In any given city, if a job exists that matches your interests, there is only one way to be sure that you find that opportunity. You must contact these specific employers who match your interests.
It is as simple as that.
"No job boards, classified sections of legal newspapers, legal recruiters, on-campus interviewing programs, job fairs, or "networks" can provide you with access to every available job opportunity."
In today's job market, it is estimated that more than 85% of all legal jobs are not advertised. Recruiters fill less than 3% of all available positions. When jobs are advertised or when recruiters get involved, a legal employer may receive in excess of 1,000 applicants for one position. The fact is that many employers do not have job openings until they are presented with a candidate who is attractive to them and who has already expressed interest. This is why a self-initiated targeted mailing is the most effective means for finding a legal job.
If you are serious about getting the type of legal job you want, you have come to the right source. "Legal Authority has the largest database of legal employers anywhere." In the 2002 edition of What Color is Your Parachute?, the author states that more than 1,400 resumes are mailed for every one job secured. While a legal job can generally be found by mailing far fewer resumes, if you are sporadically applying to the occasional job via the Internet, classified ads, or through a recruiter, it may take you a long time to find the position you seek. Legal Authority can help you ferret out and apply to the organizations you want. It is your choice: Either you can remain unhappy with your current employment situation, or you can find the job you want today. Smart attorneys do what it takes and contact employers on their own.
| Legal Myth |
Legal Authority |
| Mailing an unsolicited resume to an employer is not effective. |
When you perform a self-initiated mailing, you are sending unsolicited resumes and cover letters to a carefully compiled list of employers, defined as a group by their geographical location, type and size of business, and areas of practice. Such targeted mailing has an extremely high rate of effectiveness.
In fact, the National Association for Law Placement, a nonprofit legal research organization, has determined that targeted, self-initiated mailing is the most successful job hunt tactic used by graduates and experienced attorneys, beating both on-campus interview programs and online resume posting.
You need to remember that organizations which hire attorneys are businesses. As such, they are seeking to hire individuals who can enable them to increase their bottom lines (i.e., make more money). If you are approaching law firms, your time can be billed out to clients and the legal employer can take on additional work for you to work on, thereby increasing their bottom line. If you are approaching corporations, the company will save money by not having to rely as much on outside counsel.
If someone were to approach you and at no cost provide you an immediate opportunity to make more money, the chances are you would be interested in speaking with them. It is the same when applying for legal jobs. "Every application an employer receives serves as an opportunity for them to save money or make more money." Each application is evaluated and, if it believes it will work, the employer will want to speak with you.
One advantage of targeted mailing is the "opportunity" your application represents for each employer. Without retaining a legal recruiter, going to a job fair, or posting an ad in the classified section of a legal newspaper or an Internet job board, the employer is presented with the opportunity to increase its bottom line.
Another advantage from an employer's standpoint is that when you contact it (assuming it does not have an opportunity advertised) it is under the impression that you have researched it and find the possibility of working for it something you are interested in. When you contact an employer using Legal Authority, the employer believes that you know about the firm already and are interested in speaking with it. The fact is that most people (and organizations) like those who like them. When you are automatically predisposed to contact an employer independently, you are showing that employer that you like them. Of course, if the employer already has an opening, then it will think you responded to an ad. Either way, you win.
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| I'll just post my resume on a job board and wait for the employers to contact me. |
Job boards can be effective for companies comfortable with online job hunting and recruiting. As a rule, law firms, universities, government offices, and in-house legal departments remain most comfortable with "snail mail"—cover letters and resumes they receive from the post office. Writing professional cover letters on good stationery shows that you have taken the time to contact the employer by writing a letter, addressing an envelope, stamping it, and putting it in the mailbox. It is far more effective than simply hitting the "send" button on your email program. In addition, a recent study by the Privacy Foundation has stated that job seekers who post their resumes on popular job board websites may be sacrificing their privacy.
With the high number of attorneys seeking jobs, hiring partners and recruiting coordinators have the luxury of waiting for resumes to come in the door. Unless they are doing proactive recruiting with legal search firms or law schools, there is little "resume searching" done. In an economic downturn, proactive recruiting can decrease dramatically, leaving you few options other than to contact employers on your own.
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| I can't trust my future career prospects to you. I need to do it all myself. |
With your input, we will select the employers that meet your standards, and you will have approval every step of the way. With Legal Authority, you remain in control of your job search, and you will send out the final cover letters and resumes.
Theoretically, you could do much of the work we do by yourself. However, you are not likely to hit all the appropriate opportunities, and your work would likely take you weeks. The point is that you could do it. There is a way to do things the right way and a way to do them the wrong way.
We have the most sophisticated database in the legal industry and do nothing but update our database, counsel attorneys, and review and revise resumes and cover letters. "Who better to trust your future with than a firm that spends 100% of its time doing what we do?" We will help you save time, improve your resume, and create a cover letter that will garner attention.
While the decision to use a service like ours is certainly up to you, the odds of success in doing the work yourself are not as strong as using Legal Authority.
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| I already have a headhunter. I don't need to do any more work to find a job. |
Using a headhunter can have a distinct disadvantage over self-initiated targeted mailing. For in-house hiring, clerkships, and of counsel positions, you have a much greater chance of receiving a positive response if you do not use a recruiter. It is a well-known fact that the substantial majority of corporations do not use recruiters to fill positions, and neither does the government.
For law firm positions, recruiters will limit your exposure to (1) the small number of firms willing to pay them a portion of your annual salary if they hire you and (2) firms which have been unable to fill positions on their own and have requested that a recruiter help them find appropriate people. Recruiters typically work with less than 5% of the law firms in a given geographic market, and less than 2% of the attorneys in the workforce today. Even in the largest cities, a recruiter will typically limit your exposure to less than 20 firms, and you have no way of actually knowing if the recruiter has done what it said it was going to do in terms of submitting you. Targeted mailing can be done for far more firms, and we can help you send resumes and cover letters to as many hundreds of firms as you desire. Legal recruiters charge employers fees which are generally 25-30% of your annual salary. While employers engage recruiters for hard-to-fill positions, they would rather not pay these fees, and they generally only pay these fees for the most stellar candidates. By "stellar," we mean attorneys who graduated from top-ranked law schools and are coming from top American law firms. Accordingly, the firms which use recruiters tend to be the largest national law firms, with massive recruiting budgets, and even these firms do not use recruiters all the time.
One of the advantages of using a legal recruiter is that he/she can review and revise your resume and tailor a cover letter for your job search. Legal Authority actually does the same for its clients. The only thing missing from the letters Legal Authority prepares on your behalf (prevalent in most recruiters' letters) is the language about how it will cost the employer tens of thousands of dollars if it hires you.
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| I don't have the time to prepare 500 cover letter and resumes. |
All it takes is filling out our Sign Up Form, spending a short amount of time on the phone with us discussing your options, and signing your cover letters that we provide to you after an extensive consultation.
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