1. Hurry—get your application in before the floodgate opens. News flash: Law school applications only went down 2 percent last year! Of course, it’s still a continuing downward spiral, but that’s “the smallest reduction in four years, according to the Law School Admission Council,” reports Karen Sloan of The National Law Journal. ( In contrast, applications dropped more than 10 percent each year from 2011 to 2013.)

The other sign that law school is back in popularity? According to the NLJ, “the number of people taking the Law School Admission Test has increased in each of the three sitting since December—spiking 6.6 percent last month.”
So have law school applications hit the proverbial rock bottom? Well, no one is quite ready to say that. But if you’re hoping to maximize your chances of getting into a tony law school, this might be the time to jump in.

2. Will a rebate entice you to gamble on law school? This is either smart marketing or a sign of desperate times—maybe both. Here’s what one not-so-highly-ranked law school is doing to drum up more applicants. Reports New York Law Journal:

Brooklyn Law School has launched a program to refund 15 percent of graduates’ tuition if they have not found a job nine months after leaving school.

The refund offered through the “Bridge to Success” program begins with the class entering for the 2015-16 academic year, including those who began the school’s accelerated two-year J.D. program in May.

To receive the refund, participants must take the bar examination—though they are not required to pass it­—and continue working closely with the school’s career counselors after graduation to show they are making a “good faith” effort to search for jobs, said Brooklyn Law Dean Nicholas Allard in an interview.