With law school admissions officers again reminding themselves how best to turn a midweek holiday into an extended weekend while using minimal paid time off, we face one of the last “quiet weeks” of the summer.

Next week will be the lead-up to the first big recruitment event of the admissions year—the Washington, D.C. LSAC Forum.

In just three more weeks, law schools will start to see returning students arriving back in their hallways for early interview programs.

And just two weeks after that is the start of the academic year at many law schools.

Which means that the first wave of “travel season”—which starts in earnest just after Labor Day—is just two weeks after that.

It may seem like we’ve just created a Rube Goldberg-esque calendar.

This segmentation of the upcoming weeks means that admissions officers are going to have their “last hurrah” of vacation before really gearing up for the upcoming admissions cycle. So don’t be surprised to see another few waitlist admit offers prior to AdComms setting up a number of auto-response out-of-office messages for the extended 4th of July weekend.

And speaking of holidays and vacations, a brief note about the next two weeks of blog while we are out on vacation. We’ll have posts that focus more on matters relevant to the upcoming cycle (attending law fairs, how schools create their applications). We’ll be back to regular programming—including headlines—in two weeks. Surely nothing will happen while we’re gone….

But before we head out, let’s check in on those headlines from the world of law school admissions.

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National LSAT Figures

The June LSAT results started coming back last Wednesday, and we have a bit of a surprise on our hands per the LSAT Registrants and Test Taker Volumes report:

As of right now, LSAC is reporting more registrants for the June 2025 test versus the June 2024 version … but that June 2024 had more test takers. There could be a few things happening here:

• The most obvious answer is that the June 2025 exam had a larger percentage of registrants who simply “no showed” for the exam. It’s possible, but not probable because….
• The gaps between “Registered” and “Test Taker” totals are always very tight. For the entire 2023–2024 test cycle, there was just a 2.3% gap. Right now, the June 2025 test has a gap of 10.3%. So the answer is likely in another column—the percent of first-time test takers for June 2025. June 2024 had that percentage at 55.9% while June 2025 was at 66%. A first-time test taker is far more likely to run into some last-minute issues on test day (since they’ve never done this before and don’t know what to expect) and also needs to take the writing section before their score is released. Our guess is that the large percentage of first-timers is causing a bit more dust to get kicked up than would be usual.

When we check the stats again in three weeks, we’ll know whether our 20-month-long hot streak of year-over increases in LSAT test takers has lived to fight another month.

But even if the streak is snapped, the high percentage of first-time test takers continues to point to a competitive upcoming cycle. If a higher percentage of the test takers were first-timers versus last year, that would seem to indicate a higher percentage of test takers who were getting geared up for applications to open in a few weeks versus those who were taking the LSAT as a last-minute chance of helping their odds of being admitted off a waitlist.

Additionally, the August LSAT registration deadline passed last week, and we saw the usual last-minute surge of registrants—about 11,500 in total. With only four more weeks to go before that test, it’s unlikely we’ll see enough cancellations and reschedules to drop the August 2025 numbers below the August 2024 test.

As such, we remain at “all systems go” for our forecasts that last year’s 22.5% increase in national applications is going to stick around … like a heat dome … which surely no one reading this blog will have just suffered through.

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Continued Waitlist/Admit Activity

It’s still happening!

Per lawschooldata and the r/LSA thread, we’ve seen schools continuing to admit students, including Texas, Georgetown, Notre Dame, and Washington University in St. Louis. And it’s rather clear what these schools are aiming for at this juncture. Let’s take a quick look at the stats for Texas’s most recent waitlist admits:

Texas’s most recent LSAT median was 171 and the GPA median was 3.89. Each of these admits has a high GPA and a low LSAT. That must mean that Texas’s AdComms feel confident that they’ve locked down their LSAT median for the incoming class and the time has come to try and boost their GPA.

We saw the same trend at Notre Dame:

And at Georgetown:

So if you have a high GPA and are still in contention at these schools, now is a good time to be in touch with the admissions office to reiterate your interest!

At the other end of the spectrum was Michigan releasing large swaths of their remaining waitlist roster:

In their case, they let go of candidates who had high GPAs and other candidates with high LSATs. Michigan has clearly hit the point of their admissions cycle when they feel like they are only going to have limited seats going forward and that both of their medians for the incoming class are secure. As such, they could feel confident that it was the right time to give a final decision to a large percentage of their remaining waitlisted candidates. They’ve likely held on to a small group of waitlisted applicants as a “just in case” for when and if one of their incoming students cancels their deposit and—thus—opens up a seat in the incoming class. We’ll see more and more admissions offices provide these kinds of updates after we pass the 4th of July holiday.

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7Sage Events

Our next Admissions AMA class is on July 2nd. As a reminder that you can check out our past sessions via our Class Library—just enter “Admissions” into the search bar.

The most recent episode of the 7Sage Admissions Podcast dropped on Monday and features the audio from our June Law School Deans’ Roundtable. Along with providing updates about where we are in the admissions cycle (Waitlists! Transfers! Still reading files!), the panelists also offer a great deal of advice for those applicants from this past cycle who may have been disappointed with their results, given how competitive the national applicant pool was. If you need some words of wisdom at this time of year and some guidance for the months ahead, be sure to check it out on Amazon, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you stream your podcasts!