legal authority

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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The process of working on client files at Legal Authority is quite complicated and works like this:

First, our clients generally sign up on our web site or call in. Once a client calls in or signs up on our web site, we call to schedule an appointment with them and they are assigned an Employment Advocate who will be their contact person throughout their search. With only one exception, all of our Employment Advocates are attorneys. Our Employment Advocates work with our clients through each step of the process.

Second, once an appointment is scheduled, a client speaks with one of our Employment Advocates about their job search and what they are seeking to do. During the phone call, a list of employers is generated which matches precisely what the client is seeking to do. The Employment Advocate will generally counsel the client about what they believe is the most appropriate steps for the candidate to follow in their job search. Employment Advocates are sort of like recruiters because their ultimate objective is to get you a job. The difference between an Employment Advocate and a traditional legal recruiter, however, is that Employment Advocates work with you.

In the third step of the process, the list of employers that the client and Employment Advocate agree upon is sent to our data review center and the resume is sent to our resume and cover letter department.

Our resume and cover letter department is also populated almost exclusively by attorneys. Two of our resume and cover letter personnel have worked in major New York law firms. Another holds a master’s degree in English Literature from the University of Pennsylvania. In our resume and cover letter department, with the input from what you are seeking to do gained from their discussions with you and your Employment Advocate a resume fitting exactly what you are seeking to do is crafted.

Our data center is extremely sophisticated, operates 24 hours a day seven days a week and is staffed by over twenty researchers. Our data center is populating our database with contact information every day of the week. Many of our candidates often ask us where we get our data and the answer is we get it from numerous sources. The least challenging aspect of our work is getting the data from printed sources. The problem with printed sources, however, is that a large percentage of law firms, corporations and other legal hiring organizations do not even list themselves in printed sources. A listing in Martindale Hubble, for example, costs firms several hundreds of dollars. At a cost exceeding $50,000 a month, our data center pulls information from other data sources making use of U.S. Government issued Standard Industry Classifications (SIC Codes) which classify businesses based upon the type of industry they are in. This information is constantly being double checked, reclassified and loaded into our database.

Once the candidate file is sent to the data center, the data center reviews the list of contacts put together by the Employment Advocate. Since each search is personal to everyone who uses our service, our list of contacts inside each legal hiring organization is never perfect. For example, we try to use contacts that are less than four months old. If a contact is less than four months old we do not use it and reinvestigate who the contact is. In addition, we very rarely have a full list of contacts within each hiring organization because each search our candidates performs is unique. Accordingly, the data center identifies which contacts on the Employment Advocates list either (1) need to be found, or (2) need to be updated and sends them to a researcher within the data center. This process of updating the information often takes less than a day. In some cases it has taken our data center over two weeks. Once the data center is happy with its information, it is sent to a data analyst.

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“ASK THE EAGLE”

Q. Dear Legal Eagle,

I am a third-year law student at a second-tier law school. I have found that many of my fellow students who are not in the top 10% of their class are not finding jobs through the on-campus interview process. What is the deal?

Signed . . .Worried 3L

A. Dear Worried 3L

On campus interviewing gives the largest firms their chance to troll for what they consider to be the best candidates, breaking it down by grades, law review, and class ranking. However, you and I know that each person who has made it through law school has skills and knowledge to offer any employer willing to look at them. Many times, a law firm will consider a potential addition to their firm when they receive a resume in their “off-season”, namely, before or after the on-campus interviewing program. Also, there are many firms that don’t want to go through law school’s frustrating on-campus schedule, and will gladly look at candidates who have the initiative to send them a resume.

One of the most interesting statistics from our standpoint are those published by U.S. News and World Report each year. These statistics show that at many law schools 60% of graduates are employed at graduation and, then, 90%+ are employed within six months of graduation. Because we speak with attorneys each day, the reason for this seems quite simple to us: The attorneys who are not employed at the time of graduation get positions later. Unfortunately, this “other 30%” is often getting positions that most often are a last result more than anything—poor paying jobs, or those with little chance of advancement.

