Law School

The blogosphere has come down hard on Michigan Law School's recently announced Wolverine Scholars Program. I'm excited when any law school innovates, so I chatted with Dean of Admissions Sarah Zearfoss to find out what's what. Our Q&A below:

 

1. Could you explain what the Wolverine Scholars Program is and who is eligible for it.

Our new Wolverine Scholars Program will invite applications from University of Michigan undergraduates who have at least completed their junior year and at most are scheduled to graduate in Winter or Spring 2009 (that is, rising and graduating seniors) who have cumulative GPAs of 3.80 or higher; review will take place during the summer, and will substitute for the usual LSAT requirement an intensive review of the undergraduate curriculum. It is a non-binding program; if an applicant is admitted, he or she is free to apply to other law schools—but since we are not requiring the LSAT of the applicants, it is of course our hope that we will attract people for whom Michigan is their first choice, and who will choose to enroll here rather than going through the hassle of applying to other law schools (including the necessity of taking the LSAT).

2. You've come under a lot of fire in the blogosphere for the program. For example, MoneyLaw, Above the Law, TaxProf, and Prof. Henderson (of Indiana) have basically accused you of a transparent attempt to game the rankings. Prof. Henderson has gone so far as to say that "the only rational explanation is that Michigan seeks a rankings payoff." How do you respond to that? If gaming the rankings wasn't your only motivation, or your main motivation, what was your reasoning behind the program?

Well, I’d have to actually say the opposite is the case—that is, a desire to manipulate the rankings would NOT have been a rational motivation for this program. Consider, if that were the purpose, whether it would make sense for a public institution whose every admission decision in recent years has been subject to FOIA requests from multiple organizations to announce something so publicly! Further, since we anticipate being able to matriculate at most 5 to 10 Wolverine Scholars—a fractional sliver of our typical entering class of 360—this couldn't be a successful route for manipulating the rankings, even if we were so inclined. That number of people couldn't possibly affect our LSAT median, and is quite unlikely to affect the GPA median by even 1/100th, let alone materially.

Instead, we were motivated by a desire to strengthen our intra-institutional ties with the undergrad community, which is our single biggest feeder and at which, nonetheless, there is a persistent, unshakeable rumor that it is impossible to be admitted to Michigan Law if one attended Michigan for undergrad. As a result, we lose a lot of people who don’t apply, thinking it’s just not worth their time—and we therefore we miss getting applications from many students who would be great additions to our class. Relatedly, we needed to think creatively about ways to increase the applications we receive from our single biggest source of in-state residents (given that we are a public institution with a goal of matriculating 20% of the class as in-state residents). Bottom-line, we had well-considered policy objectives here, and our policy decisions have never been dictated by blind obeisance to rankings.

3. If you are willing to admit X students a year without an LSAT score, why require an LSAT score from the rest of the class? Why not just do away with it completely?

We have found the LSAT to be an excellent tool for predicting first-year grades, and believe that it is an exceptionally well-designed standardized test. That does not mean, however, that there may not be limited, special circumstances where reliance is not necessary, or not appropriate. We have a LOT of data on Michigan undergrads who enroll here at the law school, and the data lead us to be very confident that we can learn what we need to about ability to succeed here from a rigorous examination of the curriculum of those students who have proven themselves able to achieve at a very high level. We just don't have that body of data for other schools.

4. Some other law schools -- including top law schools like Georgetown and Northwestern -- have admissions programs that do not require an LSAT score. Any idea why people are piling on Michigan and not on those other schools?

Michigan certainly does get people's attention when it comes to admissions issues! But I suppose it's also timing; the programs that I know of are not of recent vintage, and I do think that attention to standardized tests and to rankings has really amped up in the last couple of years.

5. Colleges and business schools innovate constantly with their admissions requirements. For example, a number of top colleges make the SAT optional, while Harvard Business School has the 2+2 program. Why do you think law schools are generally so resistant to experimenting?

I confess I have found it rather surprising that in a climate where many organizations are examining the appropriate use of standardized tests, one very small outside-the-box step by one law school should attract such apparent shocked skepticism. Law schools (and the law as a field, more generally) tend to be very conservative in their approach to any proposed changes, however, and so I suppose the reaction was not completely unpredictable. I’ve had a lot of supportive emails, though, from prelaw advisors and admissions consultants, so I’m hoping that once the initial excitement winds down, the people who really matter to us—i.e., our applicants—will see that we're trying to be critically thinking about what we're doing. That can only be a good thing from their perspective.

