Admissions Update: June 1
Wherein law school admissions officers take a few days out of the office
The transition from spring into summer brings any number of migratory processes. We see it all around us—birds and other animals heading north towards cooler climates; flowers dropping from trees to be replaced by budding fruit; the school year ending and students moving into summer (or long-term!) jobs. Adding to this list is the journey of law school admissions officers to the LSAC Annual Meeting. We’re going to take a few moments (just a few, since meta commentaries about professional conferences are probably just as fun as attending professional conferences) today to discuss this event and the law school admissions professional community.
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.