Hello, my name's Harrison Barnes, and I'd like to welcome you to Legal Authority. I'm the CEO and founder of Legal Authority. Perhaps no company that I've ever been involved in has touched more people, more attorneys and law students, than Legal Authority. I'm excited for you because you're about to go on a journey. You're about to go on a journey of self-discovery. Where you may be 4, 5, 6, 7 weeks from now or less can be a far different place from where you are right now. You may be in a different area geographically. You may be in a job that pays three times as much as what you were making at your pervious job. You may be in your first job. What's going to happen to you is very, very exciting.
You worked exceptionally hard, and I know it, I used to be an attorney in practice, too. You've done very, very well. But you're at an area right now where something is about ready to happen to you. There is no more powerful way of looking for a job than Legal Authority. I mean that, I've helped my own friends with the service, I know so many people whose lives have been changed. There are so many testimonials on our site that I haven't even been able to read them all in several years — they just keep coming in on a day-to-day basis.
Legal Authority is a wonderful service. I want to briefly tell you what Legal Authority does and why it's so effective. You need to understand why this site works. It's probably the best investment you will ever make in your entire career if you use the service, and I want to tell you why right now.
What we do at Legal Authority is different than any other job-search method. We go out and we gather the contact information for every single US legal employer we can find. I'm talking about government offices, I'm talking about corporations, I'm talking about public interest organizations, I'm talking about law firms. Every single organization in the United States that hires attorneys is part of our database. We know who to send your resume to, we know what that firm does, we know its practice areas, we know its sides, we know everything we can possibly know about it to assist you. Legal Authority then goes out and verifies its information up to six times a year. There's certain areas we don't update as much, smaller states — South Dakota would be an example — don't get updated as much, but for the most part most areas are updated a minimum of four times a year, so that information is very valid.
Now to give you an understanding of the power of Legal Authority I'm gong to walk you through the typical job-search process. In this example, I'm going to pretend like I'm the job seeker. Say I live in Pasadena, California, and I decide that I want to look for a legal job. The first thing I may do is I may go to a site like Monster or Careerbuilder or Law Jobs, LawCrossing, one of the many different legal websites, and I look and I see that there's only a couple jobs for me in Pasadena, and there's only a couple jobs for attorneys. Pasadena is a good-size town, you know, maybe 100,000 people, but there's not a lot of advertisements on any job boards for attorneys. And I say to myself, "Gosh, I guess I'm going to have to wait," and I wait, and I wait, and I wait, and if you keep waiting, you're probably not going to find a lot of jobs advertised. The reason is, not every offer and not every corp. that has jobs advertises their jobs and posts on their website, in fact, most of them don't. It's well known in the legal community that 85% of all jobs that are filled in the United States for attorneys, that includes law students, are jobs that aren't publicized at all. So when you do traditional job-search methods, you're only exposing yourself to 15%, and that's really only major areas — in other areas it's less.
So, in Pasadena if you do a search, you're going to find in our Legal Authority database that there's hundreds of law firms and hundreds of corporations. You have literally over 1,000 different employers that are hiring or have the ability to hire you as an attorney. And if you send that group of people your resume, they are going to look at it like a business proposition. You need to understand this, and it's a fact, and it's important. Law firms, corporations, and most organizations that hire attorneys are businesses. If they feel they can hire you and make money by hiring you, they will. When you send a resume through the mail, it has a different impact than if you send it by email. Emails can be deleted. And that's especially true in law firms because in law firms, law firms typically have very good procedures for the way that paper is handled coming into the law firm. The paper is stamped, it's opened, it's routed, it's traced, and the reason for that is it could be a major case coming in. And that's the same thing that happens when you send your resume to a law firm via mail.
So if I'm looking for a job in Pasadena, all of a sudden I have over 1,000 different employers I can apply to. And if I apply to them by mail, and I'm just talking about the practice area I'm in, I'm a former litigator. So if I send my resume out as a litigator, that number may be 1,000; if I send it out as another type attorney, that may be 35-50. It depends on the practice area that you're in. But if I send my resume out, all of a sudden this information is being routed out to someone whose in charge of hiring, and it comes in the paper form, and when they look at that they say to themselves, "My gosh, this person has a lot of interest in us, I wonder why that is, and maybe they know something about our firm." The thing is, when you send your resume through the mail to every organization in a given city that matches your interest and goals — and I'm not saying you have to send to everyone, so what we do is targeted mail, so for some people you may want to work at a law firm with 100 people, for some people, you may want to work at a smaller law firm, for some people, you may want to work at a corporation that deals with buyer chemistry. It just depends, but that's what we help you do at Legal Authority. We put together these lists for you that can help you get a sense of the places you want to go.
