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International students face unique challenges in the U.S. law school admissions process. This article presents an analysis of how top law schools treat international applicants, using data from the past three cycles, and explains what's new for 2024-25!
Updated with 2025 seat deposit deadlines for all ABA-accredited law schools.
Being admitted off the waitlist is actually pretty simple—okay, not easy, but simple. There are really only three factors that law schools consider.
Submitting a LOCI is a necessary step in trying to get admitted off any waitlist—this blog will walk you through some key "dos" and "don'ts" to keep in mind while you're drafting yours.
Most applicants understand the basics of what it means to be waitlisted, but in this blog, we wanted to give a quick look at why and how law schools use their waitlists from an insider perspective, then outline the differences between a waitlist and a "hold" or a "hold tight email."
This comes from Joe Pollak, a consultant at our firm who took the time to look at schools' messaging and share his thoughts. Mike added a bit at the bottom.
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.”
The waitlist is a tough place to be. It’s better than being rejected, but usually it’s tough to tell where you stand.
It's that time of year: waitlist movement time. Many first and second deposit deadlines have passed, and schools are starting the process of finalizing their entering 2019 classes. That's good news for thousands of nervous applicants who are sitting on waitlists anxiously hoping for news. Those of you who were around in the 2017-2018 cycle remember it as a summer of disappointment. The dramatic 7.9% increase in LSAT applicants in that cycle overwhelmed many schools unprepared for such drastic
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.
In this podcast, Mike Spivey talks about the LSAT-Flex, particularly is it relates to timelines and the pace of admissions this cycle. It is important to note that LSAT scores are higher at the top bandwidths right now than one would expect in any cycle. There are several hypotheses out there for why that is.
LSAC maintains that they will organically come down to natural levels. Spivey Consulting (and others we should note) believes that we won't maintain this pace of increase, just like every cycle, but that we are already past the point where they could come down to "natural" levels barring some extremely inorganic occurrence, and that until now law schools have been trying to figure this equation out. To LSAC's credit, they have provided law schools with data that we think should now speed up the pace of admitting for the cycle — although exactly when and at what pace that happens is still impossible to predict.
You can listen to this podcast below or via SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
Please note that our reservation list for next cycle (2021-2022) is now open.
In this video, Spivey Consulting Group founder Mike Spivey answers questions from r/lawschooladmissions on strategies for splitters, international students, non-traditional applicants, reapplicants, and more.
You can also listen to the interview as a podcast on SoundCloud or Apple Podcasts.
