With only a few days left on the calendar before we bid adieu to 2025 and begin to ponder what surprises 2026 has in store for us, law school admissions officers are keeping their noses to their respective grindstones. There’s little time left and a lot to accomplish! More files to read, more decisions to issue, and more egg to nogg when the time allows. Which it rarely does.

(A live look at an admissions officer being interrupted during file reading by the law school’s party planning committee.)

And after this week, things will slow down through January 5th. While things will vary by school, some things are the same across the country. Those law schools that utilize committees to finalize decisions will find it difficult to have a quorum. Professors are grading final exams. The mailroom crew slows down their pick-up schedule. Staff members are taking vacation days to quote/unquote “spend more time with my family during this season of giving.”

Admissions offices won’t be at full speed again until the week of January 5th. As such, it’s reasonable to expect a few small waves this week (more like gentle nudges rather than waves), next to nothing the following two weeks, and a return to normal admissions programming the week of January 12th.

We here at 7Sage Law School Admissions Blog HQ will be following a similar-ish schedule. Apparently, we will be needed to set up both new video game systems and old video game systems (i.e., the local elves have discovered the old Nintendo Wii and were not satisfied that connecting it to a post-2010 TV requires a few intermediary steps/cables/plugs) and we imagine that it will be 2026 before we know what hit us. We will take a break from the newsletter next week before we are back in action with a quick version on January 5th.

But before we let go of this year, let’s take one more quick lap around the news and headlines from the world of law school admissions!

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National LSAT Numbers AND Current Volumes Summary

Combining two of our normal sections together?! A sign of the holiday rush or that we’re in a bit of a holding pattern until the January LSAT?

Information is stable in both venues and likely won’t shift for another few weeks. In the case of the LSAT, LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report continues to show stable numbers as we approach the January LSAT:

Last week, January registrations went down 1.2%. This week, it’s a slightly steeper decline at 2.2%. This is a completely normal trend when we’re still more than two weeks away from an LSAT administration. During those two weeks prior, however, we often see dips of 5‒10% each week. As such, we’re still betting that the final January numbers end up just a little below last year.

And meanwhile, our next blog post will arrive after the February LSAT registration deadline passes on December 23rd. To feel confident that we’ll surpass the final number for the February 2025 LSAT, we would have to see something in the neighborhood of 20,000 registrations post-deadline.

And similar to LSAT registrations, national application trends via LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report are also holding remarkably stable:

Last week, applicants were +21.5% over the same date last year, while applications were +22.3%.

The biggest annual tidal wave of applications received by law schools usually happens over the holiday season. The greatest constituency of law school applicants is current college seniors. This is the time of year when they’re home for winter break. Not only do they have free time on their hands, but they are also receiving daily inspiration from their family’s questions of “So, what are you doing after graduation?” and “How are those law school applications going?” As such, our check in on the applicant pool after the New Year will be telling—will our increase start to slow down, will it keep going apace, or will it accelerate?

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Updated ABA 509 Reports

But enough about this year, let’s talk about last year—the updated ABA 509 Reports are available! For law school admissions and enrollment stat nerds

it’s a big day!

The 509 Reports are the gold standard / gold mine for enrollment information. ABA Standard 509 states that law schools have to disclose certain information every year not only to the ABA but to the public. This allows consumers to make apples-to-apples comparisons without having to navigate through different schools’ websites and brochures.

For example, here’s the upper-right corner of the first page of Harvard’s 2025 509 Report:

If an applicant wanted to compare the admit rate for Harvard versus School X, they would just have to go to the upper-right corner of the first page of School X’s 509 report.

We’ve also chosen this particular corner deliberately. So much of the information on a 509 form is pretty straightforward—apps received, offers of admissions made, LSAT and GPA medians, and so on. But you get itty-bitty nuggets here and there. For instance, 96 enrollees who deferred admission from a previous year?! That seems rather substantial (it’s 16% of HLS’s incoming class) until you realize who those people likely are—participants in Harvard’s Junior Deferral Program.

Or how about an applicant who is curious about Harvard Law School’s demographics—what’s the breakdown by race/ethnicity and gender? That’ll be on the third page for every law school:

And if we compare that versus other schools, we may find—like the New York Times did—that some schools’ enrollment figures for students of color have fluctuated a great deal in the two years since the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision.

While these reports are data-rich and very useful for admissions purposes, their publication date probably lessens their utility for applicants trying to figure out where to apply. The reason that they aren’t published until mid-December is for rather pedantic reasons—schools can’t report their enrollment figures for the academic year until the academic year begins … and then some schools don’t start classes until September … and then the ABA allows a little grace period (until October 5th) for the dust to settle at schools and for everyone to clean up their data … and then the data is scrubbed again after the ABA compiles everything but before publishing everything.

However, they can be very useful now for gauging matters that may be less important for determining where to apply and more important for figuring out where to deposit after receiving different offers of admission. For example, what’s the student/faculty ratio at every school that’s admitted you? Is it important for you to be somewhere with smaller classes? How generous does the school tend to be with scholarship money? Do lots of students transfer out of this law school? You can use the 509 reports to answer all those questions and more!

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7Sage Events

Keeping with the theme we established in our intro, our next Admissions AMA won’t be until January 7th! We’ll post details in our next blog on January 5th.

Our most recent podcast dropped last week 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.