How did you spend your Mardi Gras? Attend a Carnival and eat some king cake? A parade? Eat an unhealthy amount of pączki? Continue to read applications like you were a coal miner on an extended shift like our friends in law school admissions offices?

Time and law school apps wait for no man. So as our AdComm friends continue to work their way through a record number of apps, let’s check in on the latest news and headlines from the world of law school admissions.

National Application Trends

Early March is when we pass the 80% threshold for submitted apps for the cycle. At this point, you can safely add an extra 20% to the present app totals and get a good approximation for where the national pool will end. If that’s the case, then woof.

Last week’s check of LSAC’s Current Volume Summaries had us at +20.7% for national applicants versus last year and +24% on applications. Things have cooled off just by the lightest of touches:

Our professional guess is that next week will show another status quo. Of more interest will be the following week. A number of schools use March 15th as their application deadline and this usually elicits a lot of applications from last-minute law school hopefuls.

Even without a possible last-minute booster shot, national apps are still not only up but ahead by over a month from our most recent “crazy cycle” in 2020–2021. One way to grasp this is to take a look at LSAC’s Five-Year Volume Graph report. This report updates on the last day of every month. With February in the books, it’s good to take a quick look at the chart

and shake our heads slowly.

The Five-Year report tends to not be a very informative tool because application cycles usually move gradually and mirror previous years. We see that kind of cluster for the 2022, 2023, and 2024 admissions cycles—there were some variations (most notably that 2024 started slow and then just barely passed the previous two years). But in our case, looking at the Five-Year report just emphasizes how far ahead this cycle is running versus previous years. The only comparison point is an admissions cycle when everyone was locked down and had nothing better to do than bake sourdough bread, make handmade face masks, and study for the LSAT. But even that isn’t a good comparison because the 2025 admissions cycle had already seen almost as many submitted apps by the end of February as we saw through the end of March 2021.

We live in interesting times….

LSAT Registrations

And the interesting times aren’t just limited to this admissions cycle. Rather, we just got another data point to lead us to think that the coming admissions cycle will also be a bit larger than what we’ve seen in the recent past. The registration deadline for the April LSAT was on February 27. When we checked in on LSAC’s LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report last week—pre-deadline—registration numbers were at 19,420. Did we have another last-minute surge of deadline registrations?

You know it.

While the numbers will come down in the coming weeks as test day approaches, it’s highly unlikely to come down by over 30%. This will be yet another LSAT administration that shows an increased number of test takers from the year before (a hot streak that began all the way back in October 2023). And since current LSAT takers are the best predictor of future applicants, the initial indications for next year’s applicant pool are that it will look a lot like this year’s.

Decision Trends

While admissions offices still have lots of applications to read (I once read a blog that said that national law school applications were up 23% versus last year!), we are going to see some transitions in the coming weeks as law schools start to hit their numbers for admitted students. We know “their numbers” sounds a bit dramatic and obtuse so let’s take a moment to unpack that!

Every admissions office has a target number of students that they want to enroll for the coming class. This number is usually a balance of factors like:

  • Goals for tuition revenue
  • Scholarship budget for the coming year
  • How obtainable certain targets are for the median GPA and LSAT for the incoming class
  • Hiring practices for law school graduates (i.e., do you feel like all your graduates can get jobs three years from now?)
  • And perhaps the most “dry” yet basic factor: how many chairs do you have in your biggest classrooms and your library? It’s challenging to enroll a bigger-than-expected class if you don’t have enough chairs for your new students to sit on!

For our purposes, let’s say a law school’s target enrollment number is 200—they want 200 1Ls to arrive at orientation in August. To get to that number, they have to admit more than 200 students. This is because every admitted student has lots of options for the coming academic year—not just other law schools, but sometimes job offers, family obligations, or unique opportunities like a post-grad fellowship. Not even Yale Law enrolls all the students they admit!

Further, each law school knows that there are certain factors, statistics, or characteristics that predict the likelihood of an admitted student deciding to enroll at their school. For example, admitted applicants who live in a school’s geographic footprint are more likely to enroll than applicants who live far away. Admitted students whose stats are far above a school’s medians are less likely to enroll because they’re probably being admitted by higher-ranked law schools. Schools analyze their admitted groups every year, pick up on trends and patterns, and then use that information to build an “application model” for the coming year. This model helps guide them through the course of file reading. The school will know that—based on past data—they need to admit this number of students, with these stats, and with this scholarship budget to eventually reach their goal of those 200 theoretical students.

So now let’s come back to the present moment. Apps are up 23% nationally and admissions offices have been working furtively and diligently to review applications. They’ve been issuing decisions—making admit offers, placing students on the waitlist, and the “third one” that we won’t mention. Heck, they’ve even created a fourth category of “holds” in an attempt to let applicants know that they’re so far behind on reading applications that they feel compelled to reach out to applicants just to assure them that everything is alright … other than the massive landslide of applications that they’re dealing with. But at some point, an admissions office will hit “their number” for admitted students. How will you know that that’s happening? Because we’ll start seeing a school’s decisions on lawschooldata.org go from this

to something more akin to this

The first schools to hit their numbers and switch over to more waitlist and deny decisions tend to be the T25 schools. Schools like George Washington, Notre Dame, or Southern California know that they need to admit a critical mass of your applicants by early March. This gives them enough time before their mid-April deposit deadline to recruit admitted students away from T14 schools (who have more prestige) and lower-ranked schools (that are likely offering more scholarship money). Similar strategies abound at most T14s but the focus is more on recruiting your admitted students away from other T14s.

Keep a weather eye on the horizon for these shifts!

7Sage Events

We’re taking a brief break from our weekly admissions classes, but these will resume in a few weeks. A reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

Our latest episode of the 7Sage Admissions Podcast dropped on Monday and featured a vibe check conversation with a current Fordham 2L about all things Ram-related. Be sure to tune in on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!