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The minor factors that can make a real impact on your admissions results.
A rising 2L was kind enough to submit this piece of advice for everyone heading to law school.
(Guest blog from someone who has been there, and scored in the upper 170s!) If you’re reading this, you’re likely sitting at your desk pondering each LSAT question that you can remember, analyzing score charts, and trying to predict the curve. As a test taker who has survived three score release waits, I’ve compiled some suggestions to help you get through this anxious time. 1. Try to relax. You worked hard to prepare for the LSAT and you gave it your best effort, you deserve to unwind no
This is a simple way to differentiate yourself, yet my experience has been that only about 1% of applicants and 5% of law students do it. But 50% of professionals do. Before I reveal it, a very quick backstory is necessary. Without this understanding, I think it is hard to genuinely “get” what I am about to say. The backstory is simply that professionals are really busy, often stressed, and at times frantic. Moreover, they know all of this. Anything tedious that requires a shred of time increas
Learn why being too nice can hurt your scholarship process and how to avoid this common mistake.
Thoughts on transferring law schools.
On insecurity in admissions.
There is nothing more difficult in the admissions process than being wait-listed. For 175+ years as a company we have seen students in law school admissions who have been admitted, wait-listed and denied, and they nearly universally express that the denial was easier than languishing on a wait-list for a drawn-out period. The irony is that just about every
Here you have it – two pieces of advice that are not only going to contradict a great deal of what you read online, but which also seem to contradict each other: 1. If you retake the LSAT your score is not likely to go up substantially or beyond the measurement of error for the first test. 2. You should likely retake the LSAT. In
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike sits down with the original LSAT cheating scandal whistleblower, who we call “Travis” in this podcast, and Dave Killoran, Founder and CEO of PowerScore. They discuss Travis' investigation process, how he tried to sound the alarm, LSAC's response, why he came to Mike and Dave, and an analysis of what happened and what's next for the future of the test.
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.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike Spivey hosts Trey Cox, co-chair of Gibson Dunn's global litigation practice group, on his legal career (4:18, 31:27), law school selection (9:20), hiring philosophies (16:42), and advice for aspiring law students and lawyers.
Trey and Mike both recommend the book Brain Rules by John Medina, which you can learn more about here.
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.
The landscape of legal recruiting in law school has changed significantly over the past 5-7 years. What should prospective law students know about what's changed so rapidly, and how has it impacted how admissions officers make their decisions? What caused these changes (11:04), how do they impact 1Ls (16:15), and what are admissions officers increasingly valuing in the application review process in response to these changing trends and practices (25:07)? How can incoming students best prepare themselves for this new world of recruiting (39:54)?
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Anna Hicks-Jaco sits down with Rob Cacace, long-time Georgetown Law career services professional and Spivey Consulting Pre-L Program Director, and Kristen Mercado, former UC Davis Law admissions dean and one of Spivey's newest consultants, to discuss these questions and more.
Here are two short documents from the National Association for Law Placement (NALP) that provide additional context for this discussion:
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.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Anna Hicks-Jaco interviews Natalie Blazer, Assistant Dean for Admissions and Chief Admissions Officer at the University of Virginia School of Law, on the upcoming 2025-2026 admissions cycle, how applicants should be thinking about and taking into account relevant current events, and advice for prospective law students preparing to submit their applications. They discuss predictions for the 2025-26 cycle (1:56), rising LSAT and GPA medians (20:22, 27:45), changes they've made to their application this year (12:30), the new student loan cap (30:26), how admissions offices are considering applicants writing about politics and protest in the current political climate (4:18), how they evaluate applicants who have been unable to get a job after graduating from college (7:36), whether writing about AI is overdone (36:34), advice for the “Why UVA” essay (13:05), and much more. As a brief disclaimer, Dean Blazer speaks for herself and often for UVA Law in this episode; her opinions do not reflect those of all admissions officers.
In addition to her work at UVA Law, Natalie has served as Director of J.D. Admissions at Georgetown University Law Center and was Associate Director of Admissions at Columbia Law School. She hosts the UVA Law podcast Admissible, which "offers insights into the world of law school admissions and a behind-the-scenes look at life as a law student through interviews with students, faculty, alumni and staff."
We've interviewed Natalie twice for Status Check before, and though we weren't able to get to all of the questions that Redditors requested we ask, we answered many of them in these past episodes:
Please note: At the time that we recorded this episode, we noted that August 2025 LSAT registrants were up 27% relative to August 2024 registrants but that that number would come down over the days of the test administration. Ultimately, August LSAT registrants landed at a 23.7% increase vs. last year.
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.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike interviews Kate Reder Sheikh, a Partner at Major, Lindsey & Africa, one of the top recruiting firms for legal hiring in the nation. Mike and Kate discuss the legal hiring market, how legal hiring may be impacted by the state of the economy in the coming months and years, what you can do to best position yourself for the employment opportunities you aspire to, and more advice and tips for law students and graduates.
Before becoming a recruiter, Kate was a litigator in San Francisco for almost a decade. She is regularly the highest performing associate recruiter at Major, Lindsey & Africa globally, and she was named a partner after 4 years with MLA, among the fastest in company history.
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.
In this episode, Mike interviews a current applicant (who we'll call "Barb") about her application process so far. Barb is a splitter with a 176 LSAT and a 3.1 GPA, and she's also a non-traditional applicant with 10+ years of full-time work experience after college. In this interview, we talk through her motivations for going to law school, her school list, the three different personal statement topics she's debating between, and more.
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Google Podcasts.