So once that law firm or organization gets your resume, they believe that you have some kind of interest in them because it's very rare for people to mail their resume to a law firm. When they get it, they look at it, and they think about it because they may have a need and that may need may have been unadvertised, and by writing them you stand a far better chance of getting a job than if you had just mailed an email. It shows that you're interested, that you've taken the time to write a letter, and that's what we do at Legal Authority.
It goes beyond that. We also do your resume and cover letter, they're professionally written, they're written exceptionally well — the product that you receive is typo-free, it's on high-quality paper, no ink smudges, and it's addressed to the proper person, and it goes out and makes an impression. This way of getting a job is the way that more attorneys have gotten jobs in the states than any other source I'm aware of. This method works. Could you do it yourself? We have, at our company, over 500 employees, we have printers, some of them digital printers that cost $700-$800, we have staff who are researching the contact information for these organizations every single day of the year — over 40 people are normally researching this information on a constant basis. To print the information is a massive task. You're talking about for most searches very little money in terms of the cost per letter once the work is all said and done. You receive a package and you sign your letters, and you mail them.
I want to talk to you and take you through about how the process is going to work for you because I'm confident that once you talk to an employment advocate about our site that you're going to want to use our service. If you complete the sign-up form, which i strongly encourage you to do — it just takes a minute of your time — the next thing that will happen is you will receive a phone call, and that phone call will be from someone in our customer service department in Utah where we've had an office for several years, and it will be one of three or four people who will call you, and they will ask you when you have time to talk to us, and we will schedule your appointment. We probably won't be able to do it the same day — there is a tremendous amount of demand for our services — but we may be able to do it the next day or the following day. We try to fit people in as quickly as possible because we know your job search is important.
Then you will be talking to a person we call an employment advocate from Legal Authority. What an employment advocate is is someone with a legal background — almost all of them have gone to law school and taken the bar and are very passionate about the work they do. And what that employment advocate will do is take a look at your resume that you have submitted, and they will sort of evaluate it and say to themselves, "What kind of job will this person be best at, what are some flaws in their resume, how should they address certain things," and those are the thoughts that will be going to through their mind. Typically an employment advocate will review your resume at the day prior to your appointment, and I like them to do that because it gets their mind churning overnight, and they think about how they can help your job search and make the best recommendations when they talk to you the following day. Employment advocates are great. These are people who really spend their whole career focused on others and doing what they can to assist you. They're, you know, motivated people — almost all of them are attorneys. They're motivated by doing good. They have backgrounds, and we've had people in the peace corps, and people who've worked in orphanages, and it's because they have sort of that human connection and they can understand where you're coming from.
I don't care what kind of law school you went to or what kind of jobs you're coming from or even if you're a partner in a firm making millions a year — which we've had lots of them — and I'll tell you why before the end of this discussion. So they'll look at your resume, and when they talk to you, they'll ask you what your goals are, where do you want to work, what are you interested in doing, what is the reason for this move and this move, and then what they'll do after they try to get an understanding of where you're coming from is they'll do a search on the database, the Legal Authority database, and they will identify employers in the regions they believe that you're interested in working in, the size company, the type of office you want to be in, they'll look at all that information, and once they have all that information and they've thought about it, they'll ask you for your input, and it's really kind of nice because this process will be driven by you, you are the person who will drive this whole process, it's not the employment advocate — the employment advocate is there to provide advice to help you understand what's best for you.
Once they identify the list of employers, they'll discuss it with you, and once they discuss it with you, they'll tell you the cost of the work that we're going to do and how everything will work. And then the employment advocate will save the files of the lists that they generated, and that information will be closed out, and you will have completed that discussion with your employment advocate. Then you will receive an email that will talk about the service and will ask you to upload your resume. Once you've uploaded your resume, it will also ask you for additional information to fill out a profile. That information will go to our resume department. As I'm sure you're aware, Legal Authority is part of one of the largest employment organizations in the world — you're not dealing with a small organization. We control several resume companies. We have great procedures in place.
