The Biggest Non-Negotiable Rule in Law School A...

As much as we deign to use absolutes, there is at least one principle we can think of that is absolutely non-negotiable in law school admissions. Regardless of your qualifications, breaking this rule can tank any applicant's chances—this episode of Status Check with Spivey discusses that rule.

Mike mentions our blog post predicting the 2023-2024 admissions cycle in this episode—you can read those predictions here. You can find our interview with Terry Real, which Mike also mentioned in this episode, here.

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.

Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, a little bit of everything. As we're just about to enter the new 2023-2024 law school admissions cycle, there's going to be a lot of change, and we've talked a lot about that change. We’re about to talk more about that change, but I wanted to actually focus on the singular—or maybe the most important—non-negotiable aspect to law school admissions.

So, I heard a CEO of a company recently give an analogy, which I love, which is his lighthouse analogy. So there's a story of this lighthouse and this ship, and they're out in the ocean, it's dark, and they're miles apart, and the lighthouse gets a radio message, “Change your course 30 degrees,” and the lighthouse radios back, “No, you need to change your course 30 degrees.” And then the ship radios back, “Look, we're a four-star class HMS ship, you change your course right now.” And then the lighthouse of course radios back, “We’re a lighthouse.”

So what is the lighthouse in law school admissions? And this story actually piggybacks very well off of it, this analogy. It's how you treat admissions officers. Because there's a lot of things in admissions outside of your control, a ton outside of your control. One of the reasons I like what we do is your essays, your interviews are more in your control. But the thing that's singularly always in your control is how you would treat admissions officers, the people making the decisions. And here's the amazing thing about this. For many years of my career, because I was an admissions officer, I traveled with admissions officers, and we all had nightmare stories about people who were going to be admitted, and they were rude to the front desk people of the admissions office, were rude in an email, were rude in a phone call, or they were one-uppity like that ship I just alluded to. Their numbers were high, so they were so grandiose in how they approached a school, almost like, not looking people in the eye and their head up like the person was an afterthought, rude to students, rude to faculty. I don’t know how else to say this, but we're all equal here on planet earth, right? I’ll quote Terry Real, who had a wonderful podcast on our show about self-doubt. “You're here, I'm here, congrats. We both made it, no different than anyone else.” You're going to have bad moments in the admissions process; that's true for almost everyone. Best case scenario, those bad moments might be waiting and waiting. Anna Hicks, our COO, interviewed in three parts someone going through the admissions process, and she was admitted to every school she applied to including Yale. But she had bad moments, because she was admitted later than a lot of posts that popped up early on Reddit, and of course her mind understandably registered, uh-oh, what’s going wrong? Because people are getting admitted to schools, I’m above the medians and I haven't yet, and it’s October. She ended up going something like, I don't know word for word, but she didn't get a single denial. So that's the easy part. But it's not easy while waiting. On the flip side, you might get an early admission and then four denials in a row, and that might cause you to act a little bit more with worry.

We're going to have an upcoming podcast on worry towards the school, and worry often comes out not as positive messaging to the school. And in the worst case, maybe you've been admitted to five schools but you haven't heard from two, and we've seen this. I'm not saying you, the person listening to this, because most people are extraordinarily kind, but 100%, people have done this. They start acting uppity to those two schools. “Why the wait? I'm 5 for 5 in the admissions process. What's the slow-up on your end?” Why would you ever risk something incredibly important to you? Please don't. Another analogy would be like, I never attack people online. There's no win in it. Doesn't even feel good. And now when people falsely attack me online, which happens from time to time—this is part of anyone in the professional world, it’s going to happen to a lot of people listening to this—I just don't respond. I'm like 0 for 12 in responding. So why would I respond? I mentioned Anna Hicks, our COO, I was—one day I think I was having a bad day, and I was totally faking it, and I finally was like, “You know what Anna, I'm just faking it. This is a stressful day.” But sometimes you have to fake it with admissions if you're having a bad day, because upbeat, ebullient, likeable people—believe it or not, in my 24-25 years of doing this—when things are equal, particularly on the waitlist when all the medians are locked in and a law school wants to admit someone, it's the people who have interacted and are upbeat, professional, but happy manner with the admissions office that get admitted. And now the LSAT metric has been halved as far as U.S. News weight, the GPA metric has been halved. Our best guess is—and Dean Z mentioned this in one of our two podcasts we did recently—there may be more admitting off the waitlist based on softs or based on just people who, how you interact with the law school.

