Application Timing

When you apply to law school, would you voluntarily remove 10 points from your LSAT score? Or a full point off your GPA?

When you miss-time your application, that’s essentially what you’re doing. For some schools, timing might have an even bigger impact than 1 point off your GPA or 10 points off the LSAT.

Law school applications typically open in the fall, and stay open until the middle or near the end of the spring semester. Many students think this means applying in the spring is a good goal. They are wrong.

Law schools use “rolling admissions” systems. They begin admitting students as soon as they start getting applications. When you wait to apply until the spring, most applications have already been received, and many admissions (and scholarship!) decisions have already been made. When you apply in the spring, you’re competing with more students for fewer seats and less money.

Applying in the fall is the single easiest thing you can do to maximize your application chances. Every day you wait to apply after about mid December, you are choosing to give yourself a worse chance of admission – just like you would be if you tried to get a lower score on the LSAT.

An Example

This graph shows admissions decisions at the University of Georgia School of Law for the 2024 admissions cycle. Green are admits, yellow are waitlists, and reds are rejections (grey means the data is incomplete). Source: lsd.law

The stark thing about this graph is how much admissions stop for applications sent after December 11th. Only 5 students from this graph sent their applications after that date and received offers of admission. All but 1 of those students had LSATs of 170 or more.

Not every school’s timing is quite as severe as UGA’s was in this case, but all schools follow the same pattern. Once we hit winter break, even if schools are still admitting students at a higher rate than UGA, they are admitting fewer of those students than they do in the fall, and the applicants have greatly reduced chance of getting in.

The single biggest thing you can do to control your own destiny in law school applications is apply before winter break. 

If you’re a non-traditional student or taking a gap year, your goal should still be to apply the fall before you wish to attend.

Making Sure You’re On Schedule

Junior Year – Fall

  • Study for the LSAT
    • Take a practice exam – build your study based on your score
      • Use admissions calculators to determine your target score
    • Attend LSAT workshops and free tutoring sessions hosted virtually or on campus
    • Purchase LSAT study books with full tests inside. Complete a few questions per day, and a whole, timed section every week or every other week. Score yourself.
    • If you’re not getting close to your target score, then consider tutors/paid study courses

Junior Year – Spring

Summer Before Senior Year

  • Take the LSAT
    • First LSAT in early summer: May/June depending on yearly schedule
    • If necessary, plan to take a second LSAT at the end of the summer: August/September. This will give you enough time to still get your score back and keep your application on schedule.
      • Taking the LSAT more than twice is not necessarily a helpful strategy. Speak to a pre-law advisor or check on your desired schools’ LSAT score policies for more information.
  • Finish your application materials
    • Your personal statement, resume, and any addenda should be complete by the end of the summer and ready to send out.
    • You might need to write unique essays for some schools and those prompts may not have been published yet. You can’t start those yet, but prioritize them and finish them quickly in the fall.
  • Have your application statements reviewed by a pre-law advisor
    • And/or the writing center, the career center, etc.

Senior Fall:

Apply. Apply. Apply.