NYU says that the personal statement can only have a maximum of 500 words. I finished my statement and my final draft is of 628 words. Do you think that that could be frowned upon by the judges? Should I defiantly shorten the essay?

I am not an expert but especially NYU has a lot of applications to read, as they have a huge LLM program. I guess its on purpose that the PS has to be as short as 500 words. But I have no idea to which extend this might be a disadvantage for your application review. I don't know how strict they are on their requirements. I limited myself to 499 words :D

agree...sometimes common sense does work. Slightly over 500 maybe acceptable but 100 more than that cap they set...
My first PS draft was over 700 and I didn't even feel enough to support my experience. Eventually I cut it down to 520 'cause I wanna respect their rule.
Try to make your PS more slim, actually briefing is the basic skill of lawyer :)

LAW1982,

I believe NYU is trying to keep their word limit under 500 words. Their website particularly bolden the number of words saying that the statement should not exceed that limit. However, I am sure how much disadvantage it will bring to ur file in general. Mine was 510 and I just could not go less than that. You might want to call them up and ask them directly whether they are strict on word limits or not, and if yes, how much it can be exceeded.