How to Evaluate Your LLM Admission Chances: Expert Guide, with Case Studies

Why Would you need to evaluate your background for an LL.M. application?

Writing an LL.M. application requires you to analyze and present your background in multiple ways. It comes up, inter alia, in:

• essays such as motivation letters, personal statements, statements of purpose, or other essays that ask you to answer questions about your background and clarify your reasons for applying.
• CV, which provides a factual description of your background.
• The application form, where you’re asked to provide factual information about yourself (often overlapping with the CV) and sometimes to respond to essay prompts.
• Letters of recommendation, which offer an analysis of your background written by a 3^rd party.

As you can see, you must thoroughly analyze your background to ensure that your application presents a holistic and convincing picture of who you are, ultimately working towards the goal of gaining you acceptance into the chosen LL.M. programs.

Challenges you might face when evaluating your profile for an LL.M. application

• It's hard to write about yourself. It’s just hard. It’s like listening to a recording of your own voice.It’s often harder than producing a high-quality piece of research on a legal topic or a memorandum for a high-stakes project.
• You are too close to your own experience, so it’s difficult to recognize its value (‘I’ve done nothing special’ or ‘everyone I know did this, so it’s not a big deal’ syndrome).
• You may see value in your experiences but struggle to describe it in a way that effectively communicates the strength of your candidacy to the admissions committee.
• You see the things you’ve done but find it challenging to interpret them in broader terms, such as demonstrating leadership potential or a commitment to improving the lives of others.
• You might have a diverse range of experiences and struggle with presenting a cohesive profile.
• You might get fixated on answering essay questions accurately, which can make your writing feel generic.
• You may find it difficult to present yourself from a place of professional maturity, without coming across as boastful or self-inflating.

Start by conducting an inventory of your experience

Make a comprehensive list of all the things you’ve done in life – academically and professionally. The goal here is to collect as much of your life experience as possible.

How do you go about collecting your own experiences?

Imagine you are interviewing yourself about your life. As you go through your life experiences, resist the urge to say, ‘oh, this is not relevant’ or ‘I already know this, there is nothing new to discover’.

Maintain the attitude of a compassionate and interested, yet detached interviewer. As an interviewer, you don’t yet know what you’ll ultimately use in your final text. You are in discovery-and-collection mode, not in the discard-and-edit mode.

You can structure the interview process chronologically or by area of life.

Don’t start with anything formal or something you think you ‘should’ start with. Begin with what you are most drawn to in your background – your favorite part of your life – something that naturally comes to mind. For me, it was the moot courts and the all-Russian Olympiads in law. Maybe for you, it’ll be a project you worked on, a business you helped build, a mentor you worked with, or research on something important that you completed.

I generally prefer organizing experiences by subject matter area. For me, these include:

• education
• work
• moot courts
• olympiads
• conferences, summer schools, etc.
• teaching and designing courses
• language learning experiences
• growing up – the environment in which I grew up, the people who surrounded me

Your subject areas may overlap with mine, or they may be completely different. For instance, I don’t list sports because I didn’t participate in any. My school didn’t have sports teams – it’s just not a thing in Russia, and my father didn’t introduce me to any. However, maybe for you, it’s the opposite. Maybe you’ve done 6 years of ballet, and that was a huge part of your life. If so, reflect that in your interview.

You can also organize your experiences chronologically. Start with an event, such as your first day of law school, and go through events as they happened.

Make sure you don’t force yourself into following an abstract order. Our memories are associative. Once you start with an event, see where the associations lead you rather than forcing yourself into what’s ‘logical’ to discuss next. Allow yourself to move freely along the timeline of your life.

Another strategy you can use is to tell stories about beginnings – how your interest in something was sparked, eg, how you decided to become a lawyer, how you got interested in a particular field of law, how you came up with a topic for your graduation thesis, how you found your first job (and the next one after that) etc.I call these ‘stories of origin’. They can serve as entry points into multiple facets of your background. They can also provide important insights into your motivations and why you do what you, which you’ll later use in your LL.M.applications.

Why go through such an elaborate process? Don't I know everything about Myself already?

