OCI Bidding Strategy Forum

[TheGreatestGunner]

OCI Bidding Strategy

tl;dr safeties first not last, favorite firm, then heavily bid firms, then less bid firms, then firms that did not fill prior year, to assure full interview slate.

Introduction
Early on in preparing for OCI I realized that while resources on how to succeed at the overall OCI process are excellent, resources on OCI Bidding Strategy are deficient. They are either too vague to actually articulate a strategy or they do provide a strategy, but one actively detrimental to your odds of landing the interviews and options you want.

OCI Bidding is not similar to law school applications. It’s not about identifying reaches, strong fits, safeties, and then prioritizing them in that order. Your wants, interests, or priorities play a role in the process, but not the central one.

Instead, as the word bid implies, OCI is like an auction. It is about understanding what your class wants, what their priorities are, and how to allocate your resources given that information.

Bids as Resources
Assuming you are in a pure lottery system, each of your bids has a value related to the total number of possible interviews. Let’s assume your school allows you to place 50 bids but only grants 10 interviews. This is like going to an auction where you are given 10 different vouchers to spend one for $10, one for $9, one for $8, $7, $6, and so on all the way down to $1. Those amounts will be bid based on your priority list. Once you successfully spend an amount, you go down to the next value. Each of your other classmates also has the same resources as you-- it is an even playing field. There are multiple of each item, but when they sell out, they are gone.

Let’s assume you list all the items in the order that you would prefer them. You get your first choice your $10 is spent. You get your second choice $9 is spent, your third choice $8 is spent, your 20th choice and $7 is spent, your 45th choice and your $6 is spent, and then nothing else. You remain with a $5, $4, $3, $2, $1 unspent. What happened?

What most likely happened is that you overpaid for the first three items and your classmates were competing over other resources. By the time you bid on them, your $7 paled to what they offered, your $6 barely made it, and the rest of your bids were too low to matter. This is similar to how OCI works and is why an optimal strategy is not based on your preferences alone.

Instead, optimal OCI strategy is about getting each firm you want for the lowest possible bid that will still secure an interview. In other words, OCI is a pricing game.

Determining Price
You are all aspiring lawyers here, so you should know that supply and demand determine price. In this equation, supply is simple, it is determined by the number of available interviews and positions at a given firm. This roughly correlates to office size, practice group size, and location.

So now we have demand. The factors that go into demand are:

Compensation
Grades Required
Prestige
Geographic Location
Practice Group

Firms that pay market are more desirable than those that do not. Firms that will accept lower grades will be desirable to more of your classmates than those that do not. Firms that are prestigious are more desirable than those that are not. Firms in Major Metros are more desirable than those that are not. In Major Metros, the order of priority will vary by school, but generally, DC, Chicago/California, and NYC are the most desired options. NYC is less competitive because of the supply side, not the demand side. A lot of people want to go there for whatever reason. Lastly, we have Practice Group. Patent Prosecution has the lowest demand because only your classmates with B.S. degrees could immediately take a position. Interviews for both Litigation and Transactional are the highest demand because every student could land something they are interested in. These are the factors that generally go into how students bid.

So, the most desired firms would be those that pay market rate, accept lower grades, are extremely prestigious, in a major metro, and interview for any kind of work.

If you are lucky, your school will also provide you with bidding statistics from past classes. This will help you to identify the information above, but most importantly, it will tell you how previous classes have valued firms. It will give you a general idea of demand. And here is where you can use strategy to improve your OCI outcomes.

This is because while bidding statistics will tell you which firms are the most desired, they will not tell you what “price” students paid for them. To get an idea of price, take the number of interviews available, divide by the number of bids received, sort smallest to largest. That will tell you what the percent chance of success is, if everything were equal. But as we know, everything is not equal, you are bidding. Each failed bid represents either someone who lost the lottery or someone who misread the market price, never had a shot, and effectively threw away a bid.

From my OCI, I found out that most bids fall into the second category as I secured multiple firms that had over 100 bids. Which indicates that students consider their own internal valuation in their bids rather than market price. Listing the most desired firm as your 20th bid will not get you an interview. It may be wise for other reasons to underbid (explained later), but for the purpose of securing interview, it is not ideal. So, your goal then is to bid the minimum amounts that will secure your guaranteed number of firms you can interview with, that includes your safeties, your strong fits, and your reaches.

You do this by bidding strategically and identifying market vs. personal value mismatches.


Bidding Strategy

So, with the information above, it’s time to make your bidding strategy. Your bidding strategy will vary depending on your grades, geographic preferences, practice group desires, and how many bids you get. Note that schools use different systems– some are pure lotto, some are a mix of lotto and firm select, some are firm choice– however, there are some common elements. Your strategy should be guided by a spreadsheet that includes:

Firm Name | Firm City | Selectivity | Interview Slots Available This Year | Interview Slots Available | Slots Last Year | Total Bids | Slots/Bid %.

First, if you have bad to okay grades, eliminate every single firm that you do not have a realistic chance of getting into from the list. Your goals is to maximize your odds of both interviewing and securing a position. Getting interviews with firms that will not hire you wastes everyone’s time. Highlight the least selective firms that pay market.

Second, if you have good to great grades, pick the firms that you most desire to work at, including at least three “safeties”. Highlight them.

Third, take a look at the list sorted by slots/bid%, lowest to highest. The lower the number, the earlier you will have to bid the firm. So, start using your early bids on highlighted firms with the lowest numbers. In general, you will find that most of these firms are the less selective firms that pay market. In other words– safeties go first. If you have good grades, you should probably just use your top 3 bids on safeties towards the top of the list, then as many as you want on competitive firms at the top of the list. If there is a firm you really like, you can put it right after the three bids on safeties, if it is unrealistic to get it there, you can spend your one on it, and 2-4 go to safeties.