Good news for prosecutors, legal aid attorneys, and public defenders here.

Anna,

I read your blog before making the decision to attend law school and right on through my 1L year. I've learned a lot. Thank you.

I attend the [deleted] School of Law and received a public interest fellowship to do a summer internship at [deleted], an NGO that provides free legal services to poor farmers in Cambodia. I'm part of the land law unit, which tries to protect rural farmers from land seizures.

In a nutshell, I signed on for a summer internship in a foreign country and have done almost no substantive legal work, partly because I was placed in a dysfunctional unit, partly because of the low English level of my colleagues, and partly because I'm having a hard time creating good opportunities to do legal work.

My dysfunctional unit. One problem is my colleagues and supervisors don't seem to do much. I nicknamed one attorney "man that stares at his cell phone" in honor of his 8 hour a day activity. The lack of work is partly due to the fact that government doesn't respond to motions, follow its own laws, or respect the court system. It's common to wait months for rulings, only to find out the court is "too busy" and will not issue any ruling at all, or the case file has been lost. As a result, the attorneys often wait around and do nothing.

I think my boss is depressed about the corruption. The program's two showcase lawsuits have been going on for 7 and 4 years respectively. In the first case, the local prosecutor has refused to correctly implement the presiding judge's verdict, and in the second case everyone involved in facilitating the fraudulent sale of indigenous land has admitted to taking bribes in a transaction that was, on its face, against the law (the land was sold to the sister of the Minister of Finance).

I should provide a little more context. At the end of the Vietnamese occupation following the Khmer Rouge, there were only a handful of lawyers in Cambodia. By 2007 there were 574. A good number work for NGOs and legal aid organizations. So it's understandable that attorneys have only a shallow pool of legal experience to draw upon when considering legal strategy, but we mainly do nothing. (A side note: At our organization the lack of activity is partly due to poor organizational structure. The bylaws allow the employees to elect the management team, which creates a huge disincentive for the management team to "crack the whip" leading to the current very weak executive director).

I know that one of the themes of your blog is that Gen Y's self-involvement leads to unreasonable expectations and more than an acceptable level of complaining. So I decided to create a writing project for myself where I would investigate how to go about filing a complaint in US courts against a Cambodian-American that dispossessed 23 families using armed men and bulldozers. I thought several allied NGOs were representing the families. I went to the province and met with people from the 3 other NGOs, but no one spoke sufficient English to discuss the case. I had to get the moto taxi driver to translate, which of course didn't work since the taxi driver's English was limited to "right, left" and not "motion, complaint." Then I went and interviewed an American ex-pat restaurant owner who witnessed the seizure. He was smoking pot during the interview. Anyway, long story short the NGOs weren't representing the families anymore because they never had actual title to the land and the Cambodian-American is politically connected and paid an acceptable bribe to the local families. The memo, while a nice academic exercise, would be functionally useless. Instead I'm writing another grant proposal and shadowing my boss to his infrequent meetings with court officials (going to an hour meeting in the provinces can take 3 days after factoring in driving).

But that's it. I've got an interesting story or two about the outrageous facts in the cases, but I haven't done much substantive legal work. In on campus interviews, I can show an attorney a picture of a client meeting with a monkey in the background but not a legal memo.

I am concerned about on campus interviews. Although I am doing public interest work this summer and will have meaningful service in my legal career, I would like to have the opportunity to work for a mid-size to larger local firm next summer and after graduation. My big hairy audacious goal is to be part of the legal community that shapes [US city's] land use regulations to meet the transportation and environmental challenges of the next century.

What advice do you have? I'm actually pretty down on my summer experience. The land law unit has a poor reputation with its donors and will probably lose its funding because of its failure to do much for its clients. For me personally, the unit's inactivity means I have a lot of dead time. I also haven't learned directly from any legal professionals that speak English well. When I'm asked to comment on what I did and how I liked it, I don't want to be too negative or dishonest. But honestly: "I sat around a lot in a foreign country, went to meetings that I didn't understand, and helped absolutely no one, in part, because the judicial system is utterly corrupt" is probably a conversation killer.

