. You can also access your acceptance letter online with an email! When you get rejected, you will see it online.