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As of March 20, 2025, nearly 7,000 offers of admission remain at the top 100 law schools, including 2,500 from top 20 schools. While we don't have definitive data yet, these figures provide a snapshot of the cycle’s progress.
The very first LSAC Volume Summary Report of the cycle just dropped, which means we have our first applicant (and application) data for 2024-2025.
The 2022-2023 application cycle is coming to a close, and overall, it will finish with about 2% fewer applicants than the prior cycle—the lowest total number of applicants since the 2017-2018 cycle. In this blog, we look at 2023-2024.
It's certainly too early to make predictions with any sort of certainty, but given that we now have final June LSAT numbers, and registration for the August LSAT is now closed, we now have some early indicators of what we might expect to see in the 2022-2023 law school admissions cycle.
We are essentially at the midway point of the admissions cycle. Predicting part 2.
The 2020-2021 admissions cycle is going to be the most challenging yet to predict, and most will understand a large part of that uncertainty.
Early in my admissions career, a former boss of mine would often use the following Niels Bohr quote when speaking of law school admissions: “prediction is difficult, especially when it involves the future.”
This will be a short but I hope important blog to consider. It's been a notoriously slow admission cycle, and it possibly would have stayed at an equally slow pace until COVID-19 changed things in many dramatic ways.
In the past month or so, I’ve had the good fortune to speak with the Chancellors to the respective boards of two vastly different universities.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike has a conversation with Spivey Consulting's COO Anna Hicks-Jaco about what to expect during the upcoming cycle, her perspective as both a recent Dean of Admissions and relatively recent applicant, and advice for applicants getting ready to apply.
Mike and Anna mention several resources and past podcasts in this episode:
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, two experienced and respected law school Deans—Craig Boise, Dean of Syracuse University College of Law, and Daniel Rodriguez, former Dean of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law—discuss the history, the present, and the future of law school admissions and legal education. Their conversation covers a range of topics, including problems with the LSAT, the recent test-optional proposal to the ABA, the impacts that the U.S. News law school rankings have had on legal education (and their thoughts on the new methodology changes), and a new pathway to law school admissions, JD-Next.
You can find basic information on JD-Next, as well as a list of schools that have been granted variances to accept JD-Next in lieu of another admissions test (LSAT or GRE), here.
Craig Boise is the Dean of Syracuse University College of Law, where he is currently completing his final year in that role, after which he will be working with colleges, universities, and law schools as a part of Spivey Consulting Group. He is a Member of the Council of the ABA Section on Legal Education, previously served on the ABA’s Standards Review Committee and the Steering Committee of the AALS’s Deans’ Forum, and served as Dean of Cleveland-Marshall College of Law. He holds a JD from the University of Chicago Law School and an LLM in Tax from NYU School of Law.
Daniel Rodriguez is a current professor and former Dean of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law. He served as President of the Association of American Law Schools (AALS) in 2014 and served as Dean of the University of San Diego School of Law from 1998 to 2005. He holds a JD from Harvard Law School.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike discusses a question we receive often (especially lately, in light of the most recent U.S. News law school ranking methodology changes that significantly emphasized job outcomes over admissions metrics)—just how important is work experience in the law school application process?
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike gives his top 5 pieces of advice from his 20+ years working in law school admissions.
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike interviews Ellen Cassidy, author of the acclaimed Loophole in LSAT Logical Reasoning and founder of Elemental Prep, on LSAT strategies, handling expectations (both from others and self-imposed), trends in law school applicants/LSAT-takers over time, and more. Ellen, as an LSAT expert and former applicant who was admitted to Harvard Law but turned them down thrice, has a great many nuggets of wisdom to share about confidence, bad advice, mentorship, destiny, and imaginary ceilings. Listen below.
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.
In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike discusses the reasons that this law school admissions cycle will be the slowest one ever (or at least within our admissions careers)—and, perhaps more importantly, what you should do about it if you're a current applicant.
You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, and Google Podcasts.