In this case, you're going to be working with our affiliate, Attorney Resume — it's an outstanding organization that has helped more attorneys with their resumes than any other organization in the world that I'm aware of. Attorney Resume will take a look at the questions you've answered, and will take a look at your resume, and will proceed to laboriously work on your resume — the style and the perfection that you obviously as one of our clients deserve and are entitled to. Now you have to understand that there's a lot of people that are interested in the Legal Authority service, and we have to keep our quality up. In some cases, people will ask to do it rushed, but in most cases you will be put in a queue for the work. The queue is pretty fast, but for the quality we only let a certain number of resumes be worked on per day, and we try to control the flow so our resume writers are sharp, and we have a very, very good team of resume writers. We'll also write a cover letter for you, and that cover letter will go into detail about why they believe that you're good for the job that you are applying for. That letter will be proofed and written by people with very advanced experience in the legal industry that know what it takes to get attorneys jobs.
Then you will get input on all this. You will receive an email asking whether you want more work to be done. At that point, many people proof the work most people do, some people want more input. We're there, and we'll work with you as long as it takes to get you the product that is best suited for you. Once you have proofed the product, it goes over to our printing facility with the absolute best printers. The people we have are experienced with working with these files, and the kind of printing that needs to be done for attorneys. We know how important it is that the resume is properly formatted on the paper. Before that's done, it goes to our final department, which is basically a group of people who do nothing but edit the files that we're producing. They put all that information into a spread sheet and they make sure all the contact information looks perfect. Believe it or not, law firms, when they post information about whose in charge of hiring, will often misspell their own employees, but we fix that. The information's printed, put in a box, you receive cover letters and resumes. We put foam around everything, and we federal express that to your house.
What happens next is you sign your letters and put them in envelopes and mail them out. We can do that for you, it's obviously an extra charge and a lot of work, but most people prefer to sign things themselves. I recommend you always sign letters in blue, it's a good practice to get in because attorneys who sign in blue, if someone ever shows you a signature and it's in black ink, you know it's not yours. Then you mail that information out. Typically within 1-2 days, you will start receiving calls, and you will also receive letters from firms interested in working with you. Those calls can come very, very quickly. I've seen people receive 20 calls, I've seen people receive 100 calls, I've seen people receive 5 calls. The calls in almost all instances do come, and it is remarkable, because you'll see calls coming from pretty much organizations that you know, that you are surprised are contacting you. You might see them from really, really good organizations or ones that you didn't know had openings, and they'll say, "How did you hear about us?" and then you'll start going out on interviews, and you'll have your choice of where you want to work, and that is almost always the case.
Many of the clients of Legal Authority are people that may have used it in the past, it works so well they come back when they want to move or find a job. It's a fantastic service, and it's something that can really change how you approach your career. So I want to get back to you about the example I gave you earlier about why is it that these partners and large law firms are using the service. When I first saw that I thought — the first one I saw was a partner at a major firm — "What's he doing using the service?" And the reason I thought that was kind of strange is because partners are concerned about confidentiality, and it just seemed to me that it wouldn't be useful. But I just started seeing this more and more. It was like the most successful attorneys were the ones that were using Legal Authority, and I became very, very interested in that, and I like to stop by our printing facility which is on the other side of the city, and I like to look at the work that they do, and so I started calling a lot of our clients at Legal Authority, and what I discovered is that the reason they were using it is that they had come to the conclusion, and it is the right conclusion, that the best way for them to possibly do a job search was to run it like an auction, and by running it like an auction they were saying, "I'm going to contact all the firms that I'm interested in at once. And what's going to happen is the ones who are interested are going to call me. And they're going to be interviewing me, but I'm also going to be interviewing them. And I'm going to find a place that matches what I'm interested in culturally, financially, and geographically." Because when you give yourself all these job options, and all at once, it's kind of like using a nuclear bomb to mow your lawn. You're getting the job done in a major, major way. And that's what I realized, that's why all these super important attorneys are using Legal Authority, because it's the smartest way to get a job.