Why do I insist on this thorough, seemingly redundant and self-indulgent, yet completely non-judgmental approach to analyzing your own background?

I insist on it because, in my experience, people are notoriously bad at evaluating their own life experiences. Being your own mirror is hard. It’s really hard. When you do this on your own, problems and drawbacks seem to be magnified, and you can barely see your achievements.

Another source of resistance to this process an illusion of being omniscient. It’s your own background, after all. What could you possibly gain from an inventory of your life, besides what you already know?

Yet, I’ve gone through this process many times, with myself and others. I have seen, over and over again, how much there is to discover. Facts will remain facts. However, what you see in those facts and how you interpret them, the stories you tell yourself about your life – they will change. These shifts will inevitably influence how you write your applications.

I will give you examples of how new interpretations can emerge when you conduct an inventory like this, interpretations that will help you write your applications from a place of emotional maturity rather than from a position of bragging or artificial self-inflation. This approach can ultimately secure your place in a desired LL.M. program.

Example 1: Postdoc in international investment law

From “I don’t think I’m qualified for this” to “Wow, I’ve done so much in this field – how could I not see it?!”

I recently applied for a postdoc in international investment law. I’ve always liked investment arbitration. Yet, I had focused significantly more on private international law and civil procedure in recent years, and initially I didn’t think I was qualified enough for the postdoc.

However, when I did an inventory of my experiences, I recalled that:

• I co-designed the curriculum for a course on international investment arbitration taught by Prof. Ko-Yung Tung at Harvard Law School
• I took a course at the European University Institute on trade and WTO law that included discussions on investment protection
• I co-authored a commentary on behalf of the Association for InternationalArbitration on the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP)
• I worked at the Permanent Court of Arbitration on investment cases

These were all on my CV, of course, but I hadn’t realized their relevance to my postdoc application until I reviewed my experiences. This realization completely changed my perception of my value as a candidate. The application I wrote afterward was significantly more convincing – because I genuinely believed I was a strong candidate. I didn’t just claim that. I had evidence to back it up.

This kind of transformation happens to everyone I work with. Here are more examples.

Example 2: Corporate Lawyer’s Transition

From “I’m an obstacle to business” to “I’m a co-creator”

• A client of mine worked as a corporate lawyer with startups, handling the legal work that new companies typically need. As a lawyer, she was accustomed to being perceived as an obstacle to a company’s growth, as someone who forced everyone through unnecessary bureaucratic hurdles.
• As we started inventorying her experiences, we discussed the projects she worked on, eg, for a startup designing an app for elderly. She realized that what drew her most was being actively engaged in co-creating positive results with the startup founders, helping them manifest an important idea in the world.
• This was in stark contrast to her previous law firm, where her specialty was bankruptcy.There, she accompanied a company’s death rather than its birth.
• This realization helped her shift from perceiving herself as an obstacle to seeing herself a co-creator. This insight became the foundation and main theme of her application for an LL.M. in corporate law.
• It only became clear through the process of inventorying her background. Although she knew the contents of her CV perfectly well, the interpretation hadn’t been there before.

Example 3: Academic goals reinterpreted

From “I lack empirical evidence for a career in academia” to “I’m passionate about disseminating important ideas, and that’s key for a scholar”

• A client of mine was considering transitioning from legal practice to academia but didn’t think she had enough empirical evidence in her background to demonstrate a sustained interest in an academic career.
• As I interviewed her, I discovered that she had written her master’s thesis on democracy and the decline of the rule of law in the EU. She argued that the legal tools at the EU’s disposal were inadequate to promote democracy and deal with authoritarian tendencies in some EU Member States. As a result, she proposed broadening the powers of judicial oversight, making the Court of Justice of the European Union more capable of addressing the democratic decline. The subject matter of the thesis was so important to her that she transformed it into a peer-reviewed article after graduation. After months of writing, re-writing, and editing, it was published in a peer-reviewed journal.
• As we discussed this, she realized that for her, the process of making important ideas known on a larger scale was deeply meaningful. It kept her going through all stages of adapting her thesis into an article and navigating the peer-review process.
• Before I guided her through analyzing her background, she struggled to interpret her plans for an LL.M. and later academia in broader terms, as a contribution into something larger than her own career.
• After this realization, she was able to use this experience to connect her academic ambitions to her passion for disseminating important ideas to wider circles.

