With February having arrived and six more weeks of winter apparently on the horizon (and leaving an eternal mystery still unsolved—if the groundhog is so powerful at predicting the weather, why not just cover him up with an umbrella and sunglasses so that he can’t see his shadow? Something along these lines wouldn’t be too tricky),

law school admissions officers continue to be in the middle of file-reading season. So while they do their best to wade through the sea of applications and scholarship models, let’s take our weekly check on the headlines from the world of law school admissions.


National Application Trends

Checking in on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report this week offers a glimmer of hope for applicants … that will likely slam shut in a few days. 

As a reminder, here were the national totals of applicants and applications that we noted in last week’s blog:

The trend the past few weeks has been that both applicants and applications have been gradually slowing down. The percentage of applicants ticked up a touch last week, and we attributed that to the passing of the January LSAT. Our check on these totals this week shows some numbers that are a bit surprising until we unpack a data point in a few paragraphs:

On first blush, this is a huge drop-off in percentages in just one week. It would seem to indicate that both applicants and applications have slowed down drastically, and that would be amazing news for stressed-out applicants and overworked law school AdComms.

But now let’s ruin the fun and give our best guess as to what’s happening.

The Current Volume Summaries report has a feature that allows you to look at the number of applicants and applications by date. We—your humble admissions blogger—check in on these stats once a week. But what if we checked on them daily? That would allow us to identify the day when things went off the rails.

Here’s January 28th again:

Things were still looking good on January 29th:

Nothing weird on January 30th:

But then we see a crazy shift on January 31st:

Which continued on to February 1st:

And has continued through today:

It sure seems like something odd happened on January 31st! Was it a full moon? Pre-Groundhog Day Fever? While anything is possible, the shift probably has more to do with last year than this year. The results of the January 2024 LSAT came back on [drumroll]

January 31st, 2024.

The results for this year’s January LSAT come back on February 5th, and—given the update we’ll give in just two sentences—this slowdown in apps will likely be very short-lived. We encourage you to celebrate its memory by putting on your Sarah McLachlan playlist, writing about it in your dream journals, and holding it dear to your hearts.


LSAT Registrations

And just keep that Canadian chanteuse’s hits rolling for this section—surrender to the January LSAT:

The numbers we’re seeing on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report remain significant. With January registrations up 13% versus last year, we expect that the percent increase in both national applicants and applications will accelerate in the coming days. It was fun while it lasted!

Meanwhile, registration figures for the February exam dropped 5.5% on the eve of the test administration. The February LSAT is when we see a shift in the “first-time test takers” percentage. Much like the hours of sunlight in the northern hemisphere, the percentage of LSAT first-timers gradually declines over the summer and fall. The February test is when we see the first-timer percentage start to rebound. What this means is that the February (and April and June…) LSAT registration figures are more about gauging next year’s applicant pool rather than making any pronouncements about this year. So February registrations being up 40% versus last year and April registrations looking strong four weeks out from test date would seem to indicate that this year’s increased application numbers are likely to stick around next cycle.


7Sage Events

We’re taking a brief break from our weekly admissions classes, but these will resume in March or April. But a reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar. But given the release of the January LSAT results, we will be doing another round of our “What Does My Score Mean?” classes on Friday, February 7th at 1PM Eastern. The class is free but registration is required.

Our next Law School Admissions Deans’ Roundtable will be February 25th at 8 PM Eastern. The topics du jour will include burning issues when you’re considering admit offers at this time of year—how to get the most out of your campus visits and how to make scholarship reconsideration requests.

And speaking of the Deans’ Roundtable, our most recent podcast episode dropped Monday and was a recording of last month’s roundtable. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!