With summer officially upon us, law school admissions officers continue to round out their classes with a little waitlist activity, develop their applications for next year while wondering whether a SCOTUS case will upend their work, and try to sneak a little R&R into the schedule where appropriate. But while balancing the needs of the incoming class along with the upcoming admissions cycle and their need for a break, AdComms are also taking some time to work with another cohort—transfer students. Since this is a hot topic being weighed in on by leading admissions experts (and, yes, this is a shameless and naked plug for the one time this author has been quoted by U.S. News and World Report), let’s take a few minutes today to discuss this process further and to perhaps plant some seeds for students who may wish to consider this process next year.

As with most matters, the law school transfer admissions process began with one set of intentions but has since morphed into something altogether different. Back in the day, law schools had transfer admission for two main reasons. First, schools used transfer admission to fill available seats in the returning second-year class. Academic attrition was a real thing. A story I’ve personally heard from more than a few old-school lawyers is how they used to be told—at orientation!—that a quarter of their new classmates and friends would not be there after the year concluded. Law schools tend to be a bit warmer and fuzzier (and supportive!) now! Another reason was to help facilitate students who had to move locations. Ruth Bader Ginsburg famously transferred to Columbia Law from Harvard because:

- Her husband had graduated the year before from Harvard Law,
- He had gotten a job in New York City,
- And the Dean of Harvard Law refused to let Ginsburg complete her classes remotely or via a visiting student arrangement with Columbia Law.

Considering her career trajectory after this decision, it seems like she did alright!

While transfer admission still serves that function, it has also become a strategic enrollment management tool. For instance, Georgetown Law typically enrolls over 100 transfer students every year per their ABA 509 reports. Yet, GULC typically has fewer than 10 students transferring out from their 1L class and they rarely lose a student due to academic attrition. If they aren’t replacing lost students, what’s going on? Well, it’s entirely possible that they could enroll a bigger first-year class if they wanted to … but perhaps they choose not to do that. Maybe it would be more difficult to maintain a higher GPA and/or LSAT median for that bigger class. Maybe they don’t have enough scholarship budget to bring in those extra students. If true, then it would make sense to try and bring in those additional students as 2Ls instead of 1Ls. U.S. News rankings have never incorporated the undergraduate GPAs and LSATs of transfer students. Additionally, most law schools’ scholarship budgets are designed to assist with the enrollment of the incoming 1L class. It’s rare to have scholarship funding directed towards incoming transfer students—i.e., the incoming transfers will pay full tuition. All in all, it’s not a bad deal for the law schools!

This does, however, lead to the question of whether transferring is a good deal for the student. The clear-as-mud answer is “it depends.” The students for whom transferring makes the most sense are those whose career goals or personal background align better with a new school. For example, perhaps a student is currently attending a law school in California but wants to work long-term in Chicago. The job search process may be easier if they transfer to a law school with a bigger alumni network in the Windy City. Or maybe the student would really like to clerk after graduation and their current school’s career office doesn’t really have a lot of support for that professional path. Or, to use Justice Ginsburg’s example, perhaps a student’s personal circumstances make them a better fit for another school. In all of these cases, it could be worthwhile to the students in question to pay more in tuition dollars in order to find the right professional, academic, and personal fit for them.

Being able to articulate their clear and compelling reasons for transferring is also actually half of the student’s fight to be a competitive candidate. The other key ingredients are the student’s academic and professional potential. While U.S. News doesn’t count transfer students’ undergraduate GPAs nor LSATs in their rankings formula, they do consider a school’s employment outcomes (and they actually placed an even greater weight on that in their new formula this year). As such, AdComms reviewing transfer applications want to be assured that the student will do well academically and find a job after graduation. The best predictors for those matters are the student’s law school grades and their 1L summer employment plans. If a student has a solid GPA and has already lined up a nice gig by the time they submit a transfer application, they have a good shot to be competitive.

Regarding timelines, potential transfer students are going to find a wide variety of instructions from schools. While the 1L application timeline tends to be pretty uniform—apps open around September 1, decisions start rolling out in the fall and early winter, etc.—schools approach the transfer process in far different manners. Some applications open as early as February or March so that students can be considered for admission as early as May. Law schools may do this in order to be the first ones to admit the best transfer students and also to help those incoming transfer students have their best chance at on-campus interviews for the upcoming summer (because—after all—if one benefit of transferring is improved employment prospects, doesn’t it stand to reason that the law school should ensure that the incoming students maximize that possibility?). Other schools may not open their applications until May. These typically are higher-ranked law schools where the issue of maximizing incoming students’ employment prospects may not be as important as having the students’ entire 1L transcripts available for review during the admissions process.

So as a current applicant enrolling in law school this August or as a prospective student beginning to cobble together your application materials this summer, what can you do with this knowledge? First, just know that the process exists and is a viable path to your reach schools. The preferred path—of course—is via 1L admission since that also gives you the possibility of merit scholarship and being at your dream school for three years instead of just two. However, if you have T14 dreams on a T30 GPA/LSAT combo, transferring may be a more realistic path towards your eventual goal. Second, be sure to take full advantage of your 1L school’s academic and networking opportunities. Attend professorial office hours, form a study group, learn how to outline, and talk with the 2Ls and 3Ls who had your Torts prof a few years ago to learn about their quirks. Meanwhile, connect with your school’s career services and alumni offices. Don’t hesitate to reach out to alums to talk with them about your goals and to learn about what they do. This is going to be your best path towards that job between your first and second years of law school. And finally, remember that the grass isn’t always greener. If you end up with great grades and a sweet summer job because of the awesome alumni network at your school … then does it make sense to transfer? What if you also have a nice scholarship at your current school? And if your study group has become not only an academic resource but also your closest friends? And all those conversations during office hours have turned into some incredible mentoring relationships? To return to our shameless plug, law schools are receiving fewer transfer applications now because a lot of top students see the benefits of staying put. Being a bigger fish in a smaller pond can be pretty nice! So feel free to file this information away and focus on the more immediate task at hand—take full advantage of your 1L year!

For many law school applicants, the concept of a “second” deposit deadline is a bit foreign. Their only previous admissions experience was when they applied to their undergrad school. That process tends to be fairly straightforward:
- Early Decision (ED) admits have to deposit sometime in December or January.
- Regular Action or Decision (RA/RD) admits have a deadline of May 1 to deposit.
- Students admitted from a waitlist will have a week or two to make a decision. Most waitlist action happens before Memorial Day.

Law schools can be a bit more fluid with their timelines and procedures. The above note about Early Decision admits is directly analogous—law school ED admits will have to provide a deposit fairly quickly after being admitted. The real differences are for the RA/RD students. First, almost every undergrad school will issue all decisions—admit, waitlist, and deny—prior to their deposit deadline. Meanwhile for law school, there are some students reading this post who no doubt applied to schools before Thanksgiving and are still waiting to hear back. Sigh. Further, whereas undergrad schools have a universal deposit deadline of May 1, law schools are instead directed by the LSAC Statement of Good Admission Practices to have deposit deadlines no earlier than April 1. That opens the door to the variation we see between initial deposit deadlines of April 1, April 15, and May 1.

Adding additional fuel to matters are some factors that are completely out of admissions officers’ control. First—and from my professional experience—high school students considering their college options tend to have a) more thoroughly researched their possible options and b) received more guidance from advisors such as parents, siblings, teachers, and counselors about their college decision than law applicants have. Most law applicants are on their own with the decision-making process. While that’s certainly personally empowering, it can also be paralyzing. Additionally, double-depositing is far more common for law school admissions than undergrad admissions. In the world of undergrad admissions, it’s expected that students will only hold one deposit at a time. In the world of law admissions, that practice is a bit more common mostly because students want more time to consider their final decision.

So to recap:
- On the law school end, there’s more unpredictability when schools may issue decisions and greater variety in deposit deadlines.
- On the student end, more students are making decisions on their own and are willing to double-deposit in order to buy themselves more time to make a final decision (and—in fairness—may still be waiting for schools just to issue an initial decision).

Basically, it’s a standoff where everyone is waiting for everyone else to make their final decisions throughout April and May. Here’s a dramatic reenactment of the process. A school’s second deposit deadline serves the same purposes as Clint Eastwood’s revolver—in less dramatic fashion!—to help clarify matters.

Most schools treat their second deposit deadline as “binding.” They will include explicit language in their deposit form indicating that they expect that students will no longer maintain an active deposit with another school, nor will deposit at another school. While there’s no longer an overlap report that helps schools identify students, most students treat this process seriously and make a final decision. Heck, the students want to get moving on things, too! There are apartments to rent, potential roommates to vet, and moving trucks to reserve and each of those processes takes time to complete.

What does this then mean for students in this year’s admissions cycle? Now that students who were double- (or triple-, or quadruple-) deposited have made a final choice, we may now see another burst of waitlist admission activity as schools assess available seats and the statistical/demographic profile of the deposited class. If you are still on the waitlist at your top choice, now could be a good time to send a “nudge” email reiterating your interest and reminding the admissions office that you would be happy to attend if extended an offer. Keep an eye on the r/LSA board and lawschooldata to see if there’s any movement and—if so—what statistical profiles the admitted students tended to have.

As an FYI, this will likely be the final burst of waitlist activity. Further seats may become available over the summer but that tends to happen due to individual circumstances (e.g., a deposited student is admitted off the waitlist elsewhere; another student has a medical emergency and decides to postpone a year, etc.) rather than from mass movement.

Because there doesn’t tend to be as much waitlist movement after this date, this is also a fairly common time for admissions offices to hand over communications with the deposited students to whichever law school office or officer handles 1L orientation. AdComms may still send out some messages to the incoming students, but more messages may come from Student Services, Career Development, and/or Academic Deans. As a deposited student, it’s now time to think of yourself as an “incoming 1L,” start learning the names of the key people in your law school’s administration, and start logging in to your new school email address.

When AdComms pass the baton for the deposited students to other offices, it is partly with the intention to help those students transition to their law school but partly to clear mental space and professional bandwidth to start planning for the upcoming admissions cycle. So too will we start to pivot this blog a little away from this year’s admissions cycle and more towards the upcoming cycle. While certain events may arise that could be of interest for incoming 1Ls (like a certain Supreme Court case we’re all keeping an eye on), you’ll likely be more interested in memorizing the best coffee shops nearest to your law school. We wish you all the best and remind you to balance your studies with breaks to recharge your physical, mental, and emotional health. Go make some friends and learn a new hobby! Be kind to yourself and to others! And for the law applicants for this upcoming cycle who have been reading these articles and wondering “What in the world is an AdComm?!” we’ll be pivoting more towards introductory measures to get you ready for the upcoming cycle and keep you abreast of news as it arises. Get ready!

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Akin to that moment when students realize that their teachers have lives outside of the classroom, aspiring law students are sometimes shocked to discover that LSAC is a multifaceted organization. While its flagship service is the LSAT, it also serves a few other important functions in the law school admissions community. For example, LSAC develops, provides, and maintains the CRM system that most law schools use for creating/hosting their applications and for reaching out to prospective/admitted students. LSAC organizes the biggest and most well-attended law fairs in each cycle. Additionally—and germane to our conversation today—LSAC is the main professional organization for law school admissions officers. LSAC has many committees that meet to discuss various aspects of the admissions process and provide guidance to both applicants and admissions officers. For example, there’s the Misconduct and Irregularities Committee that considers cases where applicants may—maaaaaaaaaaaaay—have misrepresented themselves on their application. There’s the committee that regularly reviews and updates the LSAC Statement of Good Admission Practices which is supposedly the unifying professional code for law admissions officers, but is also a bit like the Pirate Code in that it’s more like “guidelines” than actual rules. They also organize the biggest professional conference in the law admissions world—the LSAC Annual Meeting.

The Annual Meeting (sometimes referred to just as “LSAC” as in “Where’s ‘LSAC’ this year? Hopefully somewhere warm!”) is always the week following Memorial Day. LSAC chooses this date because it falls into a relatively quiet period for admissions offices—the craziness from initial deposit deadlines has abated, schools have gone to their first few waves of waitlist admits, they’re starting to analyze what happened this year and look ahead to next year, etc. Since it’s a great professional development and networking opportunity, most admissions officers attend.