A final thought. Friends and family point to the value of a foreign experience and I think they're right. But for me, I think the marginal value of this experience is low. Like a lot of students that graduated from college around the time I did, I was fortunate enough to study abroad. I went to [deleted] for a semester. I also taught English in [deleted] after graduation for six months. Granted Cambodia is very different from either of those countries, but I still have a hard time saying with conviction that for me just being in a foreign country is a good use of my 1L summer.

I look forward to your thoughts. Any advice on how to spin gold out of this straw will be carefully studied. Thank you.

 

Holy cow, you've lived a lifetime in a summer. The only thing that could have been worse is if you'd spent the summer at Latham/Cravath/Kirkland/Perkins/BlahBlah. Seriously.

To prepare for interviews, you need to take the email you wrote me, put a far more positive spin on it, and outline at a practical level the barriers that stand between land-reform-in-theory and land-reform-in-practice. That’s the perfect (short) law review article to start writing now, and the fact that you've got it under way is a great talking point during an interview. "What did you do this summer?" "I started the summer trying to protect rural Cambodians from property seizure. The summer I got was more interesting than what I signed up for – I ended up studying what’s broken about the Cambodian legal system in practice, and now I’m writing an article about it." You're going to call it "Three Barriers to Real Property Protection in Cambodia," and I will be expecting a signed copy.

I also told a lawyer friend of mine about your predicament, and here's what he said:

It’s interesting because we’re trying to get a legal clinic going in Tanzania; that’s my next uber-project, I think. Same challenges all around, though we do expect less corruption than in Cambodia. We also expect just as much inactivity, lack of movement in the courts, etc. Property rights is a big thing.

If you take the narrow view of "what law did I practice?", then yeah, his experience is limited. But that’s not what law is in developing countries anyhow. My work in Tanzania so far has been spent trying to *see* a copy of the Tanzanian legal code. I finally did in South Africa, at the supreme court.

Incredibly experienced lawyers have a tough time getting anything done in the developing world, and you are at the teeny, weeny start of that learning curve. You have to start there, so try not to get frustrated just because you're facing as many hurdles as the superstar lawyers who are also getting stuck in the mire of "international law."

Back to interviews. What else can you do? You can talk about how grateful you are to be an American living in a country with laws and rights. You can talk about how hard it is to do any real legal work in a country where the government and the courts are hopelessly corrupt and no one bothers to do much about it. That’s not an interview killer; it’s an interview opener, especially if you approach it with humor and grace.

In the meantime, there's no need to mope around being depressed. You're there to help people, right? OK, you can’t do much legally, and I think you're right about that part of it. But you can do two things – you can learn and you can help. You should learn all you can about Cambodian law and government so that if it ends up being a country you care about, you can work for change there the rest of your life. You should go out into the community and do anything you can to help them. Teach English. Help with infrastructure projects. Pitch in at the local medical clinic. Anything. You went there not only to get experience for yourself, but to serve, right? So serve in whatever way you can, whether it's through your NGO or not. You'll be helping the people you came to help, albeit not in the way you originally intended. Add to that a positive attitude, good war stories, and a sense of humor, and law firms would be crazy not to hire you. They'll see a self-starter, a team player, and a smart guy who knows how to make lemonade. What more could you want in an employee?

You are also infinitely wiser than you were at the start of the summer. You've been up to your elbows in the glamorous world of "International Law" that every law school applicant and his brother swears he wants to practice. Good for you that you've gone out and done it, and figured out what that really means, and have a bunch of stories to tell.

And to think you could have been sitting around in some air-conditioned American law firm writing memos that no one will read about Section 226 of the Labor Code ("Social Security Number Truncation on Pay Stubs"). You are way, way ahead.

Usually the parents of applicants drive me a little nuts, but yesterday I received a lovely email from an applicant's father who reminded me that a little perspective goes a long way when people go into panic mode. And this time of year, applicants are going into serious panic mode.

The family crisis? The applicant -- call her X -- had just found out that the superstar professor who had promised to write her a recommendation a few months back has decided not to write any this coming semester. X started stressing, called a family conference with her parents, and agonized over this lost opportunity.

Once X and I hopped on the phone, I told her the following:

• Recommendations don't really matter all that much in the law school admissions process (unlike business school). Very few end up changing the admissions officer's analysis in a material way. You want to be smart in deciding whom you ask and how you ask, but after that, it's largely out of your hands, and not a big factor anyway.
• Yes, sometimes faculty are jerks. Yes, talk is cheap. Nothing you can do about that.
• If someone you ask for a recommendation declines to write one, don't push. I'd much rather he be honest wtih you and let you move on to another recommender, than have him say yes and write you a "meh" recommendation (and you'd never even know that the letter he sent was "meh").
• There are some things you should worry about in the application process. This turn of events isn't one of them, so don't lose even one more minute of sleep over it.

