The Ideal Law School Application Timeline (2024-2025)
/What to do each month of the 2024-2025 application cycle to ensure timely and high-quality materials to help maximize your odds of getting accepted. Plus, the complete list of law school application deadlines.
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Part 1: Introduction to the law school application timeline
One way applying to law school differs from applying to undergrad is that many law schools often admit students on a rolling basis. Schools with a rolling admissions process evaluate applications as they come in rather than waiting for a hard deadline before reviewing applications.
Not every law school has rolling admissions, but those that do tend to offer applicants the opportunity for one distinct advantage: students who submit applications earlier often receive a response earlier. This gives you more time to negotiate financial aid and choose between schools. It can even give you an edge in the admissions process by applying to schools when their incoming classes are full of open spots rather than already mostly filled.
So you’ve figured out that you should apply early, but what does that mean? What about the various components that comprise your complete application? At what point in the year should you begin working on each? What’s the best way to maximize the time you have available while still managing to submit your completed application early on in the application cycle?
Having a clear plan is the best way to avoid sending panicked emails to your recommenders, making midnight rewrites to your personal statement, or squeezing in just one more LSAT attempt before the buzzer. To this end, we created an ideal law school application timeline that will keep you on track while keeping your schedule manageable.
(Suggested reading: How to Get Into Law School: The Ultimate Guide)
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Part 2: Law school application timeline (2024-2025)
If you decide you do want to go to law school, then you need a plan. The timeline of this plan will depend principally on its endpoint: when you want to begin law school.
You can apply for law school before the cycle you plan to attend (e.g., you can apply in December 2024 or January 2025 but plan to start law school later than August 2025). While this is possible, it is also true that unless the law school has a specific program for deferrals, they likely prefer that applicants apply during the cycle just before their anticipated matriculation year. If you feel very strongly that applying with a plan to defer is very important to your plans, then it is certainly an option, but if you are unsure about whether you want to (1) apply now and defer or (2) apply later and continue straight through, we suggest the latter.
Law schools like to plan out their 1L classes altogether when possible, and there’s less uncertainty when you start soon after applying. Some schools (for instance, Harvard) have specific programs for deferring; for these, there’s less likely to be any issue with it. However, for most schools, we don’t suggest you defer unless you feel very strongly that it is necessary.
Say you plan to start Law school in August of 2025. This means you plan to apply in the 2024–2025 admissions cycle. Working backward, you’ll want to submit your applications, if possible, by the end of October 2024. This is considered early for submission and is the best option if you can manage it.
On the other hand, submitting your applications near the end of December would likely be “on time.” Submitting your applications after January 1, 2025, would be considered somewhat late but would by no means equal a death sentence.
While submitting your applications earlier is ideal, you should not sacrifice quality for timing.
If you have the time to prepare and are planning to submit your application by October 31, then you will need:
Your finalized list of schools to which you plan to apply
Your final LSAT score in hand (you can technically take the October LSAT and apply with that score, but you will not be able to view it prior to applying)
Your personal statement
Any additional, optional essays (this is often determined on a school-by-school basis)
Your letters of recommendation (at least two)
Any addenda you wish to submit
We created the timeline that follows to apply by October 31. If you want to give yourself more of a buffer (or aim to submit your application by October 15 or even September 30), feel free to bump up the timeline by two to four weeks as applicable. The important thing is to keep a manageable, effective pace throughout.
Pre-application cycle
Before the application cycle is even in sight, there are a few things that are good to keep in mind.
Decide whether you really want to go to law school. Many lawyers love their jobs, and there are several different paths a J.D. degree can take you. Nonetheless, it’s important that pursuing law isn’t just some backup plan or a path you’re pursuing “just because.” While the field of law is well-respected and typically offers financial security, it’s also one in which individuals must devote many long hours. As a result, it has a high rate of burnout. Additionally, law school is a large investment of time and money. Talking to lawyers, listening to podcasts, and reading books, articles, and essays are great ways to learn about the reality of pursuing law as a career.
Suggested reading: Should You Go to Law School? Pros and Cons
Choose a major that will allow you to excel. Law schools do not care what you major in during your undergrad years, but they do care how well you perform. If you’d like to take classes that’ll help shape your thinking for the LSAT, consider enrolling in a symbolic logic class. The basic rules of logical argumentation and implication are the core of the LSAT—and much of legal thinking—so internalizing them fully before even beginning to prepare for the LSAT is an advantage.
