Typos. In very important missives. That you've already sent to very important people.

Everyone has been there at one time or another, *including lawyers (*which can be especially embarrassing). And including me. Yes.

😱😱😱

And, as you might be acutely aware, it happens to future lawyers, too. When you've been staring at the same thing six hundred times while you polished it, trying to get it just so, your eyes can start missing the little things. The irony.

It's that time of year when people start freaking out over typos they find after they've hit the submit button. I feel your pain. There's no magic wand or time machine to undo that submission, so here's the best you can do:

If you find a typo after you have submitted your application, first ask yourself whether it’s a big potato or a little potato. If you misspelled one word in an essay or got your mom’s telephone number wrong, I’d let those go. The chances are very slim that anyone will even notice, and you’re better off not drawing more attention to them.

But if it’s more significant than that — for example, you forgot to disclose something in the Character & Fitness section, or you accidentally listed your GPA as 4.3 instead of 3.3 — you can call up the admissions office, be very nice (always!) to the person who answers the phone, and ask if you can update your application with a new document or (depending on the situation) substitute a particular document that you already submitted. If your file hasn’t already been sent off for evaluation, they’ll probably let you send in the new or corrected document. Ask them how they would like to receive the update or correction, and do not treat their reply as an offer for you to negotiate some other method. It's their way or the highway.

Even if they let you send in a corrected document, they might not be willing to get rid of the old one. They might only add a more recent copy to the file, but it’s unlikely that admissions officers will do a line-by-line comparison anyway. So be it. That's still the best outcome in some circumstances.

I'll end on a happy note. An applicant once called the admissions office at the University of Chicago Law School, where I used to work, and sheepishly confessed that he had misspelled his own name on the application, and what was his best option to fix that? The wonderful woman staffing the phones (a) laughed and (b) said, "Don't worry about it, honey, I'll just fix it in our system. All taken care of."