With the calendar turning to September, law school admissions counselors find themselves in a bit of a lull.

They’re still coming down from the adrenaline rush of orientation and classes starting.

All that work that I did over the past year? D-o-n-e!

Looking ahead, they know that they’re about to enter one of their busier periods of the year—travel season—when they’ll refamiliarize themselves with their preferred airline and hotel loyalty programs as they venture off to law fairs both near and far. But the challenge of travel season actually lies in the travel, not in the prep. Once plane tickets have been booked and law fair registrations have been paid, it’s just a matter of making sure that you arrive at the airport on time. Or to put things another way?

All that work that I’m about to do in the coming months? … Eeeeeeeeeeeeeh, I’ll get to it.

The lull is exacerbated by the reality that there’s a yin and yang to the busy times of an admissions cycle. Admissions officers are busiest when students give them work to do—reading applications, admitted students visiting campuses, etc. But if applications aren’t yet submitted, then law school AdComms can take a few more deep breaths in this quiet period.

But in the name of “law school applicants” creating work, let’s take a look at the headlines around the world of law school admissions because applicants have been very busy recently.

LSAT Registration Numbers

Our weekly check on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report shows a new graphical twist:

That’s right! We’ve officially turned the page from the 2023–24 test cycle into the 2024–25 edition! Woo!

But beyond that administrative note that only matters to true admissions junkies, we have a few things of note:

  • There are still a lot of August LSAT test takers whose scores are not yet official. We can tell because of the conversion rate between reportable scores and test takers. Right now, that conversion is 55.6%. The conversion rate for the entire 2023–24 cycle was 80.2%.
  • The likely culprit for this lag is the new LSAT writing section. We can suss that out by looking at the number of first-time test takers (14,089) versus the number of reportable scores (12,497). Since the former is larger than the latter, it would stand to reason that there are a bunch of folks who are still slogging their way through the new (and improved!) LSAT writing section.
  • Registrations for both the September (8%) and October (6%) LSATs dropped a little more than we typically see at this stage in the process. Our guess is that a lot of August test takers were unhappy with their scores and decided to push their next test date back to November. The raw number decline of September/October registrations over the past week (4,008) almost lines up identically with the increase in November registrants (3,974).

Regardless of the actual forces at work in these shifting registration numbers, the overarching theme is the same as it’s been for the past few months—LSAT registrations are up, so expect applications to be up. Speaking of which….

Applications Open

Most schools’ applications opened at 12 AM Eastern on September 1st. We have no doubt that everyone felt a shift in the Earth’s axis at that exact moment!

Continuing the broader trend that we saw when schools started publishing their application instructions over the summer, most schools have kept the same instructions from last year. This stands in contrast to the previous year (2023–2024) when we saw the largest changes in app instructions in forever and a day in response to the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision. It appears that we’ve come back to “the norm” where schools just tweak things on an annual basis. Things like Georgetown Law no longer asking students for their hot take on what they would “uninvent” but—rather—their hot take on what they love that everyone else hates.

On this note, be sure to pay attention as you open applications and check out this year’s instructions. While the majority of changes are minor, you don’t want to commit one of the great admissions faux pas—submitting an answer to last year’s prompt. For instance, Notre Dame Law slightly changed their “Different Kind of Lawyer” statement to ask students to reflect on a new quote from their dean. While the larger sentiment of the prompt is the same, the exact details are different. Berkeley is now asking students to use ½” margins on their personal statement (not “no smaller than ½”) rather than the 1” margins that are the default setting of most word processing programs. Much like how musicians put seemingly inane riders into their contracts to ensure that people have read the contract in full, the details matter. Be a good future attorney: dot your i’s, cross your t’s, and use the ½” margins, otherwise you’ll be like that roadie trying to obtain a brandy snifter of brown M&Ms at 3 AM or else Ozzy won’t go on stage.

7Sage Events

A reminder that we are hosting weekly live classes on different components of the application process in the coming weeks. This week’s session turns to the Addendum. Registration is free but required.

Our latest podcast dropped on Monday and it walks you through how to create your application list. Check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts.

Recruitment Events

And with law fairs around the corner, we can start advertising these events on a weekly basis!

Much like Iowa and New Hampshire kicking off the election cycle, the travel season begins with: