Podcast: The Rules of Reddit

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike talks about how online law school admissions discussion can affect (or not affect) your outcomes. Are adcoms on Reddit? Will they Google you? What sorts of online conduct can turn an admit into a waitlist or deny? Mike gives his thoughts on these questions and more from 15+ years following law school message boards.

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, YouTube, SoundCloud, and Google Podcasts.

Welcome to Status Check with Spivey, where we talk about life, law school, law school admissions, social media vis-à-vis law school admissions, a little bit of everything. If you're used to our intro, we're going to hit on the rules of Reddit and ostensibly other social media platforms.

Now let me be clear, by rules, I don't mean I think you should follow any of my rules. I don't have any for you. Obviously, every social media platform has their own set of protocols, procedures, rules that you should follow. But what I'm really talking about is things I've learned being on message boards in higher education and admissions, essentially since the very first message board. That was like lawschooldiscussion.org, I believe. And we're talking about 2006, maybe 2008, I don't know.

The first rule, which I think is the most important to bear in mind, concerns whether admissions officers are reading message boards. The answer is yes, they are. Probably more than you realize and just about every school from time to time, I mean some of them every day, are looking at what people post on Reddit and other platforms, particularly Reddit of course.

Now, there's good news and bad news here. I mean, the bad news is every year there's going to be some jerk who sounds off on a school and then the school will read that. They're not reading every post, far from it. What they're doing is they're Googling their school's name and they're trying to get valuable feedback but also to see if anyone is unhinged about their school. And if said unhinged person has made up lies about the school. This happens by the way. People make up lies about schools, about people. I mean it’s happened to me a number of times. And if you find that that person has outed themselves and the easiest people to find out who have outed themselves is schools because they have all the data in the profile, on the bio and the information, etc.

So let's say someone was admitted to a law school, we'll call it Princeton Law. But they noticed other people received scholarship information and they haven’t. And they make up some lie about Princeton Law or just say something nasty about the Dean of Admissions of Princeton Law. But they have enough posting history, and I have two podcasts on doxxing yourself, where they've said things that are aligned with things in their application. At minimum, you're going to see that person probably never get any scholarship money, right, if they're being horrible towards the Dean of Admissions, the admissions office, making up lies. And in case after case, year after year, you can see that person if they're lying, get their admission rescinded.

Rule number one would be just be wary of the fact that admissions people are reading. I clicked on this on the last podcast, so it’s another reason I think just being an upbeat person, right, we gravitate towards optimistic people, but it's really good for you because you could flip around everything I just said. And if you're upbeat, and you're champing a school and they figure out who you are, that might actually believe it or not, I'm not saying it will, but it could help you get off a waitlist, help you get more scholarship money. So that's rule number one.

Let me tie in with what law schools aren’t doing, because I get a lot of Reddit messages. There's about two out of every seven days a week I have time to respond to Reddit messages. So if you hit me on one of those two days, you probably get a response. If you hit me on one of the five days that I'm just slammed all day, you probably don't. But I do get a lot of messages, “this happened to me. The school's Googling me.” The answer is almost a categorical no. They're only Googling you if you give them a reason to Google you. No law school admissions officer I know of has time to Google every applicant, every admit. So you're in the clear if you're in the news for drinking at a cemetery with your friends and you got busted. To begin with, no school would care, they might care like 1% that you're drinking if you're 20. They're certainly not going to care that you were trespassing, okay. But number two, they're not Googling your name every day to find out. So that's rule number one.

Rule number two, and I think this is what made me think of this podcast is, we've noticed over time the message boards, Reddit, etc., start off with a sort of team-centric ethos, everyone's in it. But then over time it can evolve to where some people see it as a competition, insecurities, we all have insecurities. They exist on a spectrum and we have different triggers of those insecurities. But trust me when I say we all have them. But some people will get insecure if they see someone's name too much on Reddit, if they see some other people getting into a school they covet. And then the worst of some people come out, not everyone. I actually think it's pretty endearing that most people on Reddit are as supportive as they are to one another. I bring this up because the timing is right for this. You see maliciousness, hostility, made-up stories, things like that. You see it come out.

