The Law School Admission Council's online system is supposed to make it easier for people to apply to law schools and for administrators to track applicants.
But a glitch with the council's website has left prospective law students and some admissions offices scrambling just days before a crucial March 1 deadline. Some law schools are pushing back their application deadlines as a result.
The council discovered the problem on the morning of February 26, just three days before the application deadline adhered to by about one-quarter of all law schools, said council spokeswoman Wendy Margolis. (Some schools have deadlines as early as February 1, while others maintain rolling deadlines that can stretch into late April.)
Some people trying to access www.lsac.org were instead routed to a domain registration site and were unable to use the council's credential assembly service — which nearly every law schools uses to process applications. The council's technical staff fixed the problem on its end the day the glitch emerged, but as of midday on February 27, some users were still being denied access to the site.
Whether users can gain access to the site now depends on the route their Internet server or provider takes to get there, Margolis said. It likely will take time for the fix to work itself through the different Internet channels, she said.
"People need to keep trying to access the site, because the fix may have made its way through," she said. Additionally, users might try rebooting their computers. "We understand their pain, and we are doing all we can. People need to be patient."
Patience seemed in short supply among prospective law students who took to Twitter to complain. "I want to call LSAC and personally fire everyone there since no one can manage to have their website properly fixed," tweeted one would-be law student from Richmond, Va.
Others suggested the council caused the problem by letting its domain expire — which Margolis said was not the case.
The council was in discussions with law school admissions officials about possibly pushing back application deadlines as a result of the Internet problems. The University of Notre Dame Law School tweeted that the problem "will in no way put anyone at a disadvantage in our process." The University of Pennsylvania Law School informed applicants that it would push back its deadline to March 8, a week later than originally scheduled. The University of Nebraska College of Law also announced it would accept applications after the March 1 deadline.
Margolis said there was no indication that the council's website had been deliberately targeted by hackers.
Contact Karen Sloan at ksloan@alm.com. For more of The National Law Journal's law school coverage, visit: http://www.facebook.com/NLJLawSchools.
