Can AI Write Your Law School Personal Statement?

As a law school admissions consultant, I get it—writing a personal statement is a lot of pressure. Somehow, you’ve got to capture your entire essence in two scant, double-spaced pages. As law school application deadlines loom, the pressure may have you considering using a large language model (LLM) tool like Claude or ChatGPT to write your essays for you. So, should you succumb to those intrusive thoughts and use AI to write your law school personal statement?

Should You Use AI To Write Your Personal Statement?

Don’t do it.

You’ve made it this far as a student and as a user of the English language. You have a unique personal voice that law schools want to hear. Don’t replace that voice with a generic, trying-to-please-everyone AI that has sanded off all its edges.

Law school admissions committees want to hear from you, not an AI.

Why You Shouldn’t Use AI To Write Your Law School Personal Statement

Yes, Law Schools Can Tell

The biggest reason why you shouldn’t use an AI to write your personal statement or any admissions essays? Admissions committees can tell. Believe me, they can tell. When working with my applicants, I give them deadlines for drafts. (“Personal statement rough draft #2, due next Wednesday.”) Stuff like that. Sometimes, students hand in AI slop to meet those deadlines. It’s obvious. If I can tell, admissions committees can tell. Full stop.

The Downside is Not Worth It

Let’s consider the downsides of getting caught. Your law school application will get flagged if it’s not immediately rejected outright. Universities take academic dishonesty seriously. They don’t mess around. They don’t want students who will use LLMs to write their papers, memos, and appellate briefs.

If you hand in AI slop in the form of your law school essays—even polished, grammatically-correct AI slop—your law school journey will be over before it starts. Many law school applications require you to check a box that pledges you have not received undue outside assistance with your essays, including the use of AI tools. (And yes, it’s perfectly fine to have an admissions coach, friend, or family member do light proofreading. But there’s a line! Exercise common sense and you won’t cross it.)

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Small Circles

Law school admissions (and academia in general) is a small world. Admissions officers from different schools know each other, correspond with each other, and talk about the latest trends. If an admissions officer from School A sees a clearly plagiarized AI-written essay, what’s to stop them from sending an email to their friend at similarly-ranked School B?

The risk. Is. Not. Worth. It.

Character and Fitness

Let’s say you do get away with it, at least partially. Schools A and B spot the telltale signs and reject you, but School C doesn’t notice. Are you truly free and clear? In order to practice law in any jurisdiction, you have to pass a character and fitness test. Basically, it’s an extensive background check process where you have to get friends as character references and demonstrate that you are a generally upstanding person.

If there is one thing to know about character and fitness for the bar, it is that it is a very, very thorough process. If you don’t exercise candor, who knows what unseemly facts about you may come out of the woodwork? Again, the legal profession is a remarkably small world. If an admissions officer in School B (who saw and flagged your robo-essay, instantly rejecting you) catches wind from their colleague at the state bar that you’re trying to become a lawyer, they could remember your name four years later. They could even have a list. (Okay, not likely, but hey, some of these academics are not messing around with AI plagiarism!)

The point is, if there’s even a five percent chance of your AI-slop admissions essays coming back to you in the character and fitness process and essentially blackballing you at the start of your career, is it really worth that risk? Even if it’s a three percent chance? One percent chance? Half of one percent?

It’s not. It’s not worth it.

Sophisticated Tools

Academics, professors, and admissions officers are seeing more and more of these AI-slop essays. The telltale signs are becoming more noticeable. What’s more, though, are the ever-increasingly sophisticated software tools institutions have at their disposal to notice LLM writing. While these tools in their current state can be hit-or-miss (they often suffer from false positives), like many AI tools, the rate of improvement is exponential. They are becoming more sophisticated.

Optional Essays Will Kill You

Most law schools have optional essay prompts. The “Why X Law School” essay is one of the more common ones. Success in these essays is all about selling the school on your genuine enthusiasm at the prospect of attending the school. This is something that can’t be manufactured. It requires introspection, research, and a touch of creativity. If you use an LLM, you will just get a regurgitation of all the marketing copy the law school lists on its own website.

Statements of perspective or lived experience are another area where LLMs can’t do the job. The goal with these essays is to present some core aspect of your identity, personality, or life experience that would make you a unique voice in the law school classroom. Again, introspection and a touch of creativity are key. This can’t be faked.

More Ways AI Law School Essays Can Backfire

The law school personal statement is a moment of personal self-reflection. Where have you come from? Where are you going? Why is law school calling to you at this period in your life? It’s a chance for you to talk about scary challenges and deep-seated values—in a word, life. Do you really want to leave that impression of your life, your identity, to a software program?

Using an LLM in this regard risks creating the kind of generic, inauthentic statement that makes admissions committees’ eyes glaze over at 2:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon. But it also robs them of you, your experience, your values. These unique attributes could be the difference between admission and rejection.

A lot of law schools have adopted an interview process for candidates. How can you feel confident in that moment when you’re asked to talk about yourself?

Well, when you write something that comes from within, it is your expression. You own it. As a consequence, it becomes easier to talk about in an interview setting. Conversely, if an AI wrote your personal statement and you got interviewed afterwards, you would struggle to articulate and recapture ideas and insights that were never truly yours. The feeling would be analogous to someone handing you a bunch of typed-up notes and telling you that you need to talk about them in public.

In the law school interview, this disparity becomes starkly apparent. If you’ve authored your essays, they have captured the core of who you are. You’ll come across as more confident and self-assured. If ChatGPT wrote your essays, just try keeping a straight face while talking about them to the admissions committee. Yeah, that’s not going to go well.

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, this little pep-talk of a blog post has convinced you that it’s just not worth it to turn in an AI personal statement or use these tools for a scenario as important as your law school future. Make no mistake, AI tools like ChatGPT have a place for the light, everyday writing none of us can be bothered to do ourselves—monotonous work emails, data summaries, letters to the utility company about a bill dispute, et cetera.

But not law school applications. It’s just not worth the risk.

If you want more help creating an admissions-worthy law school application, let our experienced Law School Admissions Consultant transform your application. Schedule a free consultation to see if admissions consulting is right for you and your goals.

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