The benefit of using Legal Authority is that we help law students and practicing attorneys realize their true market value because we assist them in exposing themselves to the segment of the market they are interested in. While the number of success stories we have is profound, the fact of the matter is that by using Legal Authority you can expose yourself to the segment of the market you want at the point in time you choose.

In your example above about the on-campus interviewing process there is nothing at all surprising occurring. A small cross section of firms even do on-campus interviewing at second tier schools. Out of those firms, an even smaller percentage are even likely to do the type of work you want to do. And, even if the firms do the type of work you want to do, they are generally only seeking attorneys in the tops of most second tier law school classes. As a result, your universe of potential opportunities cannot help but be quite limited.

In contrast to this insanity—excuse the language, but it is “insanity”—Legal Authority can assist you in contacting every single employer that does what you want to do. You will actually be competing for the hundreds, and even thousands of opportunities, if you choose, that are available in the market. By following this route, you can ensure that you have access to each and every opportunity possible and that you realize the greatest return possible in your search from both a financial standpoint and the additional standpoint of finding a firm which is a “good fit” for you.

Each day across the United States, law students are getting positions through Legal Authority and we do not believe there is a more effective means anywhere for them to do so. We have seen so many law students succeed using our service that we often wonder what would have happened to the careers of the law students graduating from school each year if they had used our service. More so than on-campus interviewing, our service assists law students in locating the positions that best match what they are seeking to do.

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Are you among the many job seekers who are contemplating whether you should waste time job searching during the holiday season? If you are, I advise you to start job searching. If you’ve already started job searching, then continue to job search. Contrary to what many job seekers believe, hiring does not come to a halt during the holidays. Hiring may slow down a little, but it still goes on. Employers still have needs for their businesses, and they must continue to fill those needs.

Additionally, there are great benefits to job searching during the holidays. These benefits include that:

• There is reduced competition among job seekers. Since most job seekers put their job searches on hold, there is less competition for jobs. Since there is less competition, this increases your chances at landing a job.
• More executives and hiring persons are in good spirits during the holidays. Their good spirits make them more open to networking and interviewing.
• The holiday season is a great time for networking. There are many parties and events during the holiday season. Take advantage of this and mention your job search. You never know who may be able to help you in your job search.
• Professionals tend to change jobs, retire, and earn promotions more during the months of November and December. Therefore, hiring persons will be looking to replace these professionals.

Remember, even during the holidays, the is no holiday for job searching.

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At Legal Authority, this is the exact type of economy where we thrive. We are getting attorneys and law students jobs like crazy! In fact, the number of testimonials we are seeing at Legal Authority is at an all time high.

The best thing about this economy is the results our clients are getting. While our clients’ classmates, peers and others are not getting jobs, our clients are going out for interviews and getting jobs. This is because our service works.

The fact is that targeted mass mailing works. It provides the absolute best market coverage and the best results of any job finding method. There are a lot of people out there who will try and tell you the opposite; however, you need to simply think about targeted mailing in a rational and logical way.

First, there are a limited number of employers in a given city. At any one time, these employers could be advertising on any one of thousands and thousands of websites, newspapers and other publications. No matter how diligent you are in searching for these openings, there is a good chance you are not going to find them all. When you use Legal Authority, you track down these openings by mailing letters and ensuring that you are approaching all the correct employers at one time.

Second, many employers do not advertise their openings. Many openings in the legal field especially are spread by word of mouth, for example. When you are approaching these employers, you are applying for positions that are also not advertised.

Third, many employers make hiring decisions simply by seeing a good candidate cross their desk. In the legal field, you can get jobs whether or not employers have openings. There is a reason you can get hired when there are no openings: Law firms charge by the hour. If a law firm has more work than it can do, they are losing money. By bringing you in to do the work, they can bill out at a lot more than they are paying you and make money. This is one reason that Legal Authority is so effective–law firms are opportunists like any business and you represent a business opportunity for them.

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