I would just say the best antidote for that is number one, obviously, don't be that person. The people that are doing that have long lives ahead of them. There are deeper underlying things going on if you're making up lies about a school, a person, a Redditor, a poster, etc. Or if you're just being vicious towards strangers. But number two, I just wouldn't get involved. I would just let the thread die. Threads go away very quickly and for good reasons they should. So I just wouldn't participate. So that would be, it's not a rule, but that would just be something we've seen, that we've noticed and advice to give.

Rule number three, a Redditor hit this the other day, and I love that they hit this is, just because an admissions office says something doesn't mean it's absolutely true or universalizable to any other admissions office. So many years ago, schools averaged LSAT scores. And then the ABA started only asking for the high, so U.S. News only got the high. So then they see your scores, but they really only took in a major consideration of the high score. The other scores were almost irrelevant.

And I remember NYU had old verbiage on their website about averaging scores. It’s just they hadn’t updated their website and we’re explaining to the people the change and you know, how it had been for two years. Schools are looking at the highest score, and we knew this in our heart of hearts, this is how we read applications. There's over 220 years or something of law school admissions experience at my firm. So we knew that the high score mattered. But I just remember some applicant going ballistic about, “no, you liars! NYU says…” Well, okay, if I'm buying a car, and the car salesperson says to me, “you know, this car blah, blah, blah,” there's a part of me that's going to say, “well, again, this person wants to sell their car.” Admissions officers are hired to sell their school. So I'm not saying anyone out there is outright lying, I'm saying you need to always triangulate anything including what I say.

So if an admissions office says, you know, “we prefer people applying earlier rather than later.” Well, maybe, but they don't care if you apply in September or October, November. But law school admissions officers, pre-law advisors, LSAT prep companies, other admissions consulting companies, certainly people on Reddit that said, “I know I got admitted for this reason.” Well, no, you probably don't know why you got admitted. It may have been your personal statement on Dungeons & Dragons, but it very well may have been your 180 LSAT that you're not telling the world about. Triangulate as much information as possible before you universally believe any one thing.

And this also happens to law schools. Someone will say something about a law school and everyone will like demand that that law school apologize. But sometimes behind the scenes, we know that it's actually not the case. Sometimes, not always, it’s a lie, it's a fabrication, it's made up or there's two sides to the story. And I think some threads get out of hand. It's believe one side, believe one side, believe one side, attack the accused, attack the accused without ever thinking, maybe there's actually two sides to the story, or maybe someone just completely absolutely made it up. That would go into another rule.

It seems like every year someone pretends to be an adcomm and they're not. And we could see that as a firm almost immediately. When you've been doing admissions your entire life, you can tell when someone's faking being an admissions officer. And these things get sad to me because they get 120 comments in before the person deletes their account or fesses up that it was just a prank.

So again, the way I would word it, and you're going to be graded on this as lawyers, because I've learned this from lawyers - my mentors are all lawyers - is no absolutes. Don't take any advice as an absolute. It might be applicable to you. It might not. It might be real. It might not. I always try to triangulate what I read.

Rule number whatever, because I'm not really counting, is there's going to be periods of slowness no matter what cycle. This is obviously a very slow cycle. But every cycle, it seems after having been on message boards for many years, it seems slow because again, right now, if we're at 60% applications submitted, we're not even at 50% admits going out. So even though you see a bunch of As and you say to yourself, “wow, this is really slow to me relative to other people.” It's actually really slow to the majority of people still. The majority of people who have submitted have not received all their admits yet or close to all their admits yet.

So this is why I can never say when waves are coming in the, you know, wave prediction threads. Of course, I would do them too if I was applying to law school, I get a chuckle out of the, well, last cycle this time, these were the admits that went out. Because every cycle’s applicant pool is different, every cycle is different. This cycle is particularly different because no one knows the weights of the U.S. News & World Report metrics. So that would be another one.

There's probably many more. I just was thinking about this podcast this morning. And these, I think are the big ones to me. I just really worry more than anything for the vast majority of people on these message boards cheering each other on, trying to get solid information. I worry that the information becomes more warped and more hostile towards the end of the cycle. And the institutional memory on Reddit law school admissions is one year old. Everyone runs off. But then the new crop comes in and it always follows this predictable pattern of optimism early, and then defeatism and catastrophizing later.

