After a nice holiday weekend with their families, law school admissions officers are now bidding adieu to their families for the remainder of the week. If Memorial Day has passed, that can only mean one thing—it’s time for LSAC’s Annual Meeting! In Montreal! C’est bon!

LSAC’s Annual Meeting is the main professional conference and networking opportunity for the law school admissions community. And before going further, let’s call a time-out.

Much like that moment when you realized that your parents had lives—rich ones, perhaps!—outside of raising you, it can sometimes come as a surprise to prospective law school applicants that LSAC is much more than the organization you know and love via the LSAT. In fact, you will get to know them very well throughout the admissions process since they also help organize law fairs, host the common application platform used by law schools, and are the group to whom you will send your transcripts and letters of recommendation. But beyond the applicants and applications, LSAC also serves as the main professional organization for law school admissions professionals in both the US and Canada. As such, Annual Meeting is a pretty big deal.

So why does Annual Meeting happen at this time every year? Because LSAC knows that the end of May is rather slow for admissions professionals … which is true … if not for second deposit deadlines approaching … and transfer applications pending … and a potential record June LSAT looming … and the visa process being thrown akimbo. So while our AdComms friends enjoy their time in the Belle Province, let’s dive into the headlines from this week in law school admissions.

National LSAT Figures

Speaking of the potential for a record June LSAT, this week’s check on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report is interesting.

That’s a decline of just 1,101 registrations in the past week, or 3.3%. That’s very stable in the penultimate week leading up to the LSAT. We’ll stick with our guess from last week’s column that we end up at 29,000 test takers when the dust settles, but there’s at least an outside chance of staying over 30,000. If so, it would be the first June LSAT to cross that threshold since 2010.

And speaking of LSATs from “olden times,” we noticed an interesting trend when diving into the historical numbers of the LSAT Registrants and Test Takers Report. Let’s pull up two data sets. First, here are the LSAT test-taking numbers for 2019 through 2024:

And now let’s go to the period right before that, 2013 through 2018:

As you can see, LSAC transitioned away from the old “four LSATs a year” model during the 2019–2020 cycle. Of particular note is how many people took the LSATs in the months directly preceding September 1. For 2024, there were over 52,000 LSATs taken in February, April, and June. Back in 2014, there were just 40,891 who took the February and June LSATs.

Where are we going with this?

Well, the usual guidance regarding when to submit applications to law school has been that:

  • By Christmas is the most popular time to apply, so
  • Applying by Thanksgiving is good, so
  • Applying by Halloween is early, so
  • Applying before the end of September is like arriving at a meeting 30 minutes before it’s scheduled to begin. Sure, you’re on time … but you’re a bit too on time.

But that old advice was based on an LSAT that was offered four times a year and with the biggest administrations clearly occurring in September/October and December. But now that the LSAT happens eight times a year, that gives future law applicants more opportunities to take the exam in the spring and summer. While the biggest LSATs for the test takers still tend to be during the autumn and winter (October, November, and January), that’s not always the case (June 2024 was the biggest test of that cycle; June 2025 has a small chance to be the biggest test of this cycle), and the gaps between the autumn/winter LSATs and the spring/summer LSATs have shrunk.

Put that all together and it means that many more aspiring law students have their LSAT done and ready before September 1, the date on which the vast majority of applications open.

This Week in The Shifting Landscape of Higher Education

It’s a good thing that we started this recurring feature last week before this week’s big news dropped. Because … did anything interesting happen in higher ed news last week?

Ah, yes, that would be the Trump administration’s announcement last Thursday that it would suspend visas for all international students at Harvard. On Friday, a US District judge issued a temporary restraining order to block the administration’s plans. The next hearing in that case is set for May 29. And then this Tuesday , the Trump administration has moved to cancel all remaining outstanding federal contracts with Harvard, and the State Department is putting a pause on scheduling student visa interviews while it considers adding broader sweeps of applicants’ social media accounts.

So, a rather quiet week, eh?

