With the calendar hitting the middle of December and law school admissions officers realizing that they have two deadlines bearing down on them:

• Reading as many applications as possible before their offices take some time off, and,
• Holiday shopping because ohjeezhowisitalreadyDecember14th?!

As you can imagine, it’s a rather stressful period!

But we know that stress is also shared by you—our readers!—who are eagerly awaiting decisions … up until the moment some of the decisions actually come back to you.

We feel you. We hear you. We sympathize with you.

So as everyone manages their stress load (hopefully in the healthiest way possible rather than therapeutic strategies based on eggnog ingestion), let’s take a quick lap through the headlines from the world of law school admissions.

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National Decision Trends

Let’s start this week’s blog with the aforementioned “brown paper bag in a refrigerator”—admissions decisions!

With the holidays on the horizon, this is a normal time of year for waves of decisions to come out. Per lawschooldata.org’s “Recent Decisions” page, it’s been a busy week for a lot of folks across the rankings. From New York and New England Law, through to the Americans and UC San Franciscos of the world, up to the higher echelons with Berkeley, Georgetown, UCLA, and WashU, lots of schools have been trying to issue decisions before the holiday rush.

For some schools, we can feel confident guessing what their statistical goals are for the year. For instance, GW Law has built a pretty firm wall at a 170 LSAT:

Last week, BU Law had only admitted applicants who were above both of last year’s entering medians of a 170 LSAT and a 3.88 GPA. This week, we find that their chart is a bit more sensible:

Along with admitting a few GPA splitters, we see BU beginning to establish a wall at a 171 LSAT.

Other schools are still hazy. Take WashU Law, for instance. They are typically the most aggressive of all top schools in admitting as early as possible (sometimes as early as around Labor Day) and going hard for distinct statistical targets. They already threw us for a bit of a loop when they began telling applicants back in September and October that decisions would only start coming out in December. That was much later than usual for WashU. We wondered if it was perhaps WashU’s way of being more deliberate with their decisions—they could let the applicant pool marinate for a while before deciding where to set their targets for the year. At least for now, it looks like they’re taking a little more time to let the pool establish itself:

What WashU has done to this point is to focus its admission offers on high-GPA candidates. Doesn’t matter if they have an LSAT at or above last year’s 175 median or below. By WashU’s logic, they appear to be fine establishing their GPA median in the upper 3.9s. They’ll then take some more time before they decide where to set their LSAT target.

And speaking of LSATs …

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National LSAT Numbers

One week closer to the January LSAT, we’re already in a pattern that’s familiar to long-time 7Sage Law School Admissions Blog readers—the initial holding pattern.

Checking in on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report:

We find that January LSAT registrations declined by a “whopping” 454 souls from last week. That’s a decline of just 1.2%. We expect that we’ll continue to see a slow melt here (just like the ice in my driveway!)

until we’re two or three weeks away from the test. Then things will pick up to a weekly decline of 5‒10%. We continue to think it’s a 50/50 shot that the January 2026 LSAT has fewer takers than the January 2025 edition. If it does, it may be a sign that our surge of national applications may start to wane in the 2026‒2027 admissions cycle. But in the meantime …

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Current Volumes Summary

Things aren’t letting up, per our weekly check on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report:

Things have cooled off ever so slightly from last week’s blog, but only by the slimmest of margins—applicants were up 22.1% last week and applications were up 22.4%. Unless something radical happens, we expect these numbers to hold reasonably steady until the holidays. That’s when we may see our next surge in applications.

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7Sage Events

Our next Admissions AMA will be on December 17th. Stop on by and ask whatever law school admissions questions are on your mind!

Our most recent podcast dropped on Monday and features a conversation with one of our very own LSAT tutors and class instructors—Clayton Allen. Along with being an LSAT whiz, Clayton co-hosts the aforementioned weekly admissions AMA and is also a law school applicant in this present cycle. He’s listened to the admissions consultants answer so many questions during the AMAs, including those questions that the admissions consultants think are completely self-evident but that a regular applicant finds completely mind-blowing. So tune in as Clayton offers those points that have made him pause, ask “say what?”, and consider if he approached his applications correctly (spoiler alert—he did!). 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.