With April 15th and the initial waves of deposit deadlines done and dusted, law school admissions officers normally find themselves in an odd limbo period.
For the majority of admissions officers, their schools’ deposit deadlines passed on April 1st or the 15th. Maybe they can begin evaluating files for admission from the waitlist or maybe they begin their initial review of transfer applications.
But there’s a small and influential number of schools—roughly 14 … and they’re oftentimes at the top of the rankings, so a “Top 14,” if you will—whose deposit deadlines are still approaching on April 30th and May 1st. Those admissions officers are still busy processing financial aid paperwork and recruiting their admitted students. The decisions those admissions officers make have ramifications for everyone else. For example, perhaps an admitted applicant was considering a T30 school with a substantial scholarship and a T14 school with pending financial aid. The T14 school’s deposit deadline is on May 1st. As such, the admitted student deposited at the T30 school on the school’s deadline of April 15th just to hold the seat and scholarship in case things don’t pan out with the T14’s aid process. But now it’s April 23rd and that T14 is about to send the student an email with an intriguing scholarship offer.
The point being? There is still a lot of dust that will settle on the national admissions picture in the next two weeks.
So what can we do in the meantime? Check the national headlines from around the world of law school admissions, of course!
LSAT Registrations
We are writing this blog on Tuesday, April 22nd. It’s no more or less special than any other Tuesday … other than that it’s the registration deadline for the June LSAT! In last week’s blog, we stood at nearly 23,000 registrations and guessed that the final numbers would land around 33,000 this week. We weren’t far off per this week’s check of LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report:
We’ll take it!
Putting aside our celebrations on “being in the general ballpark of a successful guess”
the main takeaway here is that we will certainly see higher numbers from the June 2025 LSAT than the June 2024 LSAT. Combined with the increased numbers on the April 2025 LSAT over the 2024 iteration, it’s hard to conclude anything other than an increased number of applications are heading our way in the 2025–2026 admissions cycle.
And speaking of the April LSAT, those scores are coming on April 30th. The important stat to file away at that time will be the percentage of first-time test takers. If it’s consistent with previous years (roughly 55%), we can conclude that the increased April LSAT numbers are from future applicants rather than this year’s applicants either trying one last time to boost their score for this year or trying to improve their profile with an eye towards reapplying next year.
National Applications
And speaking of this year’s applicants, it’s been two weeks since we last checked in on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report. Have the numbers moved at all in the meantime?
Nope.
This is the time of year when the national applicant pool typically ticks over the 90% mark. This usually raises eyebrows from applicants who applied to schools whose deadlines were in January, February, or March—how can there still be more applications to come? And this is because a number of smaller and/or more local law schools have application deadlines in the spring and summer. So the question for this year isn’t whether or not we will get over 70,000 national applicants and 500,000 national applications but how far above those two figures we will end up.
Waitlist Season Cometh
As we mentioned back at the top of this post, we will have a much better read on national waitlist activity in the coming weeks. At this point, we’re still just too close to the deadlines to make any definitive analysis. However, we can at least give you an example of what it would look like if a school was clearly admitting a number of students from the waitlist.
Let’s first start with what we’ll see the most of in the coming week or two. Given the 23.1% increase in national applications, most law schools are continuing to review applications even though their deposit deadlines have passed. As our readers may likely imagine, the majority of the decisions rendered will be either waitlists or denies. If you continue to check our lawschooldata.org’s Recent Decisions page, you see this clearly with entries such as:
and
Boston College and Northwestern Law’s admissions staffs are continuing their evaluation efforts but recognizing that they’ve likely hit their pre-waitlist number of admit offers. May they admit some students off their waitlists in the coming weeks? Perhaps! But we can’t predict anything based on this activity alone.
But then we see a few other schools continuing to admit students
or not only admit students
but then admit even more after taking a weekend to think things over
and even extend their deposit deadline. And in this case, we can make some good guesses as to what is happening.
For Georgetown, their deposit deadline is typically at the end of April. They have among the largest enrolling classes of any law school in the country so they need to admit lots of applicants. They’re also a well-run admissions office that has been making admit offers since October. So if GULC is continuing to admit students at this juncture even though they’ve been admitting students for six months now, it is because they have concerns about hitting “their numbers” (whether that be their number of admitted students or their target for their LSAT and/or GPA medians). Those concerns are big enough that they feel compelled to act now as opposed to waiting for their deposit deadline to pass and then having a firm sense of their deposit numbers.
In Emory Law’s case, we can take that a step further. They postponed their deposit deadline on what was supposed to be their deposit deadline date (April 15th). Why is that? From past experience, we can tell you that schools do that during global pandemics that shut down college campuses in March. Or they do it because they feel that they are going to fall so far short of their target number of deposits that they want extra time to admit further students and recruit the ones who have already been admitted. Regarding the latter group, an admitted student who hasn’t yet deposited until the bitter end isn’t very likely to end up enrolling at your school. However, Emory Law probably isn’t hoping to convert 50% of that cohort … or 33% … or 25%. Extending your deposit deadline in situations short of a global pandemic is a “damn the torpedoes” strategy in the hopes of getting any return from that aforementioned cohort. Emory Law has nothing to lose, other than publicly signaling to other law schools that they’re going to fall short of their targets.
But how can you use this information to your benefit?
If you are a waitlisted applicant at School X and you see on r/lsa or lawschooldata that they’re starting to admit people, it could be good to send in a LOCI as soon as possible. In the case of Emory Law, their lawschooldata admit chart seems to indicate that they’re trying to maintain the same 165/3.81 stats that they achieved last year:
Extending a deposit deadline is a pretty drastic move. Similarly drastic would be this:
- Let’s say that you’re an applicant with either/both of those stats.
- Let’s say that you didn’t apply to Emory Law prior to their app deadline of March 15th.
- And let’s say that while you weren’t interested in applying to Emory Law before, perhaps you didn’t like the admit offers you received and Emory Law looks a little nicer now.
In this case, it would not be absurd to consider reaching out to Emory Law to see if you may be able to submit a late application. While they may decline the request, we assure you that we have received far more absurd requests from applicants in our professional history (such as the time that a denied applicant emailed us to appeal their decision … and copied both the university’s president and the head football coach).
7Sage Events
After a hiatus, our admissions classes are back! We have another AMA-style session on April 23rd with one of our LSAT tutors and one of our admissions consultants. We’ll then have several “What Does My Score Mean” sessions next week when the April LSAT results come back. Registration is free but required.