Ah, yes, mid-January! The holidays are over, law schools are open, and admissions offices are back up and running. Not only is file reading in full swing, but so is decision making. A scroll through lawschooldata’s “Recent Decisions” page is a veritable Skittles bag of admits, waitlists, and denies. Just look at all the action from the lower parts of the alphabet on January 10th:

This reflects the basic admissions reality that it’s time to start making admissions decisions. If you want a lot of students to deposit for your upcoming class by your deposit deadline in April, you have to start making some offers by January and then continue making said decisions into February and March.
But we’d be remiss if we just focused on the lime-flavored Skittles in this cornucopia of decisions. We’re also going to see some waves of lemons:

And, unfortunately, strawberries:

That sound you heard on Friday the 10th was the Michigan Law admissions team waking up and choosing violence as their course of action for the day.

(Here is a dramatic interpretation of Michigan Law sending out all those decision letters.)
So with the national file-reading and decision-making gears running at full speed, let’s take our weekly check-in on the headlines from the world of law school admissions.
January LSAT
Our check of LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes this week shows that we’re having a bit of movement just before test day:

While January registrations had held steady for much of the past month, this week saw a dip in registrations of 2,217 or 6.9%. That’s fairly normal to occur in the week before an LSAT but—admittedly—it’s been so long since we’ve had a “normal” LSAT that we forgot what the feeling was like!
Even with this drop (and likely another drop right before the test occurs), this will almost certainly be the highest number of January LSAT test takers ever and the second highest number of test takers for any LSAT in the past (trailing only the November 2024 administration).
With the January LSAT numbers remaining high, expect another burst of application submissions later this month.
National Application Trends
Not that we need any more apps!
This week’s check of LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report shows that the national increase in applicants and applications is holding steady:

Last week, national applicants were +24.3% over last year while applications were +30.6%. These figures will likely remain on cruise control until the January LSAT results come back on February 5th.
And not only has our app increase remained stable, so has the concentrated increase in the upper ranges of the LSAT score bands. If we scroll further down in the Current Volume Summaries report, we find the following table

that clearly helps to explain why many schools are aiming for higher LSAT medians right now.
Merit Scholarship Notifications
And with February on the horizon, we’re approaching the time of year when more T30 schools begin to issue merit scholarship awards. We’re already seeing a few schools setting the trend early—places like Michigan, Cornell, Boston University, and Wake Forest. We’ll keep an eye on this not only because it’s fun to see big dollar figures tossed around but also because it gives us a sense of a school’s admissions strategy.
Let’s take Cornell Law for example. Their admit chart on lawschooldata isn’t 100% revelatory regarding their LSAT target for this year. It looks like there’s a line developing at a 172

but we wouldn’t put money on it … until we see that Cornell is putting money on it.

If you organize Cornell Law’s “School applicants” chart by LSAT and GPA, you can quickly suss out a pattern. There are a number of admitted students who have both a 3.90+ GPA and a 173 LSAT. These students are receiving $150,000 in scholarship over three years. Meanwhile, students with the same GPA but a 171 LSAT are only (although perhaps “only” should be in a sarcastic font of some sort since that’s still a great deal of money!) receiving $90,000 in scholarship. This shows that Cornell Law is trying to incentivize one set of stats over another.
Interestingly, Cornell hasn’t yet started making scholarship offers to the admitted students in this GPA range with a 172. This seems to indicate that Cornell is holding off a bit before making the final determination of whether to aim for a 173 median or a 172. If they opt for the former, it wouldn’t be surprising to see admits with a 3.90+/172 stat line receive awards akin to the admits with a 3.90+/171 combo. But if we see 3.90+/172 admits receive something closer to $150,000, that would tell us that Cornell is setting their median target at a 172.
We know that you’re just as excited as we are to track another set of numbers!
7Sage Events
And speaking of fin aid, our weekly Zoom classes on different components of law school applications continue this week with a session on that very subject! Registration for this session on January 15th 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 next episode of our admissions podcast drops this Monday and will feature 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!