What 200 Prelaw Advisors Taught Us About Their Profession

By Kyle McEntee

This post is part of a series related to the 2025 Prelaw Advisor Landscape Study.

When we launched our study on the prelaw advising landscape more than a year ago, we had a hypothesis: Prelaw advisors are doing consequential work under significant constraints that limit their opportunities to address their advisees’ challenges at the level they desire. What we didn't fully anticipate were the topics where advisors are least likely to engage, or that most confidence gaps are actually engagement gaps.

The 2025 Prelaw Advisor Landscape Study is now available, and I want to share a few things that struck me most — not as a summary of the report, but as a reflection on what our findings tell us about a profession that hasn't been studied at this scale before.

The confidence story isn't what it looks like at first

When you look at raw confidence rates across advising topics, the picture can seem discouraging: Only 53% of advisors feel confident advising on post-application updates, and just 58% feel confident discussing the financial costs of pursuing a law degree. These numbers might suggest a profession that struggles with preparation.

But when you look at confidence among only advisors who actually advise on those topics — what we call the confidence ratio — the picture changes completely. Among advisors who engage on post-application updates, 87% feel confident. Among those who engage on costs, 79% do. Across nearly every topic we measured, advisors who do the work feel equipped to do it well.

This matters enormously for how we think about professional development. The challenge isn't building confidence among advisors who are trying and struggling; it's helping more advisors develop the foundation to engage with certain topics in the first place. Those are different problems that require different responses.

Financial topics are the consistent gap, and the stakes just got higher

One pattern appears across all three phases of prelaw advising: Money-related topics show systematically lower engagement and confidence than non-financial topics. Advisors are less likely to discuss the cost of pursuing a law career than to discuss career exploration. They’re less likely to help advisees understand how to pay for applying than to help them with their personal statements. And they’re less likely to advise on scholarships than on waitlists.

Some of that reflects institutional constraints, such as policies that limit financial guidance or professional boundaries that make advisors cautious about straying into financial advising territory. Some of it reflects cultural discomfort with money conversations, which affects advisors and advisees alike.

But the advisees who need this guidance most — first-generation college students, those from lower-income backgrounds, prospective law students weighing whether the investment makes sense — are the ones who suffer most from the gap. With changes to the federal student loan program taking effect in July 2026, the stakes of that gap are increasing. That’s why LSAC is launching a new financial aid training this spring, and why we'll keep investing in resources that help advisors with these conversations.

Faculty advisors often work without formal recognition or infrastructure

The report reinforces — or reveals, depending on your perspective — that faculty prelaw advisors operate in substantially different conditions than their staff counterparts. For 70% of faculty, prelaw advising is minimally considered or not relevant for tenure. In other words, faculty institutions often benefit from having a prelaw advisor without formally recognizing that work.

That lack of institutional recognition extends to preparation and professional development. Only 42% of faculty received formal training for their advising role, compared with 71% of staff. On average, faculty engage with fewer professional development sources and attend conferences at lower rates, and 31% prepared through self-directed learning alone, compared with 13% of staff who did so. In other words, faculty advisors frequently do this work without the infrastructure their staff counterparts have. One consequence is that 46% of faculty feel disconnected from the prelaw advising community, compared with 24% of staff who feel that way.

But while faculty have a different set of constraints, staff advisors and faculty alike feel they’re asked to wear too many hats (63%) or say they have insufficient institutional support (59%).

That's part of why we wanted to do this study. Advisors can use these data to make the case to their institutions for more time, more resources, and more formal recognition of their work. For LSAC and the broader advising ecosystem, this study establishes a baseline we can build from — and one we'll revisit in the future to measure how the profession has evolved.