With temperatures falling and radio stations switching formats over to holiday music, law school admissions officers are continually reminded that they only have two and a half working weeks remaining in the year—eek! So as our friends in admissions offices furiously read applications, proofread their admitted student websites, and beg and plead Temptations-style for their faculty committee members to make some decisions, let’s take a quick lap around the law school admissions world to see what’s going on.

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National App Figures

Maintaining the trend we’ve seen through the autumn, apps are slowly and surely catching up with last year. Here’s where we are (as of December 4) vis-à-vis LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report:

Now that all those applicants who had issues on the August and/or September LSATs have finally been able to take the October and/or November exams, we seem to be out of the woods. We’re now within standard deviations of both applicants and applications.

When we take a look at score bands, the 170+ cohort is still lagging a bit:

But they’re looking better than they did just one week ago on November 27:

This is a further indication of the national pool stabilizing after such a slow start!

Looking ahead, about 40% of national apps have typically been submitted by December 1 every year. Based on LSAT test-taking numbers and broader trends, we’re probably a smidge behind that number at this stage in the process. Further, it looks like we may have another big group of test takers in January (per LSAC’s Test Registrants and Test Takers report):

Registrations for the January exam were at 20,533 just a week ago. This kind of surge is not odd right at a registration deadline—this number will surely go down by the time that test day finally arrives. But this is certainly an indication that we may have a bit more activity happening in the next month+.

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ABA Reports and Waves … Still Waiting

As mentioned last week, we should expect two important benchmarks any day now—the ABA’s 509 Reports and the first big national wave of admits. Well, another week and we’re still waiting. We’ll keep our fingers crossed for more news next week!

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On-Campus Recruitment Events

With the semester winding down, admissions offices have really clamped down on the events that they’re offering. We’re continuing to try and keep things up to date on our website but it looks like law school admissions offices have decided to prioritize reading files over hosting information sessions this week. The nerve of them!

But given this week’s lack of news and admissions officers’ focus on reading files, we’ll end this week’s blog post with the encouraging reminder that now is a great time to finalize those apps if you’re in the home stretch. Try to get those apps submitted before the biggest wave of the season hits schools the week between Christmas and New Year’s! You can do it!