With the holidays over, admissions officers are taking down their lights, packing away their ornaments, and turning towards the grim reality facing them—January represents the thick of “reading season.” There are no campus visits, no admitted student programs, and—heck—minimal interactions with other humans because most current law students won’t return to campus for another week or two. That this moment of the admissions calendar happens to coincide with the darkest and coldest days on the calendar is technically happenstance … but it sure feels like the cosmos is sending signals to AdComms to just read those files!

So let’s take a few moments now that the calendar has turned to 2024 to check in on some trends in the law school admissions world while our admissions officer friends pour another cup of coffee and adjust their reading glasses.

National App Figures

As we mentioned in our final 2023 edition, the holiday season is one of the key benchmarks for application modeling. Those college students who figured that they had all the time in the world in September, whose Octobers simply got away from them, who had a few too many papers due in November, and then had final exams at the beginning of December? They tend to submit their apps once they finish their final exams. This wave usually brings us up to about 50% of the national apps for an admissions cycle, and once half the apps are in, it’s hard to change the broader trends.

Our last pre-holiday check of app figures had us at +4.1% for applicants and -3.0% for applications per LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report. Our first check-in this year via the January 1 figures shows that we’re holding steady:

While applications continue to catch up to last year, the fact of the matter is that there wasn’t an overwhelming wave of apps over the holiday break. That removes the possibility that national apps will increase significantly this year. Rather, it’s far more likely that things end up being flat.

Related, LSAT scores are still down in the 170+ range:

While it’s unlikely for us to see any large increase in national apps, it’s still possible that we could see this stat change. Per LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report, registrations for the January LSAT are up 46% versus last year:

As we can see from last year’s data, the January LSAT is the test with the lowest population of “First Time” test takers (just 37.4% last year). What does that mean? The January exam is stocked with LSAT “veterans” who are taking one last shot at the test. It stands to reason that a solid amount of those students have already submitted their apps and are trying to bump their score up a few points. Admissions officers at the T14 will be keeping an eye on these figures when the January results go live on the 31st. If the national score trends remain static, some law schools may have to determine whether they want to aim for a) maintaining their medians but enrolling a smaller class, or b) lowering their medians and keeping their class size.

Decisions Letters Forthcoming

Another big day on the admissions calendar is coming up next week—Harvard Law will release their first wave of decisions on January 8. This is relevant because Harvard Law is a bit like Metternich’s assessment of post-Napoleonic France—when it sneezes, the rest of the law school admissions world catches a cold. Harvard Law has the right combination of cachet (Elle Woods attended a fictional undergrad but a very real law school) and class size (usually the second-biggest in the country after Georgetown) to affect everyone. We’ll be keeping an eye on Harvard’s lawschooldata profile to see if there are any appreciable trends to discern!

But even if one doesn’t accept a Harvard-centric view of the law school admissions world, the period between now and mid-February remains the most active time for schools to issue admissions decisions. Schools know that they likely have received ~50% of their total apps, they have a clear sense of goals for the year, and their admissions committees have (hopefully!) gotten back up to speed on both file-reading and decision-making procedures. It’s Go Time! So keep an eye on your email inboxes and log in to your status checkers to keep up to speed on matters.

Upcoming Law Fairs

Although these remain a few weeks away, we’re so excited about being able to mention law fairs for the first time in two months that we can’t help ourselves!

Although the vast majority of law fairs occur from Labor Day through early November, there’s one exception to that rule—the Southern Swing in January. Perhaps it’s an attempt to take advantage of the nicer weather in the South, maybe it’s because college football season is finally done, but this is the time of year when a number of schools below the Mason-Dixon Line host their annual events. There’s an additional twist this year—much like the University of Washington has crashed the College Football Playoff, so has the Seattle Law Fair inserted itself at the front end of this swing:

January 20

  • Seattle Law School Fair

January 22

  • Emory University Law School Fair

January 23

  • Tuskegee University Law School Fair

January 24

  • Auburn University Law School Fair

January 25

  • University of Alabama Law School Fair

January 26

  • University of West Florida Law School Fair

7Sage Admissions Classes

And if any of our readers are just starting out on their admissions journey with an eye towards submitting applications for the 2024–2025 admissions cycle, please accept this shameless plug that we are beginning a new cycle of our Zoom admissions courses next week. We will go through each part of the application to discuss how admissions officers use each aspect.