Build genuine relationships with professors. You will need letters of recommendation for your law school application, so it’s a good idea to begin forming relationships with those who could potentially send a letter that speaks to your specific strengths and capabilities. Professors often can write letters of recommendation for any good student who makes an effort in their classes and does well, but precise and compelling letters of recommendation only come from established personal relationships.
Start researching law schools. You’ll want to initiate this process at least two years prior to when you’d like to begin law school. Sometimes, students wait until closer to the time they plan to sit for the LSAT, but starting sooner can help you narrow down your list once you receive your scores. You can visit the school, talk to and research faculty, talk to students and alumni, sit in on a class, talk to admissions officers, read their statistics for job placements/bar passage, and so much more!
January 2024–April 2024
Request and obtain letters of recommendation.
Suggested reading: Law School Letters of Recommendation: The Definitive Guide
May 2024
Begin preparing for the LSAT (or the GRE).
Suggested reading: How Hard is the LSAT? The Honest Truth
Brainstorm important qualities you want in a law school.
June 2024
Continue preparing for the LSAT; begin taking practice LSATs.
Suggested reading: How to Get a Perfect LSAT Score: Strategies From a 180 Scorer
Research law schools that make sense for your GPA/LSAT range.
Suggested reading: What Is a Good LSAT Score? (2024)
July 2024
Curate a list of law schools to apply to.
Optional: take your first official LSAT.
August 2024
Take your first official LSAT.
Brainstorm for your personal statement(s) and begin writing drafts.
Suggested reading: Law School Personal Statement: The Ultimate Guide (Examples Included)
Update and revise your resume.
Optional: begin brainstorming for additional or optional essay prompts.
September 2024
Optional: take your second official LSAT.
Optional: write an addendum.
Suggested reading: How to Write a Law School Addendum: The Ultimate Guide (Examples Included)
Finalize your personal statement.
Begin writing additional or optional essays.
October 2024
Finalize your personal and additional essays.
Fill out your application information.
Consider your application as a whole: is this ready? Do you need more time to revise your essays? Should you attempt the LSAT again?
October 31, 2024
All of your applications should be submitted.
November 2024–December 2024
Start to hear back from some law schools, possibly including financial aid packages.
If requested, meet with law schools for an interview.
If asked, meet with administrators to discuss financial aid.
January 2025–March 2025
Continue to receive admissions decisions and scholarship information.
Attend law school events and talk with law school community members to learn more.
April 2025
Negotiate your financial aid.
Decide which law school to attend.
Make a deposit for your law school of choice.
May 2025
Relax! Make the most of your time before the real challenge starts. Applications, after all, just get you to the starting line.
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Part 3: Frequently asked questions
Should I take the LSAT or the GRE?
Many law schools indeed allow you to take the GRE instead of the LSAT for admissions. However, this is somewhat risky. The GRE has not been around long enough in law school admissions for anyone to have a good sense of how it matches up with the LSAT in terms of admissions effectiveness. Nonetheless, it is reasonable to think that law schools are at least more comfortable with the LSAT than the GRE. The LSAT is specifically designed around the thinking skills that law schools require and has been shown to correlate well with 1L performance. The GRE is newer to the law school space and has less specific research relating it to law school outcomes. For these reasons, it is advisable to take the GRE only if you have reason to believe that you would perform markedly better on it than on the LSAT. To understand roughly how LSAT and GRE scores compare, you can find a GRE-LSAT conversion table here and here.
When's the last month you can take the LSAT and remain competitive?
There’s no real last month to remain competitive—applying early is a marginal, not absolute, benefit. It’s a benefit in competitiveness, but also a benefit in stress and bargaining. If you apply early, that is an advantage in getting into a school, but just as important is the advantage of not running up against a hard deadline and having more time to research schools and bargain with them for more aid.
There are three factors to consider about LSAT timing. The first is that you can use an LSAT score to apply immediately after taking it. The second is that it takes about four weeks to get a score back after your LSAT. The third is your score progression. Your practice LSAT scores will likely increase before plateauing in a specific range. You might have a few more points to eke out, but the most important thing is gaining consistency. Once you have a consistent score band, you can confidently take an official LSAT.
We suggest applying by the end of October. This means you need to take your LSAT by the end of October to use it. However, to see your score before applying with it, you would need to take your LSAT by the end of September. In addition, because your scores will never be entirely consistent, it is often good to give yourself a second chance in case your first LSAT score is lower than you are comfortable with. So, taking your first LSAT in August is advisable, if possible.
While this is ideal, what is most important is getting the best score possible. Law school applications are on time if you apply by December 31, 2024 (which would imply a November LSAT or an October one if possible). You are still competitive in applying after then, but competition will be stiffer, and it will be more likely that your application will have to be above average for the law school to consider it.