Although that’s all well and good to know that admissions officers will be hanging out in San Diego for a few days, what can you do with this information?

First, now is not the ideal time to send a LOCI or to contact an admissions office looking for some answers for your pressing questions. AdComms may have a few minutes here and there to reply to some emails but their attention is going to be elsewhere through the end of the week. Moreover and related to LOCIs and waitlist activity, it’s likely going to be a quiet week on that front. Admissions officers will still track data while at the Annual Meeting (and nothing is as funny as opening your laptop during a lull in a session to check out some stat regarding your incoming class … only to look up and see a sea of laptops with similar information from every other school staring back at you) but it’s difficult to make decisions remotely and it’s impossible to do technical aspects such as “signing an admit letter” if you’re out of the office.

Second—and really only relevant for the true law admissions aficionados out there of which I am sure there are many

—is that it can be useful to take a glance at the agenda. This can give the reader a good sense for the pulse of the profession and what topics are weighing on The Collective’s mind. For example, there are going to be a keynote session and a smaller session on the upcoming SCOTUS decisions regarding affirmative action at Harvard and the University of North Carolina—clearly, this is going to be something AdComms care about a great deal! But there are also sessions on more mundane topics like AI/ChatGPT, outreach methods to different constituent groups, and forecasting upcoming enrollment trends. And there are also sessions about mental health, managing an office, and setting work/life balances in our Zoom World—professional conferences can also be about personal development!

(They can also be about fun, which is a hard segue into providing a link to a TED Talk from one of the most memorable speakers at an LSAC Annual Meeting in the past 10 years. He gave a similar presentation at the Annual Meeting and the room almost melted down. Don’t tell me that magic doesn’t exist because I’ve seen this man do it!)

So take a similar break from law admissions updates this week, enjoy the weather, and—in solidarity with your admissions brethren—go do a crossword puzzle or two while pondering upcoming Supreme Court cases.

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While it may not seem like it if you have not yet heard from a school where you are on the waitlist, there has already been a fair bit of activity from a number of schools so far this year. Additionally, this actually stands in stark contrast to the past two years. The story of the 2021 and 2022 admissions cycles was that schools unexpectedly hit their enrollment targets while admitting fewer students. Both years had quiet waitlist activity. This year, by contrast, it seems like schools admitted even fewer students through the regular admissions process but are now able to control enrollment via their waitlists.

The best way to get a sense of these larger trends is to follow the Law School Admissions sub-Reddit and lawschooldata.org. While acknowledging that both websites may have seemingly misleading and/or extraneous information at the micro-level (although who doesn’t enjoy a good Reddit cafeteria fight about rankings?), they are very useful for macro-level information. For the sub-Reddit, you can scan the headlines to see students discussing waitlist outreach and offers. The key is to then see if they mention their stats in either the post or their flair. While specific numbers are best, even ballparks are useful. For example, this post regarding an offer of admission from the Northwestern waitlist mentions the student’s stats in the flair—“3.sad/17happy.” Without debating the specific lines between:

3.despondant
3.sad
3.satisfied
3.happy

it suffices to say that the user is likely below Northwestern’s historic medians in the range of 3.85-3.90. Meanwhile, we don’t really need to know the specific LSAT because Northwestern’s median last year was a 171. It’s safe to assume that “happy” has a benchmark of at least that number.

But if we would like to dive further into Northwestern’s possible waitlist activity and to cross-reference what we’re reading on Reddit, we can go over to lawschooldata. We can see a few things immediately on Northwestern’s profile. First, let’s isolate the admits on the LSAT vs. GPA chart.

If we know that Northwestern’s medians last year were a 3.89 GPA and 171 LSAT, we can look at this chart and reasonably argue that they were aiming for similar stats again this year. While we see a more profound LSAT “wall” at the 172 LSAT on the x-axis, there are enough 171s with sub-3.90 GPAs who were admitted that it wouldn’t be surprising if either LSAT mark was the target.

So, let’s now peek at the “School applicants” section below, sort by the “Decision” date column, and see if Northwestern has been up to anything recently:

This is a pretty rich hunk of data and confirms a few things:
- Northwestern has been actively admitting students from their waitlist.
- They seem to be targeting at least a 172 LSAT and a 3.90+ GPA. Why? Because we don’t see anyone receiving an offer of admission who doesn’t have at least one of those two stats. We have that one student with a 171 in the first row and—if our screenshot was just a little deeper—we would see a few candidates with 171 LSATs who were waitlisted just two weeks ago. If Northwestern was targeting a 171 instead of a 172, it stands to reason that at least one of those applicants could have been admitted.
- Given these statistical parameters, splitters are fair game. For instance, maybe our Reddit poster is the proud owner of that 3.3 (i.e., 3.sad) and 178 (i.e., 17happy).
- Meanwhile, the students just short of both those figures are probably out of luck.

So if you are still on the waitlist at a school, this can give you some sense of your chances:
1) Is the school actively admitting students?
2) If so, what are their statistical profiles?

If the answers are “Yes!” and “Stats like mine—I’m also 17happy!”, then it could be a good time to reach back out to the school’s admissions office to reiterate your interest. However, if the answers are “No…” and/or “My stats are a little more towards the southwestern end of that chart…,” it may be time to turn the page mentally. In the case of Northwestern, it seems unlikely that they will reach out to students with a 3.75 and 170 no matter how good the applicant’s résumé is or how deeply interested the student is in attending. This can be a tough pill to swallow. But after a well-deserved scream or cry, it can be a good opportunity to follow the best advice anyone has ever given on the r/LSA board—go get some ice cream. While you’re cooling down, think again about all the high points of the admissions process like the schools where you were admitted and the place where you’re deposited. An exciting chapter of your life is about to begin! This is cool! Or, if you didn’t receive any offers of admission or any offers of admission that you could act upon, consider your game plan for the coming year. Think about how awesome it will be a year from now when you get to have celebratory or revenge ice cream and how those are totally your favorite flavors! Your life will be a long journey and it’s alright if it has to take a few more twists and turns before it gets to where you’d like it to go—i.e., tossing that cap at graduation in a few years.

As the academic year comes to a close, AdComms are solidly in the Tom Petty Zone with their incoming classes.

Admissions offices are caught in limbo while waiting for a few key events to happen.

First—and speaking of final exams—AdComms are waiting to receive final transcripts from their incoming students who are graduating from college. At most schools, it’s not odd for this population to exceed 50% of the 1L class. That represents a potential source of chaos regarding a school’s GPA median. Let’s say we’re back at the Random State University Law Center (Go Fightin’ Randos!). RSULC may have 200 deposited students and is hoping for an enrolling class of 210. They know that they need to admit students from the waitlist. Let’s say that they’ve hit their GPA target but they’re a little low on their LSAT. That would seem to indicate that they should primarily focus their waitlist activity on high-LSAT students. But what if all the students at their GPA median are graduating seniors? Their GPAs aren’t locked in yet. If they all caught Senioritis during their final semester, that could drag RSULC’s GPA down. It would be prudent for the AdComms to keep an eye on that stat while admitting those high-LSAT students from the waitlist and to strongly encourage their deposited students to be sure to submit their final transcripts (showing degree granted and date conferred—let’s be sure that everything is officially official!) as soon as those documents are available.

And speaking of waitlist activity, admissions officers are waiting for melt to happen. “Melt” is an admissions term that refers to losing deposited students between your deposit deadline and orientation. Since you lose those students over the spring and summer as the temperature rises, one can think of the students as “melting away.” The majority of melt happens between a school’s first and second deposit deadlines. The most popular dates for first deposit deadlines are April 1, April 15, and April 30/May 1; for the second deposit deadline, those dates are June 1 and June 15. During that period, schools tend to lose students for a few main reasons: because of waitlist activity elsewhere, or because of initial admission activity elsewhere (i.e., that school that’s being slow issuing decisions finally made an offer of admission in May to a student who applied in November and hadn’t heard anything in the meantime), and if a student had been double-deposited the entire time and finally chose to attend the other institution. But there also can be melt due to family or personal circumstances—perhaps a student’s family situation has changed or maybe a new matter has arisen that has led the student to request a deferral in their enrollment. Speaking from my own professional experience, I twice lost deposited students because they won their state’s competition for Miss America. Weird stuff can happen!

Melt is a constant presence for AdComms, almost like a force of nature. And much like storms, AdComms can know the conditions when it generally happens, but it can be hard to accurately predict how things will break for a particular year. For example, a lot of the initial chatter regarding T14 waitlist activity on the Law School Admissions sub-Reddit appears to be focused on students with high GPAs. In the recent past, it was more usual for schools to focus their initial waitlist activity on high-LSAT students. This is important for schools that are “downstream” of the T14.

Let’s go back to RSULC’s admissions office for a moment. They have those 200 deposits and are trying to boost their LSAT by admitting students from their waitlist to get to 210 deposits. They have data from past years that shows that the majority of their melt tends to occur in May as the schools ranked above them go to their waitlists. This data also shows that the melt tends to be concentrated on high-LSAT students. As such, they may conclude that they will have to admit a lot of high-LSAT students to hit their targets—some students to increase their enrollment, some just to replace the students that they’re confident they are about to lose. The RSULC admissions staff is confident that they’re about to go for a run on the Admissions Hamster Wheel of Doom. But little do they know that the T14 is focusing instead on high-GPA students. This may actually help RSULC out—every high-GPA/low-LSAT splitter they melt to the T14, that gets them one step closer to hitting their LSAT targets.

Finally, admissions officers are waiting to wrap up this admissions cycle and start planning in full for the next one. It can be challenging to make strategic plans for the future if the dust hasn’t fully settled in the present. There are some tasks that the admissions staff can start checking off now—running preliminary stats on this past year, beginning to update applications and publications, planning the dates for next year’s admitted student open houses, etc. They are also evaluating the new U.S. News rankings formula and having initial conversations about what—if anything—they should do to adjust for that factor in the coming cycle. But there’s only so much AdComms can do until the second deposit deadline passes and their enrolling classes come into better focus.

So what can you do about this as an applicant? Well, if you’re solidly deposited at a school and know your plans for the upcoming year, you can extend a measure of sympathy to your fellow human beings in the admissions office—it’s good to generate positive karma for the universe. If you’re still on the waitlist for various schools and you sent in a LOCI a few weeks ago, now could be a good time for a check-in message. It doesn’t have to be as elaborate as the LOCI (and if your reaction to reading this is “…what if I didn’t send in a LOCI…?”, you can read up on those documents in our admissions course here). Rather, this is just a brief message to update the admissions office that you remain highly interested in attending. If you are one of those graduating seniors and you have your final grades, you can inform the AdComms of those marks and that you are sending an updated official transcript to LSAC in the near future. Then go back to making plans for the upcoming year at the school where you are presently deposited and join your admissions brethren as everyone waits for shoes to drop, dust to settle, and the chickens to come home to roost.

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If you need a recap on the long and winding road that brought us to this point, we applaud your ability to block out all this noise and we also offer the following stripped-down timeline:

- Yale Law announced in November that they would no longer provide USNWR with the internal information the publication historically relied on for a substantial part of its formula. Many schools followed suit for a variety of reasons. The one that hit nearest to our hearts was from Dean Mark West of Michigan Law who wrote that, among other reasons, they would no longer send information to USNWR because “The staff time required to prepare our submission … comes at a cost—both financial and of opportunity—that no public institution should shoulder in the service of a revenue-generating third-party endeavor.” To which every law school admin who ever spent hours upon days compiling, checking, double-checking, and submitting data to USNWR said in firm and enraptured reply: “PREACH!”

- In the ensuing months, USNWR said that they would make changes to their formula to accommodate the reality that not all schools submitted their internal information this year. Rather, the publication would rely only on publicly available information via the American Bar Association as well as the evaluation surveys that USNWR sends every year to law school deans, judges, and lawyers.
- Everyone expected that we would see the published rankings at their normal release date of mid-March. But instead of releasing the rankings at that time, USNWR announced that they would publish them on April 18.
- On April 11, USNWR published a preview of the new T14 on their website. They also provided each law school with information about the new formula for this year as well as their embargoed rankings. And this is when things really took a turn….
- Law schools—en masse—replied to their copy of the rankings by pointing out apparent data errors. On April 21, USNWR took down their preliminary T14 and issued a statement that they were dealing with “an unprecedented number of inquiries” from schools about the embargoed data and would update us all when they had their house in order.
- This Monday (May 8), USNWR told law schools that they would release the rankings this Thursday (May 11). Apparently the house is cleaned up and ready to host everyone.

