There is often a shroud of mystery among applicants once they submit their applications. Questions from “What is holding up my application from going complete?” to “Why is it taking my application so long to get a decision versus other people who submitted after me?” are rife online every year, and understandably so. The vast majority of applicants have never worked in a law school admissions office, so once their application is out of their hands, the next stage of the process is something of a black box. As former admissions officers, we'll walk you through (broadly, not for any specific school) how the process tends to work.
(1) When you hit "submit," the law school receives the following items directly from LSAC:
If you submit GRE or other test scores, those are sent to the law school separately, directly from the relevant testing organization, and will be added to your file as a separate document.
(2) Someone in an administrative role in the admissions office is then tasked with processing and making sure that the law school has all of the required application materials from each applicant. If they have everything they need, your file will be marked "complete." If they don't, your application may be marked "incomplete" while they wait for additional information. If you're at this stage of the process, and you're wondering, there are a number of reasons that this might be the case. The two most common reasons are as follows.
(a) Your recommenders are tardy. This is by far and away the most common hold-up for an application to go complete. So what should you do? Certainly you should ask your recommender for an update, but as with so many of the human elements of this process, you must be careful about being eminently polite and respectful of their time in all of your communications with them. We would advise not sending multiple seemingly desperate emails. Instead, consider calling your recommender, or better yet stop by their office if possible—if they can speak ravingly about you in a letter, surely they will not mind seeing you or hearing your voice. So, try to have a real-time conversation with them, update them on your life, and then let them know that, per the admissions office, your recommendation is not in yet.
(b) Your application has encountered processing issues. Most law schools receive thousands of applications every year, and at most, every single one requires some amount of manual processing to get to the first file reviewer's desk. Plus, many are working with clunky and notoriously difficult-to-use software. So, both human errors and tech errors happen from time to time. The good news is, these issues can typically all be remedied by a quick and polite call or email to the admissions office—just reach out directly.
(3) Once your application is complete, it can then be transmitted to the first file reviewer(s) to be read and evaluated (at which point your application is "under review," in many status checkers' terms). That doesn't always happen immediately—in fact, it often doesn't—but delays at this stage are typically just the result of the pace and workflow of the admissions office.
(4) Different schools have different file reading processes, so the first person reading your application might be the dean of admissions, another admissions officer, or a dedicated file reader. They will read your file, likely take some notes, and perhaps assign a score (many schools use a 1 to 5 rating system, but this varies a great deal) and/or a recommended decision (admit/deny/waitlist). From there, depending on the school's application reading workflow (and in many cases depending on your initial score/decision recommendation), your file may go to a second reviewer and/or a faculty reviewer (if the law school has a faculty review committee).
If the law school interviews select applicants, this is also the stage at which you may be invited to interview. Notes on how your interview went will then typically be added to your application file and considered in the next stage of the process.
(5) In most situations for most law schools, no matter what process and how many reviewers your application goes through, the dean of admissions (or whoever is leading the admissions office) makes the final decision on all applications. They may read each application in full at this stage, or they may rely on consulting prior reviewer(s)' notes/scores/recommendations (this will often vary from applicant to applicant, but some law school admissions deans pride themselves on reading every application in full prior to rendering a decision, regardless of prior reviewers' notes/scores).
If the school awards scholarships concurrently with decisions (some do; many do not), and if you are being admitted, your scholarship will also be finalized at this stage.
(6) Decisions are usually made in batches (or "waves," in applicants' terms) for processing reasons. Certainly, law schools can and sometimes do release individual decisions (especially during the later cycle/waitlist process—but that's a topic for another blog!), but that is not typical. Most law schools render decisions via email, some render decisions (especially denials) simply by updating your status checker, and a few schools like to call applicants who they are admitting.
Applications often encounter delays in this process, particularly at the #3 stage outlined above. But why? What does it mean? Law schools like to talk about "rolling" admissions, but that does not mean that all applications are read and decisions rendered in the order in which they are received.
Many law schools—particularly schools that are highly competitive and receive large volumes of applications—sort their file reading process not by date completed, but by some combination of LSAT score and uGPA. To put it frankly (which, in this case, is also a bit bluntly), if they think you will be admitted, they have a greater incentive to render your decision earlier, because they believe they will have to recruit you moving forward. If they think you will be denied, they have less incentive to read your application sooner.
Early in the cycle, there's another factor at play here as well—at that stage, law schools can't yet be sure what to expect. They don't know how the applicant pool is going to shake out (at a national level, regional level, or at their school specifically), and as a result, they don't know whether they'll be able to maintain their medians, raise them, or have to lower them. They do know, regardless, that they'll want to admit applicants above both of their target medians, and that they'll likely deny most applicants below both medians, but that leaves a whole middle section of their applicant pool for whom their decision-making process might look different depending on a number of factors that will only become clear as the cycle progresses.
That reality of "rolling admissions" is not the only factor that causes disparities between when different applicants hear back, however—in fact, one applicant hearing back later than another might be caused by one or more of hundreds of reasons. Let's walk through a few:
We hope that this has been helpful in understanding what happens to your law school application once you hit "submit." Best of luck!
