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Is it a good idea to send mass mails to hiring partners? I imagine they get lots of emails from random students so I'm afraid they'll ignore me. If not the hiring partner then who should I email?

I've researched some threads here and someone posted that his/her order of recipients were: 1) Undergrad alum 2) Member of my law school's Law Review alum 3) Law school alum 4) Head of the group I was targeting 5) Managing partner 6) Recruiter. Nowhere does it say hiring partner and was wondering if that's usually a big no-no. But emailing a hiring partner seems so much more appropriate than the managing partner.

Another problem for me with that list is that I'm a transfer student so lr alum and new school alum seems out of the question. I also went to an undergrad that is nowhere near where I'm mass mailing and rarely do any of my ug alums go there.

tl;dr - should i mass mail the hiring partners? if not, then whom?

Send it to recruiting, 100% of the time. Always to recruiting. Always.

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The exception is if you have a personal connection to an attorney. Ideally like a friend, family member, family friend, etc. Then maybe you want to send it to them and they can send along to recruiting. Maybe if you meet an attorney at a mixer or something you can email to them but that might be stretching it a bit. But an application packet sent as a cold email to an attorney? Never. Ever.

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A big part of recruiting's job is to sort through these emails. People think if they send stuff to them it just falls into a black hole and so they try to outsmart the system. But trying to circumvent recruiting sends things into way blacker holes most of the time IMO.

BigZuck wrote:Send it to recruiting, 100% of the time. Always to recruiting. Always.

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The exception is if you have a personal connection to an attorney. Ideally like a friend, family member, family friend, etc. Then maybe you want to send it to them and they can send along to recruiting. Maybe if you meet an attorney at a mixer or something you can email to them but that might be stretching it a bit. But an application packet sent as a cold email to an attorney? Never. Ever.

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A big part of recruiting's job is to sort through these emails. People think if they send stuff to them it just falls into a black hole and so they try to outsmart the system. But trying to circumvent recruiting sends things into way blacker holes most of the time IMO.

Oh wow. Never imagined it be so clear-cut. This place confuses me with so much conflicting info. Greatly appreciate the advice

All I have to go on is my personal experience with the recruiting season and what logically makes the most sense to me and both those things are aligned with what I said. But as with all things TLS, people can and often do argue about this kind of stuff for pages and pages.

Honestly if you're gonna go with anyone's advice on this stuff on this forum, you've gotta go with Zuck hth

chuckbass wrote:Honestly if you're gonna go with anyone's advice on this stuff on this forum, you've gotta go with Zuck hth

OP here. Yea, no doubt.

BigZuck wrote:All I have to go on is my personal experience with the recruiting season and what logically makes the most sense to me and both those things are aligned with what I said. But as with all things TLS, people can and often do argue about this kind of stuff for pages and pages.

Ok.

I'm assuming if the firm says to apply online, I should apply online and not email the recruiting department separately right? I feel like I should just follow the directions on the website.

Anonymous User wrote:I'm assuming if the firm says to apply online, I should apply online and not email the recruiting department separately right? I feel like I should just follow the directions on the website.

Yep. For instance with most firms, if you don't follow this and email recruiting, they'll just respond telling you to use the online app... or they just won't respond.

chuckbass wrote:

Anonymous User wrote:I'm assuming if the firm says to apply online, I should apply online and not email the recruiting department separately right? I feel like I should just follow the directions on the website.

Yep. For instance with most firms, if you don't follow this and email recruiting, they'll just respond telling you to use the online app... or they just won't respond.

Got it.

I think recruiter is the best person if you have a standard app.

However if you have interesting work experience thats not normal I think it might be beneficial to email the hiring partner rather than recruiter. For example, I worked in finance based M&A this summer and my return rate so far on partners vs. recruiting has been night and day. I think I'm just getting auto-filtered out by journal/grades when I email recruiters while partners are more likely to value non-traditional experiences.

Its like the idea of trying to get around Taleo for non-legal hiring.

BigZuck wrote:Send it to recruiting, 100% of the time. Always to recruiting. Always.

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The exception is if you have a personal connection to an attorney. Ideally like a friend, family member, family friend, etc. Then maybe you want to send it to them and they can send along to recruiting. Maybe if you meet an attorney at a mixer or something you can email to them but that might be stretching it a bit. But an application packet sent as a cold email to an attorney? Never. Ever.

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A big part of recruiting's job is to sort through these emails. People think if they send stuff to them it just falls into a black hole and so they try to outsmart the system. But trying to circumvent recruiting sends things into way blacker holes most of the time IMO.

So, so credited. Seems insane to me to cold email a hiring partner with application materials. This is always TCR.

Here's the exceptions I found, after having a very succesful mass mail campaign:

Apply the way the tell you to (you're not special) unless you have a serious reason to believe you are special (you are related to client and client recommends you, partner invites you to apply through them, etc.). Then, do exactly what the partner says. In all cases, follow up.

Dropping an alternate view. I hardly ever contacted firm recruiters. I always sent emails to heads of the practice group I wanted, alumni partners of my UG, fellow Law Review alumni partners, or managing partners.

I never experienced an issue. Got multiple interviews (both 2L/3L - probably around 15 interviews and 100 firms contacted) and got my associate position emailing the managing partner.

A caveat is that I was targeting mostly satellite offices in my market and midsized firms. Often times the satellite office did not have their own recruiter and shared a recruiter with the national office or maybe a region. In my experience there was always a disconnect so I opted to go straight to the source (like literally once a recruiter rejected me and a week later the managing partner emailed me for an interview - I doubt either knew about the other's action). So this approach may not work if you are in NYC or another market with a ton of firms HQ there.

I also almost always agree with zuck, and I do think sending to the recruiter first is the best option if you don't have a connection to someone at the firm. But I think if they don't respond, go for it. For example, for shits and gigs, after I emailed a recruiter at an NYC V50 and she didn't open the email for a week, I forwarded it to the hiring partner (whom I did not know), who ended up giving me a soft CB the same day. It's probably always worth a try if the firm is important to you.