The conversation took all of ten minutes, but apparently it made an impression, because X's dad then sent me the following email:

Anna -

Although we have never met or even spoken, I have with great interest and admiration observed your comments and advice to X (a wonderful young lady), and do most appreciate your helping her, as your guidance is simply terrific.

A wise man once told me "never sweat the small stuff, and it's almost all small stuff."

Should you tire of advising law school applicants (of course only after X gets accepted to several great law schools), I suggest you consider expanding your consulting practice to include advising:

a) Husbands on how to treat their wives.
b) Wives on how to treat husbands.
c) Partners on how to treat partners, or
d) large corporate clients on anything.

Thanks for all you do for my favorite daughter.

Aside from being the sweetest thing ever, this email from X's father reminded me to remind you not to confuse the big stuff and the little stuff.

I'm intrigued by Brian Leiter's rankings of law schools based on the success rates of its graduates in the 2006-2008 law school teaching market. If you don't want to read the rankings, here are some take-aways:

1. Yale was the most successful school (45% placement rate); Chicago was second (43%), followed by Stanford (41%), Harvard (37%), and UVa (35%).

2. Harvard and Yale accounted for 40% of all new faculty hires (90 out of 231).

3. Harvard had 126 grads in the market last year; Yale had 97. (The Yale number is astonishing, since they have a class about one third the size of Harvard's. By comparison, Chicago, which is the same size as Yale, had 28.)

4. DC schools apparently attract lots of people who want to teach, but few of them are successful. Three DC-area schools (Georgetown, American, and GW) had 125 grads in the market -- only 8 were placed, and all of them were from Georgetown. Georgetown alone had 80 grads in the market (placing 10%), while American placed 0 out of 27 and GW placed 0 out of 18.

5. Tulane is a real oddball in the top tier of placing schools -- its 20% placement rate outperformed Berkeley, Duke, Penn, and some other top schools.

Justice Blackmun may be famous for having authored the majority opinion in Roe v. Wade, but he's also famous for the "sappy" 1972 baseball antitrust decision Flood v. Kuhn, which exempted baseball from antitrust laws just because baseball is, well, special:

[Flood v. Kuhn] begins with a hopelessly sentimental ode to baseball and a long list of best players who "sparked the diamond" through the national pastime's glorious history. It was so sappy that two justices in the majority refused to join that section of the decision.

How bad and sappy? The blurb above, from a Tony Mauro article about the decision in today's Legal Times, doesn't really capture the florid wretchedness of Blackmun's writing in this opinion, which deserves some kind of bad writing award (on top of legal reasoning so poor that it stands as an embarrassment to lawyers everywhere):

Then there are the many names, celebrated for one reason or another, that have sparked the diamond and its environs and that have provided tinder for recaptured thrills, for reminiscence and comparisons, and for conversation and anticipation in-season and off-season.... [See entire list of players below.*] And one recalls the appropriate reference to the "World Serious," attributed to Ring Lardner, Sr.; Ernest L. Thayer's "Casey at the Bat"; the ring of "Tinker to Evers to Chance"; and all the other happenings, habits, and superstitions about and around baseball that made it the "national pastime" or, depending upon the point of view, "the great American tragedy."

But I digress.

So along came a controversial and best-selling book by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong called The Brethren (if you're applying to law school and haven't read it, you should, along with Jeffrey Toobin's forthcoming The Nine and Jan Crawford Greenburg's Supreme Conflict). The Brethren, which was overall very hostile to Blackmun, included a few sentences about the fact that Blackmun hadn't listed any black players in the first draft of his opinion and added them only at the behest of Thurgood Marshall. We were supposed to conclude that Blackmun was a bigot.

Turns out, "the story is false," according to Ross Davies in a recent interview with the Legal Times about an article he published in the current edition of the Journal of Supreme Court History entitled "A Tall Tale of The Brethren." (Ross is a professor at George Mason Law School, editor of the endlessly entertaining Green Bag, author of a new law school ranking called The Deadwood Report, and my former law review boss.) Ross's research shows that the infamous first draft omitting black players never existed.

