How to Go About Applying to Larger Firms
[00:00:00] On applying to larger firms, what is the best way to go about it? Should I look at their websites and apply for open positions, cold email partners or, what? It feels so difficult to find open positions as a 3L. Is it too late in the game?
Yeah. So people talk about emailing all the time. You can do it in a couple of different ways. The partners are okay, but it's important in whatever you do to put yourself in other people's positions. And make sure you understand where they're coming from.
Some partners rely on the law firm positions for them.
And so they need they rely on a recruiting coordinator. Recruiting staff can do that for them. And they typically do not have a lot of authority to hire on their own so many times just applying to a partner is not gonna get you very far unless that partner has a lot of business and so forth. But, I would recommend just applying to the law firms that you like many times can be helpful meaning sending your resume through their portal or via email.
So you have to remember all these people are very busy and recruiting personnel inside a law firms are very busy, but if you call anytime they will talk to you. If you call law firms and you call the recruiting department, I'm a student, at law school and I like your firm, I'd like to apply, that can
[00:01:00] be very helpful and you can often get positions that way. And then asking to follow up and say, is there any inner game you're going to have any jobs or you think you're having the openings? Will you keep my resume on file, connect with a person on LinkedIn, follow up, and so forth?
The other thing that's often very important we can help quite a bit is sending a written resume. The reason sending a written letter with a resume is helpful is because when you email and you just apply and portals and so forth, what happens is your resume just goes into someone's inbox and it's never seen again. But, if you have sent a written letter many times then that sits in someone's desk, they see it.
And then it reminds them th that you've applied. So that can be extremely helpful. And people do like to see written letters. One of the secrets is that, at BCG, for example, we always send written letters and often faxes to law firms and that helps our response rate quite a bit.
People will respond through our applications.