Since we are writing this on Tuesday for publication on Thursday, goodness knows what further plot twists we’ll have in the next 48 hours!

But let’s put the drama aside and focus on how this affects students. To put it mildly—it really shouldn’t. You should choose a school because it’s the right fit for your academic, financial, professional, and personal needs.

Academically, the law school has the classes, experiential opportunities, and instructional environment to suit your needs.

Financially, the law school has provided you with an aid package that matches both your short-term requirements (i.e., how you are going to pay your bills for the coming three years) and long-term plans (i.e., you can probably take on more loan debt in the short-term if you know that you’ll be pursuing a higher-paid profession in the long-term).

Professionally, the law school has the resources in career development and the kind of alumni network to help you find summer and post-grad employment in your preferred geographic market.

And personally, the law school community just feels right and it will be a comfortable place to study in the coming three years.

Wild fluctuations in the rankings won’t change any of those factors. Further—to go out on a limb—USNWR rankings never influenced any of those matters other than maybe financial aid. For example, students have never needed USNWR to get a sense of employment outcomes because every school’s employment data is readily available through the American Bar Association’s website for required disclosures. Rankings can’t tell you if a school can help you get a job in your preferred geographic market, but the ABA’s information sure can. The rankings can’t accurately capture a school’s academic offerings and how it will fit your needs, but visiting the school, attending information sessions from the admissions office, and networking with both current students and alums would address this concern. And regarding the brief aside about rankings possibly affecting financial aid, it is possible that a school that rises in the rankings will feel less need to provide merit scholarship (because they may be a more desirable school for admitted students) and the school that falls may be compelled to offer more merit scholarship (so as to recruit students who may be more likely to attend a higher-ranked school). But such changes would—at best—be marginal. So as we wrote back in March, our suggestion is “don’t be that student who chooses School A over School B just because the former passed the latter in the rankings—there’s no there there!”

And to put this into a real-life scenario, let’s say that you want to work in a market like New Orleans, Philadelphia, Indianapolis, or Phoenix. Hiring managers at firms in those markets likely attended schools like Tulane, Temple, Villanova, IU Bloomington, Arizona, and Arizona State. For the hiring managers, whether those schools rise or fall in the rankings only matters for bragging rights and conversation fodder during interviews. It won’t affect whether the firms will recruit at those schools—they always will.

So tune in on Thursday when—and maybe still if—USNWR finally publishes this year’s rankings. Pump your fist in celebration if the school where you’re deposited goes up, roll your eyes in annoyance if the school goes down. Give yourself a minute to feel your feelings. But after that minute passes, go back to the real work for the coming year like finding an apartment for August and writing your letters of continued interest.

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It may first be useful to know that LSAC provides tons of information to law schools. A treasure trove. A real dragon’s-hoard level of material including LSAT test-taking trends, geographic breakdowns of which regions students are applying from and which regions students are applying to, breakdowns of applicants by race/ethnicity and gender, and so on. LSAC actually provides a glimpse of this via the Research Library page of their website. Of particular utility to applicants are the Current Volume Summaries. For example, a student with a 169 LSAT who is applying to schools with 170 medians would be able to see that applications in the 170+ range were pretty flat this year—maybe the student then decides to apply to a few more schools with medians at or below a 169 just to hedge their bets a bit.

LSAC not only provides information to schools, it also receives a lot of information from schools. The most prominent of the data exchanges in the latter direction are LSAT/GPA correlation studies. LSAC and law schools continually analyze the predictive validity of both the LSAT and undergraduate GPAs. At the end of each academic year, schools will send LSAC a roster with the names and law GPAs of the students who just completed their 1L year. LSAC then studies that information and reports back to each school about how predictive the LSAT (both a student’s highest score as well as their average school), the undergraduate GPA, and the combination of those two stats are for that particular school. This is super helpful information for schools that are less concerned about how their stats may affect their rank and more concerned with enrolling students who are most likely to pass the bar exam in a few years’ time.

But this isn’t the only information schools send to LSAC in April and May—they also send information about their deposited students for the purposes of the Commitment Overlap Report.

The origins of the Overlap Report come from a good place. Schools found that some students would hold multiple deposits through the summer and then cancel just before orientation (and that was if those multi-deposited students were being polite; some would just be no-shows at orientation and then ghost the AdComms who were trying to figure out if the student was late in arriving, attending another school, or dead and—in this case—a literal ghost). So, LSAC developed two overlap reports. LSAC gave law schools the option to participate in the data collection process. Most chose to participate, but that strategy changed over time and we’ll explain why below.

The first report was available beginning in early April. Schools would report their deposits to LSAC, and LSAC would then tell the school:
- How many of their deposited students were deposited just at their school.
- How many were deposited at multiple schools.
- The names of the other law schools in question.

In last week’s update, we spent some time with the admissions office at the Random State University Law School—Go Fightin’ Randos! Let’s return to that august institution for a moment and say that they just ran this report on LSAC’s website. They may find the following:
- They have 200 deposits at the moment.
- Of those 200 students, 180 are deposited only at RSULS.
- 10 students are also deposited at one other school.
- Five students are also deposited at two other schools.
- The final five students are also deposited at three+ other schools.

Further, the RSULS admissions team would have a roster of the other law schools in question. They would know that of those 20 students holding multiple deposits:
- 10 are also deposited at schools ranked far higher than RSULS.
- Eight are also deposited at another local school that’s ranked a little lower than RSULS.
- The remaining two—for reasons unknown to gods or men—are deposited at lower-ranked schools far away from RSULS’s location and with which RSULS never competes for admitted students.

In this scenario, the RSULS admissions team would probably conclude that the majority of the 10 deposited at higher-ranked schools are going to choose that other school—that’s just how it goes. But the reverse is also true about the eight deposited at RSULS’s local rival—RSULS will probably keep the majority of those students. And those other two? Goodness knows because they seem like wild cards. Put this all together, and that probably means that RSULS can expect to lose around 10 deposits in the near future and that they should plan accordingly for some waitlist activity.

That was the first overlap report and it still exists. Schools use it to this day. The second overlap report no longer exists. This was the version of the overlap report that included students’ names.

Before we describe this report too much, we want to emphasize that last point so that we alleviate any spikes in blood pressure—this second report no longer exists. LSAC stopped providing this report to schools around five years ago as part of a broader consent agreement between the organization and various groups who were concerned with privacy and possible antitrust measures. Say it out loud a few times—“This doesn’t exist anymore, this doesn’t exist anymore, this doesn’t exist anymore!”

But now let’s talk about how crazy that report was.

The second overlap report was available beginning on May 15^th. It would not only provide the information noted on the first report, it would also list students’ names and the other schools where they were presently deposited. It was a wild time! In an ideal world, schools could use this information to contact the students in question and have a polite/professional conversation about the student’s plans. And that’s mostly what happened. But some other shenanigans would occasionally ensue.

For example, recall above how I noted that not every school would participate in the overlap reports. Why is that? Well, let’s go back to our hypothetical with RSULS. There are those eight students who are also deposited at a nearby school that’s lower-ranked. Let’s say that the rankings gap is significant enough that the majority of students admitted to both schools would choose to attend RSULS. RSULS knows this because—what are the odds?—this is another report that LSAC provides to schools. Now, let’s say—completely hypothetically—the RSULS admissions team had to admit a few students from their waitlist. They want to make sure the students have the right LSAT and/or the right GPA, but they also want students who would be most likely to enroll. And now let’s say it’s a bit later in the summer—perhaps July—when most incoming law students have already made housing plans for the coming year. It becomes a lot more challenging to enroll students from the waitlist when they have already made living arrangements elsewhere.

But what if they haven’t made living arrangements elsewhere but have made them in your market because the students are presently deposited at that lower-ranked local rival…?

Wouldn’t it be amazing to know exactly which students were deposited at your local rival…?

All you would have to do is accidentally switch a few decisions on students’ files from “Waitlist” to “Deposited” and—voila!—you have your own personalized shopping list of preferred waitlist candidates to reach out to….

We’ll stop our completely hypothetical situation here because surely no school would ever be so diabolical as to engage in such practices … but we’ll let your imaginations run wild. Suffice to say, this is why the second, or third, or fourth highest-ranked law school in various markets would not participate in the second overlap report.

So to recap—if you presently hold multiple deposits, do you need to worry that law schools will receive a roster with your name on it and the schools where you are deposited? No. That report no longer exists so you’re in the clear! On the other hand, let’s say that a school reaches out to you about a possible offer from their waitlist. It’s common for them to ask about your present deposit status. You may tell them that you’re deposited at RSULS. If they admit you and if you deposit at their school, they’ll likely run their overlap report the next day and see that they have a new overlap with RSULS—they will know that’s you. They’ll expect that you’ll contact RSULS Admissions within the day to cancel your deposit with them. And if you don’t cancel with RSULS, the other school will see that RSULS hasn’t disappeared from their overlap report … and they may get suspicious … and they may reach out to you to remind you politely that you need to cancel that other deposit. No problem at all and worse fates have happened—like being the Director of Admissions at RSULS’s local rival during the era when the second overlap report existed.

As we referenced in last week’s admissions update, this is the time of year when most AdComms are letting dust settle from their deposit deadline and are evaluating what moves to make next. Additionally, April 30/May 1 is the last big initial deadline for deposits (this date is most popular among the T14). As such—after months of us all collectively advising students to patiently wait to contact schools where they’ve been waitlisted—we’ve now reached the moment to send in your letters of continued interest (LOCIs). It’s go time! So, let’s take a few minutes today to review some basic materials about how waitlists typically operate and then give you a few pointers about LOCIs.

The first question AdComms ask at the beginning of the waitlist process is the most basic—do we have available seats? If the answer is “no,” then everything else after this paragraph is a moot point.

(As a brief aside, most admissions offices build their admission models with the hope of having to admit students from their waitlist. This is because the Nuclear Scenario for schools isn’t having to admit students from their waitlist … it’s exceeding their deposit goals so significantly that they may not have enough chairs in enough classrooms to host the incoming class. That’s a subject worthy of discussion for another day—probably when we can sit around a campfire and tell scary stories that will send shivers down admissions officers’ spines.)

If there are available seats, the next question is—are there any specific needs to address from the waitlist? AdComms will assess how stable their medians are, the gender balance in their class, the percentage of in-state versus out-of-state students, diversity, and more. If there is an area that’s a little low, that will then become a priority for waitlist admission.

The last question is financial—do we have any scholarship budget to work with? And if the answer is “yes,” AdComms will have to determine what to do with it. They could use it to help enroll students from the waitlist. They could also use it to help keep the presently deposited students from leaving for other schools.

With these questions addressed, schools can then examine their roster of waitlisted students and start to home in on possible candidates for admission. For instance, let’s create a hypothetical school—the Random State University Law School, home of the Fightin’ Randos. Maybe their admissions team analyzes their situation and sees the following:
- They are about 10 students under their target enrollment number. Additionally, they usually lose 20 deposits over the summer due to waitlist activity at other schools. So they have 10 seats open now, but are likely to have around 30 open before orientation.
- They have hit their LSAT median and have a large buffer of students to protect against losing that stat.
- They’re a little below their GPA target, but can get there with 10 more high-GPA students.
- Their gender balance looks good and diversity looks about the same as usual.
- They’re a little low on in-state students but nothing drastic. Plus, they’re more apt to lose out-of-state students to waitlist activity elsewhere.
- They have a little bit of scholarship money left over. Given their numbers, they believe it’s better to focus on helping recruit admits from the waitlist rather than worrying about their present deposits.

In this situation, the admissions office would then look at their roster of waitlisted students with an eye towards those who have a high GPA. There could be a slight secondary preference for in-state students to help address that number. Given the scholarship budget, they can maybe give admitted students a little money but perhaps not as much as they would have granted before. So perhaps now is not the time to admit students who are high-need (because if you can’t give them the scholarship they would require in order to attend, does it make sense to admit them in the first place?). Out-of-state students who are LSAT splitters would—in this scenario—be out of luck and their dreams of being a Fightin’ Rando would be dashed … but perhaps the Theoretical University Law Center needs some high LSATs from the waitlist, so there’s a good chance that the LSAT splitters could be a Stormin’ ’Retical at orientation time.

