As everyone enters their second week post-holiday break and continues their recovery from an overload of sugary food for a sustained period of time

we find that the law school admissions process is back up and running at full steam.

For applicants, the January LSAT has just passed and thousands of folks can now turn their attention to their applications. And, meanwhile, there’s another group of applicants who have a different but equally important event coming up—current college seniors are about to return to campuses for the upcoming term. You can be sure that many will be using their waning days of winter break to get as much of their law school admissions done as possible.

For admissions officers, this past week saw several large waves of decisions (as we’ll discuss below). And this coming week promises to have several big waves, the most important of which—by orders of magnitude—is Harvard Law on Monday the 12th. Harvard occupies a unique position in the law school admissions universe. While its name is so synonymous with “prestige” that it has become the go-to law school for pop culture purposes, to the point where HLS has its own page dedicated to the movies made at the law school

(The 7Sage Law School Admissions Blog does not endorse this admissions strategy …)

Harvard Law also enrolls one of the largest 1L classes in the country (579 in the incoming class of 2025). This gives HLS a certain gravitational pull that affects all other schools and means that we’ll do our best to break things down in next week’s edition and see if we can identify any trends.

But in the meantime, let’s continue our New Year’s resolutions to

and break down the news and headlines from the week in law school admissions.

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National LSAT Numbers

We are writing this week’s edition just as thousands of test takers sit for the January LSAT, and it’s a bit of a doozy, per our weekly check on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report:

On the one hand, we’ve finally had a bit of sanity show up in these numbers! After weeks of minuscule declines in registrations, registration numbers went down 8.5% this past week. While that’s a smidge short of the usual “week of the test” decline of 10%, it’s at least close!

But on the other hand, the January LSAT will likely be the second-largest test of this cycle and the biggest January LSAT on record.

Put these two hands together

and it wouldn’t be surprising to see the national applicant pool increase a bit sometime shortly after the January LSAT results come back on the 28th. Speaking of which …

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Current Volumes Summary

Things are all steady on the national applicants and applications front, per LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report:

We continue our trend of “slowly smidging down” each week—last week, applicants were +19.1% and applications were +20.8% versus the previous year. But even with this slight decline, we assure you—dear readers—that law schools are still very much swamped. Another bit of information that LSAC presents on the Current Volume Summaries report is the increase/decrease in apps per law school, aggregated as such:

The middle of the bell curve would seem to be those 34 law schools with a 30‒39% increase in apps and those 37 law schools between a 20% and 29% increase. Meanwhile, only eight law schools are seeing a decrease in apps, and goodness knows if they feel like they’re missing out on the party or they’re extraordinarily thankful to have to work through a slightly smaller stack of applications.

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National Decisions Trends

We’re starting to see the waves pick up from the post-holiday malaise! Per lawschooldata’s Recent Decisions’ page, a lot of admissions offices were busy sending out admit offers:

… and some were busy sending out the “less fun” news …

Kudos to UCLA for at least letting everyone have five nice days in 2026 before they lowered the hammer!

And speaking of UCLA Law, they have a delightfully telling admit chart on their individual lsd.law page:

We can already see a distinct wall taking shape at the 171 LSAT mark. Importantly, that was UCLA Law’s LSAT median last year. Looking at this chart, we can feel comfortable assuming that the UCLA AdComms are aiming for the same targets this year. While it’s not a decline in a target, we’ll certainly take holding the line.

But that’s at the top end of the rankings. A little further down, we’re seeing schools setting up walls a little higher than last year. For example, Washington & Lee Law’s enrolling class this year had a 167 LSAT. Over on their lsd.law profile page, it sure looks like they’re aiming for a 168 this year:

As the weeks go on and the admit waves hit the shore, we’ll keep an eye on when these kinds of clear lines develop for schools.

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7Sage Events

We’ll be hosting another Admissions AMA class on Wednesday, January 14th, at 2 PM Eastern. Come on by and ask whatever questions are on your mind!

Our most recent podcast dropped on Monday and features a breakdown of the ABA 509 reports! Do you enjoy reading this blog but find the act of reading to be too labor-intensive? Then do we have a deal for you! Just like we broke things down in blog-form prior to the New Year, we walk you through the ins-and-outs of the 509 Reports via the power of spoken words and engaging (or “engaging”) visuals! Be sure to check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!

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Thanks for reading! You can learn more about 7Sage Admissions Consulting’s services here, and if you’d like help deciding which service is right for you, you can book a free consultation here.