With January continuing to advance in the way that linear time in our dimension is apt to do, law school admissions officers continue at their daily grind:
- Reading applications,
- Meeting in review committees to make decisions about applications,
- Sending out decisions about applications.
Lather, rinse, and repeat!
At least the polar vortex has helped focus AdComms on their task—if it’s too cold to go outside, you might as well brew another pot of coffee, and get back to work.

So as our admissions friends continue their labors, let’s turn our attention to our weekly check on the news and notes from around the world of law school admissions.
January LSAT
The January LSAT occurred last week and it was a doozy! Per LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes, the numbers are rather staggering:

We wondered for a while if the January LSAT would join the November edition in having 30,000+ test takers. We obviously didn’t hit that mark! But the final registration numbers are such that it’s likely this exam will be the biggest January LSAT ever and the second biggest LSAT (after the November exam) since the 2020–2021 admissions cycle. That particular cycle was extraordinarily odd due to the COVID-19 pandemic. LSAT numbers shot through the roof and applications spiked during a time when many us were stuck in our homes—akin to admissions officers forced to read applications because it’s too cold in January to do anything else, applicants had a lot more time on their hands to prepare their law school applications! So seeing the largest numbers since then is quite something.
And speaking of that period….
National Application Trends
We have some new ways of visualizing just how large this year’s surge in applications is.
We normally check in on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report to show us the breakdown in both applicants and applications. And for the sake of blog consistency (“blogsistency”?), this week is much the same story as usual:

Applicants were +23% during last week’s check and applications were +30.2%. So the gradual slowdown of applications over the past few weeks has continued accordingly.
But this week, let’s also take a look at LSAC’s Five-Year Volume Graphs report. This report tracks the same info as the Current Volume Summaries report, but it then compares it directly versus the previous four application cycles, like so:

While this is helpful, we can get a better sense of things if we choose the “Weekly” view of applications:

And then zooming in on just January:

And then hovering over the lines to get the actual application numbers (the most recent being for the end of the second week of January):

Phew! And now that we're done with that ridiculousness

the main takeaways from these charts are:
- The consistent pattern of applications received. Regardless of the year, the charts move in relative lockstep with only a few exceptions. One of those exceptions was last year at the end of January. The 2024 cycle started incredibly slow due to massive application changes on the part of law schools (in response to the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision) and massive tech issues on the August and September LSATs. It took until January for things to even out. But the other exception is:
- This past December. The red line representing the 2024–2025 admissions cycle was already running far ahead of previous years but that growth accelerated in December. Why? Most likely because of the record high numbers from the November LSAT.
- What does a 30% increase in national applications mean? To put things into perspective, it means that admissions offices already had more applications at the beginning of the month than they did at the end of January 2021, 2022, 2023, or 2024. We’re running at least four weeks ahead of last year’s pace.
Coming back to the recently concluded January LSAT, this just gives us more reason to believe that there’s another surge of applications coming on February 5th when the January results come back. If you are still polishing your application materials, we would like to gently encourage you to submit your apps sooner rather than later!
7Sage Events
Our weekly online classes on different components of law school applications continue this week with a session on scholarship negotiations (building off last week’s session on financial aid basics)! Registration for this session on January 22nd is free but required.
And a reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.
We’ll also be hosting two AMA-style live classes on January 21st and 30th. Our admissions consultants will give a brief overview of where we’re at in the admissions process and will then open the floor to questions.
The latest episode of our admissions podcast dropped this Monday and features a conversation with Dr. Sam Riley—7Sage admissions consultant extraordinaire and former Senior Director of Admissions Programs at the University of Texas-Austin Law—on the ins and outs of being in state versus out of state in the admissions process. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!