So the point of this podcast is, it's February 2nd or 3rd or whatever. It's super early relative to how many admits have to go out. So I just don't want people to feel defeated or catastrophized based on what other people say on Reddit. This was Mike Spivey, of the Spivey Consulting Group.

Latest Podcasts

August 12, 2025

UVA Law Admissions Dean Natalie Blazer on the 2025-26 Cycle, Rising LSATs/GPAs, the "Why UVA" & More

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Anna Hicks-Jaco interviews Natalie Blazer, Assistant Dean for Admissions and Chief Admissions Officer at the University of Virginia School of Law, on the upcoming 2025-2026 admissions cycle, how applicants should be thinking about and taking into account relevant current events, and advice for prospective law students preparing to submit their applications. They discuss predictions for the 2025-26 cycle (1:56), rising LSAT and GPA medians (20:22, 27:45), changes they've made to their application this year (12:30), the new student loan cap (30:26), how admissions offices are considering applicants writing about politics and protest in the current political climate (4:18), how they evaluate applicants who have been unable to get a job after graduating from college (7:36), whether writing about AI is overdone (36:34), advice for the "Why UVA" essay (13:05), and much more. As a brief disclaimer, Dean Blazer speaks for herself and often for UVA Law in this episode; her opinions do not reflect those of all admissions officers.

In addition to her work at UVA Law, Natalie has served as Director of J.D. Admissions at Georgetown University Law Center and was Associate Director of Admissions at Columbia Law School. She hosts the UVA Law podcast Admissible, which "offers insights into the world of law school admissions and a behind-the-scenes look at life as a law student through interviews with students, faculty, alumni and staff."

We've interviewed Natalie twice for Status Check before, and though we weren't able to get to all of the questions that Redditors requested we ask, we answered many of them in these past episodes:

Please note: At the time that we recorded this episode, we noted that August 2025 LSAT registrants were up 27% relative to August 2024 registrants but that that number would come down over the days of the test administration. Ultimately, August LSAT registrants landed at a 23.7% increase vs. last year.

You can listen and subscribe to Status Check with Spivey on ⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠, ⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠, and ⁠⁠YouTube⁠⁠. You can read a full transcript of this episode with timestamps below.

August 4, 2025

Bill Treanor on 30+ Years as a Law School Dean & Standing Up to Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Mike interviews William ("Bill") Treanor on his long and recently-concluded tenure as Dean of Georgetown University Law Center as well as his experiences and perspectives from a 40-year career. Bill talks about the the biggest changes he's seen during his time in legal education (16:06), the coming changes he foresees in the short-term future both good (19:22) and bad (20:56), his proudest accomplishments as a law school dean (41:57), the biggest challenges law students face today (24:27), and how he reacted and famously responded to the letter from Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin threatening not to hire Georgetown Law graduates if the school was found to be teaching a curriculum involving diversity, equity, and inclusion (1:33).

Dean Treanor's response to then-Interim U.S. Attorney Ed Martin is below. You can also read it in full here.