Example 4: Transforming a learning disability into academic excellence and a socially meaningful project

From “I did a financial literacy project for some time” to “a deeply personal commitment to education and improving the lives of others”

• A client asked me to review her draft of a personal statement. Among other experiences, the draft mentioned a project on children’s financial literacy, but it was described in fairly general terms. It was unclear what exactly the project entailed, what her role was, etc.
• As I interviewed her, I learned that she had struggled with a learning disability in school and often bullied by other kids. Not only did she overcome this disability, graduating from school with honors, but she also translated that experience into her passion for teaching. As an economist, she designed a  program to teach kids in grades 1 to 3 the basics of math and financial literacy. By helping them acquire a sense of competence, she helped them build self-esteem. This directly spoke to her own experience as a child.
• In her application, she connected these experiences to demonstrate her academic excellence and explain the origin of her desire to pursue an advanced degree in psychology.

These are just a few examples. The important thing is to realize that a structured process of evaluating your own background can and usually will lead to unexpected benefits, such as:

• the experiences you didn’t think were relevant to your application become relevant.
• the experiences you forgot or overlooked are uncovered.
• new interpretations emerge: the life experiences you though meant one thing start to mean something new and different.

Externalize your experiences to get more distance

One of the best ways to evaluate your own profile more clearly and objectively is to externalize it – give it a form outside of your head. We are often too close to our own experiences to assess them objectively. Externalizing can provide the necessary distance.

How can you do it?

Externalization technique no. 1:

You can do this, for example, by talking about the things you’ve done in your life with other people. I believe it’s best to talk to someone outside of your immediate circle. For instance, if you are a lawyer and want your achievements in law to be appreciated, it’s better to talk to a non-lawyer (or a lawyer practicing in another domain, or in another country). Or, if you’ve danced ballet professionally for over6 years, it’s best to talk to someone outside of your ballet school.

Being part of the same circle means that certain things are regarded as normal and ubiquitous, which can prevent people from giving a less biased opinion. For instance, it’s hard to see a PhD as a huge achievement if everyone around you is doing a PhD.

Some people might be too far removed from your area of expertise to fully appreciate it. However, there will also be those who see the value where you can’t.

I’ll illustrate.

• In high school, I measured myself against people who participated in the All-Russian Olympiads in law. In the 10^th grade, I won 3^rd prize at the national level of the Olympiad, yet I felt like a failure because a friend of mine won 1^st prize, and that was all I could think about. This didn’t change for several years, as I still associated with people who achieved comparable results. It felt ordinary, like anybody could do it, I didn’t get any appreciation from my family. I only began to realize the scale of this achievement at university, when I saw the respect my classmates had for me, and later, at Harvard, when I talked to a Canadian friend and saw his reaction. Being a national champion in law while in high school was new to his world, and he was able to appreciate it better.

Be cautious, though, when choosing people to share with. Opt for those who are intelligent and empathetic enough to appreciate you. Don't pick assholes who'll devalue you and put you down.

Another example:

• Some time ago, I applied for a postdoc position. A member of the administrative stuff at my host institution commented on my application. He said, ‘Forgive me if I’m wrong but it looks like you worked for a prestigious institution [Permanent Court of Arbitration]. Do all academics in law have that experience? If not, maybe you could highlight it as a basis for your expertise in cross-border dispute resolution.’

It only dawned on me then that I had a unique  experience. It was on my CV, but I didn’t mention it in the application. Why? Because I used to be a part of that institution. I knew many people who’d done the same. It took a non-lawyer to see the value of my experience.

If you are a lawyer, much of your work involves highly cognitive task like research and writing. You probably rarely see the results of your work manifested in a tangible way. Even if you do, the result is often delayed and take ages to achieve (eg, a court ruling in a case). This is different from other professions, like programming, where you can see the results of your work in real time.

One way to address this is by giving your work tangible form.

