Writing an Effective Addendum

Law school applications themselves are pretty easy to figure out. Heck, LSAC does half of the work for you! But what should you do when the numbers themselves just don't show the whole picture?

You write an addendum to your application.

There are a lot of reasons to write addendums: a bad semester in particular, low grades overall, multiple LSAT scores (I'm talking over three), a huge disparity between LSAT scores, a really terrible LSAT score, criminal history, etc. But for as many addendums as you can write, they should all follow the same basic parameters.

An addendum is NOT a personal statement, and it's not an essay or persuasive argument. It's not a forum to get the adcomms to come to your same conclusion about a particular issue, or to tell "your side of the story" about your fault. An addendum should be extremely straight-forward, incredibly factual (with little to no "fluff"), and very concise.

Say you had a bad first semester in college. Now you could write a page and a half about the difficulty of moving so far away from home, the steep learning curve, how your newfound independence meant that you didn't spend as much time studying as you did in high school, how having your significant other at another school far away was a real strain on your resources and time, etc., but guess what? Adcomms don't care.


Or say you went to take the LSAT, and the day before your grandfather died, or you got into a car accident on the way there and were understandably shaken by it? Your performance might have been impacted, and you might want to explain why you think you could do better on a retake (make sure you're signed up for a retake) or why your score on one LSAT is 9 points lower than another. Understandable, right? Sure, but only if you don't go on and on about how you'd never been in a car accident before, how bereft you felt by the loss of your family member, or the exact feelings of adrenaline pumping through your body on the test day. Adcomms still don't care.


An addendum should, in an ideal world, be nothing but a paragraph, maybe two, in length. Short paragraphs. And it shouldn't be chock full of excuses. If you have a good reason, then list it. If you had a bad semester all it should say is, "My bad."

Well not really. But it should be straightforward, acknowledge your poor performance, give a legitimate and non-whiny excuse, and then point out the improvements made since then.

Criminal addendums are a slightly different animal, but the same rules apply. Just the facts, and how you've gone about changing your errant ways (even if "it wasn't your fault"). Adcomms don't want to see an essay about the evils of the judicial system. They just want to know what happened and if it will impact you in the future.

Okay, so you got an MIP or got busted with a little weed. Just say, "look, this is what happened. I accepted responsibility then, I accept it now, and since that time in my life I have a) never let it happen again and b) been involved in community service efforts involving alcoholism and/or drug addiction."

I'm verbose, to say the least, and when writing my own addendum I wanted to make sure that the adcomms knew that I wasn't just flighty, or partying too hard, or something of that nature...I was hospitalized and very ill for part of one semester, and it showed in my GPA. But after reading my full-page addendum, it just sounded like a 12-year-old providing excuses for something that they just needed to own up to. 

So I pared and pared and pared it down until I got to a two paragraph, less-than-half-page addendum that didn't try to paint me in the best light possible. It just said, "look, here are the facts, there was a reason for the fault that was outside of my control, but I've moved on and have done significantly better since."

In short, the most important things to remember when writing your addendum: brevity, straightforwardness, and acceptance of responsibility will win the day. Don't make excuses, keep it short, and just give the facts, not your opinion.

Good luck with the addendums!