Strategic Outreach to Law Firms: Tips and Templates for No Openings

Description

• Discover the game-changing strategy: Applying to law firms without openings.
• BCG's groundbreaking statistic: Over 85% success for candidates applying to firms without advertised positions.
• Why it works: Firms often interview regardless of openings, giving proactive applicants a unique advantage.
• The power of exclusivity: Applying to a firm without openings makes you the sole candidate, eliminating competition.
• The recruiter's perspective: Despite initial skepticism, sending lists of firms to candidates for approval proves highly effective.
• Firms without openings love proactive applicants: Expressing genuine interest increases your chances of landing the job.
• Harrison's personal experience: Mass mailing resumes to law firms without openings led to exceptional success stories.
• Boost your job search: Consider alternatives like LawCrossing to access unadvertised positions and stand out.
• Pro tip: Leverage Google searches to identify niche law firms that receive fewer applications, increasing your likelihood of success.

Transcript:

Let's hear what resources or templates would you recommend using for reaching out to law firms without openings? What is the best way to reach out? Okay. So this is actually a very good question and I will answer it. I don't know what the percentage is now, but years ago I looked at these percentages and it was something crazy.

It was like 85%. Of candidates, and this is crazy. And so this statistic I'm sharing with you, by the way, should blow you away. So this is something that again, this is if you learn this right now, it's going to change the course of your frickin career. And no one even understands this, but it's I do because I've worked with.

Tens of thousands of attorneys, and there's no one else that does what I do this and it gets, it freaks people out it, all sorts of things. So 85 percent of candidates that BCG now in the past, I haven't. Looked at this in the past few years. So I'm not going to say it's 85 now. It might be lower, but in the past that have gotten positions with us.

And this statistic should blow you away. It's incredible with us. Now, again, I'm not saying this is a term, but it's, I'm sure it's a lot. It's probably still way over 50 percent have applied, have gotten positions. with firms that don't have openings. Now, so I want to, this statistic should blow you away, but I want to be, I want to preface this with a couple of different statements, because I want to make sure you understand why this is.

So we, so certain firms, Always interview people through BCG or firms, interview people with interview, lots of candidates in different practice areas, regardless of they have an opening. So we're using we're using historical information. We're using not AI because, but we're using different machine learning and algorithms and things.

So this is our statistics. I'm not saying these are. Very high because of things that we're doing to make those, these decisions about where to tell people, but the, and then here's the other thing is. 75 percent of candidates when we send them, when we send them lists of firms to approve. geT freaked out.

So they think that we're spamming them or something. List of firms get, get freaked out. So meaning they think there's something wrong with this that why would we be sending these firms? We do it because we know the places that are likely to interview them without openings, but I'd also do it because I know that's where people are likely to get jobs because here's the kicker.

And I want to make sure everyone understands this because this. Is incredibly fricking important. It may be one of the most important job search things you hear in your entire career, and I want to make sure everyone understands this firms without openings. Now, large firms, by the way, I'm talking more about small to midsize firm, big size firm, big firms and big cities are run like machines and they know exactly what they need and they.

Often are inflexible, but firms without openings, if they receive your application, and again, this large firms and hot markets and hot practice areas, this is the case. But if you apply to a firm without openings, apply to a firm without formal openings, you are the only applicant, right? So you're the only applicant.

So if you're the only applicant that the firm, no one to compare you to, right? No one to compare you to. Easy to hire because no one applies to firms like that's easy. They obviously you're interested in them. We know about them. You're not applying just because there's a job. And what does no one to comparing with this means no competition.

For example, if I post an opening for in house counsel at BCG, what's going to happen within. A few minutes I'm going to suddenly get, and this is just because this is the kind of competition there's a lot of in house jobs, I'll start getting by the end of day two and day two, I may have, 200 applications or something.

So what am I going to do? What, how am I going to make any sense of all this? I guess I could put them all in a pile and. Sort them by school. But this is what employers say. So if you're applying to an employer with a job, what are your odds? But if you're applying for a firm that doesn't have an opening, there's no competition.

There's, you're the only applicant. And you're showing, you're proactively showing that you like the firm or the position. So that's great. You like the firm. So firms that receive applicants like this are like... That's awesome. They love it. And that, and you're much more likely to get a job. Again, these statistics at BCG are artificially high because if there's 300 firms in Milwaukee, like we know like the 10 or 15 that always interview like corporate attorneys or patent attorneys, like even without jobs.

So we send them those. And so that's one reason working with a good recruiter could change your life. But it's also, and again, I'm not Trying to, but at the same time, but you can do that on your own. You just won't have us be as accurate. But what's funny is when I send candidates, these lists of firms.

They think, Oh, this is crazy. This recruiter is sending me all these firms. I'm going to stop responding to their texts and emails and block. This is how people think. But honestly, this is the most effective way to get a position. There are so many fricking attorneys in every practice area all over the country that, that you could potentially go work for it.

It's ludicrous. So if you, I know to show you this example, so there's Google. And we'll look at, let's see, let's just take an example. What trust in the state's attorneys, if you want to do trust in the states, trust in the state's attorneys in let's pick something random in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

So no one, by the way. It's going to apply to these fricking people. There are tons of them. So look at this. So here we go. Walk in wills, Robert, all these places. They're just, they just go on for pages and pages. Look at this next, next, it's just, come on, just look at this. It's insane. If you want to work, there are so many attorneys out there that in law firms and no one's applying to that.

If you apply to them, you have a great opportunity. To get a position, all you need to do is apply and do a search on Google for whatever you're trying, whatever job you're trying to get or firm you're trying to work in. And by the way, these kinds of particular searches, which I think are fricking awesome, are hugely effective.

