As mentioned at the end of last week’s edition, this week’s edition will be a bit more succinct due to spending our normal writing hours volunteering at our local voting center and not on finding silly gifs and digesting law school admissions news. So just one silly gif that has no connection to anything and then let’s get down to things!

Oh, who are we kidding? We can make that relevant for law school admissions. Just give us a second.

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Ooof. This is a toughie.

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OK, we’ve got it!

That little guy is a metaphor for all of you who are reluctantly but confidently putting on your best shades and heading out to take the….

November LSAT

There we go! 

It’s the eve of the November LSAT and—per our weekly check on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report—it looks like numbers finally shifted a bit:

After several weeks where registrations budged by less than 1%, November LSAT registrations dropped by over 4,000 over the past week (or 10.8%). That still leaves us with the first 30,000+ LSAT in six years, but that number is looking a lot better for this year’s applicants than three weeks ago when there were still over 42,000 registrants and the numbers had just declined by 0.5% from the week before.

On a related note, registrations for the January LSAT increased by 3,000 over the past week. That’s a rather large jump—in isolation—for an LSAT whose registration deadline is still a month away. But, of course, this number isn’t in isolation—it’s tied in with the November LSAT. We appear to be seeing a number of candidates push their test back a smidge further. This is a reasonable strategy to take if an applicant simply doesn’t feel like they can hit their preferred goal on the November test. But with this said, we also encourage these applicants to think more broadly—if they’re now going to take the LSAT in January, that means that they should really finalize their application documents right now. That strategy would put them in a position to submit their applications immediately in January once they’ve completed the LSAT. And speaking of applications….

National Application Totals

This week’s check on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report shows that things are slowly coming down off their post-October LSAT boil:

With applicants freshly armed with the October LSAT results last week, we saw applicants surge to +33.4% and applications increase to +45.8% versus the same dates last year. It’s likely that we’re going to continue seeing applicant and application numbers come down over the next few weeks until the unholy alliance of “the November LSAT and the Thanksgiving holiday weekend” leads to another surge in numbers towards the end of the month.

Recruitment Events

Law school admissions travel season has officially hit the Willie Nelson stage of matters because the party’s over. After a few more events this week, admissions officers will return home, file their expense reports, try to re-learn their kids’ names, and start the long task of reading all of the aforementioned applications.

  • Thursday, November 7th: The Texas A&M Law School Fair, the Greater Charlotte Law School Fair, and the University of North Carolina, NC State University, UNC Wilmington, and Wake Forest hosting a joint virtual fair.
  • Saturday, November 9th: The Houston LSAC Forum.
  • Monday, November 11th: The LSU Law School Information Day. Fun fact: pre-COVID, this event was usually done in conjunction with a New Orleans law fair and both happened right at Halloween. It’s probably for the best for all parties involved that this has moved a little further down the line….
  • Thursday, November 14th: The LSAC Digital Forum. This is a great opportunity to ask those application questions that have been bouncing around your brain! Like, does Berkeley Law truly want your personal statement to have ½” margins and size 11 font? Ask away!

7Sage Events

We’re continuing our series of weekly live classes on different components of the application process. We turn to Résumés this week and Diversity Statements next week. Registration is free but required. You can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

The next episode of our admissions podcast will drop on Monday and will be an audio recording of our most recent law school deans’ roundtable. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!