Wasn’t it just yesterday that law school admissions officers were scrambling to make it to law fairs on time? And the other day that they were trying to hit their file-reading targets before sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner? After a deep cleansing breath to clear out the tryptophan, admissions officers are now sprinting to hit their pre-Christmas/New Year’s targets. This is an important time for AdComms. They know that their applicants who submitted files in September and October are eagerly hoping for news (hopefully of the good variety) before the holidays. And getting good news into the hands of applicants—and converting them from “applicants” into “admits”—at this time of year is strategically beneficial since it allows the admitted students time to start planning visits and to share the news with their family. The longer you give someone to think of themselves as a potential student at your law school, the better.

But it’s not just about the applicants and admitted students. Many colleges and universities close for the week between Christmas or New Year’s. Others operate on skeleton staffs because so many employees—understandably—take vacation time during this window. And this is just counting the admissions office employees. If any office has an admissions committee that is comprised of faculty, staff, and/or current students, this is basically the final week any decisions can be made. Why? Because next week is likely final exams. While AdComms think that theirs is the most important job at the law school, even they would acknowledge that things like “doing well on your exams” and “grading 120 Torts finals in two weeks” can take precedence sometimes.

So with our admissions friends balancing their attention between reading applications, rounding up enough of their committees to produce a quorum, and drinking an unhealthy amount of coffee, let’s take our weekly lap around the world of law school admissions.

January LSAT

And proving that “stress” is not a product limited to just law school admissions officers, this week’s check of the LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report shows that a lot of applicants are probably spending their holidays in less-than-preferred ways. After all, baking cookies and wrapping gifts is a little bit more challenging when keeping one eye on your LSAT prep books.

The January LSAT’s registration deadline passed just after we published last week’s blog. At that time, we were sitting on 29,028 registrations. As per usual, the registration deadline brought a few more folks into the fold:

With a regular amount of cancellations, it’s likely that we’ll see about 24,000-25,000 applicants sit for the LSAT in mid-January. That would make it the biggest January LSAT since 2021 (i.e., in the teeth of the pandemic when folks had a bit more free time on their hands). But as we wrote a few weeks ago, the January LSAT is the Hail Mary play of the law school admissions world—it’s not a high-percentage play, but it’s the one trick you have left in your bag when you need it. In this case, the January LSAT typically has the highest percentage of repeat test takers. Looking at January 2024, only 36.4% of test takers were LSAT Rookies. What this means is that this cohort is a little less likely than usual to cancel. They can’t cancel because there’s no time left on the clock and they just have to throw the ball as far as they can. As such, we wouldn’t be surprised if this group has a lower percentage of cancellations than other LSATs.

National Application Trends

Meanwhile, checking in on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report this week shows that the applicant pool remains stable.

Last week, applicants were +25.2% and applications were +34.8%.

More importantly, we usually see that about 40% of the total national applications for a year are submitted by mid-December. Between our present app numbers and the registrations for the January LSAT, it’s possible that this year will see more applications than 2020–2021 (the aforementioned COVID year) when roughly 72,500 law school hopefuls submitted their files. And if any applicant this year feels like they have some bad luck for applying this year during an upswing in law school interest, remember that it could be worse—it’s highly unlikely that we’re going to hit the numbers we saw during the post-housing bubble recession (91,000 people applied to law school in the 2009–2010 admissions cycle!).

Decision Trends

With more schools issuing their first big waves of decisions in the past week, we can check in on everyone’s lawschooldata.org profiles and see a broader national picture taking shape. And that picture is saying, “holding steady, maybe bumping up some numbers in some places.”

And, yes, we know pictures can’t talk. But gifs can!

But for our mathematically-disinclined audience members, never fear! This will be a pretty easy statistical analysis! The keys to using a school’s lsd.law profile to gauge their admissions targets are:

  • Know what their medians were for this year’s entering class. The best place to find this right now is a school’s class profile. Most—but not all—schools publish one shortly after the first-year class arrives in the fall. The easiest way to find this is to do a Google search for “[School name] Law, Class profile.” But in a week or two, the ABA will have every school’s info on their reports page. Once the ABA publishes their reports, we’ll update our own handy-dandy page that lists everyone’s stats.
  • Then go to their lsd.law “Admit Graphs” page. Isolate their decision chart for just the admitted students (i.e., the green dots).
  • See if a pattern jumps out.

To illustrate this method, let’s start with a pretty easy school—Washington University in St. Louis. Here’s WashU’s profile, isolated for just the admitted students:

We see two things right away:

  • WashU is clearly targeting a 174 median LSAT for right now. They have built a great green wall right at that number. This would represent an increase over this past year’s 173 median LSAT.
  • WashU is being very stingy on making admit offers to candidates who are below both their LSAT and GPA targets. We can only imagine the résumés that those three lonely low LSAT/low GPA dots have!

Meanwhile, let’s check in on a school where the picture hasn’t quite come into focus yet—Cornell Law:

Cornell’s medians for this year’s entering class were a 3.89 GPA and 173 LSAT. As of now, we can see that they’ve definitely admitted plenty of folks with either a 173+ LSAT or a high GPA. But there’s not enough definition at either the 173 or 172 LSAT lines to determine what they’re targeting for this year.

So with that determined, we can see that a few other schools are taking the WashU approach of being a little optimistic for the moment.

UCLA Law’s most recent medians were a 3.95 and 170, but their profile shows them presently aiming for a 171:

Minnesota Law boosted their LSAT median from a 168 to a 169 this past year. This year, they seem to be stretching a smidge further to a 170:

Notre Dame Law’s chart isn’t as clear—there are simply fewer data points to be counted—but we may already be seeing them try to push their median LSAT from a 169 to a 170:

And this isn’t a phenomenon that’s unique to schools in the US News rankings between 15 and 25. Schools a little further down the list may also be trying to take advantage of the national increase in applications to move their profile. For example, the University of Miami’s most recent class had a 163 LSAT median, but their lsd.law profile is showing a green wall developing at a 164:

While we’re seeing these trends develop, we have our standard notes of caution!

  • Not every school is following this path. Examining profiles for schools like Michigan, Georgetown, Boston University, and George Washington shows schools that are trying to maintain last year’s medians.
  • Just because a school is targeting higher medians now doesn’t mean that they will continue to do so. They may find that they have to change their strategy later because of shifts in their applicant pool. The reason that they’re being aggressive now is because they want to leave open the opportunity of achieving a higher median (or to put this another way—you can always adjust your statistical targets down by admitting more students at that lower number … but you can’t really adjust your targets up once you start admitting students).
  • It’s still early. We’re the first few miles into a marathon, and a few schools are running ahead of their normal pace. While it’s worth commenting on, there’s still a lot of race to be run.

But even with these notes of caution, we feel okay looking at these developing trends and offering a piece of advice—this is a year when it would be prudent to apply to some additional safety schools. For example, if a student is targeting UCLA with a 170 LSAT because that was the school’s median last year, it would be wise to apply to another school or two in the Southern California market that have lower LSAT medians.

7Sage Events

We are continuing our weekly Zoom classes on different components of a law school application. This Wednesday’s session will focus on Addenda while next week’s (not scheduled yet) session dives into application forms. Registration is free but required. You can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

The most recent episode of the admissions podcast was posted Monday and features a recording of our November Deans’ Roundtable. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!