What can make waitlist a bit of a ride is that various factors can shift over time. Let’s return to the Random State admissions office. They started admitting high-GPA students in early May, but they then lost a number of high-LSAT female students due to waitlist activity elsewhere in mid-June. This may help them in some ways and hurt them in others. For the former, perhaps some of the high-LSAT students were actually LSAT splitters. That means that losing them helps out the median GPA of the incoming class—yay! However, because all those students were women, the gender balance for the incoming class is all out of whack—boo! So now the admissions office may introduce an emphasis on admitting female students from the waitlist.

We can follow these ebbs and flows through the Law School Admissions sub-Reddit as well as lawschooldata.org. If you start seeing students update their information with admit offers from the waitlist, pay attention to their stats and profile. Look for patterns. Given that you’re a future lawyer and are pretty bright, you’ll figure things out quickly!

You’ll note that these above scenarios don’t mention LOCIs. A LOCI can’t change what a school does or does not need. It can’t affect whether or not a school has open seats, it doesn’t change what stats or demographics the school is lacking, and it can’t change you. A LOCI is not—unfortunately—a magic bullet. It is—ideally—a conversation starter and/or a deal sealer if your profile matches what a school needs at that moment. And on that note, let’s transition from “how most schools use the waitlist” to “what can you do with that LOCI” (a topic we also cover in our admissions course).

The goal of a LOCI should be to provide updates to a school and to inform the school of your interest in them. You want the AdComms to know that you would still be highly interested in attending if they decided to admit you. Why is this important? Because Random State may have many GPA splitters to choose from and—all things being equal—they would like to use their time efficiently to admit students who actually want to attend. That’s your audience and that’s the song they want to hear! So if that’s the track you’re going to play, let’s give you some nice guitar riffs to work on.

Regarding updates:
- If you’re a current senior or graduate student, you can update the admissions committee on your academic year. If you haven’t sent a transcript to LSAC since when you applied in September, now is a good time to send them a new document. LSAC will recalculate your GPA and issue updates to all the schools you’ve applied to.
- You can also update schools on your résumé. For current students approaching graduation, maybe that includes academic honors or awards. For non-students, this could be a new job or maybe something new that you’ve picked up at work.

Regarding your interest:

- If you didn’t submit a “Why School X” statement when you applied, now is the time to do it. What about this school makes it a good fit for you? The most mentioned items of note are academic offerings, experiential opportunities, and career outcomes. Do they have the classes you need, the experiential opportunities you want, and access to your preferred post-grad job markets? If yes, yes, and yes, then tell the school that!
- It’s also alright to mention any personal reasons you may have for being interested in the school. Family connections, a mentor who is an alum and who recommended that you applied, undergrad friends who are current 1Ls, etc. Don’t be shy—now is the time to say it!
- Have you done more research on the school since you applied? Attended an information session or spoke with current students or alums? If you have, weave that information into your LOCI.
- The most important thing you can convey to a school is that you will accept an offer of admission. If the Random State admissions team is trying to figure out the 10 high-GPA students most likely to attend, you want to raise your virtual hand and directly say, “That’s me!”

Finally—a quick note on timing. The best time to send a LOCI is just after a school’s deposit deadline. This is the prime time for most schools to begin reviewing waitlisted students. By sending your LOCI in now, you can ensure that your information is up-to-date if/when the AdComms get to your file. After sending in this letter, consider sending in brief check-in messages every three to four weeks just to reiterate your continued interest.

And at this point, we’d offer one last piece of advice—you’ve done about all you can do! If you can’t control if your dream school has seats available off the waitlist and if you can’t control what stats/demographics they may need if said seats become available, you’re really left with just two options. The first is to rage against the injustices of the world and this injustice most importantly of all! Forget about wars and famines and global warming because that’s nothing compared to this! Sob!

As emotionally cathartic as it may be to work through all of that, that’s not really going to be a productive use of your time. But you know what could be? Apartment hunting at the school where you’re presently deposited. Connecting with your potential incoming classmates. Networking with the alums so that you start getting your name out there for possible summer jobs after 1L year. And this brings us to your second option—worrying about the things that you can control. Right now, you can control your preparations for the school where you’re presently deposited. This can be one of the most exciting times of your life—New friends! New city! New opportunities!—if you allow yourself the chance to dive into that process. Be kind to yourself and enjoy this moment. And, if nothing else, remind yourself that you’re 90% of the way through the admissions cycle and you deserve a little break from the craziness!

As everyone’s enjoyment of blossoming trees and flowers is balanced by a hurricane of pollen, admissions officers are spending this week caring greatly about a different kind of fine particle matter—the dust that is continuing to settle from the deposit deadlines that just passed. Students who are on the waitlist or who received a “hold tight” email are eagerly waiting for any updates on possible offers of admission and can often be surprised at how long it can take for AdComms to start making moves. So let’s spend a little time this week discussing the variety of situations that admissions officers are juggling at the moment that can make it challenging for them to definitively answer the seemingly simple question “… um, so are you going to admit anyone else…?”

As AdComms look at their roster of deposited students after the deposit deadline, they know that there’s a core of students in that roster who will be at the first day of orientation in the fall. But AdComms also understand that there’s going to be some shifting around the margins of that group. The problem is that no one knows who exactly those students will be. Will it be your high-LSAT students? Maybe a chunk of your out-of-state students who are bringing in higher tuition? To borrow a phrase, AdComms have known unknowns and unknown unknowns at this stage.

The Known Knowns – Your solid deposits.

Let’s start with the easiest group! These are the students that you feel completely certain are going to be there at orientation short of a significant issue arising. This could include your:

Early decision admits. A typical condition of an early decision admit offer is to ask the student to withdraw all pending apps to other law schools.

Deferrals from last year. Ditto the above note. Asking deferred students not to apply to other law schools is a normal request.

Your fish in a barrel. These students represent your school’s core demographic—they make sense for you and you make sense for them. It’s a beautifully-mutually-beneficially symbiotic relationship! Examples would include in-state students, students whose stats are right around your usual medians, students who are alums of your university (since alums usually have warm, fuzzy feelings for their alma maters), and students who share some other demographic trait that makes sense for you (e.g., the student who is of the same faith as a religiously affiliated school). As an AdComm, you can point to this roster and say, “These are our people.” You may lose a few of them to waitlist activity at other schools or to some sort of emergency situation down the road, but it won’t be more than a handful.

The Known Unknowns – The students who have identified themselves as wildcards.

Either through email or conversation, these are the students who you know would like to deposit at your school … there’s just something preventing them from depositing right now. But the key is that you can easily identify them as a group. This can include:

Late admits. Perhaps you’re a school with a deposit deadline of April 15. While you’d ideally like to have all your initial offers of admission made by early March, you sometimes read a few files from late applicants and KNOW that you have to extend an offer to this student. But because they were admitted later in the process, it’s only fair to give them an additional week or two to do their research and make up their mind.

Deposit deadline extensions. Perhaps a student received a late offer from their other top-choice school. Maybe a last-minute personal or family issue arose and they wanted to resolve that before depositing at your school. Or it could be that the student is married, their spouse is interviewing for a job in your city, and they should hear back about that offer in another week or two. Regardless, these students specifically reached out to you to ask for a little more time and you granted it to them.

The Unknown Unknowns – The students who haven’t identified themselves, but you’re a bit suspicious of them.

These are the flight risks. They are the evil twins of the solid deposits noted above. Whereas you absolutely understand why the solid deposit is coming to your school, you have NO IDEA why this student has deposited at your school. They may be:
Statistical Misfits. Sure, you will enroll some students who are above both your LSAT and GPA medians. Those students tend to make sense for you because maybe they’re just a smidge over on both, maybe they’re an undergrad alum, and/or maybe they have ties to your main employment market. But what about the student who is WAY over the targets and has NO discernible ties to your school? This leads into the….

Profile Misfits. Sure, you can understand why the in-state student with big stats has deposited at your school. But this other student is out-of-state, has no ties to your school, didn’t submit a “Why School X” statement in their application, never visited your campus or attended any of your online sessions for admitted students—why did they deposit? While you hope the answer is something along the lines of “Perhaps it’s due to our office’s brilliant recruitment methods!”, the real answer is probably more along the lines of “We’re the backup choice and they’re still waiting to hear from their preferred school about admission and/or scholarship.” This student will be g-o-n-e as soon as that other school comes through for them.

The majority of “dust settling” happens by May 1^st. That other law school finally comes through with their admission and/or scholarship offer. The admitted student’s spouse now has a few good leads on jobs in your market and they feel comfortable depositing at your school. One of the Profile Misfits contacts your office to schedule a tour and they mention that their parents are alums and will also be visiting (and now it makes some sense why this student applied to your school in the first place!). But one key matter to consider as you read up on all of this is that AdComms can’t really do anything about this—this is all “reactive” rather than “proactive.” They have to let the dust settle before they get out their Swiffers.

So what can you do about all of this? A few things, but it depends on if you are the dust or not.

You’re “the dust” if you read one of the descriptions above and said, “You got me. I am a proud Statistical Misfit and I only deposited at this school where I’m 10 points over the LSAT median because I’m still waiting on my scholarship reconsideration from my top-choice school … but I’m definitely going to the top choice even if they don’t give me more money.” In this case, be mindful that other students are waiting for you to make a move. It’s okay for you to keep your interests as a top priority, but remember that we’re all connected in the Admissions Circle of Life. When you cancel your deposit at a school during this time of year, you may very well be opening up a spot for someone from the waitlist.

If you’re that person who is hoping for the Statistical Misfits to just get moving already and open up a seat from the waitlist, now is the best time to prepare your letters of continued interest. You can read up about LOCIs on the 7Sage Admissions Course. Schools are most likely to go to their waitlists—if they need to go to them at all—during May, so get your ducks in a row now. We’ll touch more on this subject in next week’s digest!

As the weather continues to improve and the world blooms all around them, law school AdComms are consumed by one thing—chaos. Maybe also “dread” with a pinch of “hope … if it isn’t too much to ask for.” The most popular date for deposit deadlines—April 15—is here. This day always leads to all kinds of stress and shenanigans for admissions officers. But adding an additional twist of the knife this year is the release of the latest U.S. News and World Report rankings. Let’s deal with that second note first because what is Deposit Deadline Week if not an opportunity for the last to become first and the first to end up canceling with you because—even though you admitted them in November and gave them a full scholarship before Christmas—they finally got their admission and scholarship package from their T14 school after that school dragged their feet on issuing a decision for six months and is only doing it now at the last minute? Not that I’m speaking from experience or anything!

As we discussed last month, this year’s USNWR rankings are going to be quite different. A number of schools will no longer give in-house information to USNWR. That means that the publication has to rely on publicly available information via schools’ required disclosures to the American Bar Association. As such, schools had a pretty good sense of what information would likely go into the rankings—it had to be on one of the ABA forms. What schools didn’t know is how the rankings formula would change. Would USNWR shift more weight to admissions metrics like LSAT and GPA? Would they prioritize job outcomes? Would they bow to pressure from the schools that no longer participate in the rankings and give weight to law school-funded post-grad positions? We’re starting to get some answers to all of that this week. First, USNWR published a very brief outline of their methodology on Tuesday the 11^th while also publishing the top portion of this year’s rankings. The rest of the rankings will drop next week and we’ll all be able to gasp, laugh, and cry together at that time.

Law schools, on the other hand, get a head start on that emotional roller coaster this week. USNWR typically provides schools with the rankings the week before things get published. So if you hear any rumblings on the horizon, it’s not an approaching spring thunderstorm but the collective groans from admissions officers as they receive a forwarded email from their dean, subject line: “Internal Rankings—Let’s Talk.”

