With law school admissions bloggers continuing their vacations for another week

we’re pre-writing another post regarding the big things that tend to happen at this time of year.

And although applicants consider September 1st to be the start date for applications, law school AdComms need to start the process sooner … way sooner … like “June and July” sooner.

If filling out an application is akin to buying a house and moving in your own furniture and decorations, the admissions officers’ work is akin to laying the foundation, installing the plumbing and electrical, and hanging the drywall. It’s a bit of a process!

And before we go too much further, it’s worth mentioning—again—how critical LSAC is to the law school admissions process. Our last blog post was all about how they host the biggest law fairs of the year. And we know our readers are familiar (perhaps more than they would like to be) with LSAC’s role in administering the LSAT. But another critical function that LSAC provides in the law school admissions process is providing the platform for schools to build their applications, receive applications from applicants, and process/review said applications in due course.

When building their apps, schools can opt in to standard templates that LSAC has provided or they can create their own questions and sections. To that end, it’s a bit Minecraft-y.

For example, LSAC has created a standard section template to ask for an applicant’s first name, last name, date of birth, and current address. It’s easy-peasy, and most schools opt in to using it because it’s already there.

But what if someone on the school’s admissions committee wants to change “Last Name” into “Family Name”? This is where the customization comes in … and it comes with a price.

The problem isn’t creating the question. Rather, it’s creating all the back-end mapping from the custom question into LSAC’s database and then transferring the data into exportable Excel spreadsheets. That’s like spending lots of time building a great house … and not realizing that you need to make the door big enough to fit through.

These are certainly surmountable problems for law school AdComms—just figure out the back-end mapping / make a new door that’s a smidge wider—but the practical implication is that most admissions officers will opt in to as many standardized sections as possible.

What can you take with this knowledge?

First, that most schools’ applications will be remarkably similar. You’ll quickly notice all the standard sections and questions by the time you fill out your third or fourth application. In fact, LSAC’s website will start to save your answers to the standard questions and will auto-populate your responses into future schools’ applications that utilize the same questions. This can be super convenient, but it also means that you want to proofread your first apps to the nth degree! If you misspell your street address on the first application and don’t notice the error, it can spread like a virus to your other applications.

Second, that if a school has a unique question, they deliberately meant to ask it. If they went through the trouble of working with LSAC to create a question, map out the data flow from the question, and then beta test / debug it to ensure it works on a technical level, it’s information that they’d really like from their applicants. It can give you insight into what the admissions office wants to know, and it’s a signal that you probably shouldn’t skip over the question.

Third, that the effort to create new questions and sections means that applications tend to stay the same in consecutive years. Of course, we’re going to lean into the meaning of “tend” because the past two years have seen more flux than usual:

• The Supreme Court’s Students for Fair Admissions decision was handed down right at the end of June 2023 … just as schools were in the process of finalizing their applications for the year. It took some time for AdComms to work with both their university’s general counsel’s office and LSAC to ensure that their applications were compliant with the government’s new approach to affirmative action in college admissions.
• And apps changed a bit more than usual last year because of everything that admissions officers learned during the 2023–2024 admissions cycle. With all the changes, AdComms found that some new questions provided useful information for their evaluation and others were less effective.

With two years of changes post-SFFA under their belts, this year’s applications are likely to be rather stable. As such, you can feel reasonably confident that the prompts from last year’s applications (which you can find on our website here) should still be there for the coming cycle. The prompts that are most likely to change on an annual basis are the short responses—for example, Georgetown’s top ten list prompt and Stanford’s book donation question. But even there, Michigan Law has already updated their short answer prompts for the coming year and their only change was to add a question—not to delete one, nor to substantially change the wording of any prompts. Hopefully this is a good initial sign for all our upcoming law applicants!

File this knowledge away, start on that writing, and avoid any chicken jockeys!

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7Sage Events

The latest episode of our admissions podcast dropped on Monday and features a conversation with Maggie Slater, Assistant Dean for Enrollment Management at West Virginia Law, about what law school reps are looking for when they’re attending forums and fairs. Be sure to check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!