A Note on the Inclusive Admission Stream

We get a lot of questions about whether the Inclusive Admission Stream is right for a given applicant. And, honestly, when we are sitting across the table from you at a recruiting event, it’s really hard to tell. If we were on the phone talking to you, we could give you a better sense of the answer to questions like that. However, one of the things we believe is that it is your responsibility to understand the requirements of the admission stream you are considering, and it’s your responsibility to apply them to your situation. Only you can tell yourself whether a particular admission stream is right for you.

We don’t like to discourage people from applying, and we don’t usually get in the weeds with applicants about their specific situation. We will not, for example, read your inclusive statement or your personal statement and tell you whether it is good enough. We just don’t have time. Besides, we expect that our applicants are willing to put in the research to and the time and the care and all of the things to write statements that fit the requirements and that are, in their opinion, good enough.

All of that said, I feel like this is a good time to talk about some of the things that we do look for in Inclusive Admission. Here are a few:

1. You’re not looking for a back door in because your LSAT or grades weren’t QUITE strong enough for presumptive general admission. We get a lot of people who just weren’t as successful in school and on the LSAT as they would have liked, but they were close. The Inclusive Admission Stream is incredibly competitive. If you have waitlist-range scores, you are probably better off applying for general admission. Another strategy would be to study for and rewrite the LSAT.
2. Your grades or LSAT are less than competitive, which is something that you cannot fix. If, for example, you have a low LSAT score but could study and take it again, you are not generally a strong candidate for Inclusive Admission. You cannot go back in time and change your grades, however, and people do eventually come up against the maximum allowable LSAT tries. If you have an issue that you cannot fix, but it is not apparent (i.e. there is a reason you cannot take the LSAT again), you need to explain that to us clearly.
3. A clear nexus. If you have a period of lower grades and/or a lower LSAT, your inclusive statement should really focus on the connection between the cause of the lower marks/score and the lower marks/score. There should be a clear and focused connection both in time and in causation. If there is more than one reason for your slip in grades, etc., this should be clearly indicated. If your difficulty/obstacle/barrier was systemic in nature, please don’t make us guess. This needs to be clearly stated in your inclusive statement. It’s genuinely okay to include a graph/other visual or to use headings/boldface type to summarize or draw our attention to the connections you would like us to make.
4. We need to see likelihood of success. Remember that all we know about you is what you submitted to us in your inclusive statement, your personal statement, your grades, your LSAT and your references. We need to see strong evidence from these things that you have a high likelihood of success. That can be shown in many ways on an application. It can be shown through grades, LSAT scores, life successes. What we are looking for is success “outside” of the issue/obstacle/barrier that caused the slump in grades or lower LSAT. The clearest way to see this is someone who scored high on the LSAT and had a couple of terms of lower grades, with the remainder being competitive. As long as there is a nexus that points us to those terms with lower grades and explains them, we can see clear evidence of success. For applicants with more prolonged “slumps” or systemic barriers, this can be shown through life successes. What doesn’t show a high likelihood of success is when an applicant says something to the effect of, “I know my grades and LSAT aren’t good, but take a chance on me because I really want to go to law school.” Without some actual evidence of this, there is no way for us to be able to predict your likelihood of success. Thus, your successes are important to point out, and it may be important to point out why they show a likelihood of success.
5. We need to be able to see that you are ready for law school. Every year we get applications from people who are just not far enough removed from whatever was holding them back to seem ready for law school. For example, if caring for a high-needs baby kept you from your highest successes at a certain point, we will want to know that you now have child care supports in place so that you can focus on law school. Sometimes, this means showing accountability for parts of your life or having a certain level of introspection that it is clear a resolution has happened.