Trev, I've been curious about how much those matter. If a school is sure you'll be able to pass the bar, how much do they hurt? It seems like Notre Dame cares a lot. They've rejected people with good numbers, who I know to have reported "non-traditional soft factors" (that's the phrase I'm going with...)
This is strictly for my situation so I don't know how applicable it is for others, but here we go.
For a while I was considering the different criminal addendum I provided per the school's requirements were indicative of how my cycle was going. I suspected the schools that asked for more detailed information were more influenced by these negative softs. Some schools only ask for convictions, some ask for all arrests, and some for some middle ground. So all told, I wrote at least 3 different addendums for my schools.
ND rejection was because of my idiocy in not proofreading the application. I rushed it off and there were errors everywhere. So I take this as an isolated incident.
Illinois/Minnesota/Boston College all asked for arrests so that addendum was longer than my conviction addendum and looked very bad. I suspected my straight up rejections without a single waitlist was because of this.
Alabama/Virginia/Georgetown all asked for convictions, which I only have two of, so nothing terribly bad. Both were class C misdemeanors and one is no longer on my record because I received it when I was 16 and did the necessary work to get it expunged.
So combined with my Chicago, Columbia, and Penn rejections, which can obviously be explained by my unqualified numbers, I briefly thought that my soft factors played a role where applicable.
Then Duke/Tulane/Vanderbilt came along and changed that. Vandy and Duke both received the full addendum and waitlisted me, admittedly with waitlistable numbers but still it screws up my theory. Tulane admitted me and gave me a sizable scholarship.
What does this all mean? Bad softs hurt at some schools and aren't necessarily too damning at others, at least in my case, which is what we basically knew from the beginning.
I definitely think that my arrest addendum is what is causing the delay in decisions at my remaining schools like Emory, WUSTL, Baylor, W&L, IU-B, and SMU. Northwestern, UCLA, Texas and Cornell are all under different circumstances - NW, UCLA and Texas all have the brief addendum too, so I'm real anxious for those.