Leaving aside the wide-ranging discussion of both the hard economic power as well as soft diplomatic power of the American higher education system, the reality is that this will have an effect for law school applicants in both this year’s pool and the one to come. Per LSAC’s Current Volume Summary report, applicants from outside the United States (signified by the “Other” category in this table) made up 9% of applicants to American law schools:

And we can get more granular data on international enrollment at particular schools by looking at their ABA 509 Reports. On each year’s report, schools are required to break down their enrollment by race and gender. Prior to 2024, schools had to specify the number of non-US citizens they enrolled. This is what Harvard Law’s table looked like on their 2023 509 Report:

We know that’s a lot of information, so we’ll guide you to the relevant line—“US nonresident” are the folks we’re looking for.

When this report was filed with the ABA in October 2023, Harvard Law indicated that they had 137 nonresidents enrolled in the JD program at their school out of 1,797 total JD students—7.6% of their student population. That’s one of the highest percentages of any law school in the country, and any issues enrolling those students could cause a great deal of disruption whether it’s:

  • Current students hoping to continue their studies in the next academic year, or
  • Incoming students who have already deposited at Harvard Law and have turned down their admit offers from other law schools.

And while that’s a high percentage of international students, it’s not as high a percentage as the 16-18% international students that enrolled at Columbia Law in the last few years that the 509 reports counted as international JD students … or the 20-22% that enrolled at Cornell Law during the same time period … or the 32-36% international students who were enrolled at Detroit Mercy Law, home to the only dual American/Canadian JD program (in conjunction with Windsor Law, just across the border) in the country. These are not insignificant numbers for law schools. More importantly, these represent a very large problem on a human level—per the ABA’s reports, there were 3,804 international citizens enrolled in American JD programs in 2023. Those are students who will have to navigate some choppy waters in the coming years, whether they decide to continue pursuing an American JD or to continue their legal education in a different country.

We would be remiss to offer any kind of analysis or guesses as to where the story will progress from here given the twists and turns of the past week. But we can offer a few thoughts on the aforementioned “human level” for our international audience:

  • Applicants in the 2024–2025 admissions cycle have presumably deposited at a law school at this juncture. As such, their main issue is obtaining their visa. It will be important for them to maintain contact with their law school’s office or administrator that handles visa paperwork—that administrator should become the new “best friend” of every enrolling international student. Working closely with the school will ensure that these administrators can share any best practices or updates that they hear from their contacts at the Departments of Education, State, and Homeland Security. It also ensures that the law school will be aware of any issues that arise with the visa processes of incoming students. And it would be prudent to monitor whether the State Department will monitor the social media accounts of visa applicants. Now could be a good time to do a personal check of one’s social media footprint and to delete material as necessary.
  • Applicants for the upcoming 2025–2026 admissions cycle should expect the tumult to continue and to plan appropriately. “Time” can be an ally, if used appropriately. There’s the obvious suggestion to be ready to apply early in the cycle—applying in September/October will likely yield better outcomes than waiting until November/December. But international applicants can also use time well on the back end of the process. For example, international students can start the visa process as soon as they are admitted and confirm their plans to enroll (i.e., deposit) at a law school. If the applicant changes their enrollment plans (like being admitted from another school’s waitlist), they can transfer their visa application to the new school. Given this, perhaps international students may want to consider depositing at one school early while they’re still waiting on admissions decisions from other schools. It’s expensive to deposit at multiple schools … but if that means starting the visa process in February or March instead of May or June, it could be money well spent.

7Sage Events

If you’re still with us after all that heavy material—thank you!

And as our way of saying thanks … you can join us for our AMA-style class on May 28th and we’ll answer all your admissions questions! Registration is free but required.

Also, a reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

The most recent episode of the 7Sage Admissions Podcast dropped last week and featured a recording from our most recent Deans’ Roundtable. The conversation centered around how schools handled (and are handling) the increase in national applications and how that has affected possible waitlist activity. Our next episode will be a “season recap” where we talk about the twists and turns from the past admissions year. That will be available on Monday on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!