If you have bad grades, you should use a good number of bids on safeties towards the top of the list. You can mark ones you want to bid with with an actual number bid or just an X and add later. Usually there is a limit to the amount of interviews you are allowed to secure. Once you have spent approximately 60% of your bids on the most contested options, its time to look for a few values.

For those with good grades, filter selectivity to high GPA, then reverse sort the slots/bid% column. Ignore firms that do not fill for now. This will find you selective firms that are less competitive, so you can secure them with your lowest bids. For those with bad grades, same thing, but filter for selectivity to low or moderate GPA. Note that there are far fewer of these that pay market. The office may also be in a less desired location.

Keep an eye open for firms that increased the amount of interview slots. The more they added, the lower you can move them in your bid priority order.

This should be ~20-30% of allocation.

When it comes to location, if you have good grades, you can largely ignore it and pick DC/NYC/Chi/CA indiscriminately. If you have bad grades, you are going to want to apply to a lot of NYC to maximize your chances. You can spend a summer literally anywhere and once you get in the door it is way easier to transfer. Looking for offices in a less desirable location where you have a plausible connection is also a good way to get an edge. Spend a few on your real target location, particularly when it is aligned with a less selective firm, but do not concentrate on the most competitive markets. The easiest way to strike out at OCI is to not include NYC offices in any real number.

For those with low grades, you can then spend a few bids on the more competitive firms, that are also more popular, that you skipped earlier (reaches). This is because if someone cancels, at many schools, you can get a slot, with priority going to firms you bid on. Then round out the bottom of the list by bidding on firms that did not fill.

For those with high grades, you should spend the rest on any other firms you would like in order of preference, this is where to include firms that you like that do not typically fill.

The better your grades, the more you can depart from the strategy and order. The better the economy, same. But the goal is to walk away with a full slate of interviews at firms you would be fine to go to. You can always cancel the interviews after you win them, but you cannot make another bid. You can also rank firms in order of most to least favorite, and factor that in, trying to bid each minimally.

If you have good grades, after you have the interviews, if you got many desired targets and at least two safeties, you can drop your less desired options if you feel confident.

From there, just watch the waitlist adamantly and respond promptly to secure additional interviews if desired.

The worse the economy is, the more interviews you want. The worse your grades are, the more interviews you want. The more paranoid and neurotic you are, the more interviews you want. As long as the interview is with a firm that could conceivably hire you, you want it.

Results

Repeating the main observation– people do not appear to be bid using any real strategy. I secured many interviews at the most bid firms by ordering them early. Literally hundreds bid on these firms. I still got nearly all of the firms I wanted to interview at by putting the less bid ones lower on my list. Because I added ones that did not fill, I had a full list, with my second to last bid securing it. And because the entire bid list was filled, I was able to take tons of waitlist interviews, including heavily bid firms. 34 total interviews all at v100 firms. That translated to 12 callbacks, 6 rejections, 2 offers that were backups, 1 offer accepted, 3 withdrawn before decision.

Even if you do have excellent grades, you may not be the best interviewer, firms can change their hiring plans, firms may interview without intent to hire (as they filled during pre-OCI or committed to interview for other reasons), you may have technical/zoom problems that ruin the interview, the interviewing partner may get an urgent client call midway through, the interviewer could just be in a bad mood or already picked their candidate before you, or for any number of other reasons, you may not get a callback. Or you may get a callback for a practice group you are less interested in. So maximizing options helps.

[Rule23andMe]

alternative tldr: check prior years' first failed bid numbers, bid a few slots higher if you want an interiew and have a reasonable shot at an offer considering selectivity etc., bid several slots higher if you really want an interview, viola

[Anonymous User]

alternative tldr: check prior years' first failed bid numbers, bid a few slots higher if you want an interiew and have a reasonable shot at an offer considering selectivity etc., bid several slots higher if you really want an interview, viola

Not every school provides this data. Penn didn’t last year. Plus everything is changing with pre-OCI and conditions are not similar enough (number of interview spots available, etc) for this to work.

[Rule23andMe]

alternative tldr: check prior years' first failed bid numbers, bid a few slots higher if you want an interiew and have a reasonable shot at an offer considering selectivity etc., bid several slots higher if you really want an interview, viola

Not every school provides this data. Penn didn’t last year. Plus everything is changing with pre-OCI and conditions are not similar enough (number of interview spots available, etc) for this to work.

Fair points. I'll revise to say that if available, I think FFB does the bulk of the work for you that was suggested above. Even with pre-oci I imagine it's still a good guideline, just need to rank a few more slots higher depending on how many fewer spots are available this year v. last.

[GoBigOrGoHome88]

I am going to ask you what feels like a really dumb question. My school doesn't go over American OCIs (we don't have American firms come to our school despite it being one of the top two schools) and their workshop for Canadian OCIs hasn't happened yet. Not sure if it is the same/similar process.

When you bid using a system (like Symplicity), do you do customized cover letters for each law firm?

Without knowing the Canadian OCI system, I know that I should be doing a customized cover letter. What do Americans do for the Bay Area Diversity Fair?

When I read the title, I think of it like a career fair (despite it being virtual) where I would have a generic cover letter and resume. Aside from direct applications to firms, this is my primary opportunity to participate in the American recruit and I don't want to mess it up.

Do you customize your cover letter for the diversity career fair?

Also, does it make sense to go to the Lavender Law conference if I am participating in the diversity career fair? I am open to NYC, the Bay Area and the Pacific Northwest.

I have to commit to all of this soon so thank you for any insight you can provide.