Owly01

Any news? They typically admit around four applicants and send out notifications early to mid February. Wishing good news your way!

Let the record reflect: what is quoted above is not true 

They're in NYC ;). You aren't going to go from a T20 outside NYC or DC to biglaw in NYC or DC. If you do, it's rare. That's like saying someone with a UW-Madison History PhD is going to go straight to teaching Ivy TT. It's possible, everything is, but it's not going to happen in any reasonable world. BigLaw at those schools are also still less than 10% and most are less than 2%.
LSAT is required by the ABA unless specific conditions are met (less than 10% of entering class is admitted without LSAT, GRE higher than 85%, and SAT/ACT scores higher than 85%, etc). The ABA is where the LSAT bias comes in.
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/administrative/legal_education_and_admissions_to_the_bar/governancedocuments/2015_s503_guidance_final.authcheckdam.pdf

20 hours is a common way for the graduate school to classify your employee status for payroll purposes. It does not necessarily mean that you will be working 20 hours every week. The amount of work you will have will likely vary by week, with weeks in which they take an exam or turn in a paper being heavier workload weeks, since you will likely be doing most or all of the grading. 

My advisor shared some insight with me that some of the faculty who sit on admissions committees can be fickle and traditionalists and/or elitists, regardless of where they received their Ph.D. from or what school they're now at. At the heart of what my advisor was saying, is that quite often, working in one field without taking a breath now and then generates a myopic worldview, and sometimes causes faculty members to forget how difficult the journey going into, or even out of, academia can be. Sometimes, it goes as far as them taking their tenure track positions for granted. Even the nicest of POIs can be affected by this.
What I took away from this is that no matter how perfect of an application we submit, it will always be, although it really shouldn't, entirely subjective to the eyes and ears of those reading and grading our applications. More often than not, we're left beating ourselves up over things entirely out of our control. Yes, we can check grammar and punctuation, finely tune the angle from which we answer their prompts, and to a certain extent, up our GRE scores. But, at the end of the application cycle, a lot of us have been subjected to a sort of indescribable hell that was totally out of our control, regardless of whether or not we were admitted anywhere.

My advisor shared some insight with me that some of the faculty who sit on admissions committees can be fickle and traditionalists and/or elitists, regardless of where they received their Ph.D. from or what school they're now at. At the heart of what my advisor was saying, is that quite often, working in one field without taking a breath now and then generates a myopic worldview, and sometimes causes faculty members to forget how difficult the journey going into, or even out of, academia can be. Sometimes, it goes as far as them taking their tenure track positions for granted. Even the nicest of POIs can be affected by this.
What I took away from this is that no matter how perfect of an application we submit, it will always be, although it really shouldn't, entirely subjective to the eyes and ears of those reading and grading our applications. More often than not, we're left beating ourselves up over things entirely out of our control. Yes, we can check grammar and punctuation, finely tune the angle from which we answer their prompts, and to a certain extent, up our GRE scores. But, at the end of the application cycle, a lot of us have been subjected to a sort of indescribable hell that was totally out of our control, regardless of whether or not we were admitted anywhere.

Congrats to all those who had favorable news this past week. For those who were rejected my heart goes out to you all and i wish nothing but the best for those still waiting to hear or who were wait listed.
My update - I received 2 rejections in the past week from Duke and George Washington, which were pretty devastating as expected. On the positive front though, I also received an offer of admission to Georgia State, but i am currently wait listed for funding. Hopefully i'll soon be off the wait list, but it is a nerve-wracking situation for me right now. GSU would be a perfect fit for my research interests and their funding package is more generous than i thought it would be. Please keep your fingers crossed for me. If anyone here got accepted to GSU with funding, but doesn't plan to attend, please let them know ASAP.
I'm still waiting to hear from Emory and South Carolina, so think nothing but positive vibes for me, please!
Good luck my scholarly friends!