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I've compiled some firms to mass-mail and have a cover letter prepared. How much tailoring is necessary for each cover letter?

Do people just literally cut and paste firm name and recruiting contact and send it off? Or is it more customized than that? If the latter, this is gonna be phenomenally time-consuming.

Edit: I am going to tailor the intro for each market (I'm hitting 4 markets), but that won't be too difficult.

Depending on how big your list is, you probably don't need to do too much tailoring. Firms care a lot more about the resume and transcript anyway; cover letter is more of a formality. Just make sure what you says is applicable to every firm - don't say "I'm very interested in corporate work" when the firm only does lit. And make sure there aren't any errors.

More tailoring is better than less, but little to none is "required."

As an example: Quinn has a very unique culture. I don't doubt that candidates who mail them and mention their attraction to that culture and/or litigation focus stand somewhat better odds than a letter that's obviously targeted towards any large law firm with a lit department in that location.

I wrote a generic lit-focused cover letter. Set-up a mail merge with the standard addressing/firm name fields. I made two custom fields: <practice area> and <why firm>. <why firm> was something relatively unique about the firm or something they were trying to sell themselves on. So, I have a paragraph that is: I want to do litigation. Your firm has <practice area>. Further, <why firm>.