I don't understand the process of sending paper LSDAS reports to schools. It looks like reports are submitted electronically as soon as possible after the report or updated report was available. Apparently, a paper report is then generated and mailed to the school. Most schools won't consider the report until they get the paper copy. Now initially, I figured that LSAC would send a paper copy to each school in an envelope, and they would get it around a week after that.
Having thought about the process and researched it a little more, I think what actually goes on is that LSAC bundles the reports - it would make no sense to mail out each one individually when you are sending thousands of reports to the same address. Since they are bundled, there must be some schedule for how they are mailed out. Do they wait for a certain number of reports? Do they send them out on certain days of the month? Are those days the same, or different from each school?
I remember reading somewhere that the delivery preferences for each school are listed on the LOR screen of LSDAS when you select that school to receive a recommendation. Here is the text I found there for UVA (the same text is there for all the other schools I checked):
"Three letters of recommendation recommended and up to three letters accepted.
This law school accepts letters of recommendation when the initial law school report is sent.
Once the initial law school report has been sent, this law school will accept additional LORs when there is new activity such as transcript or score updates.
In addition, this law school accepts updated law school reports with recently received letters of recommendation twice per month. These updates are generated on the 1st and/or 15th of every month.
Does this mean that reports are only sent out on the 1st and the 15th? That's what it sounds like, but that doesn't make sense based on what I've seen with my UVA app.
I sent in my UVA application on 1/13. My LORs both arrived at LSAC over the next week, so, unlike all my other apps which went out later, LSAC created 3 reports - an inital report on 1/19, the first LOR on 1/21, and the last one on 1/25. These are the report dates from the report page.
Yesterday, I got an email that my app status for UVA had been updated - I checked and both my LSDAS report and my first LOR had been received. The second had not been, so my app was not complete. Since yesterday was the 1st, that seems to indicate that at least some of the LSDAS reports went to UVA, scheduled as their text on the LOR page implies. I don't know how they got from LSAC in PA to Charlottesville in the same day, but the text may mean that they GET the reports on or around the 1st, not that they are sent then.
But my 2nd LOR was in well before the 1st, yet did not seem to get sent out. I see three possibilities for why:
1) UVA did get a huge pack of LSDAS reports yesterday, and it takes them some time to enter them. My 2nd LOR might be at the bottom of the stack and not entered yet.
2) The cutoff date for inclusion in the Feb. 1 batch sent to UVA might fall sometime between 1/21 (1st LOR received) and 1/25 (2nd LOR), meaning that UVA will not get the 2nd one and my app will not be complete until at least 2/15, when the next batch arrives from LSAC. This is what I am afraid of...
3) LSDAS reports are sent more often than twice a month - the text on the LOR page doesn't apply to reports, or means something other than how I am reading it. My 2nd LOR will get to UVA a few days later than my other one, since it was submitted later.
Does anyone know which, if any of the above is correct?
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