Getting Started with LSD.Law

Orientation for first-time visitors: the dataset, school profiles, the predictor, and the cycle tools.

LSD.Law is free. You shouldn't have to pay a consultant thousands of dollars to figure out where to apply, what your numbers mean, or what scholarship offer is realistic. More on the mission.

Law school admissions runs on two numbers: your LSAT score (a standardized test scored 120 to 180) and your undergraduate GPA. Every school publishes the LSAT and GPA of its most recent enrolled class in an annual disclosure called the ABA 509. LSD.Law combines that official data with cycles reported by thousands of users — stats, where they applied, when they heard back, and scholarship amounts.

Most of the site works without an account. Reporting your own cycle unlocks applicant profiles and contributes back to the dataset. Nothing is paywalled.

A few terms up front

A handful of admissions terms come up constantly. Worth knowing before you click anywhere else.

Cycle: One year of admissions. The 2024–2025 cycle covers applications submitted between fall 2024 and spring 2025. LSD tracks every cycle separately.
25th / 50th / 75th percentile: Every school publishes three LSAT and GPA numbers describing the middle half of its enrolled class. The 50th is the median. An LSAT at or above the 75th percentile means you scored better than three-quarters of the enrolled class.
Splitter: Someone with a strong LSAT and a weak GPA (or vice versa) relative to a school's medians. Splitters behave differently in admissions than applicants with balanced stats, so the predictor accounts for it.
Softs: Everything on your application other than LSAT and GPA — work experience, major, leadership, military service, personal statement. Secondary to your numbers.

The glossary defines every other term used on the site — URM, KJD, UR2, waitlist movement, and so on.

What to do first

Most visitors are either deciding where to apply or tracking a cycle already in progress. Work through these in order.

1. See where you stand.

Open the admissions predictor and enter your LSAT, GPA, and a few background details. It returns probabilities of acceptance, waitlist, and rejection at every accredited law school, based on how similar applicants fared in past cycles. If you haven't taken the LSAT, plug in a target score to see how the outcomes shift.
2. Build a school list.

Browse the rankings to see schools grouped by employment, selectivity, or cost, or use applicant search to find past applicants with stats like yours and see where they applied, got in, and enrolled. A typical list mixes reach schools (above your numbers), targets (at or near), and safeties (comfortably below).
3. Research individual schools.

Every school has a profile page with admissions data, employment outcomes, bar passage, tuition, and scholarship stats, plus an interactive chart showing every reported applicant color-coded by outcome. The school profile guide walks through what each number means. Use compare to put two or three schools side by side.
4. Follow the cycle.

Once your applications are in: Recent decisions is a live feed of outcomes as they post. Heard back shows what share of applicants at each school have received a response, broken out by submission date. The cycle tracker compares the current cycle's pace to prior years, so you can tell whether slow movement is normal.

Still have questions?

The rest of this guide covers each tool: how the ranking is built, how the predictor works, how to read scholarship data. Topics are grouped by section in the sidebar.