A conversation with Joe Pollak of Spivey Consulting Group on what has shifted in law school admissionsand what it means for the consultants guiding todays applicants.
When Joe Pollak took a job in the admissions office at the in 2012, he planned to stay for a year while he figured out the rest of his life. He stayed for seven. Since leaving the admissions office in 2019, he has become a consultant with Spivey Consulting Group, working with applicantsmost of them aiming for top30 law schoolson the strategy, storytelling, and decisionmaking that a competitive application requires. In a recent conversation, Joe reflected on what has changed across two decades in law school admissions, what has stayed the same, and what those shifts mean for independent educational consultants (IECs) advising todays applicants.
An Unexpected Path into Admissions
Joe did not set out to become an admissions professional. His first job out of college was at in Texas, where he had grown up as a camper and counselor. In that role, he hired counselors, ran fulltime operations on the property, and traveled to different communities to convince parents to send their children to camp. Years later, he can see the throughline: part of admissions work is convincing people, including people who are not sure the door is open to them, that they belong inside.
After law school and a brief stretch at a law firm, Joe moved to Michiganhis wifes home stateand had to sit for the Michigan bar. While he waited months for results, he applied for every job that did not require a law license. He was hired as an admissions officer at Michigan Law.
Inside the Admissions Office: 20122019
Michigan is a useful vantage point for a conversation about race in admissions, because by the time Joe arrived in 2012, the state had already banned the use of race and ethnicity in admissions at public universities. It affected what we were allowed to do, Joe recalled, and it also made it harder for us to attract minority candidates. We had to work pretty hard when we had students we wanted to admitto help them see that we were a great place, even if they couldnt see that in the numbers of students who looked like them.
Across his seven years in the office, Joe saw the profile of the admitted student shift. The tilt toward work experience, already visible when he arrived, accelerated. It has become much more relevant to law schools to admit people who have a strong idea of what theyre going to do with their postlawschool career, he said. That usually means theyve done something professional already. Numbers still get an applicant in the door, but among the large pool of admissible candidates, the essays, r矇sum矇, and letters of recommendation do most of the sortingespecially at schools like Michigan that do not conduct admissions interviews.
Joe also watched the national applicant pool rise and fall, and noted an important distinction IECs should keep in mind: the standards for admission did not change dramatically with those swings. What changed was the scholarship and yield environment.
From the Other Side of the Desk
In 2019, Joe left Michigan for a nonprofit role that paid less than he needed, and picked up consulting on the side. When the pandemic hit, and the nonprofits work was substantially undone, he laid himself off and chose, at first somewhat reluctantly, to take consulting full-time. What surprised him first on the other side of the desk was how much variation he saw across law schools in something he had taken for granted: data.
I had made assumptions about how we did things at Michigan, he said. I expected that every school was using pretty heavy data analysislooking at their applicant pool, making decisions about outreach. It turns out not every school is. Some schools lack dedicated data staff, and others lean on outside consultants to interpret what their own numbers are telling them. Joe pointed to a small but telling example from his Michigan days: preparing for a session with Michigan undergraduates, he expected the familiar student claim that the law school did not like to admit its own. A quick dive into the data showed the opposite: Michigan undergraduates were being admitted at twice the rate of any other undergraduate institution. That kind of internal analysis, he now knows, is not universal.
After SFFA: A Quieter, Harder Conversation
For Joe, the single largest change to the admissions landscape in recent years is the Supreme Courts decision in . At a very minimum, every law school had to consider what they were asking for in their applications, he said. Almost every law school significantly changed their applications. Because Michigan had not been using race for years, his own experience as an admissions officer had already been raceneutral. But he watched peers at other schoolspeople who had come into admissions precisely because they saw themselves as diversity professionalsnavigate a genuinely difficult shift.
The effect on applicants, he said, is real and often quiet. Its discouraging to some, for sure. There are applicants who hear about that decision and decide to take themselves out of the pool. They say, Oh, I cant do that. Thats not for me. And thats sad. Joe described coaching clients through that hesitationasking them to envision themselves at a top law school rather than ruling themselves out at the door.
One case stands out. Working with a firstgeneration college student who was also about to be a firstgeneration law student, Joe pointed her to the profiles of recent first Black editorsinchief of law reviews at several top schoolsmost of them just five or ten years ahead of her. You cant force this on a client, he said. They have to find out for themselves. But I really wanted her to see herself in some of those people, and think broadly about where she could apply. She applied broadly, received strong offers, and graduated from law school this year.
It is a story worth sitting with. Many 51勛圖 members are not people of color themselves, and the question of howand whetherto support marginalized students with intentionality has been a recurring conversation in our community. Joes example suggests a concrete answer: even when you cannot offer lived experience, you can do the research, surface the role models, and make sure your client is not the only person in the room imagining their future.
Meeting Each Client as an Individual
That philosophy extends well beyond questions of race and ethnicity. All my clients are individuals, Joe said. We can categorize themthis persons coming straight through from college, this person has two years of work experiencebut what I try to approach philosophically is addressing each of them as their own individual. Sometimes that comes out in saying, Lets look for role models who are like you. Sometimes its just saying, Its okay to feel frustrated by this process.
Joes own background as a Jewish kid from Oklahoma has quietly shaped a specific niche in his practice. He works with a number of Jewish clients, including several yeshiva graduates whose bachelors degrees may be in Talmudic studies. Theyve spent a long time in a relatively small academic world, and they know it, he explained. They understand they need help, in some cases literally translating what theyve been doing and why its important to them, into why they now want to go to law school. That work calls for the same posture he brings to every client: patternrecognition across the admissions landscape paired with careful attention to what is unique about this particular person.
Staying Current Without an Office to Sit In
One of the questions IECs in law school admissions consistently wrestle with is how to keep learning once you are outside an admissions officeespecially in a field with relatively thin professional development compared to undergraduate admissions. Joe offered several concrete strategies.
First, cultivate relationships. Joe stays in touch with former Michigan colleagues, several of whom are now admissions deans elsewhere, and he is part of a group of former admissions officers at Spivey Consulting Group who can pool information. For consultants without those builtin networks, he suggested starting with a single local law school. If you can find somebody who will give you half an hour to answer your questions about the admissions process, thats a good starting point. I took those meetings when I was in the admissions officethere are no state secrets youre going to give away. Summer, when admissions offices are quieter, is the right time to ask.
Second, read the required disclosures. The include admissions, scholarship, and outcomes data for every accredited law school. I spend a lot of time looking at those. Every time theyre new, I look at whats changing.
Third, read the applications themselves. Every cycle, Joe reads the application instructions for roughly 50 law schools. Once youve done it once, you have a better feel for whether something changed. I try to move backwards from changesif a school changed an essay question, why would they change that question? What are they trying to learn? And finally, he urged consultants to be shrewd about where theyre gathering information. Applicant message boards can be useful for understanding how applicants think about the process, but they are rarely accurate descriptions of how the process actually works.
The Throughline: Strategy
Across a wideranging conversation, what came back repeatedly was Joes focus on strategy. I help clients with writing their essays and getting the commas in the right place, he said. But Im really focused on admissions strategy and the big picture: helping them put together the whole application. Thats what I like doing.
For IECs watching this landscape evolve, that may be the most useful framing to carry forward. Much of what is changing in law school admissions is not, in the end, about any single metric or policy. It is about how institutions think about who belongs in their communityand how skilled we, as advisors, are at helping individual applicants write themselves into that story with clarity, honesty, and strategy.
By Sydney Montgomery, JD, 51勛圖 (MD), Barrier Breakers, Inc.