November 2010

In terms of helping attorneys get jobs, one of the more effective means for doing so is by approaching the specific types of employers you would like to work for (whether or not they are soliciting applications) directly through a focused campaign. Sporadically applying to jobs on job posting boards, classified advertisements, and through recruiters can work — but for many attorneys it can take a great deal of time and does not work for even the best attorneys. I formerly practiced law with a major New York City-based law firm and knew several attorneys with stellar qualifications who sporadically applied to jobs through recruiters, classified ads, and job posting boards for years. You probably know attorneys who have been doing this for a long time as well.

The “apply now and then” means of going about a job search (which is a common strategy for most attorneys) cannot possibly give you the type of market coverage (and corresponding offers) that you are capable of getting—or ensure you get a position in a timely manner. No matter how good a recruiting firm is–not all firms use recruiters, and not all recruiters have all the jobs. No matter how good a job board is–no job board has all the jobs and you will be competing with every attorney with an email account. Statistics also indicate that the vast majority of legal positions in the United States are filled by unsolicited and self-initiated contact attorneys initiate with employers. Incredibly, however, most attorneys never take the step of actually performing an aggressive self-initiated and targeted job search campaign to employers not soliciting applications. Even the National Association of Law Placement is clear that most attorneys get position by approaching employers who do not solicit their resume.

The problem with contacting employers on your own is that it is a tremendous amount of work and something few practicing attorneys have the time to do. In addition, an attorney’s time is valuable. The amount of work required to build a comprehensive list of employers and hiring contacts within each city is profound. Not all firms list themselves in Martindale, we estimate that less than 1% of the law firms in the United States are in the NALP Guide and–even assuming you had a comprehensive list of information–picking up the phone to make hundreds of phone calls to identify who to approach within each hiring organization is a ridiculous amount of work. Not to mention the cost of printing, the possibility for typos in the contact information and loading all that information into a database to print all those cover letters and envelopes.

In my opinion, the most effective way to get a legal position is by using a company called Legal Authority (www.legalauthority.com). Legal Authority probably assists more attorneys get positions than any single organization in the United States and what they do is nearly foolproof.

Legal Authority (working closely with you) will review and revise your resume and cover letter, and then laser print cover letters and envelopes addressed to the hiring contacts in the specific types of legal employers you are interested in. Legal Authority maintains the largest database of legal hiring contacts of any company in the world: There are over 40 attorneys and researchers working at Legal Authority, and the company operates 24 hours a day updating a database of more than 750,000 hiring contacts. There is probably a 99.9% chance that the next legal hiring organization you go to work for is already in Legal Authority’s database. How you get to these legal employers is up to you, but using Legal Authority will ensure you do find these employers. I strongly encourage you to review Legal Authority’s website at www.legalauthority.com.

If you are serious about getting an attorney position, you owe it to yourself to at least speak with Legal Authority and hear what they can do to assist you. Legal Authority offers a free no cost or obligation consultation where they will tell you how many employers match your interests in the area(s) you want to work, and will advise you on changes you can make to your resume to make it more effective.

One of the most important attributes any attorney can have is the ability to advocate. Legal Authority will make you your own advocate by, in effect, allowing you to do the type of work recruiters do on your own while providing you with (1) an effective and revised cover letter and resume and (2) personalized letters to every specific employer you tell them you would be interested in working for in any area of the United States, Europe or Asia.

This strategy is effective and works: Legal Authority assists hundreds of attorneys each month has been used by top partners in major United States law firms, General Counsels of important corporations, associates in small and large firms, and even law students. Legal Authority can assist you too.

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Have you ever heard of Legal Authority? Think hard. You may have seen it somewhere in a magazine or on a website or on a billboard. Did you every wonder what Legal Authority is?

It’s the best kept secret of job seekers nationwide. More attorneys and law students find jobs using Legal Authority than any other source in the world. Most legal professionals are aware of the fact that over 75% of legal jobs are filled by word-of-mouth, not by job openings. Using Legal Authority’s aggressive career marketing program, they are able to dominate a job market and generate interviews while friends and colleagues are unable to even get a phone call.

You can tap into the hidden job market. Legal Authority has the world’s most sophisticated database of legal employers, containing up-to-date hiring contacts and classifications for specific criteria such as size, revenue, industry/practice area, and location. With your input, we will use this database to identify every single legal employer that meets your specific interests and search criteria. Somewhere in that market, your next job awaits. We just have to find it.

A good resume and cover letter can make a difference. Our skilled writers will craft a perfect resume and cover letter for the market you are approaching. You get the final say over the documents, of course, and our writers will work with you until we have an exemplary set of documents that will highlight your skills and illustrate your marketability. One of the most frequent comments our clients hear from employers nationwide is how impressed each employer was with the resume and cover letter. This level of perfection never goes unnoticed.

