Law School Evaluations vs. Recommendation Letters

The below excerpt about law school evaluations vs. recommendations is from A Guide to Law School Recommendations.

A Note about Evaluations  

In 2010, LSAC introduced the option of Evaluations in place of or in addition  to letters of recommendation. These evaluations consist of ranking responses to several specific questions with the opportunity to expand on each answer in text.  The evaluation form also includes an opportunity to add a general text supplement of up to 3,000 characters.

As of this writing, I am not aware of any school that requires Evaluations. Informal comments from representatives of several schools seem to indicate that they are not currently being given much weight, and that to the degree that admissions committees find them useful the value is primarily in the comments included in the text fields; such comments could in most cases be addressed as well or better in a traditional letter of recommendation.

You will, of course, want to carefully review the instructions provided by each school to which you are applying.  However, as a general rule the best course appears to be to stick with traditional letters of recommendation unless a school specifically requests Evaluations. Evaluations may become an integral part of the law school application process at some point, but at present the simple scoring system seems to be viewed by most schools as not especially helpful.

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