With the calendar flipping to March, law school admissions officers are entering one of their busiest and most nerve-wracking times of the year.

Apps need to be read and decisions rendered!

US News and World Report rankings are on the horizon (but only perhaps as we’ll note below)!

Admitted student visit programs are almost here!

And looming over all of this like the grim reaper … deposit deadlines are only four or five weeks away for the vast majority of schools. So while AdComms stretch out their quads and hammies for this final sprint

let’s take a quick look around the world of law admissions to see what’s going on.

National App Figures and LSAT Registrations

Checking in on LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries report, we see that last week’s “brake tap” was just that. Whereas we had slowed down to applicants being up 4.6% versus the same date in 2023 and applications being up 0.8%, we’re back up a smidge this week:

We can see two factors coming together in this bump:

  • February LSAT results went live on the 28th (more on that below).
  • There was one more day in February this year (and jokes about Leap Day aside, adding an additional day into the mix doesn’t hurt).

Of interesting note in the above data, there’s something we haven’t yet caught in our weekly check-in. If we look at the Applicants table, the largest increase in students applying to law school is from the “Other” geographic category. These are students whose permanent residence is outside of the United States. Their numbers are up by a smidge over 1,000 from the year before and that accounts for almost half of the total increase in applicants. While this group may include Americans residing abroad, it’s fair to assume that the vast majority are non-US citizens. Many American law schools are a bit hesitant to admit foreign nationals because of worries regarding post-grad employment searches and how quickly visa policy can shift depending on the resident of the White House and the composition of Congress. We’re going to keep our eye on this stat and how it manifests itself in other ways such as waitlist activity.

But let’s go back to our check-in on the stats and the February LSAT. Per LSAC’s Test Registrants and Test Takers report, it was a pretty good run for the exam:

The percentage of test takers vs registrants and the conversion rate of reportable scores out of test takers look pretty good for one week out. But of particular note is the percentage of first-time test takers with reportable scores thus far—at 46.7% versus 49.1% last year. That can shift in the coming weeks as more first-timers submit their writing section and—thus—produce a reportable score.

But even with all these flashy new LSAT scores floating around the ether, we’re still not seeing a nudge on scores in the 170+ range for those T14s. Per the Current Volume Summaries report, we see the declines in both test groupings:

and individual score bands:

But, oh, to be a school aiming for a median in the 160s. This truly is their golden era!

US News Rankings

Last year’s great drama (or at least the “Great Drama” prior to the Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision!) was the turmoil in the US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings. A very brief recap reads almost like a law school admissions version of War and Peace.

  • Yale Law announced in November 2022 that they would no longer provide USNWR with the internal information the publication historically relied on for a substantial part of its formula. Many schools followed suit for a variety of reasons.
  • In the ensuing months, USNWR said that they would make changes to their formula to accommodate the reality that not all schools would submit the usual internal information. Instead, the publication would rely only on publicly available information via the American Bar Association as well as the evaluation surveys that USNWR sends every year to law school deans, judges, and lawyers.
  • Everyone expected that we would see the published rankings at their normal release date of mid-March. But instead of releasing the rankings at that time, USNWR announced that they would publish them on April 18, 2023.
  • On April 11, USNWR published a preview of the new T14 on their website. They also provided each law school with information about the new formula for this year as well as their embargoed rankings. And this is when things really took a turn….
  • Law schools—en masse—replied to their copy of the rankings by pointing out apparent data errors. On April 21, USNWR took down their preliminary T14 and issued a statement that they were dealing with “an unprecedented number of inquiries” from schools about the embargoed data and would update everyone when they had their house in order.
  • It took another three weeks for them to clean up the house and host everyone, finally publishing their rankings on May 11.

And once they hit, there were plenty of collective gasps:

  • Harvard at #5! And tied with Duke and NYU!
  • Columbia at #8! The CCN (Chicago, Columbia, and NYU) group has been disbanded!
  • Georgetown falling out of the T14!
  • WashU falling out of the teens!
  • Schools in the 20s, 30s, and 40s rising like lava out of an erupting volcano (Texas A&M up 17 spots! Kansas rising 27 spots!) and others falling to Earth like debris from an erupting volcano (and thus do we hit our quota on volcano metaphors for the week).

Why dredge up this old story and relive the drama? Because USNWR historically publishes their rankings in mid-March. We’ve been (politely) hounding our AdComm friends to see if we’ll all have some fun professional news to gossip about over St. Patrick’s Day, but everyone has provided a collective:

We’ll be sure to pass along any information once we have it! We’ll also have a column in the coming weeks about the importance—or lack thereof—of rankings when considering your deposit decision.

7Sage Events

A quick reminder that 7Sage Admissions Consultants Taj McCoy (formerly of Berkeley Law) and Sam Riley (formerly of Texas-Austin Law) will be hosting a new blog piece entitled “Dear AO.” Styled as a “Dear Abby” advice column, this is a chance for you to submit your questions and get feedback from some of our resident experts. Check out their debut column here!

And as a shameless plug for those who can’t get enough of our weekly columns but wish they were easier to listen to instead of read, be sure to go check out our podcast—How to Get Into Law School. Hosted by … well, this can’t be right … me! and joined by fellow consultants Brigitte Suhr and Aaron Thier, we walk you through all the ins and outs of the process. Our most recently published episode is on the waitlist and letters of continued interest. Check us out on Spotify, Apple, Google, or wherever you snag your podcasts!