Your Move This Week
You’ve read the whole argument. The spreadsheet, the doom loop, the money, the cliff, the playbook. All of it.
The part that actually matters is what you do with it in the next 7 days.
Reading a book changes nothing by itself. So if you do nothing else with what you just read, do these 6 things this week.
1. Take a free practice LSAT.
A real, timed practice test this week, not a guess or a memory of your PSAT from 10 years ago. You need an actual starting number, because everything else in your plan depends on it: your timeline, your hours per week, all of it.
2. Look up your target schools’ 509 numbers.
Every ABA-accredited school files this report every year. It’s free, public, and the most honest document any law school publishes. Find the employment rate in full-time, bar-required jobs. Find the bar-passage trend over 3 years, not 1. Do this for every school on your list before you fall in love with any of them.
3. Start a real study plan, not a vague intention.
Pick your test date. Block 10 to 15 hours a week on your actual calendar. Open with untimed Learning, not a timed practice test you’re not ready for. A plan you wrote down holds up better than one in your head.
4. Figure out your true cost under the new caps.
Add up 3 years of tuition, fees, and living costs. Subtract your scholarship. Compare what’s left to the $200,000 federal lifetime borrowing cap for professional students. If there’s a gap, it gets filled with private credit, priced on the school’s outcomes, not yours. Know the number before you owe it.
5. Mark the early-application deadlines.
Schools reward applicants who apply early, while more scholarship money is still in the pool and more seats are still open. Pull up your target schools’ early deadlines right now and put them on your calendar today. Waiting until December on an application you could’ve finished in October is a decision. It just doesn’t feel like one.
6. If you already have offers, send the negotiation email today.
The window to negotiate scholarship money closes the moment the school fills its class. That can be weeks, sometimes days. If you’ve got a real competing offer sitting in your inbox, use it now. It’s one of the highest-payoff moves in this book.
That’s it. 6 moves. None of them takes more than an hour to start. Most take less.
The applicants who come out ahead of this crisis aren’t smarter than everyone else, and they’re not luckier. They just did the things on this list instead of reading about them and closing the book.
You just read the whole thing, so you’re already ahead of most people.
So go take the test. Pull the 509. Write the plan, run the math, mark the calendar, send the email. Do 1 today. Do another tomorrow. By next week, you won’t be someone who read a book about the law school collapse. You’ll be someone who used it.
The free LSAT cheat sheet that goes with this book is at unpluggedprep.com/cheatsheet.
