With the holiday season firmly in the background and the long winter weeks ahead, law school admissions officers find themselves in the middle of File Reading Season.

Sure, they started reading applications as early as September … but that was balanced with traveling to law fairs and hosting recruitment events on campus. 

And then they really focused on reading apps in November … but Thanksgiving helped break up the monotony.

And then they were totally focused on reading applications in December so as to get out their first big waves of admit decisions … but—oh, dang!—I have to get my holiday shopping done soon!

But now that it’s January, there’s nothing between now and when major on-campus recruitment events begin for admitted students at the end of March other than reading applications. There’s an alternate universe where the plot of the movie Groundhog Day takes place in a higher ed admissions office!

So as we enter the beginning of this period, let’s brew a pot of coffee in solidarity with AdComm friends and check in on the headlines from around the world of law school admissions.

National Application Trends

January 1st usually marks the halfway point in the admissions cycle. This is literally the time when law schools have received ~50% of their total applications for the year. As such, if the rocket of national application burst was ever going to start falling back to Earth, it would have to be now. Alas, our read of LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report shows that there’s still plenty of fuel left in the afterburners:

Things have slowed down just a touch since last week when applicants were at +24.5% and applications were +31.3%, but the larger point remains—by all appearances, law schools received a normal load of applications over the holiday season.

Longtime blog readers (we know you’re out there!) may remember our notes from a few months ago regarding a caveat we were providing when comparing October 2024 to October 2023. Namely, the 2023–2024 admissions cycle got off to a very slow start. This was due to massive application changes in light of the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision and significant tech issues on both the August and September 2023 LSATs. So our caveat in October was along the lines of “let’s see if this initial burst levels out not only as we go on with this cycle, but as we compare versus last year’s numbers that took a while to get up to steam.”

We can’t provide that caveat any longer.

January 2024 was when the 2023–2024 admissions cycle finally overcame its initial headwinds and caught up to the 2022–2023 cycle. We can still see that moment in the Current Volume Summaries report. Right above the table of applicants and applications is this note:

Additionally, the last big remaining curveball of our admissions cycle is breaking next week….

January LSAT

And it remains a doozy.

Last week’s check of LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report showed 32,891 hearty souls signed up for the January LSAT. And the numbers this week

are pretty spot-on!

With this test administration set for next week, it’s likely we’re going to see the highest numbers ever for the January LSAT. While the January LSAT will likely have lower numbers than the November LSAT once the dust settles, it’s still highly likely that these two exams will see in excess of 60,000 test takers. That would be the highest total for consecutive LSATs since a little over 63,000 people took the September and November 2018 exams. 

Admissions Decisions

In general, this should be a rather slow week for schools to issue admissions decisions. This is because:

  • Admissions offices can’t issue decisions if they haven’t reviewed applications recently.
  • Admissions offices can’t review applications if they’re closed for the holidays.

So expect this week to be a bit quieter and next week to be when we see more action.

But do you know who doesn’t play by the normal rules? Harvard Law School! HLS is rare among law schools in issuing just three waves of decisions and advertising those decision dates all the way back in July on their website. So they can issue decisions on January 6th because those applications had been reviewed, debated, and decided upon back before the holidays.

And did HLS keep to their schedule? Oh, dear reader, you know it. Per the law school admissions sub-Reddit, it was quite the day:

And per a check on Harvard Law’s lawschooldata profile, it appears that they’re joining the national trend of aiming for a higher LSAT median for the upcoming class:

Sure enough, there seems to be a bit of a drop-down at a 175 LSAT, and the lowest GPA for any of the 174 LSAT admits is a 3.92 (i.e., just below this year’s median GPA of 3.95). We’ll keep an eye on that as more students report their results and—more importantly—when Harvard Law sends out their next wave of decisions on February 10th.

7Sage Events

Our weekly Zoom classes on different components of law school applications starts up again this week with a session on interviews on January 8th. Registration 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 have our next Deans’ Roundtable on January 14th. The topics du jour will include the initial wave of admissions decisions and scholarship offers, the status of the national applicant pool, and much more!

And looking ahead to the end of the month, we’ll 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.