Numbers, numbers, numbers. Legal Authority will print out the completed, addressed application materials that we send to your door. All you do is sign each letter and stamp each envelope. As a result, mailing out hundreds of letters to employers and getting interviews by the handful only takes minimal effort on your part. And, with hundreds of thousands of legal employers nationwide, hundreds of letters are necessary for you to get your foot in the door. Legal Authority’s aggressive strategy is marketing at its purest, and we always win when playing the numbers game.

There’s always a catch. Except with Legal Authority. There is no catch. You are our client, and we will go to the greatest effort possible to give you the best chance you have at finding your next (or first) legal job. We know that you’re discouraged or disappointed in your job prospects, and we make it our goal to make your job search painless.

Think about your job search. Are you 100% confident that you’re doing everything you can to find the best job out there for you? Now that you have the answer, get in touch and start putting us to work for you. Visit our website at www.legalauthority.com, or call us at 1-800-283-3860 to find out more about what we can do for you.

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Does this work?
Many attorneys who have used self-initiated targeted mailing originally tried the other ways to find a job that you may have. It did not work for them either. Beyond even compensating for ineffective methods for location a position, however, Legal Authority provides you with the exposure to the most opportunities. Having the most options is simply a good strategy for your job search. Would you rather have one job offer, or several?

We believe the methods we use to give attorneys exposure to the largest possible market of employers are the most effective means to an interview and potential job. When you conduct your job search through Legal Authority, you have the luxury of approaching every legal employer that matches your interest in every area of the world where you are interested in working. The services we provide empower you to perform a more pro-active, expansive job search that will greatly increase your chances of finding the job that you want. If you use a job posting board, recruiter, or other method, you will have reduced your exposure to a fraction of the employers available through Legal Authority.

How many legal employers are in Legal Authority’s database?
We have over 500,000 legal employers in our database. This includes law firms, corporations, public interest groups, private associations, law schools, municipal, state and federal offices, state representatives, United States politicians, foreign ambassadors, and many other miscellaneous types of legal employers. If there is an organization that employs attorneys in the United States, the chances are extremely good they are in our database.

Why should I spend money on Legal Authority when I can do all this myself?
You can do it yourself. You can go the library, subscribe to over 50 legal directories and newspapers, call each employer and get the name of the people in charge of making decisions, and write it all down. Then you can input all this information into a database and then you can update that information on a daily basis seven days a week. If you think this is easy, think again: We have over forty people doing this for us on a daily basis in both the United States and abroad.

Then, while trying to hold down a full time job, you can create and revise an effective cover letter and resume that will draw any employer’s attention. Don’t forget to have your friends (are they experts on cover letters and resumes?) proofread your resume and give you editing suggestions. After you have perfected your resume, you can print out hundreds of cover letters, resumes, and envelopes on a laser printer, and then, finally sign, stamp and mail all of those letters. Hopefully, you will have reached every possible employer that matches your interests. This could take you a week, it could take you four months, or you might never finish the task.

Or you could call us.

How much will this cost me?
The cost is up to you and it depends on how expansive you want your job search to be. There are no hidden charges. We charge a Membership Fee that allows us to continually update and expand our sophisticated database and covers the cost of us preparing your resume and cover letter from scratch. The only other charge is a small charge for every employer for whom we prepare resumes, cover letters, and envelopes on your behalf. This charge also decreases depending on how expansive your job search will be. When you consider that each interview you receive will have cost you less than a coffee at Starbucks, you can see that our service is worth every penny. Click here for the details about the pricing.

What about getting a job through a job posting board on the Internet?
In our job, we speak with hundreds of legal professionals each month. The number of these professionals who have found legal employments from a posting on the Internet is dismally small.

There are several reasons the Internet is not the best sources for jobs.

1. Law firms are known as “dinosaurs” for a reason.
Job posting boards like Monster.com are effective for companies that are comfortable with online job hunting and recruiting. As a rule, law firms, law schools, remain most comfortable with “snail mail” – cover letters and resumes they receive from the post office, not from the Internet. Writing professional cover letters on good stationary that show you have taken time to contact the employer by writing a letter, addressing an envelope, stamping it and putting it in the mailbox is far more effective than simply hitting the “send” button on your email program.

In addition, government offices, hiring partners, and recruiting coordinators rarely advertise, and they have the luxury of waiting for the resumes to come in the door. Unless they are doing proactive recruiting with legal search firms or law schools, there is little “resume searching” that is done.

2. The Internet allows for overwhelming responses to every job posting.
If an employer is posting a job online, they will likely receive hundreds, or even thousands, of responses. You will be competing with every attorney with a computer who can email their resume.

