With the calendar turning to the middle of September, we’ve hit the first full week of “travel season” for law school admissions officers. Events in Kansas City (MINK Law Day) and New England (the Connecticut Law Fair, the Providence Law Fair, and the Boston Law Fair) are just the opening salvo. For most of the next two months, law school admissions officers will be spending as much time out of their office (heading to the airport, driving to an event, attending an event, heading to the hotel after an event, etc.) as they will in the office. And even when they’re back in their home environment, a good amount of their work time will be devoted to travel-adjacent matters like submitting expense reports, sending follow-up messages to the potential applicants they met at law fairs, and making sure that their itinerary is all ready to go for the next trip. It’ll be a blur! Before AdComms know it, they’ll return to their home after a trip, only to arrive at the same time as some eager trick-or-treaters.

Why is this important to point out? Well, we know that we have a lot of new readers of our weekly blog since we just began a new admissions cycle. (And on that note: Welcome! Make yourselves comfortable! You can take your shoes off over there and then grab a drink from the fridge!) The purpose of this blog is to give you the latest news and updates from the law school admissions cycle, but to do so with a bit of an eye from the perspective of a law school admissions counselor. Like a great military tactician, understanding your opponent’s strategy can help you—the applicant—have a more successful admissions cycle. Or at least a less stressful cycle! So returning to the question of pointing out that we’ve entered travel season and why this is important:

  • Don’t stress too much about submitting applications immediately. Most admissions officers are more concerned with figuring out where they can get breakfast this morning nearby their hotel rather than reading applications right now!
  • And if AdComms are going to spend so much time traveling, perhaps you can go out there to said law fairs and meet them! It may not seem like a big deal to shake a few hands and ask a few questions, but the little things can make a big difference if your stats put you right into the competitive zone for a school.

But in that vein of welcoming the new readers to our blog, let’s take a lap around the news and headlines from this week in law school admissions and also take few minutes to introduce our audience to some of the resources you’ll be seeing a lot of throughout this cycle.

Helpful Reports and Data Points

One important metric that we keep tabs on in this blog is LSAT registrations. Although no one has access to a fully functioning crystal ball (we keep scouring shady second-hand stores just in case!), the most reliable predictor of “future applicants” is “recent LSAT test takers.” To that end, LSAC provides a very helpful report on their website entitled LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes which shows us a few things.

First, it gives us a running tally of LSAT registrants and test takers in this cycle and compares it to last cycle:

The August LSAT is the first exam in this new testing cycle. The key is to see how many test takers took the August 2024 exam (22,448) versus the August 2023 test (16,632) and consider that increase (a lot!).

This same report also allows us to see LSAT test-taking numbers from the recent past:

The key number here to look at is that 17.7% increase in LSAT test takers during the 2023–2024 cycle. Although there can be any number of reasons for this increase, the most likely one is more people want to apply to law school this year so they took the LSAT.

Another report we’ll regularly check in on is LSAC’s Current Volumes Summary. This helpful report will let us know how many applicants are in the national pool and how many applications they’ve submitted. This report will start providing information for the 2024–2025 admissions cycle after October 1. In the meantime, you can use the slider tool in the upper-right corner

to get a sense of the flow of applications to law schools last year. What you’ll find is that only 5% of total national applications were submitted by October 1 and only 15% by November 1. So if you were starting to sweat a little bit after seeing those LSAT registration numbers above, hopefully this information lowers the heat a bit! Another website we’ll check regularly for information regarding trends will be lawschooldata.org, otherwise known as lawschooldata or lsd.law. On that website, law school applicants can create anonymous profiles with some key data points such as their LSAT and GPA. The fun happens over the course of the admissions cycle as lsd.law users then update their profile to indicate where they’ve applied and been admitted/waitlisted/denied, and—if admitted—what scholarship they’ve received. This aggregate data can be super useful for us to keep a finger on the pulse of broader trends! For example, we’re already seeing some lsd.law users reporting that they’ve received offers of admission at UVA, Wake Forest, Arizona State, and Missouri. If you take a look back at any of these schools’ profiles from last year, you’ll see that this is part of their normal strategy. For instance, here’s a peek at UVA’s chart from last year which we’ve sorted by the date on which users reported receiving a decision:

So it looks like the UVA Law admissions team is following their normal trends! Meanwhile, other admissions offices won’t start issuing decisions until December or—famously in the case of Harvard Law—January. We’ll check in on these kinds of charts regularly to see how the cycle is progressing and if there are any trends that we can pick out.

7Sage Events

We also will use this blog to keep you up-to-date on different ways to learn more about the admissions process!

First up is a note that 7Sage has been doing a series of weekly live classes on different components of the application process over the past weeks. This week’s session turns to the 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.

You can also check out our admissions podcast on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts. We’ll be posting a new episode this Monday that will feature a panel discussion from a few different directors of admission regarding this year’s application process.

Recruitment Events

And another way to learn about the admissions process is to go chat with law school admissions officers!

The upcoming week has a few different events to check out depending on where you live.

- As noted at the beginning, there will be a tour of southern New England with the Connecticut Law Fair in North Haven on September 12, the Providence Law Fair on September 13, and the Boston Law Fair on September 14.

- Down south, the University of Southern Mississippi will host their law fair on September 18. - LSAC will then host their first Law Forum of the fall on September 21 in Chicago.