Now, as we mentioned last month, no change in the rankings actually affects the educational quality of the school! Harvard is the same school now (when it’s ranked in a tie for 4^th with Penn) as it was last year (when it fell to 4^th behind Chicago) as it was fifteen years ago (when it was ranked 2^nd ahead of Stanford). There has been no actual change in the reality of what a Harvard Law education entails and there’s an almost nil chance that this will change employment outcomes for students graduating in three years.

Yet, with that said, applicants can be weird sometimes. Schools know that a certain chunk of their admitted students will make decisions based on shifts in the rankings. That’s just life in admissions. But to have drastic changes in the rankings formula combined with the late release date for the rankings (typically in mid-March but pushed to mid-April this year) that happens to coincide with the most popular deposit deadline? Hopefully all the AdComms remembered to pack their emergency bottles of whiskey in their lunchboxes.

Speaking of said deposit deadline, we’re here! It’s April 15^th—Happy Deposit Day to all who celebrate the high holidays! If you want to participate in authentic and traditional celebrations, I encourage you to go to a spreadsheet, create a pivot table, and refresh it every five minutes while doing your best Samuel L. Jackson impression.

For admissions officers, this is the first big test for all the hard work and recruitment strategies that they’ve pursued since last spring. They’ve built application and admit models based on past years’ yield rates. They studied how admitted students deposit based on all kinds of variables like LSAT, GPA, in-state vs. out-of-state status, scholarship amount, race, gender, whether or not they’ve visited campus, and a million other things. Deposits may have trickled in up to this point—perhaps with a cohort of Early Decision admits, maybe a few more students who deposited after they visited for an admitted student open house—to give them a glimpse of whether their calculations were actually right. But AdComms just won’t know anything for certain until the first deposit deadline passes. Fun fact—the vast majority of admitted students will submit their deposits within three days of the deposit deadline. As such, things can change quickly! An AdComm may be worried about their LSAT median on Wednesday … only to discover on Friday that the real issue was that they didn’t admit enough high-GPA students. It’s no big deal—just whether or not all their work was worthwhile and if your school will bring in enough tuition revenue to stay solvent.

But now that we’ve given some insight into this process, what are things that you should keep in mind as an applicant (other than to be nice to AdComms at this time of year)?

First, if you’ve been admitted somewhere, you should let the school know whether you are depositing or not. If you are depositing, follow the instructions that the school gave you on your admit letter. If you don’t see any there, call the admissions office to ask how you can deposit.

Be mindful of the actual deadline. April 15 falls on a Saturday this year, so some schools have moved their deadlines to the 14^th or the 17^th.

Pay attention to whether the school mentions a time for the deadline. Some schools set their deadline at 5 PM in their time zone (i.e., the form is open until they leave work that day). Others set it for 12 PM local (i.e., so that they can give a full report on deposits to their school’s leadership by the end of the day). If there’s no time mentioned, you can assume that the form will be open until 11:59 PM local on the day in question.

After you deposit and take a few deep breaths, let’s come back to the other schools where you’ve been admitted and the ones where you’ve been waitlisted or ghosted.

For the schools where you’ve been admitted but have chosen to deposit elsewhere, the best practice is to reach out to them to cancel your offer of admission. They should have provided you instructions for this process but you can always send an email to their general email account to accomplish this task!

Now let’s move to the waitlisted schools. If there are any that you’d still consider attending over the school where you’ve deposited, this is the time to send in that letter of continued interest (LOCI). Schools with April 15 deadlines will let the dust settle from the deposit deadline, then assess their available seats, statistical needs, and scholarship budgets, and may start reaching out to waitlisted candidates soon thereafter.

And remember that you don’t have to stay on a waitlist! If you’re excited about the school where you’ve deposited and want to start making plans for moving there, finding a roommate, and scouting out the coffee shops where you’ll spend hours reading case studies, you can do that! In that case, just be sure to reach out to any schools where you’ve accepted a place on their waitlist and tell them that you’ve decided to move on. This will remove clutter from their spreadsheets and will let them more efficiently identify and reach out to other waitlisted students when the time arises.

Finally, there are the schools that have ghosted you to this point. You applied in November, you bought yourself a sweatshirt in December as a pre-admit Christmas present to yourself … and the sweatshirt has stayed in your closet for five months. Now that the schools know the new rankings formula, it’s possible that they’ll start making some last-minute offers of admission once their deposit deadline passes. Now is a good time to send them a check-in/nudge message. You can mention that they’re still one of your top choices but that you’re also facing a few deposit deadlines. Provide any relevant updates you may have and offer to address any questions that the Admissions Committee has regarding your candidacy. Keep it light and professional.

And after all of that—depositing, canceling, LOCIing, nudging!—you can then go get your emergency whiskey from your lunchbox to join in the celebration and be satisfied that you’ve done all you can to advocate for yourself!

As April showers continue to bring the promise of May flowers, admissions officers are reading late-arriving applications, processing decisions, hosting admitted students for one more program, and staring at their deposit form like an old-school Wall Street stock trader so as to follow the up-to-the-second fluctuations in their incoming classes. We’ll go more into that deposit form process next week given the approach of April 15, but we wanted to give a little time this week to a series of related questions we receive quite often from our students—why do most law schools schedule their admitted student visits for the same day? It seems like all the open houses are on the same Fridays. Why don’t they do more programming on the weekends? Don’t admissions officers get it that almost all their applicants are either working or are current students, so a weekday visit is tough? It may seem pedantic, but thinking this over can probably give students a bit more insight into how law schools operate.

Let’s start with the basics—what are the big factors that affect when a school’s visit programs are scheduled? 

First and most obvious is the deposit deadline. As mentioned in previous newsletters, most schools have deadlines of either April 1, April 15, or April 30/May1. Clearly, schools want to have their visit programs before that date. 

But then you have to worry about holidays. What’s “fun” (with all the sarcasm that those quotation marks convey) about scheduling recruitment events for March and April is that the main holidays at this time of year are based on lunar calendars. They are moving targets. So one of the first things that admissions officers have to do when scheduling their recruitment calendar is to do a Google search for the dates of Passover and Easter. Even if a school is public and has no religious affiliation, they likely want to avoid hosting big recruitment events then since admitted students may be spending time with their families and faculty/staff could be busy.

Speaking of those pesky faculty and staff, another curveball is spring breaks. Notice the plural there. It’s not just the law school’s spring break; we also mean the local school systems’ spring break. Did you know that faculty/staff sometimes have families with small children? And that those children have a break that doesn’t align in any way at all with when a college’s spring break happens? It’s true! This is one of a million small psychological cuts that parents have to endure (e.g., “I can’t go anywhere during my law school’s spring break because the kids are still in school … and I can’t go anywhere for my kid’s spring break because my law school is open…”). While it’s rare for faculty/staff to take off for an entire week of vacation towards the end of a semester, it’s fairly common for them to take a three- or four-day weekend to go do something with their family.

And finally there are weather considerations. For schools located in snowy climates, hosting any big visit program prior to March 1 wouldn’t be prudent. It’s not super welcoming to roll out the red carpet onto a few inches of freshly deposited “wintery mix.”

Once you bring this all together, you basically have an LSAT Logic Game question. For this year, the question would be presented like this:

- Whereby your deposit deadline is April 15, and
- Your law school’s spring break is the week of March 13, and
- The local school system’s spring break is the week of April 3, and
- Passover and Easter are the week/weekend of April 5-9, and
- There’s a strong possibility of snow through February.
Question: When do you schedule your big open houses?

Answer: March 24 and March 31, maybe March 3 if you’re willing to tempt the fate of the Snow Gods.

“But wait!” you may be saying. “You’re assuming that these events must happen on a Friday and that’s a logical fallacy! Schools could just do them on Saturdays!”

Au contraire.

From the school’s perspective, the purpose of a visit program is so that admitted students can see what the law school is like and if it’s the right place for them. They want to show you what the law school looks like when it’s in action. You can’t really do that on a weekend because faculty, staff, and students won’t be there. Class observation? Nope. Lunch with faculty? Dude—if we need to beg them to attend a free lunch on a Friday, there’s no way they’re coming to one on a Saturday. Info session with career services? Tour of the law school? The list goes on and on.

There are some schools that do programs on Saturdays but they tend to be very stripped down affairs—perhaps an information session with admissions, a student-led tour, and maybe one prof to talk with. This can be alright as an accoutrement to your menu of visit options, but it really can’t be the main course. If AdComms need to hold big events to recruit a lot of students, and if the events require a critical mass of current students, faculty, and staff, then you have to do them on a weekday.

In the end, this also probably gives you a sense of how law schools are a bit different from undergrad schools. Law schools are so much smaller. Even the biggest law schools—Harvard, Georgetown, NYU, etc.—enroll classes of 500-ish students. That’s fewer students than the senior class at my local high school. It’s far smaller than the incoming freshman class at the nearby colleges and universities. And because law school classes are smaller, the law school staffing is also smaller. For recruitment programs, the staff is limited enough that AdComms know which profs have kids and will be out on spring break. They know which ones tend to be fussy about the lunch menu. And they know which ones need to be reminded—constantly!—about the big open house on Friday. There’s minimal slack on a weekday so that means that weekend recruitment programs are just a non-starter. But there’s a benefit, too. Smaller classes mean that you get to know everyone. You will also learn about professors’ kids, the faculty who are fussy about lunch (because there will be lunches with your faculty), and which ones tend to be a bit spacey about showing up on time to meetings. Most colleges are too big to really develop those kinds of meaningful relationships with the professional side of the institution. But law schools? They’re like a little town and you’re the new neighbor who just moved in. So while you’re shaking your fist, cursing every law school for having an open house on the same day, and wondering where you can obtain your very own Time-Turner so you can be in more than one place at the same “time,” remember that this will be to your benefit in the end! You just have to get to Orientation!

As the trees and flowers start to bloom around law school campuses, law school admissions officers continue to host admitted students for visit programs and are also preparing for one of the biggest days of their year—deposit deadline day. Let’s take a few minutes this week to go through some of the basic details regarding deposits and protocols.

Maybe it’s because I have school-aged children, but I oftentimes revert to who/what/when/where/why/how explanations when confronted with questions. Whether it’s “What kind of bird is that on our patio?!” or “Deposit? What’s that?!”, this can be a useful way to organize information!

Who, What, and Why

Law schools have spent the past few months reading applications and making offers of admission. At some point, they need to start taking a head count of those admitted students (i.e., the who, not to be confused with The Who). Who is planning on coming to your school and who is planning on going elsewhere? Deposit forms and fees (the what) are the main mechanism to achieve that end.

Most students intuitively understand submitting a form indicating that they plan to attend. But why a deposit fee? Because this encourages students to take the decision super seriously, and that helps with enrollment management. The more accurate your head count, the better you can understand some critical matters such as:

- Do we have seats available in the class for students on the waitlist?

- How are our LSAT and GPA looking? Do we need to give either (or both!) preference for waitlist admission?
- How is our scholarship budget?

- Based on the answers to the questions above, how much wine should I drink before giving my dean an update on the incoming class?

When

The LSAC Statement of Good Admission and Financial Aid Practices encourages schools to “request commitments of any kind from admitted applicants only after applicants have had sufficient opportunity to consider other offers” and mentions April 1^st has historically been a good “no earlier than” date. While students who are still waiting to hear decisions from schools that they applied to before Thanksgiving may scoff at the first part of that request (and this is a good reminder that the Statement of Good Admission Practices has as much binding power as the Code of the Brethren from Pirates of the Caribbean), the second part has generally held. Except in cases of binding early decision, law schools don’t ask for deposits prior to April 1. You then have three general groups of deadlines:

April 1 – Usually local and regional schools outside of the US News top 25-30.

April 15 – Usually the schools in the US News T15-30 range.

April 30/May 1 – The T14.

There can be some variations in there depending on the year. For example, April 1 and 15 fall on Saturdays this year so some schools have adjusted their deadlines either to the preceding Friday or the following Friday.

It’s important to read the fine print regarding the timing for each of your schools. Some may actually set a particular time of day for their deadline—for example, “5PM Eastern on April 14.” If you don’t see a time, you can assume that the form is open through 11:59PM local time (for the law school, not for you!) on the day in question.

Where and How

So where do you find your form and how do you fill it out? The most likely place to find this information is on your initial admit letter/email or somewhere on the school’s admitted student website. The majority of forms are electronic, and the deposit fee—if a school requires one—can also be paid online. For most schools, this process shouldn’t take more than five minutes as long as you have your payment information (i.e., checking account info or a credit card) ready to go when you start the process.

