20 Easy Law School Application Fixes Before You Submit

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Anna Hicks-Jaco shares 20 easy law school application fixes crowdsourced from Spivey Consulting Group’s team of former admissions officers. From essay formatting and résumé consistency to application form mistakes and final submission checks, these are common issues that may seem minor individually but can collectively affect how polished and detail-oriented your application appears.

Timestamps:

1:57 — #1

3:03 — #2

3:34 — #3

4:04 — #4

4:41 — #5

5:15 — #6

5:44 — #7

6:11 — #8

6:28 — #9

6:47 — #10

7:23 — #11

7:36 — #12

8:03 — #13

8:30 — #14

8:51 — #15

9:06 — #16

9:56 — #17

10:18 — #18

10:39 — #19

11:00 — #20

[0:08] Anna Hicks-Jaco: Hello, and welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. I’m Anna Hicks-Jaco, Spivey Consulting’s president, and today we are fully in the law school admissions category, where we will be talking about 20 easy fixes you can make to your law school application. And this could be right before you submit—we’re talking actually easy fixes here, where if it’s addressing a mistake that you made, it should take you five minutes or less, often one minute or less, to make the fix.

First, I’ll note this list was crowdsourced from our whole firm, from all the consultants at Spivey Consulting Group, who collectively have over 250 years of experience actually working in law school admissions offices, reading applications, making decisions on files, plus our experience working with thousands of applicants to help them improve their individual applications. So these are mistakes we’ve all seen many, many times, they’re super common, but the good news, as I mentioned earlier, is that they’re easy fixes.

And I’ll note right up front that a lot of these are pretty minor things. If you make these mistakes and don’t get a chance to fix them, they’re almost certainly not going to turn an admit into a waitlist or a waitlist into a denial. But this is something we were actually just talking about on our last episode with Dean Natalie Blazer, the Dean of Admissions and Chief Admissions Officer at UVA Law—even if none of these mistakes individually are going to tank you, getting them all right, buttoning up all the little details, will contribute to an overall impression of you as a careful, detail-oriented person. And on the flip side, getting all of these wrong will contribute to an overall impression of you as not so detail-oriented, or not all that invested in the application process to that law school. And that can make a real difference. So let’s jump in.

[1:57] #1: Regardless of the fact that they may be marked “optional,” don’t leave application form questions blank unless they just don’t apply to you. So yes, leave the military information blank if you’ve never been in the military, leave your visa number blank if you are a citizen, but things like the “reason for leaving” field in your employment history, where they ask you to extremely briefly summarize why you left every job that you list, a lot of people leave those blank. Don’t. Especially don’t leave only one blank, unless it’s your current position, of course. It’s just distracting. Like, did you get fired, or are you trying to hide something, or what? Find some way to briefly summarize that’s truthful and ideally unobtrusive, unconcerning.

Another one a lot of people leave blank is their GPAs, degrees, and degree dates in the education section. If you have a GPA, if you got a degree, include it. Those are just a couple of common examples, but in general, assume that a law school wants you to answer every question if applicable. And quick note: you do not need to include “N/A” if it’s not applicable.

[3:03] #2: Make sure you’re adding a title to all of your essays, and that you’re titling those essays in alignment with the terminology that the specific school uses. If they’re asking for a “statement of purpose,” don’t title it “personal statement”; if they’re asking for a “personal experience addendum,” don’t title it “perspective essay,” etc. Getting this right shows that you put real effort into their specific application and helps them understand what you’re submitting and what each essay is meant to be.

[3:34] #3: Make sure you add a header with your name and LSAC number to all of your essays, and make sure those headers are consistent with each other. If your name is on the left side and your LSAC number is on the right side on one of your essays, it should be that way for all of your essays, and they should always be in the same font and size. And while we’re at it, that typeface and font size should also be the same typeface and font size that you use in the body of your essays. So if you wrote your essay in Times New Roman, don’t make your header Arial.

[4:04] #4: Follow each school’s instructions for formatting. If they ask for 12-point font, don’t use 11. If they ask for one-inch margins, don’t use 0.75. If they ask for double-spaced, don’t use single. If they ask for Times New Roman, don’t use Arial. And if they ask for headers in a slightly different way from how you’ve done it for your other schools, make that change.

This whole “read and carefully follow instructions” thing is broader than just formatting, of course, but some of that gets out of the easy-to-fix range, so I will just say now, you should be reading every word of the application instructions for every law school you’re applying to.

[4:41] #5: This is another formatting thing, but it does have substantive implications. Please indent the paragraphs in your essays. It can just make them really hard to read when you don’t. One of our newer consultants who recently came to us from a law school admissions office brought this up, that she was seeing more and more applicants who weren’t indenting their paragraphs, and it, quote, “drove them crazy.” I don’t think that this conflicts with the last fix about following instructions for formatting, because I don’t know of a single law school that wants non-indented paragraphs. Just do it.

[5:15] #6: Before you upload any document, export it to a PDF and make sure it still looks right. Sometimes if you upload a Word document or another file type, it can mess with your resume formatting, or it can push a few lines onto another page. So suddenly, your perfect two-page essay, for example, is two pages and 1.5 lines. This is really easy to fix. Just PDF everything and look at the exported PDF right after you save it and right before you upload it to make sure everything is still right.

[5:44] #7: Make sure all the dates on your resume are accurate. Sometimes those dates change in between the time when you first put together your resume and when you submit it. Don’t leave in, for example, that your degree date is “expected” May 2026 if you’ve since graduated, and make sure any positions you’ve left no longer say “to present.” The former will stand out as a lack of attention to detail, and the latter is factually misrepresenting the truth, which is not good.

