This August, 24,907 people took the LSAT. The most recent version of the LSAT was back up to four sections instead of three. After the onset of the pandemic, test administrators slashed the length of the test (it used to be five sections) and moved to an online, at-home format. The newly lengthier four-section LSAT does not seem to have deterred many potential lawyers. More students than last year are set to take the LSAT in October, when it will be next offered.
While the length of the Law School Admission Test has now changed to four sections, the online, at-home format isn’t going anywhere for the time being. The Law School Admission Council insists that the pandemic-era LSAT has not been inherently easier than previous iterations of the test, even though LSAT scores have been way up during the pandemic. The LSAC says students have been studying more during the pandemic than did previous law school candidates. Some LSAT test prep companies point to the positive effects of taking a test at home, and the LSAC has conceded that at-home testing can be a powerful salve against test-day anxiety. Whatever the reasons behind the higher LSAT scores, the stronger scores and modified format seem to have had some positive effects, with top law schools welcoming the most diverse applicant pools in history.
Yet, I still feel the need to rain on this parade a little. Although the bonanza in apparent LSAT prowess is great for some of these students, and certainly for some of these schools, it is going to come at a cost. Law schools have been grappling with overenrollment. That’s not really much of a problem for the schools — they just get to rake in more tuition dollars. It’s going to be a big problem for a lot of these students though in three or four years.
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We know that there are already more lawyers coming out of law school than the entry-level legal job market can absorb. We know total JD enrollment was up slightly in 2020 from 2019, and while we don’t have exact figures yet for 2021, the number of LSAT takers indicates we’re in the midst of a bigger enrollment jump. If current LSAT trends continue, we’ll see another competitive law school admissions cycle in 2022. It’s great that taking the LSAT has never been logistically easier, and it’s nice to have seemingly more well-qualified law school candidates, but where are the jobs going to be for all of these people when they graduate?
Maybe I’m just succumbing to characteristic lawyers’ pessimism. Perhaps more lawyers will decide to retire and open up some jobs in the next three years. A bunch of us did report plans to retire earlier due to the pandemic (although even more said they’d stick around longer: out of the third of older lawyers who said the pandemic changed their retirement plans, 53 percent said the pandemic would actually spur them to delay retirement, while the remaining 47 percent reported an increased likelihood of retiring early, according to the ABA). I guess life expectancy in the United States is way down, so that could open up some extra jobs in the legal marketplace.
The really high LSAT scorers will be fine, as will most of those admitted to the truly elite schools. For everyone else, I’d recommend leveraging those historically impressive LSAT scores and GPAs into graduating with as little debt as possible. Or, you know, you could look into other possible careers. If you can score high on the LSAT, you can score high on the GRE or whatever other test is required to get into a nonlegal graduate program.
The legal job market is fickle. Despite what you might see on television, the work life of the average lawyer is no picnic. For those who recently scored well on the LSAT, congratulations, godspeed, I wish you well. Remember me fondly if you’re on the bench someday. But keep in mind: a lot of other options are open to you too, some of them, perhaps, better ones. You can always take the LSAT, score highly, move on to some nonlegal career, and reserve the right to opine loudly later in life about the excellent lawyer you could have become.
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Jonathan Wolf is a civil litigator and author of Your Debt-Free JD (affiliate link). He has taught legal writing, written for a wide variety of publications, and made it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at [email protected].