But now that we’ve gone through Deposits 101, let’s step up a level to material covered in Deposits 201:
Can I deposit at more than one school?

As always, the answer is “it depends.”

Most schools frown upon holding multiple active deposits at one time—this is called “double-depositing.” This messes up their head count and can make it challenging to figure out what further work they need to do with possible waitlist admission.

However, let’s say that it’s not a case of holding multiple active deposits. For example, let’s say that you deposit at School A now and then are admitted at School B in May. That’s totally fine! You would deposit at School B and then reach out to School A to tell them that your plans have changed.

Speaking of which….

Should I tell a school that I’m NOT going to attend?

Yes, you should definitely tell them!

This is partly a courtesy to them and part of quote/unquote “being an adult.” If you’re invited to a wedding but you can’t attend, or if you’ve been offered a job but you’ve decided not to accept it, the proper thing to do is to politely decline. 

But this is also a courtesy to those students on the waitlist. Remember, schools can’t know whether they can admit students from the waitlist until they feel like they have a good head count. So be nice to your confreres on the waitlist!

But can’t I just let the deposit deadline pass?

You could. That’s what we in the biz like to call a “passive cancel.” An “active cancel” would be a student who formally declined their admit offer.

But if you know that you aren’t going to attend a school and if you formally tell them, this—again!—helps the school with their enrollment management. If they’re a week away from their deposit deadline and they see cancels tracking higher than in past years, maybe they are more generous in scholarship negotiations. Maybe they start assembling their preferred waitlist candidates to reach out to.

What if I’m still waiting to hear back from my top-choice school?

Oh, yeah. The entire “there are students who are still waiting to hear decisions from schools that they applied to before Thanksgiving” thing that we mentioned before!

You have a few options. First, you can reach out to the school where a) you’ve been admitted, and b) you’d attend if you don’t get admitted by your top-choice school, and you can ask for an extension on your deadline. Some schools may be happy to give you a few more days. Others may say that your other school being extremely slow with decisions is not their problem—c’est la vie. In that case, you could also reach out to that top-choice school and ask them when you might expect to hear a decision from them. Feel free to mention your deposit deadline at your backup school. If they fail to budge, your best bet is likely to deposit at your backup school while awaiting word from your top choice. While you would lose your deposit at the backup school if/when the top choice admits you, this at least avoids the worst-case scenario—not depositing at the backup school because you’re sure you’ll get good news from the top-choice school … and then the top-choice school denies you.

I’m horribly confused by my school’s deposit policies—what should I do?

Always feel free to reach out to the admissions office. A key part of their job is to help navigate admitted students through this process. They should be happy and willing to talk things out!

Last but not least … am I doing alright?

As always, you’ve got this!

With Daylight Savings and their schools’ spring breaks in the rearview mirror, law school admissions offices have reached one of their busiest times of year – admitted student visit season. We discuss the importance of school visits on our admissions course and it’s worth fleshing out some key matters in more detail.

Let’s start with the obvious – why is it important for you to visit campus? It’s because there are a lot of aspects of each law school that are distinct, cannot be sufficiently explained in a brochure, and you just-kind-of-have-to-see-in-action to understand them. For example, it says something about a school’s culture if the faculty offices are right next to the classrooms; it says something very different if the offices are spread around campus. Or how about the vibe in the school cafeteria at lunch – are people hanging out and talking, or are they wolfing down their food while reviewing notes? Meanwhile, the admitted student packet claimed that there was a lot of housing within walking distance of the law school, but did they mean “my preferred walking distance” or “the theoretical distance that we would walk through a desert in order to reach an oasis and continue living”? You really have to visit to get a sense of this.

Visits usually come in three flavors:

1) The Admitted Student Day / Open House. This is the big program when schools really roll out their red carpets. Since they can expect a critical mass of visitors, admissions officers will put tons of effort into making sure that the school puts its best foot forward. You can expect class observations (or “simulations” if the number of visitors is too big to host in a normal classroom), tours, panels with faculty and students, lunch with members of the law school community, sessions about career opportunities, and more. Since the crowds tend to be bigger, you may not get as much individual TLC. On the other hand, you’ll also probably learn more than things in a more efficient manner then if you visited any other day. Speaking of which….

2) Another visit day. While schools highly encourage their admits to come to the big programs (since it makes it more efficient for the admissions office), many will still be open to visits on other school days. The way AdComms see it – while they’d love for you to come when everyone else is visiting, they also don’t want to lose out on an admitted student coming to their campus. The tradeoff for coming on a random day is that you may not get all the bells and whistles of the open house, but you may also get a more low-key view of the school. For example, maybe you don’t have a big lunch with tons of faculty, but maybe you can have lunch with the tour guide after they walk you around the building.

3) A ghost visit. Maybe you can’t attend the visit days that a school offers. Or, maybe you don’t want to feel like you’re getting a sales pitch (a point that we’ll return to in a moment). In that case, some students will just visit a school law unannounced and without making any contact with the admissions office. The benefit is that you can fly under the radar and not be beholden to the school’s schedule. But on the other hand, you are flying under the radar – since you never told anyone that you were coming, you likely can’t sit in on a class, go on a tour, or talk with any faculty or staff. Those are some critical things to miss!

And on the note of avoiding sales pitches, some students are leery of formal visits for just this reason. At the heart of their jobs, AdComms are recruiters – they try to encourage students to apply, admit the ones who they think are going to be the best fits for the school’s goals and mission, and then facilitate programming and connections to convert those admitted students into deposited students. While acknowledging that, most AdComms view that last component less as “sales” and more as “educating.” They want students to understand the distinctive features and strengths of their particular school and they hope that those qualities align with what the students want from their legal education. Put another way – they want students who want to be there! Those students will be happier for the next three years which, in turn, leads to happier alums who then – happily – contribute financially back to their dear alma mater. And thus does the circle of life continue!

And on a final and more technical note, let’s give some tips on what you can expect from a visit day (beyond the schedule) and how you can approach it:

- Be ready to learn. The schools are going to tell you about how sections are set up for 1Ls, what OCI looks like, all of their journals and clinics and externships, and more. So bring a notebook and a pen!

- Be professional. Most schools won’t have a dress code for visitors, but you can never go wrong with business casual. A button down shirt with a sweater or jacket, paired with khakis/nice jeans/skirt, and you’re all set. If you’re going to skew “casual” with any item in your wardrobe, let it be your shoes since you’ll be walking around a lot.

- Be ready to talk. Lawyers are networkers. Since that’s the case for lawyers, law students are also networkers. Since that’s the case for law students, applicants should also be networkers. Your professional identity starts taking shape during these visits. For the schools you attend, the faculty, staff, and students you meet will likely remember you (“Oh, hey, didn’t I meet you at the open house?”). And even for the schools you don’t attend, you may see one of those students down the road at a summer internship, or a moot court competition, or as opposing counsel at a pre-trial hearing. So be ready to be professional (as noted above!) and to give your elevator-pitch introduction. If you’re naturally introverted, remind yourself that you just have to make it to the end of the day!

- Be ready to follow-up. While you’re going to learn a lot during your visit, there are likely going to be some questions that didn’t come up. All that networking that you just did now comes into play – you now have a few people you can contact and see if they can chat.

- Be ready to soak it in. Remember all the stress and anxiety of assembling your application materials? Then there were all the fun updates from your lsd.law profile about your status checker at School X moving from “Complete” to “Under Review” and you fired off a post to Reddit asking “what does this mean?!” All of that work and all of that stress was so that you could have the opportunity before you. You owe it to your past-self to take a moment for a deep, cleansing breath, and then to tell yourself clearly and confidently - “This is so cool!”

As the first shoots break out of the ground and the leaves begin to unfurl on the trees, many admissions officers are using their school’s spring break to read applications and go over last-minute plans for upcoming visit admitted student visit programs. This is also the time of year when some important information begins to become available – updated cost of attendance figures! While students typically are more excited about scholarship possibilities (ie, “Yes, free money! Please and thank you!”), a complete sense of your potential budget can only come into view when you take a look at the entire picture.

Let’s start with the basics. Per regulations from the U.S. Department of Education, every college and university that receives federal funding (which is all of them other than a select few libertarian-leaning campuses) has to publish a maximum total cost of attendance. This budget includes a few fixed costs – things like tuition and fees, which will be the same for every student before any scholarship aid is applied. The budget also includes good faith estimates for matters that can vary from one student to the next – books, travel, room and board, and personal expenses. Schools are required to prominently post this budget on their website per requirements from the both Department of Education and the American Bar Association.

Why do schools publish this budget other than “they’re required to”? First – and probably most obvious – is that they want to give students a heads-up about what their actual total costs may be. There’s a lot that can go into your budget beyond just tuition and fees and these can vary drastically from one school to the next – especially living expenses. Second, grad students can use federal loans to completely finance their legal education. However, to ensure that students don’t unnecessarily over-borrow (or “purposefully” in order to commit loan fraud!) the Department of Education needs a cap on how much a student can borrow using Grad and Grad Plus loans. That cap is this “total cost of attendance” budget.

To give you a sense of what this budget may look like, let’s check out what Harvard Law publishes (and a warning for those drinking anything right now, be sure not to take a sip before you look at the total figure – we don’t want any spit takes!):

After you clean that coffee off of your screen despite my warnings, let’s unpack a few things!

- This is only a budget for nine months. What about those three months over the summer? Well, you’re going to be working and the Fin Aid officers don’t know where you’ll be. As such, they can’t give you a budget. And you’ll hopefully be earning some money for that work so the whole “using federal loans to finance your lifestyle” thing could be a moot point.

- HLS has a mandatory student health fee. Although you haven’t taken Contracts yet, “mandatory” means “required.” On the other hand, they also note $4,080 for student health insurance. You can delete that line item from your budget if you’re going to be covered by someone else’s insurance plan (like a spouse or a parent). This is an example of how budgets can vary from one student to the next.

- On that note, this is meant to be a maximum budget. It can vary a great deal. For example, a student who has family in Boston who is willing to house them is going to spend far less in rent. Put another way, don’t feel like you should borrow money just because you can borrow money.

- Last but not least (and most germane to our discussion today), note that this is the budget for the 2022-23 academic year, ie, this year. HLS hasn’t yet published their updated figures for the coming year.

That last point is key, both for understanding your upcoming costs as well as for negotiating scholarships. Regarding the former topic, schools are in the process of updating their figures. For example, Georgetown Law has already published their budget for the coming year. Notre Dame Law has their 2022-23 figures on the Law School’s website … but the updated figures on their University’s Fin Aid office website. And regarding the latter topic, one of the biggest negotiating faux pas you can commit is to tell School A that School B has a much lower cost of attendance without noticing that School A has already updated their figures for the coming year while School B still has their current year figures published. This is the law school negotiation equivalent of having spinach caught in your teeth – don’t be that person!

So as your deposit deadlines approach, be sure that you know this budget for the coming year. If one of your top options doesn’t have it listed on their website and if you can find it using the tried-and-true Google search formula of “[law school name] cost of attendance,” contact the admissions office. Ask them if the 2023-24 budget is set. If it isn’t, ask them when they plan to publish it and also what have been the most recent increases in tuition. This is basic consumer information that they’re obliged to provide! And now that you know this, remember that:

As the snow melts and the grass turns a little greener, admissions offices are still reading applications, preparing for visit programs, and waiting for the ultimate late game-curveball to arrive in their email inboxes – the updated US News and World Report (USNWR) rankings.

Historically, USNWR rankings are published in mid-to-late March. USNWR typically gives each school their own rankings report a week or two prior to publication. Beyond being a professional courtesy, this allows schools to address any errors (which – yes – has happened in the past…) as well as prepare for when the rankings go live.

The rankings this year have the chance to be a bit unique. Although they make minor tweaks to their formula every year (and you can see their most recent one here), USNWR’s considerations have remained pretty static over time. However, since a number of schools did not provide USNWR with the usual internal information the publication requires to produce their rankings, USNWR has had to adjust their tactics. Right now, no school knows what changes have been made to the secret sauce. The changes could be minimal or “maximal” (which is a word that actually exists and yet seems like it shouldn’t).

