With Easter/Passover upon us, law school admissions officers find themselves facing an additional hurdle in their day-to-day operations—their local schools’ spring break. When law school applicants hear this, their first reaction is usually along the lines of:

But this is just a reminder that AdComms are real people.

If they have school-aged children, they now need to accomplish all their last-minute work while figuring out what in the world the kids are going to do if they aren’t in school for a week. Maybe they can be put to work reviewing last-minute applications! That’s surely as much fun as the spring break trips that their friends (whose parents are NOT admissions officers) are taking, right?

But even if AdComms don’t have school-aged kids, some of their law school faculty and staff do. Now—dramatic pause—why is that relevant? Because you can’t have a big recruitment event for your admitted students if a critical mass of your faculty and staff may be absent because their work schedule is actually pretty clear around this time of year.

So let’s pour one out for our AdComm friends as they navigate this week of file reading, approaching deposit deadlines, and angry children while we prep for our own spring break plans and take a quick lap around the happenings in the world of law school admissions.

National App Figures and Continued 2023–2024 Recap

We mentioned last week that the national app figures likely aren’t going to shift drastically in the coming weeks because March 15th is a pretty common deadline for schools. Proving us right, here are last week’s figures per LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report:

And here are the fresh stats for this week:

(And a quick apology for the difference in photo quality! The archived info from LSAC can sometimes be wonky on screen grabs!)

So … yeah … not much new there! We’ll take a pause on our weekly check-in with these figures until things shift a smidge. That may not be until after April 15 and May 1, which are also fairly common application deadlines.

But continuing our “2023–2024 Cycle Recap” from last week’s edition, let’s take a look at the final numbers for LSAT scores. Schools have been able to boost their LSAT medians dramatically over the past four years. This has been due to a unique combination of:

  • Changes to the LSAT post-COVID. The LSAT-Flex was an LSAT … but was also shorter. Just like some runners are better at sprints and others are better at marathons, some test takers perform better when the exam is an hour shorter and if they can take it in the comfort of their home. We should also note that it’s probably (for most people, at least!) less distracting to study for the LSAT in COVID isolation rather than at a college campus.
  • Increased applicants and applications. Numbers surged during the 2020–2021 application cycle. Check out this chart from LSAC’s Five-Year Volume Graphs report to see if you can find the outlier:

Although apps have dropped back closer to pre-COVID levels in the past few years, they still remain just a bit higher than what we saw in the late 2010s.

While we won’t know final results for schools’ medians until the new academic year begins, we at least have two data points available to us to get a sense of what may happen with schools.

First, we have information from the Current Volume Summaries report showing applicants by their highest LSAT score. We can see this information by both aggregate score bands

as well as individual scores

Per this information, the happiest AdComms this year are those targeting medians at a 163-164 and those hoping to bump their medians from a 167-168 to a 168-169. But once we cross the 170 threshold, numbers take a little bit of a downturn. While a decline in applicants of 2.8% isn’t drastic, it’s also not nothing.

Second, we can also get a sense of schools’ targets via their admit charts on lawschooldata.org. It’s been pretty clear that the T14s are trying to maintain their medians. For example, let’s take a look at Penn’s chart and isolate for just the admitted students:

Let’s turn on our Sarcasm Font. I don’t know… it could be that they’re going for a 172 and a 3.9 again this year. But we can also wait for more data before making a final call on this one.

So when we combine a slight decline in 170+ scores with schools trying to maintain record high medians, it’s possible that we’ll see some schools fall a bit short of their targets. The best indicator of this will be waitlist activity after the T14’s usual deposit deadline of April 30/May 1. If we see a lot of admit offers and chatter on the law school admissions sub-Reddit, we’ll know that something is up.

Continuing our recap and looking towards the upcoming cycle, we’ll take a look in next week’s blog post at LSAT registrations, changes to the LSAT, and how that may affect broader trends. [Insert ominously foreboding music here.]

7Sage Events and Blogs

And speaking of blog posts, some quick reminders regarding some new features on our blog page!

- Be sure to check out Tajira McCoy and Sam Riley’s latest “Dear AO” column!

- And for the readers looking ahead to next year’s applications, a reminder to check out the posts from Ethan Madore and Lulu Dewey. Lulu’s most recent post goes over how to define target, reach, and safety schools. We also have a guest blog from Aaron Thier about the transfer process.