Think about it, what you're doing is you're exposing yourself to the entire legal market that you're interested in at once. And you may look for a job once ever 5 years or 2 years or 3 years or 20 or 30 years. And when you look for a job, isn't it important to be thorough? And that's exactly what these people were doing. And then I started saying, "That's why this service works so well. That's why people keep coming back to it. That's why it works." And it does work, and it's a phenomenal service, and I believe when people are doing a job search, you can hit as many employers as possible. You're actually better off looking at every possible employer because you never know.
Let me tell you a quick story about myself. I clerked for a federal judge, and as my clerkship was coming to an end, I had a plan to go back and work in New York City for a large law firm there. I was working as a clerk in a very cold climate, and I really didn't want to go back to that kind of climate, I wanted to be in a warm climate, and I thought, "California sounds pretty good." So I applied to a bunch of firms, and I sent my resume out through the mail, but I didn't do it the way everyone else did. What I did was I sat down and I studied Martindale, and I sent my resume to 400 firms. I spent weeks putting together this list and calling them and asking them who was in charge, and it was exhausting, the paper would jam in my printer, and I'd run out of toner cartridge, envelopes would jam, it was a pain. I sent my resume out — and this is 12 years ago — and what I did is I chose a small firm, with maybe 30-40 people, and one of the firms I applied to was a firm called [inaudible], and I sent my resume out and I got interviews in tons of places, and I was looking around happily interviewing. But I also interviewed with this little firm, and I liked them the best, and the didn't pay the most, but I really liked them the best, so I took a job there and that was one of the best things I've ever done, and that was a fantastic firm and today that firm is probably the highest-paying firm in Los Angeles.
I wouldn't have had that experience had I not done my job search in this way. When you do your job search this way and you think outside the box, and I hate to use that analogy because I've heard it so many times, but when you do your job search that way, that's the kind of stuff that happens, and it happens to our clients on a daily basis — they wind up with great hiring organizations. And as much as I didn't like practicing law, if I had practiced law again, that's where I'd want to practice because it was a great firm.
A couple of other things, I want to talk a little bit to you about the differences between recruiters and the different ways of getting jobs, but I want to give you a sense of Legal Authority and why it's different. If you've done you're homework, you found out I'm the owner of the companies BCG Attorney Search and LawCrossing, and that those are successful firms. BCG is the largest law firm placement company in the United States — it does nothing but that. LawCrossing is the most visited legal job board in the United States despite the fact that it's a subscription site.
The way that Legal Authority came about is pretty simple. In the year 2000, there was sort of a dot-com explosion in the United States, and all of a sudden everyone that was interviewing through our company BCG Attorney Search, the interviews all stopped and the offers stopped coming in. And the reason for that was the economy. When a recruiter submits your resume to a law firm, typically what they do is they charge 25% of your salary to that law firm for hiring you. Now, if you went to Stanford Law School or Harvard Law School or Michigan or Virginia, and your working at Nathan or Watkins or Scatan, or you're moving in between one and five years, then these recruiting firms are great. There's tons and tons of business, and it's a high class way of getting a job. But it's not the right way for everybody, because first of all only about I'd figure 1%, but it's less than 1% of attorneys in the United States should be using recruiters. And the reason for that is, recruiters charge fees to hiring organizations that hire you. And those fees can inhibit you from getting a job if you are not a stellar candidate, I mean awesome. And in addition to the fees, there's sort of another problem with recruiting. And that's that the only time they're paying fees is when a certain practice area is in demand. So if the economy tanks maybe bankruptcy is in demand, if real estate is popular, maybe real estate is in demand, but different practice areas are in demand at different points in time. And only the ones that are in demand are the ones where recruiters should be being used.
You just have to think about this from the standpoint of a hiring organization. If there's tons and tons of people out there that have this qualification, then why in the world would they pay 25% of your salary to a recruiter? They would have to be insane. And that's what happens to many people — they use a recruiting firm for the job search which is insane unless you are confident that you're in that top 1%, or that you have such incredible skills that you're in demand, don't delude yourself. The chances are very, very good that you shouldn't be using a recruiter.
|