Eagle-eyed readers of Ross's article might notice that this is not a battle of anonymous sources, as is so often the case, particularly with Woodward. The authors of The Brethren claimed to have relied on an actual draft of the purportedly all-white document, and they have yet to produce it. (See in particular pages 11-12 and 20-23 in Ross's article.)

What else can we take away from the Flood decision? As Brad Snyder, lawyer and author of a book about Curt Flood, explains in the Legal Times interview: "Even the best judges turn into pennant-waving schoolboys when they decide cases about sports."

 

* Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Tris Speaker, Walter Johnson, Henry Chadwick, Eddie Collins, Lou Gehrig, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Rogers Hornsby, Harry Hooper, Goose Goslin, Jackie Robinson, Honus Wagner, Joe McCarthy, John McGraw, Deacon Phillippe, Rube Marquard, Christy Mathewson, Tommy Leach, Big Ed Delahanty, Davy Jones, Germany Schaefer, King Kelly, Big Dan Brouthers, Wahoo Sam Crawford, Wee Willie Keeler, Big Ed Walsh, Jimmy Austin, Fred Snodgrass, Satchel Paige, Hugh Jennings, Fred Merkle, Iron Man McGinnity, Three-Finger Brown, Harry and Stan Coveleski, Connie Mack, Al Bridwell, Red Ruffing, Amos Rusie, Cy Young, Smokey Joe Wood, Chief Meyers, Chief Bender, Bill Klem, Hans Lobert, Johnny Evers, Joe Tinker, Roy Campanela, Miller Huggins, Rube Bressler, Dazzy Vance, Edd Roush, Bill Wambsganess, Clark Griffith, Branch Rickey, Frank Chance, Cap Anson, Nap Lajoie, Sad Sam Jones, Bob O'Farrell, Lefty O'Doul, Bobby Veach, Willie Kamm, Heinie Groh, Lloyd and Paul Waner, Stuffy McInnis, Charles Comiske, Roger Bresnahan, Bill Dickey, Zack Wheat, George Sisler, Charlie Gehringer, Eppa Rixey, Harry Heilmann, Fred Clarke, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Pie Traynor, Rube Waddell, Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Old Hoss Radbourne, Moe Berg, Rabbit Maranville, Jimmie Foxx, Lefty Grove.

For an unrelated discussion of Blackmun's list of players by law professor/baseball fan/former Hall of Fame scholar-in-residence, see this 2006 article by Roger Ian Abrams.

One of the hardest things to sort out in law school is whether to choose a litigation or transactional career. Law school training (at least the required part) is notoriously biased in favor of litigation, so the burden is on law students to figure out whether they want to default into a litigation career or seek out training for a transactional practice.

Prof. Jeff Lipshaw has some great postings on how to go about deciding whether transactional law is a good fit. Check them out here and here.

By the way, you are forgiven if you are a law student and don't even know what a transactional practice is. (And when transactional work is slow at law firms, as is the case on a fairly cyclical basis, even first-year lawyers walk the halls asking themselves, "What's a 'deal' anyway?") Prof. Kenneth Klee has written a great paper on transactional law, and you can also check out Columbia Law School's transactional program (arguably the best around) to get a sense of what's involved.

Note, too, that transactional work can get very specialized. For example, my old law firm (Irell & Manella) has sub-groups focusing on art transactions, intellectual property transactions, and IPOs and private placements (among others).

Edited to add: Prof. Lipshaw kindly sent this follow-up to his original posting, with an emphasis on in-house counsel positions. I have a posting on in-house roles here as well.

Always the innovator in one of the most sclerotic and hidebound industries on the planet, Northwestern Law School will be offering a 2-year JD, as reported in today's Chicago Tribune.

Even more exciting is that the 2-year JD students will be the first to take newly required classes in accounting, finance, and statistics. I have long told rising 1Ls that the best class they can take while in law school is financial accounting. You shouldn't even be sitting on a local PTA board without being able to read a financial statement, let alone work as a lawyer.

From the article:

"We don't intend to put out a generation of accountants or business analysts, but we do hope to put into the workplace alumni who have a better grounding in the kinds of issues that they will face from their client's perspective," said Mascherin, a Northwestern alumna and member of one of the focus groups that helped shape the new curriculum. "Clients don't like lawyers who can spout legal analysis but can't do strategic analysis."