So, why are the rankings such a potential curveball? Answer: because of how much they matter to students. For instance, LSAC provides schools with data each year regarding how much of their applicant pool and admitted group overlapped with another school. LSAC also gives schools the next step in that “information ladder” – how many of those overlapping admits enrolled at their school, how many enrolled at the other school, and how many chose to attend some other school. With this data in hand, schools can calculate their “win percentage” against every other law school. What they find quickly is that minor changes in the rankings have big effects.

Let’s say that you work at School A. You’re always in the same rankings neighborhood as School B – you annually go back-and-forth in the rankings. In the years when School A is ranked ahead of School B, your win percentage for overlapping admits will go up. In years when School B jumps ahead in USNWR, the win percentage goes down. In some cases, you may have dozens of overlapping admits with School B so a change in win percentage of even just 5-10% can have a noticeable difference. But usually a rankings drop versus School B is balanced out by a rankings gain against School C, so no one’s orbit is knocked too far off kilter.

(And as a quick note – these kind of minor rankings variations have no objective basis in reality! If a school goes from 34 to 26 in the rankings, that doesn’t mean that they’re a much better school this year than last year; if a school drops from 45 to 55, it’s not because of internal problems there. USNWR tweaks their formula each year and that leads to minor changes in the rankings – it just happens! But you can almost bet that the core data for the school as reflected in things like graduation rates, bar pass rates, employment rates, etc. remained about the same as the year before. So don’t be that student who chooses School A over School B just because the former passed the latter in the rankings – there’s no there there!)

Tying this back to the admissions process, there’s been speculation that some schools have been slow to issue decisions in order to suss out what will happen with the rankings formula. If true, this could be for two reasons:

1) Maybe schools want to see the new formula so that they can adjust their final waves of decisions in order to max out their rankings potential for next year. I think that this is a possible - but risky - strategy. While the benefit for schools would be maxing out rankings next year, the danger is that they’ve waited so long to make offers of admission that a large chunk of those last-minute admits may be turned off to the school. There’s a real balancing act there!

2) Maybe schools want to see the new rankings because they’re worried that a drastic change may lead to big skews in their win percentage. All of that stuff I wrote about above … what if School A not only passes School B … what if they are now 15 spots higher in the rankings than School B?  What if School A also passes School C who is usually 20 spots higher? In a normal year, those kinds of ranking shifts are almost impossible short of bribery, black magic, or – more realistically – substantial human error. But in a year when so many schools aren’t participating in the rankings, perhaps things can best be summarized by the immortal Kevin Garnett:

Hopefully you can also reenact KG’s glory after you get those last minute-decisions from schools!

Schools are now in the heaviest part of their file review process, so you’ll want to make sure to check your email and spam folder for updates to ensure that you aren’t missing any communications from schools on your list. January is a huge month for communicating decisions. During this time, scholarship committees also review admitted applicant files (this process can take longer for higher-ranked schools, while scholarship notifications may accompany admissions decisions from other schools). Some schools may require admitted candidates to complete supplemental forms that help them assess financial need before scholarship offers are made, so again, be sure you are checking your email regularly.

If you’ve submitted your applications already, make sure that you check your online status checker to confirm that your applications are processed and completed. If something is missing, you’ll be able to see that on your status checker.

In addition to file review, admissions offices are beginning to prepare for admitted student events, both in-person and online, as well as their annual admitted student weekend (if they offer one). Pay close attention to communications regarding possible travel stipends, lodging, and timelines.

FAQs from Students

I’ve been rolled over from ED to RD and have already emailed a letter of continued interest (LOCI). Should I send in another one? Not necessarily. Often, when a candidate is rolled over into regular review, they are then reviewed by an entirely different admissions officer. Additional materials are only important or necessary when they provide new, relevant information regarding your candidacy.

What about waitlisted candidates? If you are waitlisted, the best time to send a LOCI is just prior to the first deposit deadline—you can include any resume updates, any new interactions you’ve had with the law school community, things you’ve learned about the school/programming after submitting your application that strengthen your interest, and/or new LORs (if accepted—remember to review each school’s instructions carefully).

Helpful Link

Did you miss our conversation about diversity statements and addenda? We’ve posted it to our podcast! Listen here.

7Sage Guide for the LSAT Writing Sample

Stressed about this LSAT requirement? We are offering a 100% free guide to the LSAT Writing section that explains what it is, how you can prepare for it, and whether it matters at all (hint: it does)! Access the guide here.

7Sage Rewards

We are pleased to announce our new rewards system! When you purchase a 7Sage product, you earn rewards that you can use throughout your law school journey. Redeem them for LSAT Tutoring, Admissions Consulting, or our Bar Prep course. For more information, and to learn how to view rewards you’ve earned, click here.

7Sage Study Group Breakout

Are you looking for an easy way to find people to study with? Or do you want a break from reviewing questions on your own? You're in luck! Join us for our next "Study Group Breakout" on Tuesday, January 17th at 9 p.m. ET. For more details and to RSVP, click here.

7Sage Webinar: Law School Admissions Deans’ Roundtable Talk (Part 2)

Save the date: Tuesday, January 31 at 8 p.m. ET. Next week, we’ll post the registration link for all interested in joining 7Sage admissions consultant Tajira McCoy for the second installment in a series of discussions with law school admissions deans from across the country. For this first conversation, hear from representatives of  Boston College, Emory University, Loyola University Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Richmond, and the University of San Diego, as we delve deeper into the current application cycle, January LSAT scores, February application deadlines, scholarship offers, LOCIs, spring semester events.

Recruitment Events

• Boston College has canceled in-person events for this semester. They are offering virtual coffee chats with current student ambassadors, which will resume in January.

• UCLA Law is offering in-person and virtual options for law school tours and live class visits. Register here.

• WashU Law in St. Louis is offering meetings with admissions, virtual open houses, and live-streamed events. For more details and to sign up, click here. To schedule an in-person campus visit, click here.

• Yale Law is offering one-on-one appointments with a member of the admissions office to address prospective student questions. Schedule here.

Schools are focusing a lot more time and attention on application review, so you’ll want to make sure to check your email and spam folder for updates to ensure that you aren’t missing any communications from schools on your list. Waves of decisions and other communications should be picking up over the next couple of weeks. During this time, scholarship committees are also beginning to review admitted applicant files (this process can take longer for higher-ranked schools, while scholarship notifications may accompany admissions decisions from other schools). Some schools may require admitted candidates to complete supplemental forms that help them assess financial need before scholarship offers are made.

If you’ve submitted your applications already, make sure that you check your online status checker to confirm that your applications are processed and completed. If something is missing, you’ll be able to see that on your status checker.

FAQs from Students

I’ve been rolled over from ED to RD and have already emailed a letter of continued interest (LOCI). Should I send in another one? Not necessarily. Often, when a candidate is rolled over into regular review, they are then reviewed by an entirely different admissions officer. Additional materials are only important or necessary when they provide new, relevant information regarding your candidacy.

Helpful Link

Did you miss our conversation about navigating character and fitness questions? We’ve posted it to our podcast! Listen here.

7Sage Guide for the LSAT Writing Sample

Stressed about this LSAT requirement? We are offering a 100% free guide to the LSAT Writing section that explains what it is, how you can prepare for it, and whether it matters at all (hint: it does)! Access the guide here.

7Sage Live Classes Through December

Live Classes during the month of December have received some scheduling changes. Click here for updates.

7Sage Rewards

We are pleased to announce our new rewards system! When you purchase a 7Sage product, you earn rewards that you can use throughout your law school journey. Redeem them for LSAT Tutoring, Admissions Consulting, or our Bar Prep course. For more information, and to learn how to view rewards you’ve earned, click here.

Recruitment Events

• Boston College has canceled in-person events for this semester. They are offering virtual coffee chats with current student ambassadors, which will resume in January.

• Columbia Law is offering a virtual information session on Thursday, December 15 at 12:15 p.m. ET. Register here.

• Duke Law is offering a virtual information session on Thursday, December 15 at 2 p.m. ET on the following days (registration link here).

• Fordham Law is offering a virtual admissions session on Tuesday, December 20 at 12:30 p.m. ET (register here).

• Northeastern Law is offering outdoor law school tours, showcasing three of their law school buildings. Each tour is led by a current law student who will take Q&A during the tour. Schedule a tour here.

• UCLA Law is offering in-person law school tours on Mondays and Fridays. They are also offering virtual law school tours on Wednesdays. Register here.

• University of Virginia will host in-person Q&A sessions each Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET. No registration is required.

• WashU Law in St. Louis is offering meetings with admissions, virtual open houses, and live-streamed events. For more details and to sign up, click here. To schedule an in-person campus visit, click here.

• Yale Law is offering one-on-one appointments with a member of the admissions office to address prospective student questions. Schedule here.

Schools are focusing a lot more time and attention on application review, so you’ll want to make sure to check your email and spam folder for updates to ensure that you aren’t missing any communications from schools on your list. Waves of decisions and other communications should be picking up over the next couple of weeks. During this time, scholarship committees are also beginning to review admitted applicant files (this process can take longer for higher-ranked schools, while scholarship notifications may accompany admissions decisions from other schools). Some schools may require admitted candidates to complete supplemental forms that help them assess financial need before scholarship offers are made.

If you’ve submitted your applications already, make sure that you check your online status checker to confirm that your applications are processed and completed. If something is missing, you’ll be able to see that on your status checker.

FAQs from Students

Is it too soon to send a letter of continued interest (LOCI)? Possibly! If your online status checker provided you with an estimated turnaround time and you are now beyond that estimate, you could send a LOCI now, but we’re still early in the cycle. Recruitment travel ended just before the holiday break, and so many AOs are still getting their bearings in the office. If you have an update that you can send to the school—notification of a new achievement, a new employment position, or otherwise, I’d start with sending that type of update before sending a LOCI. Preserve those LOCIs to use them strategically, as you can only express your interest so many times.

Helpful Link

Did you miss our conversation with Tracy Simmons, Assistant Dean of Admissions, Financial Aid and Diversity Initiatives from the University of San Diego School of Law? We’ve posted it to our podcast! Listen here.

Discussion

I applied early decision (ED) and was deferred/rolled over into the regular decision (RD) pool. What should I do now?

For schools that roll ED candidates into the regular pool for another review, these second reads are often done by a completely different admissions officer for an unbiased evaluation. During my time at Berkeley, we often admitted close to as many “rolled over” students as students who were admitted ED.

While many candidates opt not to make any application amendments, some others decide to be more proactive in providing updates to the admissions team—just in case additional information might be helpful in getting AOs to a “yes” decision. Always make sure that you pay close attention to any instructions provided by the school—often they will provide guidance on what kinds of updates they are open to considering. For ED programs with decisions communicated in early December, these “deferred/rolled over” candidates can often expect that they’ll have final decisions on their applications by the end of January, so there’s a very short window to submit new information. It is extremely possible that admissions teams will be reading application files over the holiday break.

Provide Transcript Updates. If you have an updated transcript that provides a positive boost to your GPA, make sure to get a fresh document sent to the LSAC so that they can calculate a new cumulative GPA for you. When that happens, the LSAC will automatically provide an updated CAS report, so there’s no need to reach out to the admissions office to notify them that a new document is coming unless you want to provide context for a drastic jump and highlight the boosted score.

Provide Résumé Updates. If you’ve changed jobs, received some new honors, have some anticipated summer work that you’d like to highlight, have been selected for publication, or have some leadership experience to share, an updated résumé is always a welcomed amendment to an application.

Supplement the Application with a January LSAT Score. Some schools will allow a rolled-over application to be held in anticipation of a January LSAT score before completing the RD review. This is certainly an opportunity to improve credentials, but I’d only recommend that you do this if you are extremely confident that you’re going to outperform your previous score. If you’re unsure, or your practice tests are telling you that your score is essentially the same, the last thing that you want to do is have a new score that undermines your previous performance.

If you do decide to retake the LSAT and either want to highlight the improved score or explain a dip in performance, it’s a good time to email the admissions office an LSAT addendum right when the scores are distributed.

Just remember, if you don’t have any updates, it’s okay not to do anything. Any school that expects updates will communicate that to you—the rest will prepare to review your application when it arrives in their queue.

