The snow is melting, some brave birds are venturing back home after a winter away, and Shamrock Shakes are back at McDonald’s. We’re reaching the peak of file reading and decision-making among American law schools. Even though it has seemed like a slow cycle (as will be explained below), schools are still churning out the decisions. Just this past Friday per lsd.law’s Recent Decisions page, lots of schools were issuing “rainbow decisions”:

So with the wheels turning in admissions offices across the country

let’s take our weekly check on the news and headlines from around the law school admissions world.

National Application Trends

When we last checked on national applicant and application figures two weeks ago, both pools had stabilized after a temporary blip of a decline at the end of January (a blip that was likely driven by the fact that the results of the January 2024 LSAT came back on January 31st, 2024, while the January 2025 LSAT results were posted on February 5th). National applicants were +20.3% versus last year while national applications were up 23.5%. Checking on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report this week, we see

that things have ticked up a smidge, but not so much to write home about.

We had posited prior to the January LSAT that there may be one last tidal wave of applications that would hit admissions offices afterwards. This theory was based on the big increase in January LSAT takers over the year before. While apps didn’t skyrocket after the January LSAT, they didn’t go down either. The results of the February LSAT come back this week, and we’ll see if that adds a last-minute boost of nitro to the applicant pool.

And speaking of the LSAT….

LSAT Registrations

We’re writing this week’s blog post just before the registration deadline for the April LSAT. And our weekly peek at LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report indicates that it should be a doozy:

Historically, the April LSAT is the first exam of the calendar year where first-time test takers outnumber repeat test takers. What does that mean? The April LSAT is our first predictor of the upcoming admissions cycle. Based on the present numbers, acknowledging that we’ll likely see registrations shoot up right at the February 27th registration deadline and then slowly come back down to earth as the test dates in mid-April draw near—our strong guess is that the April LSAT will at leastbe on par with last year’s numbers. The good news is that that means we probably won’t see another 20%+ increase in national applicants—yay! But it also means that next year’s application numbers will likely be in the same ballpark as this year’s, a year when applications will be at their highest levels in 15 years.

So for our friends already looking ahead to the next admissions cycle, your friends who applied this year may gently encourage you to work on your application materials over the summer so that you can be in the first wave of folks to submit your documents when applications open in September!

Decision Trends

And speaking of “applying back in September” and returning to the topic of file reading from the introduction, we know that many of our readers are still waiting for decisions. You aren’t alone! One of our favorite annual r/LSA recurring threads began again a few weeks ago in January, but the end of February is a good time to check in.

While acknowledging that using information from lsd.law is an incomplete data set, the “heat map” visualization of matters really helps to highlight matters:

  • Schools like UChicago, Harvard, Michigan, Cornell, Michigan, and Georgia are almost up-to-date for folks who submitted their apps in 2024. You can also see that these schools work in chronological order with their application review—this is why UChicago has provided 70% of December 1st-10th applicants with a decision but just 2% for December 11th-20th applicants.
  • Other schools “cherry pick.” For example, Washington University hasn’t provided 60% of decisions to applicants from any time band, but they’ve also provided some decisions to applicants who submitted their materials as recently as January 20th. If we take a look at their lsd.law decision chart, we quickly see that almost all of WashU’s decisions thus far have been admits. Our professional guess is that they keep combing through their recently submitted applications for students with competitive stats. They then review those applications quickly and are going to loop back to everyone else at a later time.
  • We also see schools that are struggling to keep up with the national increase in applications. Notre Dame Law is clearly working in chronological order—much like UChicago, we see a clear drop off for decisions rendered by NDLS at a certain point. But whereas UChicago’s drop off is at December 10th, Notre Dame’s is waaaaaaaaay back on October 20th.

And here is another way of considering this app increase and how it affects the decision making process. Per LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report, here is the breakdown of national applications by LSAT score band:

Let’s focus on the 170-174 score band for a moment since that’s the zone where all the T14s are located for their medians. There are roughly 1,200 more applicants to law school this year versus last year in just that score band. The average T14 enrolls about 300 students—this is four whole extra T14 incoming classes versus last year! If we take this same group of applicants but now bring them over to the T15-30 range where the average class size is more in the range of 225 students—this would be over five extra classes of incoming students. The numbers are staggering to consider and it simply takes admissions offices more time to process this amount of applications.

But given that admitted student visit programs are quickly arriving on the social calendar of every law school, we can assure you that AdComms will be spending their non-sleeping hours with plenty of file review.

7Sage Events

We’re taking a brief break from our weekly admissions classes, but these will resume in March or April. But a reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

Our latest episode of the 7Sage Admissions Podcast was dropped last Monday and includes a conversation with Kamil Brown—7Sage admissions consultant and Director of Admissions and Financial Aid at Boston College Law—on the things that future applicants should know as they’re starting to get geared up for the upcoming admissions cycle. Our next episode will be published on Monday and will have a vibe check conversation with a current Fordham 2L about all things Ram-related. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!