Expect lots of sniping from other top law schools. Unlike other top schools, though, Northwestern requires work experience, and someone who has already been out in the working world will have a much clearer and more targeted idea about what he wants out of his legal training than your typical college senior. In any event, the market for legal talent will soon tell us how graduates of the 2-year program stack up against their 3-year counterparts.

I say: Northwestern rocks.

It's not uncommon for applicants to put down deposits at multiple schools. Sometimes there are good reasons: maybe your spouse needs to find out whether he can relocate to a different branch office, or you might need to stay close to home if your dad's health takes a turn for the worse.

Often, though, there's no good reason: many applicants have access to all the information they would
want or need to make a decision by May 1, and they just want more time to
agonize over their decision some more. Closing doors can be scary, but there comes a time when you just have to pick a horse.

Multiple deposits drive admissions officers completely batty. They have to figure out how many people are actually going to show up at orientation, and in a world of multiple deposits, they can't just look at the number of people who have sent in checks. (That's one of the reasons waitlists have grown grotesquely deep.) Every empty seat is a huge revenue hit for the school, so no school wants to be undersubscribed. I've been there, and I feel their pain.

It's therefore not surprising to me that some schools have started playing hardball with multiple deposits.

From Columbia Law School's admitted students website: We cannot support the practice of placing deposits at multiple law schools. Therefore, if you decide to hold a place at Columbia, we ask that you refrain from doing the same at other law schools. Should we discover that a candidate has made commitments to multiple law schools, Columbia reserves the right to revoke our offer of admission.From the University of Chicago Law School's offer letter:We believe that applicants should have at any time only one deposit or letter of intent to enroll at another school unless there are substantial reasons why an applicant cannot make a decision among outstanding offers of admission.... The Law School will contact individuals who have multiple deposits as of June 15 to discuss their situation and their place in the Class of 2011 may be in jeopardy. [Bold in the original]From NYU's enrollment form:___ I plan to enroll at NYU School of Law in Fall 2008. I have no commitment to attend another law school, have not deferred enrollment at another law school, will not apply to another law school, and have withdrawn from other law schools to which I was admitted. [Bold in the original]Given the difficulties that multiple deposits pose for schools, I wouldn't have any problem with those policies but for the fact that LSAC's own rules prohibit them.

From page 4 of the LSAC Statement of Good Admission and Financial Aid Practices 2007-2008:

Except under binding early decision plans, every accepted applicant should be free to accept a new offer from a school even though a deposit has been paid to another school.That's what lawyers like to call "plain English." No ambiguity there.

What does that mean for you? Ultimately LSAC is just the sum of its member law schools, so don't look to them to slap any wrists here.

These threats against applicants -- to put their offers in jeopardy if they exercise their express right under LSAC rules -- are distasteful and hypocritical, but there's probably not much applicants can do about it. You may ask yourself why you should take any other LSAC rules seriously -- and there are many -- when the schools themselves don't, but, alas, you have no leverage here, and no real recourse.

May 1 is coming up. It's time to pick your horse.

Waitlists stink, don't they? I'm receiving a lot of emails right now from applicants agonizing about their waitlists. No matter what kind of program you've applied to -- college, business school, law school, public health, doesn't matter -- the process works more or less the same. Here's the drill:

You're on a waitlist because something about your file made you less than an easy decision to admit.

Maybe it's because one of your numbers is too low.

Maybe it's because you are a total stud and the school assumes you'll go somewhere higher up the food chain. Why risk taking a hit to its yield rate by wasting an offer on you?

Maybe it's because your numbers are great but your essay is subliterate.

Maybe one of your recommenders sandbagged you.

Maybe you flubbed your interview.

Maybe you're a perfectly fine applicant but your competition is really, really tough this year.

There could be a million reasons why you're on a waitlist. Or in a cryptic "hold" category. Or a cryptic... something. Example:

Dear Anna,

First, thank you so much! I applied to law school last Fall and consulted your book religiously. It's hard for me to describe how much your guide helped me through my application process -- not least in helping me avoid a number of things I now recognize to be application pitfalls. As a result, I've been admitted to 9 of the 12 law schools to which I applied, all but one in the top 14. I've recommended your book to everyone I know who's interested in applying to law school.

But now I find myself in a position that your book doesn't seem to address directly. I've been but on hold at two schools (Harvard and the University of Chicago). I've also received a cryptic email from a third (Yale) that said I would either be admitted or waitlisted in the coming weeks.

