As the holiday shopping days dwindle, law school admissions officers continue to be deep in their figurative coal mines—reading applications, coordinating review committees, and trying their best to get as much work done as possible before their schools close for the holidays. We continue to be on the precipice of the first major wave of national decisions, so let’s take a few moments—before the wave crashes—to take a look around and assess the trends as well as look ahead to next week.

National App Figures

There’s a little bit of a twist to our check-in on app numbers! 

The trend of the past few months has been that both applicants and applications have been slowly catching up to last year. Once the November LSAT results cleared (which happened to coincide nicely with Thanksgiving, which can sometimes serve as a soft deadline for many applicants who want to get their family off their back from asking, “So what are you doing next year?”), we actually caught up to last year vis-à-vis applicants. Applications were still trailing behind a smidge, likely due to the increased number of school-specific requirements that sprouted up post-Students for Fair Admissions.

Here were the numbers we reported last week from LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report:

And now a week later, here are the numbers as of December 11:

For the first time in a few weeks, applicants have slowed down slightly versus last year. However, we’re now seeing the gap tighten a bit more on applications. We’ll keep our eye on this trend!

And speaking of trends, we continue to see a decline in applicants in 170+ LSAT bands both in the aggregate:

as well as individual score bands:

We’ve been keeping an eye on this for some time and we thought that this would close a bit once the November LSAT scores got posted, but it really hasn’t nudged much.

Of particular interest, applicants just in the 171-173 range are down by a raw number of about 150. That’s 150 fewer students to go around among the 12 law schools that had LSAT medians in that range. That’s not nothing—it’s not odd for even the best law schools to achieve their median LSAT just with a margin of 10 or 15 students (or fewer!) to spare.

In practice, we’re not seeing this trend bleed into the decisions coming out of law schools. For example, Wash U, Georgetown, and Michigan have been the most active schools in the 170+ Median Club for admitting students thus far. Each appears to be using last year’s medians as their guidelines thus far for this year. But we’ll certainly keep an eye on this once other schools jump into the mix with decisions. Speaking of which….

Deans’ Roundtable

We’ll be hosting our next Deans’ Roundtable on December 19 at 8 PM Eastern. Of particular note will be discussions related to the timeline for this admissions cycle and potential delays in reviewing files. It should be an interesting and illuminating conversation!

Schools’ Holiday Closings

As we made reference to in our introductory comments, admissions officers are presently conducting their work under any number of deadlines—not least of which is “will my office be closed over the holidays?” 

While acknowledging that every school is different, it’s fair to assume that everyone will be closed for Christmas and New Year’s. The key will be the days in between. From our experience, most private institutions simply close down for the week. Public institutions may be open, but admissions officers may take vacation time (the nerve of wanting to spend this time with their families!) or operate on reduced hours. But even if an admissions office is fully staffed, they still might not be able to make decisions because their admissions committee (which could include faculty, staff, and/or current students) may not have an available quorum during this period. Zut alors! So if we don’t see our big national wave of decisions next week, we likely won’t see that wave until the new year.

ABA Reports … Still Waiting

And only because we’ve made reference to these documents the past two weeks, we want to report—AGAIN!—that we eagerly await the publication of the ABA’s 509 Reports. While Mariah Carey may only want you for Christmas, we want these. Fingers crossed that they arrive next week!

7Sage Events

Along with our Deans’ Roundtable, we want to remind everyone that we’re also hosting several workshops on different application components. If you’re still trying to get your documents together, this is a good opportunity to hear from 7Sage admissions and writing consultants about best practices for different documents. We’d love to see you there!