Applying

Sourcing and Selecting Leads

Once you have your cover letter written, it’s time to start sending it out. When I was first applying to jobs my natural inclination was to send my application materials to law firm recruiting departments. After all, they’re the ones responsible for hiring, right? Yes, and no.

While recruiting departments will typically handle the logistics of scheduling interviews year-round, outside of the structured process of OCI they do not always have their finger on the pulse of a law firm's hiring needs. Let me explain through an anecdote.

When my wife was applying for jobs in New York back in the spring of 2013, she got a screener interview at Ropes & Gray’s real estate group (where she ultimately ended up). During the screener, the managing partner of the real estate practice told her that her timing for reaching out was impeccable. A day or two before she reached out, during the real estate group’s weekly meeting, the partners were casually discussing how it would help to have another junior associate join in the fall. Odds are the real estate partners had not yet told the recruiting department because the idea was in its nascency. The partners knew they wanted another associate, but it hadn’t even hit the firm’s job board yet.

The point of this anecdote is that outside of the OCI process it is the partners who have the best gauge of their practice group’s staffing needs, not the recruiting department. Partners are the ones who know the firm’s deal flow and understand their team’s capabilities and personnel gaps. It follows, then, that the best people to reach out to when applying for law firm jobs outside of OCI are partners. And that is what you are going to do.

I understand that this may feel uncomfortable at first. That makes sense. It's not what you're used to and most of the information out there directs you to submit your resume through the firm's job portal. Having done this myself prior to implementing this framework, I can tell you that recruiting portals are where applications go to die.

Exercise

By the end of this exercise you should have a list of people to reach out in the Airtable CRM you created earlier. These are the actual people you’ll be reaching out to so it is important to be thoughtful and resist the urge to add anyone and everyone to your list.

The first step is to make a list of at least 100 firms you want to apply to. There are multiple existing lists you can use to help you do this:

Some of these lists are paid (like Am Law), while others are free (Vault). If you are still in law school, odds are that your law library has a subscription to most paid lists, so make sure to check that out before you spend any money. You can also find additional lists outside of these (by geography, practice group, size, etc.) if you spend some time on Google. Whatever method you use, you should aim for at least 100 law firms to start.

Pro Tip: I recommend creating the list of law firms in a new table inside the Airtable base you created earlier. This will let you easily link individual prospects to the firms they work at.

Once you have a list ready, it's time to find the right partners to email within each firm (remember, we are targeting partners). Start by going to the firm’s website and navigating to the practice group page. Some firms will not have standalone pages for each practice group, in which case you can usually use the website’s search and filter functions to find all the attorneys in the practice group you are targeting.

The key here is to find a commonality that makes it easy for the partner you are emailing to relate to you. The best commonality is graduating from the same law school. Depending on your law school and target firms, though, it may not always be possible to find alumni of your law school. That’s why when we were first developing the framework we created a hierarchy to help us maximize the commonality between ourselves and the partners we were emailing. Here it is, in order from tightest fit to loosest fit:

  • Tier 1: Law school, undergrad

  • Tier 2: Organizational affiliations (prior jobs, volunteering, etc.)

  • Tier 3: Cultural affiliations, common languages

All of this information is usually available on attorney website bios and can be gleaned in 30 to 60 seconds of skimming. You’ll start to notice that attorney bios are usually laid out in the same with, with education toward the end or in a callout box or tab on the side.

Pro Tip: To quickly evaluate multiple attorneys in a practice group for commonalities open up each of their bios in a different tab in your browser (to open a link in a new tab click it while holding down the Cmd key on the keyboard). You can then toggle through the tabs using Ctrl + Tab and closing out of tabs that are a poor fit. Remember that you are only reaching out to partners, so you can close out of associate and counsel tabs without much thought.

For some firms, you may not find a partner who is a great fit (i.e., there may not be anyone with commonalities). In these cases, I would always select a partner who went to a similarly ranked law school to mine and who seemed friendly based on their picture (usually because they were smiling). For example, if I could not find a partner who went to Michigan Law (my law school), I would try to find and email somebody who went to Berkley or Northwestern rather than Harvard, Yale, or Stanford. The reasons I selected a partner that went to a similarly ranked law school is because many attorneys—whether we want to admit it or not—put stock in law school ranking. 

For each attorney that you deem a good fit, collect their information in your Airtable CRM. It’s okay if there is more than one good match. For each firm, add as many partners to your CRM as you think makes sense.

Once you have done this exercise for at least 10 firms on your list, you are ready to start sending out emails. Notice that I am not suggesting that you go through the selection process for all 100+ firms on your list. The reason is that sourcing candidates is tedious work that might wear you down. It’s better to start getting emails out early to keep your momentum and drive up. 

In the next section, we talk about sending emails and follow-ups using MixMax, so if you have not installed it yet, now is a good time to do that (see the section on tracking your activity).