My roommate is in the same situation with Columbia, and I know a number of other applicants that are currently in the "on hold" limbo at other schools. Being put "on hold" seems fairly common, but no one seems to know the best course of action in this scenario. Should I start sending additional materials? Should I call the HLS admissions office and tell them Harvard is my first choice? I'm worried that by doing nothing I'll be wasting a huge opportunity.

Thanks again for all your guidance so far. Any advice you could offer would a great reassurance.

First, you should know that at this point in the season, being waitlisted, being "on hold," and not having heard anything at all are more or less the same for practical purposes.

Schools are waiting to see how things shake out after their first deposits come in. Then they do a head count, see if they are under- or over subscribed, see what their medians and quartiles look like, make sure they have enough minorities, etc. etc. -- all the stuff they get paid to worry about. Inevitably, there's some tweaking they have to do, and that tweaking continues for the rest of the summer, even into orientation. They spend the rest of the summer feverishly engineering their incoming class.

Why so long? Because in a world of the common app, gazillions of applications per person, and multiple deposits (with some variation, but not much, from program to program), admissions officers really can't get a true headcount just by looking at deposits. Deposits signify nothing about your true intention to attend, which is the main reason schools now maintain waitlists that are absurdly deep.

And as soon as someone gets off a waitlist somewhere else, and withdraws from the schools to which he has already sent deposits, the Big Mad Shuffle begins. It's like musical chairs. And it also means that admissions officers themselves have no earthly idea how the waitlist is going to unfold. There are even people who put down deposits and then just fail to show up at orientation. You might get that waitlist call after you've moved into student housing and bought your books and started playing stupid getting-to-know-you icebreaker and team-building games with your new classmates.

The bottom line is that the waitlist process is completely unpredictable for everyone involved. If admissions officers seem cryptic, it's because they don't know how things are going to develop any more than you do.

Which is why I scratch my head a bit when I get other emails from people saying, "I just sent my waitlist stuff in two weeks ago, and I still haven't heard anything, and OMG it's already so late, why haven't I heard anything yet???" It's not late in the process at all. By waitlist standards, it's early. Really, really early.

So, what to do when you find yourself in that situation? Well, put yourself in the shoes of the admissions officer. You're a mere mortal, and mere mortals are a little bit lazy, right? So if you find yourself having to fill a spot, and you're looking at a waitlist that's hundreds deep, do you want to have to call 300 people to find that one person who is willing to change his plans at the very last second? Nope. You'd rather call your mental shortlist of the 5 or 10 people who you think are the most likely to say "yes" when you call. You'll still have certain gaps to fill -- numbers you need, demographics you need, all that stuff over which applicants have no control anyway -- but fundamentally, you also care very much about how quickly you can fill that spot, and applicants do have some control over that.

What that means for you, the applicant: if you find yourself waitlisted, "on hold," or completely ignored by the powers that be at this point in the admissions season, you want to make crystal clear to your school of choice that you would be the guy who says "yes." You do that by writing them and telling them without any ambiguity that you remain very, very interested, and that you would accept an offer if you received one. You can make that promise to only one school, so be strategic about it, and be honest with yourself. (And if you know in your heart that you wouldn't say "yes" if that call came around, be a good citizen and take yourself off the waitlist. You'll make someone else very happy.) The other schools on your shortlist should get the strong expression of continued interest, without the promise to accept an offer.

Stay in touch with your shortlist of schools about once a month. That's often enough to stay on their radar screens without looking like a pest or a stalker. Those letters will feel very repetitive, and that's OK. If you have updates to share in those communications, so much the better, but don't feel as if you have to manufacture lame updates if all you have to say is... "I'm still really interested."

If your schedule and budget permit, visit the school. Say hello. Introduce yourself to the nice people at the front desk. Hand deliver your LOCI (letter of continued interest). Do not pitch a tent in the quad or call people at home or do anything stupid.

What doesn't work, in my experience?

• Extra letters of recommendation. Rec letters have such questionable value to begin with; sending more of them doesn't add a whole lot more value, although I would make an exception for MBA applications, where the recs really do matter.
• Extra essays, unless (1) additional essays are invited (like Chicago Law School's hold essay), or (2) you have not yet sent a very tailored, very credible "here's why I love your school!" essay as part of your original application.

Keeping my fingers crossed for you you... I know the wait is excruciating.