The legal profession is grappling with a dramatic surge in demand for law school places, reshaping how institutions evaluate prospective students.
Ethan Madore, the coordinator of 7Sage’s admissions consulting program, has been tracking these shifts closely and says the pressure on applicants has never been greater.
In a wide-ranging interview, Madore described law school attendance as increasingly resembling the “graduate-school version of a liberal arts degree,” reflecting how the credential is perceived by a new generation of applicants.
The numbers illustrate the pressure building across the admissions landscape, with even highly regarded institutions reporting extraordinary entry-level academic profiles.
The University of Alabama School of Law, ranked 35th in the US News rankings, reported a median GPA for entering students of 3.95 in 2025, a figure that would have seemed remarkable just a decade ago.
Law school rankings have shifted significantly, with outcomes-based metrics such as bar passage rates and post-graduate employment rates gaining more weight relative to traditional input measures like LSAT medians.
Despite that shift, Madore argues that many administrators remain fixated on raw scores, creating a persistent tension between what rankings reward and what schools actually pursue.
“Law school administrators — people who, by and large, don’t have JDs themselves and have never sought truly competitive employment outcomes — are addicted to the median game, especially below the T10,” Madore said.
He raised pointed concerns about whether high GPAs in the current academic environment can reliably signal a student’s readiness for the demands of legal practice.
“It’s easy to see if someone has a 3.95 GPA in political theory,” Madore noted, adding that it is much harder to assess what those grades truly mean in a “post-Covid, post-Claude world where GPAs really aren’t a reliable indicator of rigor.”
The concern extends well beyond campus, with practising lawyers in both large firms and smaller boutiques having a direct stake in understanding how the admissions pipeline is evolving.
Madore warned that it “might be impossible to know if that will translate to workplace competence and the ability to succeed in an accelerated Biglaw recruitment process.”
For applicants navigating this extraordinarily competitive environment, expert guidance has become less of a luxury and more of a practical necessity to stand out in an overcrowded field.
The interview is the latest instalment in an ongoing series examining how legal education is changing, with more of Madore’s analysis set to follow in subsequent parts of the conversation.