So this is non-negotiable—and I’ll stop belaboring the point; I just heard that lighthouse analogy and I hit record on my phone. And it might come across as a little bit preachy, and I want you to know that obviously I have bad days, you have bad days, everyone on this planet has bad days. I'm not trying to tell anyone how to live their life or how to voice their frustrations. My point is simply this: the lighthouse in this analogy is a positive attitude, even in the thick of things when things get hectic and tense. And they do. And this is going to be a very slow cycle; our prediction blog is coming out soon. [Editor’s note: that prediction post is up now, here.]

As the cycle progresses, things are going to get tense. People are going to say things that might offend you or hurt you, and me too, for that matter. I think that it's completely fine to be yourself amongst your inner circle. It is incredibly value-added to be happy, upbeat, positive in any interaction with any law school. I hope this was helpful. This is Mike Spivey, the Spivey Consulting Group.

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March 24, 2026

Denial/Rejection in Admissions: Why It Hurts & What You Can Do About It

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike discusses the five reasons that being denied from law school hurts—and the concrete ways that you can handle it.

Mike mentions a few other podcasts and a video clip in this episode:

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.

March 5, 2026

r/LawSchoolAdmissions AMA: Waitlists, Predictions, Loan Caps, Scholarship Reconsideration, & More

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, we take questions from Reddit! Mike Spivey, Mike Burns, and Anna Hicks-Jaco discuss just how slow this cycle is (10:19) and how that might impact late-cycle applicants (6:47), why law schools place applicants on “holds” (1:23), decision timelines and how/why they vary (4:23), advice for scholarship reconsideration (11:20), whether schools rescind admits or scholarships if you ask for more money (13:31), how the new student loan caps might impact your request for scholarship reconsideration (14:00), whether you should email a school if you haven’t heard from them since you applied early in the cycle (23:44) and whether they might have forgotten about your application (24:44), predictions for next cycle (19:31) and waitlist season this cycle (15:00), the cannonball strategy of law school waitlists (25:50), how important softs are and whether “soft tiers” are admissions pseudoscience (27:48), essays about institutional injustice and how to avoid coming off overly negative in a way that could harm your chances (34:36), advice for becoming an admissions officer (37:40), and more.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.

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AI Law and Policy Expert & Duke Law Prof. Dr. Nita Farahany on Our AI-Driven Future

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike has a conversation with Dr. Nita Farahany—speaker, author, Duke Law Distinguished Professor, and the Founding Director of the Duke Initiative for Science & Society—on the future of artificial intelligence in law school, legal employment, legislation, and our day-to-day lives.

They discuss a wide range of AI-related topics, including how significantly Dr. Farahany expects AI to change our lives (10:43, 23:09), how Dr. Farahany checks for AI-generated content in her classes and her thoughts on AI detector tools (1:26, 5:46), the reason that she bans her students from using AI to help generate papers (plus, the reasons she doesn’t ascribe to) (3:41), predictions for how AI will impact legal employment in both the short term and the long term (7:26), which law students are likely to be successful vs. unsuccessful in an AI future (12:24), whether our technology is spying on us (17:04), cognitive offloading and the idea of “cognitive extinction” (18:59), how AI and technology can take away our free will (24:45) and ways to take it back (27:58), how our cognitive liberties are at stake and what we can do to reclaim them both on an individual level (30:06) and a societal level (35:53), neural implants and sensors and our screenless future (39:27), how to use AI in a way that promotes rather than diminishes critical thinking (44:43), and how much, for what purposes, and with which tools Dr. Farahany uses generative AI herself (47:27).

Among Dr. Farahany’s numerous credentials and accomplishments, she is the author of the 2023 book, The Battle for Your Brain: Defending Your Right to Think Freely in the Age of Neurotechnology; she has given two TED Talks and spoken at numerous high-profile conferences and forums; she served on the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues from 2010 to 2017; she was President of the International Neuroethics Society from 2019 to 2021; and her scholarship includes work on artificial intelligence, cognitive biometric data privacy issues, and other topics in law and technology, ethics, and neuroscience. She is the Robinson O. Everett Distinguished Professor of Law and Professor of Philosophy at Duke University, where she also earned a JD, MA, and PhD in philosophy after completing a bachelor’s degree from Dartmouth and a master’s from Harvard, both in biology.

Dr. Farahany’s Substack—featuring her interactive online AI Law & Policy and Advanced Topics in AI Law & Policy courses—is available here. The app she recommends is BePresent. The Status Check episode Mike mentions, with Dr. Judson Brewer, is here.

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The Biggest Non-Negotiable Rule in Law School Admissions

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