I go to Penn and badly want to work in San Francisco. However, I have limited ties, unfortunately, so I’m planning on using all of my regular main campus OCI bids on safer bets like NYC and Philly because BigLaw is my first priority. However, I was wondering, would it be wrong to mass mail every and all SF firms that I can find and try to setup an interview before OCI – including all of the SF firms/offices (and there is a sizeable bunch) coming to Penn’s main campus OCI? Would this look bad if I try to get a screening interview by mass mailing when I could have simply bid on them? I’m doing Penn’s regional OCI for SF, so my plan is to try and setup as many interviews as possible while I am there. Then, I shall return to Philly and use all my bids for NY, DC, et cetera firms but hope that one of the SF firms gives me a nibble. I think all of this seems logical and okay but I don’t really know. Thoughts?

This is smart, not unethical.

Many will still probably tell you just to bid on them.

Most firms will require you to go through OCI if they actually come to your campus.

You can usually go to the law firm's website (or NALP) and look at their "Career" or "Recruiting" information and see. But in my experience if the firm interviews at your school you are going to have to go through them for an interview. Now if they don't come to your school for OCI I see no problem mass mailing.
After all, this is your career and placing certain restraints on how you go about it wouldn't be the reasonable thing to do.

I go to a peer school, and the person I met with in our career services office TOLD me to try doing this. She said some firms may tell me to wait until OCI, some will ask me to come in and treat it like an informational interview, and some will actually treat it as an interview (and some will ignore me altogether...)

Because you are not guaranteed to land an interview for each of your bid, you should hedge your bets by applying to the firms you like anyway. The worst that would happen is that they know you are really interested.

When making your NY bid list, don't forget to think about firms that have a sizable SF/SV office. If you are a strong enough candidate to collect a few offers, which is actually pretty likely, once you get your foot in the door you can tell the firms you'll accept the offer if they let you split the summer half in NY and half in SF. A lot of people did something along these lines, which I didn't know went on going into OCI. Once you have a split summer, you're in a great spot to shoot for an offer in SF. Then you have ties - you can just say you liked that half of the summer so much better, etc etc.

Oh wow, this is good to know as someone who'd like to target LA. Should you only bring it up when yu have an offer?