3. A high number of the jobs on many posting boards online are outdated.
The legal employers who use the Internet as a source to find resumes generally use it as a secondary tool to hands-on, offline recruiting and resume searching. Consequently, when a job is filled, many employers forget to remove or delete the jobs they have posted throughout the many posting boards.

4. No single source of jobs on the Internet is complete.
You may need to review more than 50 job websites just to find 1/10th of all the jobs out there. Simply put, this is an ineffective way to search for a job. By using Legal Authority, you can approach all of the employers in a given market very quickly and cost-effectively. Alternatively, you can keep checking job-posting boards for weeks or months until a job that looks good comes along and then hope you stand out among the numerous resumes sent to the employer.

What Makes Legal Authority So Unique?
We give you the tools to perform the most effective job search, but you remain in control of every aspect. With the use of our database of employers and our team of experts reviewing your resumes and cover letters, you will be able to realize your full job hunt potential.

How expansive should my job search be?
In a market as small as the San Francisco Bay Area, we have well over 1000 legal employers. Should you approach them all? It will ultimately be your decision. You would think that if you wanted to work in a market as small as the San Francisco, you would not need to approach 1000 employers. The problem is that getting a position is very numbers driven. The more employers you approach, the more likely you are to get an interview, and the more likely you are to get a job offer. This does not mean that you need to send out such a high volume of letters in your specific job search. In some cases, we may recommend you only send out 25 or less. However, the more options you have, the more likely you are to find a great position that matches your qualifications and skills. And that is really the essence of becoming a client of Legal Authority: You are in charge of determining your career destiny.

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Legal Authority was built on the belief that there is no point in doing something if it is not done at its very highest level and better than anyone else. I can say that we are the undisputed world leader in the attorney mass mailing service. And our efforts will only continue to improve. The reasons we are the undisputed world leader, and will continue to dominate the market are described below:

First, we have more potential legal jobs and hiring contacts than any single source on Earth. There is no one with more hiring contacts—anywhere. When we started, we knew that there was no reason to do what we were doing unless we did it all. This was a massive goal—and still is on a daily basis. But it is one we have achieved and continue to achieve.

Second, we are aggressively using technology. Recent changes, such as the compact search, and the ability to upload thousands of corrected records in seconds, have improved efficiencies of our workforce by over 2.5 times. We need to continue aggressively using technology to experience the levels of market domination we should.

Third, we stress an outstanding work product in all we do. While our review and revision of cover letters and resumes may seem like and unnecessarily time consuming task—and one that detracts from our profits—it should be noted that we are committed to doing exceptional work. To this end, we have almost from day one had a professional writer on staff to ensure this work is done in a timely manner. In addition, our production department consistently keeps stressing a quality and first-rate work product that is error free. To date, we have done an exceptional job with this.

Fourth, we are a team. There is little doubt that we are a team here! In fact, I would question any organization to try and be more of a team than us. Work can be fun and we can do excellent work at the same time. We are proving this on a daily basis with all we do. Our weekly Attorney Employment Advocate and Production Department meetings have proven an outstanding tool to ensuring we are all in the same team.

Fifth, we exist because we want to help those who have proven they are worthy of help. This organization was founded simply because there was no source in existence which would do all they could to assist attorneys. Our work is noble and has profound significance. We are helping people who deserve our help because they are people who have taken efforts to help themselves by attending law school and completing a rigorous curriculum.

We need to constantly be aware that our goal is to make a meaningful difference in peoples’ lives and that we can do this. We are often people’s last stop in their job search; however, we are without a doubt the most potentially effective stop. There is no more effective way for an attorney to get a job than by using our service—anywhere. In fact, there has never been. We are making history here and changing lives for the better on a daily basis.

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Quite frankly, Legal Authority is not something that every law student in the United States should be using. And not every law student Legal Authority works with gets a job using our service.

However, thousands of law students do get jobs using our service each year. We work with well over 100 law students per week who are seeking their first position. Our service is comprehensive: Our attorneys counsel law students about appropriate positions for them to apply to, rewrite their resume and cover letter, and provide them with professionally printed cover letters and envelopes to sign and mail. The average cost of our service is most often less than $500 for every law student we assist.

Our attorneys generally spend at least an hour talking with each individual law student and then several hours redoing their resumes and cover letters. In addition, we spend far in excess of $1 million each year maintaining a database that contains the information students need to apply for jobs: What type of practice areas is the student interested in? What type of employer does the student want to work for—a law firm, the federal or state government, a public interest organization, a corporation? Where does the student want to live? What size law firm does the student want to work for?

Certainly, on-campus interviewing, relationships with employers, and other means are good ways for students to get jobs—they always have been and always will be. However, we believe that our service is a profoundly effective way to ensure that law students find the precise job they are looking for when this job might not be available from more traditional sources. There is strength in numbers and because thousands of students use our service each year, we are able to offer a service far more effective than many law schools have the time, or the money, to offer.

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