2025 Prelaw Advisor Landscape Study

Prelaw advisors at undergraduate institutions serve a vital role in higher education and the legal profession, guiding people through one of the most consequential decisions of their lives: whether to pursue a law degree. Their advisees come to them with questions about where to apply, how to present themselves as applicants, and where to attend. Advisors perform this work under significant institutional constraints, such as a lack of time, funding, or other support. Additionally, many of them are the only prelaw advisor on their campus, and their work is further complicated by shifting state and federal policies.

With the goal of better understanding the landscape faced by prelaw advisors today, LSAC in 2025 performed a study intended as the first comprehensive look at who advisors are, what they do, where engagement and confidence gaps exist, what challenges their advisees face, and where the profession needs more support. Two hundred advisors from schools in 35 states participated, representing 15% of four-year institutions in the LSAC system and advising for 30% of this year’s incoming 1L students. For advisors, the findings in the study can be used to make the case for their institutions for more time, resources, and formal recognition of their work; for LSAC and the broader advising ecosystem, it establishes a baseline that will be revisited in the future to measure how the profession has evolved.

Key insights from this report include: 

• 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. However, among advisors who actually advise on these topics, those numbers rise to 87% and 79%, respectively. This suggests that the challenge in advising lies not in building confidence in advisors, but in helping more advisors develop the foundation to engage with certain topics.
• Financial topics — such as the cost of pursuing a law career, application fees, and scholarships — consistently show lower engagement and confidence than non-financial topics. This gap is of particular concern given the looming changes to the federal student loan program.
• Faculty prelaw advisors face significantly different challenges than their staff advisor counterparts. Faculty advisors were much more likely to report a lack of institutional recognition or formal training for their advisor role, along with a feeling of disconnection from the prelaw advising community. Both types of advisors, however, reported wearing too many hats or having insufficient institutional support.

To learn more about what prelaw advisors are facing today, please download the full report. If you have any questions related to this project or future work informed by the results, please contact the Prelaw Advising Community Team at prelaw@LSAC.org.