Header: Georgetown Law, William M. Treanor, Dean and Executive Vice President, Paul Regis Dean Leadership Chair, March 6, 2025, Addressed to: Edward R. Martin, Jr., Interim United States Attorney, District of Columbia Judiciary Center, 555 4th Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20001. Contents of Letter: Dear Interim United States Attorney Martin: I write in response to your letter dated February 17, 2025, which you sent to me via email on March 3, 2025. As a Catholic and Jesuit institution, Georgetown University was founded on the principle that serious and sustained discourse among people of different faiths, cultures, and beliefs promotes intellectual, ethical, and spiritual understanding. For us at Georgetown, this principle is a moral and educational imperative. It is a principle that defines our mission as a Catholic and Jesuit institution. Georgetown University also prohibits discrimination and harassment in its programs and activities and takes seriously its obligations to comply with all federal and local laws. Your letter challenges Georgetown’s ability to define our mission as an educational institution. It inquires about Georgetown Law’s curriculum and classroom teaching, asks whether diversity, equity, and inclusion is part of the curriculum, and asserts that your office will not hire individuals from schools where you find the curriculum “unacceptable.” The First Amendment, however, guarantees that the government cannot direct what Georgetown and its faculty teach and how to teach it. The Supreme Court has continually affirmed that among the freedoms central to a university’s First Amendment rights are its abilities to determine, on academic grounds, who may teach, what to teach, and how to teach it. Georgetown University Law Center 600 New Jersey Avenue, NW | Washington, DC 20001-2075 This is a bedrock principle of constitutional law – recognized not only by the courts, but by the administration in which you serve. The Department of Education confirmed last week that it cannot restrict First Amendment rights and that it is statutorily prohibited from “exercising control over the content of school curricula.” Your letter informs me that your office will deny our students and graduates government employment opportunities until you, as Interim United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, approve of our curriculum. Given the First Amendment’s protection of a university’s freedom to determine its own curriculum and how to deliver it, the constitutional violation behind this threat is clear, as is the attack on the University’s mission as a Jesuit and Catholic institution. Georgetown Law has one of the preeminent faculties in the country, fostering groundbreaking scholarship, educating students in a wide variety of perspectives, and thriving on the robust exchange of ideas. Georgetown Law faculty have educated world leaders, members of Congress, and Justice Department officials, from diverse backgrounds and perspectives. We pride ourselves on providing an excellent graduate and professional education, built upon the Catholic and Jesuit tradition. Georgetown-educated attorneys have, for decades, served this country capably and selflessly in offices such as yours, and we have confidence that tradition will continue. We look forward to your confirming that any Georgetown-affiliated candidates for employment with your office will receive full and fair consideration. Sincerely, [Signature] William M. Treanor Dean and Executive Vice President Paul Regis Dean Leadership Chair 2

Other topics they discuss include the value (and lack of value) of the Socratic method (16:30), experiential learning in law school (16:06) and the potential effects of a current proposal before the ABA (20:56), the growing field of law and technology (19:22), the prospect of government taking accrediting authority from independent organizations (21:57), the current and coming impacts of AI on legal education and practice (23:43, 46:58), how law firms have learned from past recessions and overreactions (29:33), Bill's take on the current surge in law school applicants (30:36), his advice for prospective law students today (33:48), and his thoughts on the law school rankings (35:18).

Bill Treanor served as Dean of Georgetown University Law Center for 15 years, prior to which he served as Dean of Fordham University School of Law for almost 20 years. His accomplishments at Georgetown were innumerable—you can read more about him and his impressive career here.

Letters of Recommendation

Admissions

July 14, 2025

Podcast: Military Applicants—Law School Admissions Strategy & More with Harvard Law Grad Brian Henson

In this episode of Status Check with Spivey, Spivey J.D. admissions consultants Danielle Early (former Associate Director of Admissions at Harvard Law School and military/veteran admissions specialist) and Mike Burns (former Director of Admissions & Financial Aid at Northwestern Law and Navy veteran) interview Brian Henson, a former consulting client of Danielle's, Navy Intelligence Officer, ⁠Service to School⁠ mentor, Harvard Law Armed Forces Association president, and recent HLS graduate. They discuss Brian's story of applying to law school from the middle of the ocean on an aircraft carrier and his experiences as a veteran at HLS, plus insights into admissions and legal education specifically targeted at military veterans and those on active duty.

What considerations should military applicants keep in mind that differ from non-military applicants? What is the adjustment like moving from the military to law school? What sorts of admissions resources are available for military members and veterans? What are common pieces of misinformation that military applicants may encounter, and what's the true story? They cover these topics and more, including admissions for enlisted soldiers vs. officers (29:36), getting letters of recommendation from supervisors/commanders (36:44), application timing (5:28 and 21:51), resumes (43:36), personal statements (46:08), determining your chances and making a school list (31:51), job search advice (1:03:42), and more.

Listen

Latest Podcasts

Have questions? Get in touch with us

About

For Prospective Students

For Universities

Follow Us

Podcast: The Rules of Reddit

Podcast Transcript

Latest Podcasts

Have questions? Get in touch with us

Stay Updated!

About

For Prospective Students

For Universities

Follow Us