If you're planning on submitting law school applications this coming fall, now is a good time to start thinking about your recommendations: Whom are you going to ask? And when?

The first thing to know is that most law schools prefer academic recommendations.

It's almost the end of February, and you have all the time in the world to deal with your law school applications, right? Wrong. By the time we hear from people in the fall, or even as early as June, they've missed a lot of lead time to get their application strategy and logistics in order. Here are ten things to start thinking about now:<!--break-->

1. LSAC

The Law School Admission Council (LSAC) is the gatekeeper for all your application logistics.

At Harvard, where the author got her law degree, she shows up on the business-school campus and asks random students if they know any introverts.

I'm sure this is just about the last thing in the world you want to be doing right now, but it's a good time to start pulling your documents together to prepare for your law school financial aid applications.

Here are some interesting stats from a recent post by Equal Justice Works:

It's no surprise... that most law students borrow to finance their legal education (88.

Not to ruin the relief you felt when you submitted your last application at two minutes until midnight on December 31, but I do have to bring your attention to a critical reality.  SUBMISSION IS NOT THE FINAL STEP in the application process.  Your application will not be considered until your application is COMPLETE.  That’s right, if your application is not complete, it won’t get evaluated.

In the past, workers with average skills, doing an average job, could earn an average lifestyle.

What's the ideal LSAT timeline? Your mileage may vary, and your LSAT instructor will be able to give you advice customized to your individual situation. But in a perfect world, here's how I like to work backwards from the end goal:

Plan to submit your applications in early November (or even sooner, but early November is plenty early).

Juniors – it is time to shift gears!

It's Tough Love Season* here Chez Ivey, and it's time for my annual public service announcement to applicants, wherein I say some version of "STOP ACTING LIKE A CRAZY PERSON."

I've written a whole blog post about how waiting is the hardest part, with a Tom Petty/Eddie Vedder video and everything! In that same spirt, I have a story to share.

I was talking to a law school admissions officer, among other things about applicants who feel compelled to check their online status every six minutes.

What's the fastest way to tank your legal career before it even starts? Being found guilty by LSAC of "misconduct or irregularity" in the application process.

LSAC has a helpful page on its website explaining what that means. In part:

What constitutes misconduct or an irregularity?

The submission, even by mistake, as part of the law school admission process of any information that is false, inconsistent, or misleading, or the omission of information that may result in a false or misleading conclusion, or the violation of any regulation governing the law school admission process, including any violation of LSAT test center regulations.

At a time when the media and even Congress are scrutinizing claims by law schools about their graduates' employability and earning power, these application questions caught my eye:

Student Indebtedness

1. Please list all of your outstanding educational loans. List amount, type, lender name, and total amount.

2. Have you ever defaulted on any educational loan?

Law school applications don't typically ask you to provide information about your indebtendess (except in the separate, optional financial aid application).

There is some very smart and forward-thinking advice from Professor Larry Ribstein in his response to the NYT article "What They Don't Teach Law Students: Lawyering."

My favorite line from Prof. Ribstein's piece: "[L] aw schools should teach law students how to be architects and designers rather than mechanics." After all, "[l]awyers now don’t draft agreements from scratch.

Take a walk down memory lane with me.

In hindsight, my biggest frustration when I applied to law school many years ago was something that should have been easy to check off the list: the Dean's Certification.

The economy is in the tank, things are down. Nobody was thinking about ‘transparency’ five years ago, because the job market was so rich there was no reason to quibble over statistics.

- Larry Kramer, dean of Stanford Law School to the Wall Street Journal ("Congress Gives Law School the Stink Eye," Nov 14, 2011)

I have a lot to say about that, and it ties in nicely with a follow-up I want to make to an interview I gave recently to US News & World Report, which was nice enough to quote me yesterday in an article called 5 Tips for Current or Prospective Law School Students in a Difficult Economy.

It was election day here yesterday, and in the run-up I came home to a front porch blanketed with postcards and flyers from various City Council candidates (there were a whopping 18 for our hamlet of Cambridge — enough flyers to cover some meaningful real estate on my little porch).

Now that the election has passed, I feel free to post a picture of one them, the biggest in size.

Say you receive an email from an admissions officer inviting you to an interview. Or you grabbed someone's business card at a school forum and want to email that admissions officer with a question. What's the appropriate way to address that person?

Here are some guidelines to help you communicate with admissions officers in a professional way:

• If the person's recent email or recent business card clearly identifies him (in the email signature, for example) as having a Dean title, you can address him as Dean So-and-So.

I've written before that in your application essays, you must answer the question they're asking you, not the one you wish they had asked. Here's a related problem I often see: Rather than ignoring the question entirely, you might answer only part of the question and ignore the harder (and more interesting) bits.

Here are two examples, one from the MBA world, and one from the law school world:

• "What matters most to you, and why?

My applications are out, and already I have a couple of answers back (both admits, thankfully). Since I have no idea what I'm doing, I thought you could answer two etiquette questions for me: 

1. Is it acceptable to send a short thank you email to the admissions dean after receiving your decision? Or is that generally not advised?

 2.