How can I prepare for the LSAT?
It’s advisable to give yourself at least three months between starting to study for the LSAT and taking your first official test. A thorough test prep plan will likely include at least 250 total hours of preparation. There is no way around learning the LSAT: it’s its own test, and buying practice books, using tutor services, and doing the problems and practice tests required is the only way to be fully prepared for the test. The LSAT is unlike the MCAT or SAT in that there is no quantitative or scientific section that requires you to know specific theorems or pieces of information. Instead, the LSAT tests your logical reasoning and reading comprehension skills.
There aren’t any college courses that prepare you for the LSAT specifically (or law school generally). Although, if you are dead set on trying to prepare for law school admissions in undergrad, don’t take classes on law or legal studies (at least not for that reason specifically), but rather a symbolic logic class. This will prepare you more for the LSAT than other commonly taught undergraduate courses. The basic rules of logical argumentation and implication are the core of the LSAT (and much of legal thinking). Internalizing them fully before even beginning to prepare for the LSAT will give you something of a head start in your LSAT prep.
Finally, any prospective law school applicant should know that historically, the LSAT has had three different section types: Logical Reasoning, Logic Games, and Reading Comprehension. Beginning in August 2024, Logic Games will no longer be a section of the LSAT and will be replaced by another Logical Reasoning section. Depending on your specific skills and preferences, you may be able to use this information to decide for yourself whether you would like to take the test with or without a Logic Games section.
Is there anything I can do to prepare for law school once I’m admitted?
There technically are, but none are expected. You could read about the law, but law schools expect to teach you the law. The mild benefit of a couple of months’ head start is not worth the risk of increasing your academic burden unnecessarily or even getting exhausted early into law school because you didn’t take advantage of a break when you needed one. If you are just raring to go and need to think about some law right now, go for it! But know you’ll be satisfying a personal interest, not gaining a leg up on your classmates.
How do I choose what law schools to apply to?
Figuring out which law schools to apply to is very important. The first year of law school (1L) is generally pretty regular across schools. However, beyond 1L, law schools’ opportunities, resources, and particularities vary wildly. There are a couple of very easy filtering mechanisms to start with. First is your application strength. It will be somewhat difficult to know early on where you stack up regarding raw numbers since you haven’t taken your LSAT yet. However, once you have seen your section scores and have taken a few practice tests, you can get a sense of what band of scores you will likely end up in. If a school you want to go to is somewhat of a reach for your LSAT/GPA mix, you can definitely apply! However, if it is very important to you to begin law school at the end of the application cycle you are applying in, it’s good to have a mix of schools that you are more and less likely to get into.
(Suggested reading: T-14 Law Schools: How to Get In)
The second major filter is location. Even more so than in applying to undergrad, it is important to go to law school with a basic idea of how the law school you’re going to connects to the sort of job you want as a lawyer. Only the top 15 or so ranked law schools have truly national reach, where a degree from that law school is pretty similar to getting you a job in any state or city in the US. Once you start getting outside the top 20 or 30 ranked law schools, their influence and relationships with law firms become much more regionalized. This does not mean they are not a good deal! However, if you want to work in entertainment law in New York City, a degree from Stanford Law School will likely be able to give you a connection with at least some firms in the area. Meanwhile, even though Loyola Marymount University has a very respectable entertainment law program, its connections and reputation are much more concentrated in the southern California area. The region becomes a much more important consideration here.
(Suggested reading: Law Schools in California: How to Get In)
Beyond application strength and location, deciding which law schools to apply to means learning about the specific strengths and focuses of their academics, culture, and networks.
Where can I learn more about specific law schools?
There are three types of resources that you can use to learn about law schools: third-party aggregation, first-party websites, and in-person experience.
Third-party aggregation websites like US News and Above the Law rankings can give a (very rough) shorthand for the relative quality of many law schools. Above the Law takes US News’s data and strips out all the ‘input’ data (e.g., LSAT and GPA medians of incoming classes) to focus merely on the ‘outputs’ of the schools — their occupational placements, bar passage rates, and so on. This is meant to make the ranking more specifically about where a school can take you, not what kind of students a school admits. If you are trying to find out which school is the best rather than which has the best students, then this is at least somewhat less confounded than the alternative. Princeton Review has more granular data and top rankings for specific qualities, such as how easy it is to get a federal clerkship from a school or how good the professors are. These aggregation websites can be good for getting a list of schools that fit the basic characteristics you’re looking for: Are they in the right region? Do they have a specific clinic or specialty you are particularly interested in? How much aid do they give? Once you have that rough list, though, you should look for more granular information to choose between them.