Twyla Tharp, an American choreographer, writes in her book The Creative Habit that she starts every project with a box – a physical box where she puts objects that she finds relevant or the notes she makes. She employs this technique during the creation stage of a project to help visualize her ideas. I find that giving the end result of my work a physical shape can be incredibly powerful too.

• For my PhD defense, the EUI administration printed out copies of my thesis for the jury. I had submitted the full version of the thesis months prior, but only when I saw it on paper did I fully realize – wow, I created this! I wrote a whole book, 240 pages. It didn’t look that impressive in Word.

• The same happened with a book I published in June 2024, Private International Law in Russia. I worked on it for so long (3 years) with so many people(coordinating a team of 12 people) that when it finally came out, I almost missed the day. I had become so accustomed to the idea of publishing a book that it didn’t seem extraordinary to me. In my mind, it was a done deal. Only after getting the editor’s copy in print, did I fully grasp the scale of the creation.

When you look at the inventory of the things you’ve done, think about how you can give an external form to your accomplishments. How can you make them visible?

It can be as simple as printing out an article or a paper you wrote. It could also be a tangible point of impact your work has had in the outside world.

For instance, a client of mine worked pro bono at law clinic. For her, receiving thank-you notes from the clients she assisted made her feel that her work was making a difference in the world. A way to externalize it could be to print out the messages – or even to simply write down from memory the words of gratitude you received.

For me, a highlight was when a Chinese PhD student approached me to see if he could translate my article on the jurisdiction in cross-border contractual disputes under EU law into Mandarin for a Chinese law journal.

If you are a practicing lawyer, you can think in terms of the work you’ve done and the results you’ve gotten. For instance, one of the most impactful cases I worked on involved a Japanese producer of child car seats. The producer discovered a fault in the car seats after they’ve been released to the Russian market, and we were doing a recall. It was the first case a senior lawyer fully delegated to me – I was not just a junior lawyer completing tasks assigned to me. I was leading the project. The social impact of that case really meant a lot to me.

Other externalization Techniques

Look for points of impact in the world and make them visible.

Externalizing your accomplishments can take many forms:

• A printed version of your work. It doesn’t necessarily have to be published – even just printing out your writing can already have a noticeable psychological effect, helping you see it from a distance and thus more objectively.
• Responses from your clients or other people you helped – print them out. Whether emails, messages, or notes, giving them a tangible form can make them feel more real.
• Offers of jobs, admissions, or scholarships.
• Words from someone telling you about the positive effect you’ve had on their life – write them down, even if from memory alone.
• Your diplomas and certificates. It’s no coincidence that when you win something, you receive a statue or another token – it makes the win feel more tangible, more real.
• Simply writing down whatever was important for you on a separate sheet of paper.

For my last book, PIL in Russia, I had to write background summaries of the team members for the book proposal. One of the authors later told me, ‘I thought I hadn’t done anything special in my life, but when I saw your description of my profile in the book proposal, I realized I was actually quite accomplished.’ Even just writing down the things you’ve done, even in a matter-of-fact manner, can help you gain some perspective.

• Talk to a rubber duck. You know how programmers have a rubber duck on their desk? There is a good reason for that. When you talk through the code out loud, instead of just in your head, you spot the mistakes easily. The same is true for accomplishments – talking about them out loud can create distance, helping you see things more clearly. Personally, have a rubber dog for that – I just like dogs more. 😉

• Create a Patronus folder. What are the things you’ve done in your life that make your heart leap? What are the accomplishments that make you feel proud, happy, and delighted? How have other people appreciated you? Save these in a Patronus folder. I have one. It works like magic, especially when the dementor of self-judgment shows up and tried to give me a kiss.

Conclusion

To summarize the tactics you can use to evaluate your background:

• Take inventory of the things you’ve done in your life. Focus primarily on professional, but don’t try to strictly separate professional and personal - they don’t exist in isolation.
• Talk to other people about the things you’ve done. Preferably, speak with people who aren’t doing the same thing, as they can offer a more objective view of the scale of your achievements. Be careful when choosing in whom to confide.
• Externalize it. Give your accomplishments a form outside of your brain. Something that doesn’t seem that impressive in your head may look quite different once outside of it.