PLEASE READ: LSAT Licensing Has Changed

[nowornever]

Thanks, Dave.
I just discovered your podcasts a month or so ago, and started with the oldest and have been working my way to the newest, so the Licensing changes caught me a little off-guard.
Great podcast, btw.
Thanks.

[falconbridge]

Ok so: “The primary consequence of the new license is that for any company that wants to show LSAT questions on a digital screen, each student must have an active LSAC Prep Plus subscription.”

That’s fine and all, but what I’m most interested in knowing is whether or not the new license has made it such that people MUST purchase - at MINIMUM - a two-month LSAC Prep Plus subscription (as you are requiring on your site)? Or if that’s merely a stipulation that your company has enacted?

Falcon

[Dave Killoran]

Hi Falcon,

The sentence you quote is accurate, but of course it doesn't capture the entire story (and wasn't intended to). Students indeed have to pay for the LSAC Prep Plus subscription. As we talked about in a podcast, that's not the only fee LSAC gets (and no one is surprised by that, lol!)). There's an additional fee we have to pay for each student, and that helped dictate our pricing decisions.

Thanks!

[Jon Denning]

Ok so: “The primary consequence of the new license is that for any company that wants to show LSAT questions on a digital screen, each student must have an active LSAC Prep Plus subscription.”

That’s fine and all, but what I’m most interested in knowing is whether or not the new license has made it such that people MUST purchase - at MINIMUM - a two-month LSAC Prep Plus subscription (as you are requiring on your site)? Or if that’s merely a stipulation that your company has enacted?

Falcon

Hi Falcon - thanks for reaching out and seeking clarification on this (I'm sure you're not the only one curious about the new licensing rules and their impact on companies like ours).

The $99 Prep Plus subscription is an LSAC program that we have nothing to do with—not in terms of its cost, its contents, or its duration (your fee gets you 12 months' access to LSAC's provided test material via lawhub)—but that they have forced us to require in order to show students even a single question's worth of digital content. So anyone who wants to take a section or a test or even view just a scrap of real LSAT material through our system MUST have an active LSAC Prep Plus account. That's just the rule they've put in place and there's no way around it on our end.

But it actually gets a bit worse: for us to then provide access to that same content you've "purchased" (rented, really, since their subscription is only good for a year) through LSAC, we get charged what they call a "coaching fee" for every student. We're hit with this fee the second anyone comes into our system and digitally views anything from a released test, whether they're a full course student or just looking to get access to practice tests and comprehensive feedback/analytics.

And that's the reason we charge what we do for our Analytics Package: we're not turning some hefty profit; we're merely trying to recoup the mandatory per-user fees LSAC forces us to pay them when we provide students with our services. Spreading payments out month-to-month with a two-month minimum was designed to be as user-friendly as possible so people weren't hit with a single upfront fee if they preferred breaking it into smaller pieces over time (note we do allow a single payment for a full year's access if people would rather enroll that way).

I hope that helps clarify our position in LSAC's new licensing arrangement! Parts of it are objectively excellent—$99 for 60+ tests is a solid deal—while other elements, like our inability to offer any content to students free of charge, will hopefully be re-evaluated by LSAC in the near future.