With the second full week of November upon us and the long weekend for Thanksgiving just on the horizon, law school admissions officers find themselves in one of their key transition periods.

Travel season—meeting with prospective students at law fairs, panel discussions, and LSAC events—is done in its corporeal form and has just one digital ghost left in it (details below in the Recruitment Events section). Now safely ensconced back in their offices, admissions officers now face the beginning of Reading Season. After talking with people non-stop at events for weeks … and weeks … and weeks, AdComms will now squirrel themselves away to read the thousands … and thousands … and thousands of applications that applicants have submitted and are about to submit. It’s rather like the equivalent of wrapping up a half-marathon only to be told that the full marathon begins tomorrow (which is something that Disney World does for their race week—they call this The Goofy for understandable reasons). And much like running a marathon, the best day to begin training is always “last week”—that’s the position AdComms find themselves in considering present national app numbers.

So in that spirit, let’s stretch out

and take a quick lap around the world of law school admissions!

November LSAT

After weeks of watching numbers slowly, slowly, slowly creep down, the November LSAT is behind us and we have a final tally of test takers from LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report:

When registration for the exam closed in early October, we stood at a “high-water mark” of 42,743 registrants. Our “melt rate” from the registration deadline through test day was 21.3%. That’s a touch lower than what we saw for the October (35%), August (23.4%), and June (33%) exams. As it stands, we’re left with the highest number of test takers for any LSAT since November 2018 (34,369 test takers). But that was also back in the day when the LSAT was only offered six times a year (up from just four times a year in 2017 and all years prior) and was universally in person. Those were simply different times!

We now turn our eyes towards both:

  • November 27, when these LSAT results come back. Given that it’s the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, we expect applications to surge over the holiday weekend.
  • December 3, which is the registration deadline for the January LSAT. It seemed highly unlikely a year ago that our hot streak of increased LSAT test takers would continue for so long … but the January LSAT is already at nearly 16,000 registrants with three weeks left to go before the deadline.

National Application Totals

But enough talk about surging LSAT registration and test-taking numbers—that’s so passé! All the cool kids are talking about increasing application numbers instead!

Our weekly check on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report shows that numbers are still high but aren’t high:

First-time readers to this blog may see a national application increase of 37.8% and start panicking. But for our loyal longtime readers, they know that this has slowly been coming down after a very hot start to the admissions year. Just last week, the applicant and application increases were at 30.3% and 43.3%, respectively. Our guess is that these increases will continue to go down until the November LSAT results come back—that’s when we’ll see another surge of applications.

But we’ll also note one thing that we’ll track for another few weeks. Let’s take a look at the applicants table again and let’s enhance it on just one group:

The applicants table breaks folks down by where they’re applying from. The “Other” group are those applicants who currently reside outside of the United States. The majority of these candidates are non-American citizens, although this group does include that American national who may be attending a college in the United Kingdom and is now applying to a U.S. law school.

Just last week, the Other group was up 14.3% from the 2023–2024 admissions cycle. That’s a rather radical swing in just one week—we can all scratch our heads and consider what may have happened in the past week to cause this disruption. If foreign-based applications fall off drastically, that will certainly help to put a bit of a brake on our broader applicant pool trends.

Recruitment Events

And then there was one!

The Digital Forum was an innovation for the COVID era that has continued onward, much like QR code menus at restaurants. Although it’s no longer necessary in the sense that in-person events are effectively back to their pre-COVID schedule, the Digital Forum still provides a wonderful opportunity for many candidates who may not be able to attend a law fair physically. And, thankfully, a wide variety of law schools are still active participants—from T14s through your local school down the road. Take the chance to get a last few questions answered before these events disappear until next summer!

7Sage Events

We’re continuing our series of weekly live classes on different components of the application process. We turn to Diversity Statements this 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 latest episode of our admissions podcast dropped on Monday and is an audio recording of our most recent law school deans’ roundtable—they cover character and fitness statements, addenda, and much more! Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!