The first-party websites of law schools have specific information on the clubs, clinics, courses, and faculty that a school has. They are also great ways to find out more about how law schools see themselves and what they choose to emphasize. Law schools will all try to make themselves seem as impressive as possible, but you can learn about what the school focuses on by seeing what courses, faculty, clinics, and sectors get the scarce area on their website. No law school will say that their law school culture is bad, but some will emphasize cooperation while others emphasize rigor. You aren’t going to find out whether a law school is better or worse than another by looking at their websites, but you will be able to see how they are different — and that is often just as important.
The most honest and specific information you can find is face-to-face, in-person interaction with the law school, its students, or its faculty. Sitting in on classes and talking with students provide the most particular information, where law schools don’t have the ability, and students don’t have an incentive, to sand the edges off of life at that law school. However, this is also the most costly (both in terms of time and money) type of information, so it’s best to try to get as much information as you can before deciding that a school is worth the trip.
How do I know whether I should write an addendum?
An addendum is a place to explain any circumstance which deeply affected a part of your application, but is not itself reflected in your application. An addendum should be matter-of-fact and sound like an explanation, not an excuse. There should be (1) a part of your application which you feel is unrepresentative of your actual quality as a student, (2) a story explaining why it is unrepresentative, and (3) a reason why such a situation will not derail your academic career again. In some cases this third addendum component is self-explanatory and it is not necessary to spell it out yourself. Nonetheless, it still might be good to explain how you have grown since the time in question.
An addendum should be an explanation, not an excuse. It should explain why a part of your application does not reflect your underlying abilities as a student—fundamentally, the key is (3), which will show a law school that who they will be admitting is not the student who did the part of your application the addendum is for, but rather the student who did the rest of your application.
What should I write my personal statement about?
The answer to this question varies between law schools. Some law schools have their own, special prompts, like Harvard’s Purpose and Perspective prompts. Most law schools, however, give you fairly free reign on your personal statement (though they may ask for additional written essays which are more specific). However, under this heading of a general personal statement, there are still distinctions. Some law schools will want you to just tell them something interesting about you, and may even prefer that it not include references to law and law school, while other schools want to hear more specifically about your interest in law. This changes school to school, so the only way to find out what schools you like are which is to look for how they explain the personal statement and what they ask for specifically on their website.
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Part 4: Deadlines for the 2024–2025 cycle
Since law school has rolling admissions, there is no entirely centralized timeline except for official LSAT tests and the LSAC application software opening.
The dates of upcoming LSAT tests for the 2024-2025 cycle are not fully determined. They will be made available on the official LSAC website as the year progresses. The LSAC application itself, which all law schools require and accept, is always open for you to make an account. Once schools’ applications become available, you can begin to fill out their forms and apply.
While there are no centralized timelines outside of LSAC, there are periods when applications tend to open and close or school deposits tend to be required. School applications generally open anywhere from mid-August to the end of September, with a large proportion of them opening September 1. To find out when a specific school’s application opens, you can look at their website or look for historical data on when they have opened in the past. When applications close has much more variance, especially when taking into account early decision applications. Some law schools have early decision programs that require you to apply with a binding commitment to that school, should you be accepted. These work similarly to undergraduate early decision programs and generally require applications to be submitted somewhere between November 1 and December 1. For regular decision, application deadlines vary greatly, with many law schools closing their applications in February or March while some extend them into April, May, or even later.
Once you apply, depending on the school, you might hear back in 8 to 10 weeks or at specific ‘waves’ of admissions decisions. Once you are admitted, you will likely be asked to fill out a survey for financial aid. It is highly recommended to fill out these surveys as soon as possible, so you can have as much information about your financial situation before negotiating.
It is very common to negotiate your scholarship for law school. However, your opportunity for doing so is best before you need to begin making (often binding) deposits on law schools. These deposits secure your seat in a law school class and are generally due around the end of April or early May. It’s important to decide where you want to go before then, so you don’t find yourself being forced to decide.
Finally, once you’re in a law school, there’s the deadline to begin classes! Orientations for law school almost always begin sometime in August, so you have at least three months to get excited about the law school you chose. Once you have your seat in a law school classroom, your application timeline is fully finished and you don’t have to worry about application deadlines again. But don’t worry; at that point there are other deadlines to think about!
About the Author
Dr. Shirag Shemmassian is the Founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting and one of the world's foremost experts on law school admissions. For nearly 20 years, he and his team have helped thousands of students get into law school using his exclusive approach.
