OCI Cover Letters? Help! Forum

[Anonymous User]

I have several years of work experience. Some of it has decent prestige- corporate at a Fortune 500 company that has a wonderful reputation within the business world. I have no legal experience, however.

Now that write on is over, I’m turning my attention to preparing for OCI and mass mailing firms in an attempt to secure pre-OCI interviews and hopefully offers.

I’m a little lost as to what types of skills I should be emphasizing in my cover letter. I get the interest in firm part. I plan on finding two to three things about each firm I’m applying to to talk about somewhere in the letter. However, I’m not sure what I should address in terms of what I bring to the table.

What I’ve come up with so far:

Writing/research/editing skills (I was the editor of my graduate school’s academic journal, I also was a writer and editor for an online magazine). I also have experience as a dramaturg. The dramaturg is the person that does a shit ton of research for the director/designers/actors before production begins on a play or film. Essentially, I created thousand page binders that had different sections: prior production reviews, potential program notes for the audience’s edification, a glossary of terms from the text for the actors/director, scholarly articles on four to six areas of research the director is interested in, as pertains to the play and/or the dire tor’s design vision (history of the time period, research into architectural/clothing styles, political/socioeconomic/religious norms of the play’s time period, specific artistic traditions, if the play falls into a specific type of drama (surrealism, realism, well made play etc), the playwright’s biography etc. the dramaturg highlights and annotates all of the research so that the director can easily find the most useful info in helping to develop the actors’ portrayals and the design. My worry about the dramaturgy is that it’s an unknown field by and large and I don’t want to be pegged as a theatre person- I’ve heard anecdotal evidence of this being held against candidates in the past.

Customer service skills- at the aforementioned Fortune 500 company I did a lot of work on events that required public and customer interaction. The company prizes themselves on their guest recovery skills and I learned an awful lot about people happy and recovering escalating situations.

Creative problem solving- my main duty at the Fortune 500 company was helping teams ideate and foster their ability to think outside of the box in order to solve problems and create innovative marketing campaigns.

The writing/research seems to be directly connected to what junior associates do. The other two are more client facing skills but I think they may be seen as beneficial by employers.

What have others included in their cover letters? How individualized were you in writing them? Was it mostly the same with the interest in firm paragraph change dfor each firm? Or did you write distinct letters for every firm?

I’m probably overthinking this but I’d like some input from the TLS hivemind!

[2013]

Keep it short and simple. No one has time to read all of that. Just make sure it has no mistakes and you’re golden.

I did the very generic:

1, intro (this is where I tailored based on location of the firm to show ties).

2. Former experience. Choose one or two examples max.

3. Blah blah, I did well in school and I’m on law review.

4. Can’t wait to meet you.

I know people in my firm’s HR/recruiting department and they said they very rarely read SA cover letters. I think my friend told me that at his firm, they send off the cover letters in batches to word processing and convert to word to see if there are spelling mistakes (seems like too much effort, though).

[Anonymous User]

Here is a great article on cover letters and examples/templates

http://www.legallyblondeandbroke.com/20 ... r-and.html