[6:11] #8: While we’re on the topic of resumes, make sure you’re using the correct verb tenses on your resume. That means past tense for past jobs and activities—if you recently ended at a job, make sure that you update that—and that means present tense for current jobs and activities.

Let’s stick with resumes for a few more.

[6:28] #9: Make sure you’re consistently abbreviating or not abbreviating the months on your resume, and if you are abbreviating, make sure they’re abbreviated consistently—using periods, whether or not you add a T at the end of September, or… any other ways that people might inconsistently abbreviate months.

[6:47] #10: If you have anything that’s supposed to be aligned along the right side of your resume—so if you have, for example, as is common, your job title on the left side of the page and then the dates you were in that job on the right side of the page—make sure that all of those right-aligned items are consistent with each other, and that they don’t accidentally drop a few letters or characters down onto the next line.

If this is something that has been a pain for you before, look up “tab stops.” They’re a game changer. You do not have to be trying to add the exact right number of individual spaces to line something up perfectly on the right side. That is a burden technology can solve.

[7:23] #11: Make sure you’re using bolds, italics, and underlines consistently. Your section headers should be all the same as each other in this regard, your position titles should be the same as each other, your position dates, organization or company names, locations. There’s no one right way to do it, but whatever you choose, do it consistently throughout your resume.

[7:36] #12: One more resume one, and yet another that has to do with consistency. Make sure that you’re either using periods at the end of bullet points throughout your resume or not using periods at the end of bullet points throughout your resume. That’s an easy one.

Okay, back to our non-resume fixes.

[8:03] #13: Check for blank pages at the ends of your documents before uploading. This is another thing that actually another one of our newer consultants said “drove her crazy,” when there were blank pages in the application, because it just seemed to evince a lack of attention to detail. If you look over that application PDF preview even one time before submitting, you should notice if you accidentally included a blank page. So double-check and make sure that’s not you.

[8:30] #14: Don’t use the same non-basic punctuation too many times. One essay shouldn’t have an abundance of colons, semicolons, or em-dashes. Mix it up. This is one where it can just get a little bit distracting or sometimes even make your essay read like AI, which, you don’t want your essay to read like AI, regardless of who or what wrote it.

[8:51] #15: If you have one essay that you’ve made different versions of for different schools, please, please, please double, triple, quadruple-check before you submit that you are submitting the right version for the right school—and do it right before you submit.

[9:06] #16: Go through your application form and make sure that you haven’t gotten cut off at any strange places due to character limits. I think this tends to happen when you’re copy-pasting things from your resume to your application form, which is very reasonable because a lot of that stuff can be really repetitive—but sometimes you’ll paste in a “Senior Administration & Logistics Coordinator” or something like that, but it’ll cut off at a certain number of characters, so you end up with “Senior Administration & Log” or something like that.

Admissions officers realize that these character limits are sometimes really short, too short, and you may not have room for your full title, but the way to handle that is not to just let it cut off wherever it happens to cut off; it’s to use abbreviations. So maybe, you know, instead of “Senior,” you can say “Sr.”; “Admin” instead of “Administration,” that kind of thing.

[9:56] #17: This is a more common mistake than you might think (within the actual application form, not the essays). Go through your application form and make sure you’re properly capitalizing the beginnings of sentences and any proper nouns. Capitalization is one of those things that can really make an application look sloppy. If everything is lowercase, it looks so informal, and it can even be kind of distracting.

[10:18] #18: Here’s a super tiny and quick one. Go to anywhere in your application form that asks for an address—mailing address, permanent address—and make sure that your house number and street name aren’t duplicated in both the address 1 and address 2 fields. I think that sometimes this happens because of auto-fill functions on your browser. Just double-check.

[10:39] #19: Add dashes to your phone number. I guess this one is even tinier and quicker than the last, but it’s actually sometimes a little bit tricky, because some phone number fields in the LSAC portal automatically add dashes while others do not. So just check on it. It’s a really easy thing to add, and it makes it look a little bit more buttoned up and professional.

[11:00] And #20: we’ve made it to the end.

In the section in many schools’ applications where they list a bunch of areas of interest and ask you to check some or all that you’re interested in—corporate law, criminal law, environmental law, etc.—some people have this tendency to check every single box that they are remotely interested in, even if they don’t really go together or align with anything in your application. Try to make your answer to this question align with the overall messaging in your application, not just absolutely everything you think is interesting on an intellectual level. Doing it that way often comes across as demonstrating a lack of focus or clarity of purpose.

Okay, so that’s our list. This was a quick episode. A lot of these things are really feathers on the scale, but part of what we do, what we aim to do, is help you pile every little feather that you can on the correct side of that scale. Because any given one might not make the difference, but all of them together definitely can.

So feel free to subscribe if you want to keep piling up the right feathers all cycle long, but regardless, thanks for listening, and we hope this was helpful.

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September 22, 2026

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Dean Blazer’s podcast, Admissible, is available here. Listen to the episode she mentions, one of her favorites, with a successful reapplicant here.

You can listen to our previous episodes with Natalie here: 2025 | 2023 | 2022

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.

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For more advice and resources on researching individual law schools and developing a strong, differentiated “why X,” see our Why X Essay Deep Dive: Advice from Former Law School Admissions Officers podcast episode. Anna also references our earlier conversation with psychologist Dr. Guy Winch, Dr. Guy Winch on Handling Rejection (& Waiting), which includes the confidence exercise discussed in this episode.

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.

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20 Easy Law School Application Fixes Before You Submit

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20 Easy Law School Application Fixes Before You Submit

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