7Sage Guide for the LSAT Writing Sample

Stressed about this LSAT requirement? We are offering a 100% free guide to the LSAT Writing section that explains what it is, how you can prepare for it, and whether it matters at all (hint: it does)! Access the guide here.

7Sage Live Classes With J.Y. Ping and Through December

Curriculum creator and 7Sage founder J.Y. Ping has been hosting a Live Class! His course will walk through every game, passage, and question in the newly released PT93. To access the remaining class, you must be subscribed to 7Sage Monthly + Live. J.Y.’s final class will be held on the following date (from 12:00-1:30 p.m. ET):

• December: 7th

Additionally, Live classes during the month of December have received some scheduling changes. Click here for updates.

7Sage Rewards

We are pleased to announce our new rewards system! When you purchase a 7Sage product, you earn rewards that you can use throughout your law school journey. Redeem them for LSAT Tutoring, Admissions Consulting, or our Bar Prep course. For more information, and to learn how to view rewards you’ve earned, click here.

7Sage Webinar: Admissions Deans’ Roundtable Talk

On Tuesday, December 6 at 8 p.m. ET, join 7Sage admissions consultant Tajira McCoy for the first in a series of discussions with law school admissions deans across the country. For this first conversation, hear from the admissions deans of Boston College, Emory University, Loyola University Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Richmond, and the University of San Diego, as we discuss the current application cycle, some of the areas where candidates miss the mark, and advice about application submissions in terms of timelines, LSAT scores, and scholarship consideration. Register here.

Recruitment Events

• Arizona State is offering virtual JD information sessions every other Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. MT. Register here.

• Boston College has canceled in-person events for this semester. They are offering virtual coffee chats with current student ambassadors, which will resume in January.

• Columbia Law is offering a virtual information session on Thursday, December 15 at 12:15 p.m. ET. Register here.

• Duke Law is offering virtual information sessions at 2 p.m. ET on the following days (registration link here):

  • Thursday, December 8

  • Thursday, December 15

• Fordham Law is offering a virtual admissions session on Wednesday, December 7 at 5:30 p.m. ET (register here).

• Harvard Law is offering a virtual Q&A session Thursday, December 8 at 8 p.m. ET (register here).

• Northeastern Law is offering outdoor law school tours, showcasing three of their law school buildings. Each tour is led by a current law student who will take Q&A during the tour. Schedule a tour here.

• UCLA Law is offering in-person law school tours on Mondays and Fridays. They are also offering virtual law school tours on Wednesdays. Register here.

• University of Virginia will host in-person Q&A sessions each Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET. No registration is required.

• WashU Law in St. Louis is offering meetings with admissions, virtual open houses, and live-streamed events. For more details and to sign up, click here. To schedule an in-person campus visit, click here.

• Yale Law is offering one-on-one appointments with a member of the admissions office to address prospective student questions. Schedule here.

For ED programs where the deadline has now passed, ED apps should now be in review in anticipated of decisions being distributed next week and the week after. Make sure you are checking your spam folder regularly, and if more than a couple of business days go by after submitting an application without receipt of an online status checker email, reach out to admissions for access to this resource.

FAQs from Students

Is it too soon to send a letter of continued interest (LOCI)? Possibly! If your online status checker provided you with an estimated turnaround time and you are now beyond that estimate, you could send a LOCI now, but we’re still early in the cycle. Recruitment travel ended just before the holiday break, and so many AOs are still getting their bearings in the office. If you have an update that you can send to the school—notification of a new achievement, a new employment position, or otherwise, I’d start with sending that type of update before sending a LOCI. Preserve those LOCIs to use them strategically, as you can only express your interest so many times.

Helpful Link

Did you miss our conversation with Tracy Simmons, Assistant Dean of Admissions, Financial Aid and Diversity Initiatives from the University of San Diego School of Law? We’ve posted it to our podcast! Listen here.

7Sage Guide for the LSAT Writing Sample

Stressed about this LSAT requirement? We are offering a 100% free guide to the LSAT Writing section that explains what it is, how you can prepare for it, and whether it matters at all (hint: it does)! Access the guide here.

7Sage Live Classes with J.Y. Ping

Curriculum creator and 7Sage founder J.Y. Ping has been hosting a Live Class! His course will walk through every game, passage, and question in the newly released PT93. To access the remaining classes, you must be subscribed to 7Sage Monthly + Live. J.Y.’s classes will be held on the following dates (from 12:00-1:30 p.m. ET):

• November: 30th

• December: 1-2nd, 5-7th

7Sage Rewards

We are pleased to announce our new rewards system! When you purchase a 7Sage product, you earn rewards that you can use throughout your law school journey. Redeem them for LSAT Tutoring, Admissions Consulting, or our Bar Prep course. For more information, and to learn how to view rewards you’ve earned, click here.

7Sage Study Group Breakout

Are you looking for an easy way to find people to study with? Or do you just want a break from reviewing questions on your own? You're in luck! Join us for our next "Study Group Breakout" on Monday, December 5th from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. ET. Click here for more details.

7Sage Webinar: Admissions Deans’ Roundtable Talk

On Tuesday, December 6 at 8 p.m. ET, join 7Sage admissions consultant Tajira McCoy for the first in a series of discussions with law school admissions deans across the country. For this first conversation, hear from the admissions deans of Boston College, Emory University, Loyola University Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Richmond, and the University of San Diego, as we discuss the current application cycle, some of the areas where candidates miss the mark, and advice about application submissions in terms of timelines, LSAT scores, and scholarship consideration. Register here.

Recruitment Events

• American University (Washington College of Law) is offering in-person and virtual information sessions.

  • In-person info sessions are offered on Mondays and Fridays at 2 p.m. ET (register here).

  • Virtual info sessions are offered

• Arizona State is offering virtual JD information sessions every other Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. MT. Register here.

• Boston College has canceled in-person events for this semester. They are offering virtual coffee chats with current student ambassadors (sign up here) and a virtual information session on Wednesday, November 30 at 12 p.m. ET (register here).

• Cardozo Law is offering virtual information sessions on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. ET and Friday afternoons at 2 p.m. ET. Register for a session here.

• Columbia Law is offering a virtual information session on Thursday, December 15 at 12:15 p.m. ET. Register here.

• Duke Law is offering virtual information sessions at 2 p.m. ET on the following days (registration link here):

  • Thursday, December 8

  • Thursday, December 15

• Fordham Law is offering a virtual admissions session on Wednesday, December 7 at 5:30 p.m. ET (register here).

• Harvard Law is offering a virtual Q&A session Thursday, December 8 at 8 p.m. ET (register here).

• Northeastern Law is offering outdoor law school tours, showcasing three of their law school buildings. Each tour is led by a current law student who will take Q&A during the tour. Schedule a tour here.

• Notre Dame Law is offering in-person visits, which include an admissions information session and a student-led tour of the law school on Fridays at 11 a.m. ET. RSVP here. They also offer group information sessions via Zoom every other Wednesday, which will include time for Q&A. RSVP here.

• UCLA Law is offering in-person law school tours on Mondays and Fridays. They are also offering virtual law school tours on Wednesdays. Register here.

• University of Virginia will host in-person Q&A sessions each Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET. No registration is required.

• WashU Law in St. Louis is offering meetings with admissions, virtual open houses, and live-streamed events. For more details and to sign up, click here. To schedule an in-person campus visit, click here.

• Yale Law is offering one-on-one appointments with a member of the admissions office to address prospective student questions. Schedule here.

Some admissions teams are now adjusting their focus from recruitment travel to the application review process and are subsequently issuing decisions. Other schools, though they may have started review, are waiting to begin issuing decisions in batches after Thanksgiving (after recruitment season concludes) or after they’ve completed their Early Decision review. Make sure you are checking your spam folder regularly, and if more than a couple of business days go by after submitting an application without receipt of an online status checker email, reach out to admissions for access to this resource.

FAQs from Students

Does 7Sage offer a Black Friday sale? YES.

Helpful Link

Do you keep a wrong answer journal to track your answers on the LSAT? We have a podcast episode that will help you learn from past mistakes. Listen in on 7Sage tutors Scott Milam and Julia Greve, as they walk listeners through the process of using The Wrong Answer Journal and field questions from the audience.

7Sage Guide for the LSAT Writing Sample

Stressed about this LSAT requirement? We are offering a 100% free guide to the LSAT Writing section that explains what it is, how you can prepare for it, and whether it matters at all (hint: it does)! Access the guide here.

7Sage Live Classes with J.Y. Ping

Curriculum creator and 7Sage founder J.Y. Ping has been hosting a Live Class! His course will walk through every game, passage, and question in the newly released PT93. To access the remaining classes, you must be subscribed to 7Sage Monthly + Live. J.Y.’s classes will be held on the following dates (from 12:00-1:30 p.m. ET):

• November: 28-30th

• December: 1-2nd, 5-7th

7Sage Rewards

We are pleased to announce our new rewards system! When you purchase a 7Sage product, you earn rewards that you can use throughout your law school journey. Redeem them for LSAT Tutoring, Admissions Consulting, or our Bar Prep course. For more information, and to learn how to view rewards you’ve earned, click here.

7Sage Study Group Breakout

Are you looking for an easy way to find people to study with? Or do you just want a break from reviewing questions on your own? You're in luck! Join us for our next "Study Group Breakout" on Monday, December 5th from 9 p.m. to 10:30 p.m. ET. Click here for more details.

7Sage Webinar: Admissions Deans’ Roundtable Talk

Join 7Sage admissions consultant Tajira McCoy for the first in a series of discussions with law school admissions deans across the country. For this first conversation, hear from the admissions deans of Boston College, Emory University, Loyola University Chicago, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the University of Richmond, and the University of San Diego, as we discuss the current application cycle, some of the areas where candidates miss the mark, and advice about application submissions in terms of timelines, LSAT scores, and scholarship consideration. Register here.

Recruitment Events

• American University (Washington College of Law) is offering in-person and virtual information sessions.

  • In-person info sessions are offered on Mondays and Fridays at 2 p.m. ET (register here).

  • Virtual info sessions are offered

• Arizona State is offering virtual JD information sessions every other Tuesday at 9:30 a.m. MT. Register here.

• Boston College has canceled in-person events for this semester. They are offering virtual coffee chats with current student ambassadors (sign up here) and a virtual information session on Wednesday, November 30 at 12 p.m. ET (register here).

• Cardozo Law is offering virtual information sessions on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. ET and Friday afternoons at 2 p.m. ET. Register for a session here.

• Columbia Law is offering a virtual information session on Thursday, December 15 at 12:15 p.m. ET. Register here.

• Duke Law is offering virtual information sessions at 2 p.m. ET on the following days (registration link here):

  • Thursday, December 8

  • Thursday, December 15

• Fordham Law is offering a virtual admissions session on Wednesday, December 7 at 5:30 p.m. ET (register here).

• Harvard Law is offering a virtual Q&A session Thursday, December 8 at 8 p.m. ET (register here).

• Northeastern Law is offering outdoor law school tours, showcasing three of their law school buildings. Each tour is led by a current law student who will take Q&A during the tour. Schedule a tour here.

• Notre Dame Law is offering in-person visits, which include an admissions information session and a student-led tour of the law school on Fridays at 11 a.m. ET. RSVP here. They also offer group information sessions via Zoom every other Wednesday, which will include time for Q&A. RSVP here.

• UCLA Law is offering in-person law school tours on Mondays and Fridays. They are also offering virtual law school tours on Wednesdays. Register here.

• University of Virginia will host in-person Q&A sessions each Friday from 2 p.m. to 3 p.m. ET. No registration is required.

• WashU Law in St. Louis is offering meetings with admissions, virtual open houses, and live-streamed events. For more details and to sign up, click here. To schedule an in-person campus visit, click here.

• Yale Law is offering one-on-one appointments with a member of the admissions office to address prospective student questions. Schedule here. They are also offering a series of online open houses (space is limited for most events, and these events fill up quickly—these events below still have spaces left):

  • Monday, November 28 at 5 p.m. ET: Legal Scholarship & Academia @ YLS (register).

  • Wednesday, December 7 at 5 p.m. ET: YLS Online Open House (register)