Law Personal Statement Guide

What Is a Law School Personal Statement?

A law personal statement is your chance to make a good impression on admissions tutors at your chosen law school. In it, you need to be able to successfully articulate why you would be suited for a career in the legal field.

Given the limitations on the number of words/characters you can use when creating a personal statement, you must be precise and use your unique selling points as well as you can to stand out.

What’s the Word Limit?

The maximum you can write in your UCAS personal statement is 4,000 characters and 47 lines.
As a rough estimate, this equates to around 500-600 words.

For personal statements submitted through the Central Applications Board, you’re allowed to write up to 10,000 characters including all punctuation and paragraph breaks, etc). The most common length is between 500-1000 words (3-4000 characters).

You might find it tricky to stay within this character count, but there are various methods of making sure your statement is concise. For example, you can try deleting adjectives and overcomplicated vocabulary. Sometimes, the simplest personal statement is the most effective. You might also find it easier to delete chunks of texts than go through and shorten individual sentences.

What to Include in a Law Personal Statement

Broadly speaking, your personal statement for law needs to cover three main strands:

• Motivation: Why do you want to study/practise law?
• Exploration: What have you done so far to explore your career choice?
• Suitability: Why are you a great fit for a legal career?

How to Structure a Law Personal Statement

There is no one-fits-all law school personal statement structure. It’s purely a matter of personal preference. But you do need to make sure you have a clear and logical framework.
Read our article on how to structure your personal statement.

What to Avoid

There are certain things stylistically to avoid in your personal statement. For example:

• Passive tense: keep everything active as this engages the reader more
• Informal language: this can make you seem quite casual and set the wrong tone for your application.
• Overly formal tone: don’t write it as you’d write a piece of academic writing
• Spelling and grammar mistakes: use a tool like grammarly to triple check your work

Getting the Right Tone

Aim to use short, polished sentences in your statement, rather than overly wordy ones. Keep the language simple. You only have a short space to make your point, so it is vital to be clear, while communicating your enthusiasm for law. Superfluous text will detract from the impact of your piece.

Use empowering and active language that demonstrates pro-activity – for example, turn difficult or negative situations and problems you have encountered into challenges that you rose to, explaining any positive outcomes.

More Personal Statement Tips

Check out this video from Solent University, packed full of great tips on how to write a strong law Personal Statement:

Find out more about studying Law at Solent University.