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Law school letters of recommendation go through LSAC's Letter of Recommendation service, which is included in your Credential Assembly Service registration and lets you assign which letters each law school receives. LSAC publishes no maximum number and no per-school targeted limit. Verified July 2026.
Recommenders send letters to LSAC once, and you assign which letters go to which school. LSAC states that access to the Letter of Recommendation service is included in CAS registration; LSAC publishes that access to its Letter of Recommendation service is included in Credential Assembly Service registration, retrieved July 31, 2026. Verified July 2026.
LSAC also states that you get to assign which letters you want each law school to receive, which is the feature that makes targeting possible at all (https://www.lsac.org/applying-law-school/jd-application-process/credential-assembly-service-cas/letters-recommendation), retrieved July 31, 2026. Verified July 2026.
The practical consequence is that a recommender writes once and you decide the routing. Nobody has to write four versions of the same letter.
Two is the working answer for most applicants, and the ceiling is set by each school rather than by LSAC. LSAC's own service page publishes no maximum number of letters; We read LSAC's Letter of Recommendation page on the day and it states no total cap and no per-school targeted limit, retrieved July 31, 2026. Verified July 2026.
That absence matters, because the caps applicants worry about are school rules rather than LSAC rules, and they differ.
Check the number on your own school's requirements page. Sending more letters than a school accepts does not add weight, it adds an administrative problem.
A general letter goes to every school you assign it to. A targeted letter is written for one school, and LSAC's own example is a professor recommending you to their alma mater; For letters that are not targeted, LSAC states the description could read General Use, retrieved July 31, 2026. Verified July 2026.
LSAC's published example of a targeted letter is that if one of your professors is a law school graduate, you could ask this professor to recommend you to their alma mater (https://www.lsac.org/applying-law-school/jd-application-process/credential-assembly-service-cas/letters-recommendation), retrieved July 31, 2026. Verified July 2026.
That label is what routes the letter everywhere. Verified July 2026.
Most applicants need general letters only. A targeted letter is worth the extra ask when the recommender has a real, specific connection to name.
Someone who has watched you do hard intellectual work recently and can describe it specifically. Proximity to your actual work beats the recommender's title every time; A committee is reading for evidence about how you think, argue and take criticism. Verified July 2026.
Only someone who has seen that can supply it.
Seniority is a weak proxy. A department chair who taught you in a lecture of 300 knows less about you than the instructor who marked your seminar papers.
This is a position rather than a hedge: given a choice between a famous name with nothing to say and an ordinary one with detail, take the detail.
A professor, if you have been out of school under about three years. Law school is an academic program and an academic reader is the closest available evidence of how you will perform in one; The further you are from graduation, the weaker that logic gets. Verified July 2026.
A supervisor who has watched you handle responsibility for five years knows more that is currently true.
The mixed pair is usually the strongest file for a career changer: one academic letter for the classroom evidence, one professional for the current evidence.
Some schools state a preference on their own requirements pages. Where yours does, that preference outranks any general rule including this one.
Six to eight weeks before you need it, and add two weeks if the letter will be posted rather than uploaded. LSAC publishes a two-week processing window for paper letters; LSAC states, please allow LSAC two weeks from the time of receipt to process your paper letters, retrieved July 31, 2026. Verified July 2026.
That window is on top of your recommender's own turnaround, which is the part you cannot control and the part that actually slips.
Asking early costs nothing and buys you the option to ask somebody else if the first person goes quiet.
Your resume, the work of yours they supervised, a short note on what you want the letter to establish, and the deadline. Four items, sent once, in one message; Handing back the specific paper or project solves the recommender's real problem, which is remembering enough detail to be concrete. Verified July 2026.
The note on what to establish is not a script. It is a sentence telling them which of your qualities the rest of your file does not already prove.
Make the deadline earlier than the real one. That is not manipulation, it is the standard practice of anyone who has ever collected documents from busy people.
Yes, waive it: a waived letter is read as candid and an unwaived one invites the reader to wonder what the recommender chose to leave out. The cost of waiving is a document you had no practical use for anyway. Verified July 2026.
The waiver exists so that readers can trust the letter. Declining it removes exactly that signal and supplies no offsetting benefit.
If you do not trust a recommender enough to waive, that is information about the recommender rather than about the waiver.
Ask someone else instead. A lukewarm letter is the quietest way a strong application gets weaker.
A maximum number, a per-school targeted limit, and any processing time for electronic letters. We read the service page on the day and it states none of the three; The only timing LSAC publishes is the two-week window for paper letters, retrieved July 31, 2026, so anyone quoting you an electronic processing time has invented it. Verified July 2026.
School-level caps are published by schools rather than by LSAC. That is where to look, and this page does not guess at them.
Where a figure is in neither LSAC's pages nor our data sheet, we write that it is not published rather than estimating it.
Every figure on this letters of recommendation page carries a Verified July 2026 stamp because a dated stamp is the only honest way to publish a number that moves. Each source below was retrieved in July 2026 and is linked in full rather than named vaguely, so nothing here is modelled, averaged or inferred.
What it supportsSourceLSAC Letter of Recommendation servicehttps://www.lsac.org/applying-law-school/jd-application-process/credential-assembly-service-cas/letters-recommendationLSAC Credential Assembly Servicehttps://www.lsac.org/applying-law-school/jd-application-process/cas
Two works for most applicants. LSAC publishes no maximum and no per-school targeted limit, so the ceiling is set by each school's own requirements page. Verified July 2026.
No. LSAC publishes that access to its Letter of Recommendation service is included in Credential Assembly Service registration. Verified July 2026.
A professor if you have been out under about three years, a supervisor if longer, and one of each if you are changing careers. A school's stated preference outranks this. Verified July 2026.
Six to eight weeks, plus two more for a posted letter. LSAC asks for two weeks from receipt to process paper letters and publishes no time for electronic ones. Verified July 2026.
Yes. A waived letter reads as candid; an unwaived one invites the reader to wonder what was left out.
If you would not waive, ask someone else. Verified July 2026.
Line up your two recommenders before you touch the essays. They are the only part of the application whose timing is not yours to control. The Lovare Diagnostic takes about fifteen minutes and returns your own numbers against published school data rather than a single probability, and it is free.
Written by Ali, Georgetown Law, founder of Lovare Institut.
August 5, 2026
August 5, 2026