They are, you can, let me just fix something here. I'm going to fix so I can show this anyway, this particular search, but. 6. 2 million or anyway, I'll just show this, but the point is that if you apply to firms without openings, you are going to have a massive opportunity to get positions that no one does.

I've seen this with myself. An example would be. I used to, up till a couple years ago, I had a law firm. Now, I didn't have a law firm where I was representing people. I had a law firm that was representing my companies and things that we were involved in, whatever, not serious things, but if someone owed us money or was using our trademark or whatever, we would, this law firm.

But the point is that in the entire history of having this law firm, Which was years and years. I only had a couple people, I can remember them walk in or in the ones that walked in were the most effective, but send their resume out of the blue saying, Hey, do you have any opportunities? And the ones that did would all get jobs.

I'll tell you a quick story that blows my mind. And this I just want to tell you because I wanna give you an example of how fricking effective this is. So I used to have a company. called legal authority, which you can see online. You can go to legal authority right now. And legal authority, um, would basically you could call legal authority and say that you'd fill out a form and you'd say, Hey, I want to work at, and this company, the website's still up, but it's not where no one's working on at the moment.

It hasn't been for years, but you call it, go to this company and say, You could be, and I'll tell you a quick story. There was a couple of guys that were friends that went to Thomas Cooley Law School, which I guess is now called, I don't know what it's called, but it's something else. But it, for whatever reason, it's not a highly ranked law school.

As a matter of fact, I think at the time it was one of the 10 worst in the country or something. I don't know. But, and again, nothing against people to go to Thomas Cooley, but there are a couple of guys from there one day visited my office. One of them brought their father and was like, we can't thank you enough.

We got these great jobs with entertainment law firms. And the dad was like, yeah, thank you so much. We can't believe what a great job you did. All legal authority would do is if you said, I want to be any type of attorney in any city, we would just search our database. And if you want to be an entertainment attorney in LA, we would search and then we'd find 200 law firms doing it.

And then we would. At that time, we would print out letters and everything and send it to the people and they would send it out to all these firms. And they want to be entertainment attorney. We would do the resume and cover it. But the point of this whole thing is that getting an entertainment job in LA.

If you're a attorney at Morrison and Forrester or Melvyn, you're one of these big for Gibson Dunn and want to do it. It's extremely difficult. It's beyond difficult. It's not impossible, but it's pretty freaking hard because everybody wants to do entertainment law. It doesn't matter if you went to Harvard, whatever.

But these guys that went to this worst law school, one of the worst law schools in the country as law students were getting entertainment jobs using the service. It works. If you apply, it's the point I'm making. It's this company was getting so many people jobs that it was ridiculous. So many people were getting positions of legal authority.

It just blew my mind. And all they were doing was mass mailing their resume and with letters instead of sending, what do you call it? Emails. And so it works. If you apply to places without openings, you're going to do well now. There is something now called, that BCG does, which is called, what's it called?

Reverse, and I started to give such a long drawn out answer to this. BCG search. So what is this called? And essentially, this is the same thing. This is reverse recruiting, which is basically a similar type service, but it's a little more high end. Because unfortunately, the legal authority is a low end service was.

It's a difficult company to operate from both the profitability and a customer service perspective. But yeah, reverse recruiting is something that we do. But here's one other thing that I would recommend. And again, I'm not trying to bug my companies and things here, but I am trying to present my job search offerings.

So anytime you use LinkedIn or what else? Indeed for jobs, everyone in there, every, everyone out there, every single person with an internet connection, single attorney. But the internet connection is applying to those jobs. So what does that mean? That means that you stand very little chance. Of getting those jobs, because first of all, the employer may not even see your resume because there's so many fricking people applying to those jobs.

And the second thing is that you don't stand a good chance of getting those positions because you're going to be competing with a huge number of people. Just think of how many law students and how many new attorneys are looking for jobs. So that's the problem. So there, I do have a company that does this and helps people other than this reverse recruiting.

It's called LawCrossing, which you probably have heard of, but all LawCrossing does, it's a little different. It goes, the site goes and looks at every law firm website. Oh, and by the way, to get an Indeed or LinkedIn for jobs, employers need to pay. So that means that, but law crossing, basically, this, it's every law firm we can find, law firm we can find, and we can find in every government office, all that, every government in house, whatever.

And then takes those jobs and posts them on its site. And those jobs, the majority of these are not advertised. So that's all. So you stand a better chance if a law firm has a job somewhere or a company. It's not advertised because if some municipality puts a, or a government office or a law firm in whatever, in a small or mid sized law firm, or even a large law firm that doesn't advertise its jobs, puts a job has a job and it's not advertised, but you stand a much better chance.

I don't want to get too far into it, but that's the whole point of these. I'm not trying to tell you that you should do it, but people get the site works and you'll get it. I'm not going to say i'll get a job because that's ridiculous, but I think if you find positions like on legal authority day, which you can do with reverse recruiting now, but it's Expensive.

So I don't even want to talk about it really but it's there, but if you use something like law crossing, which is very expensive, you can find jobs that aren't advertised. If you use, if you do mass mailing on your own, or you just search the internet and find lists of firms doing their practice area and apply, you're going to get more jobs.

So the whole idea is if you're looking for a job, and I'm sorry to get into talk so much about this, but this is my passion. And I have businesses doing it, but if you look for a job if you try to get a position and there's no competition. What the hell you're gonna have 10 times a better chance.

You're also gonna look like you're interested in the employer when other people aren't necessarily doing that. Okay. So I hope that helps.