- Sep 9, 2024
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Introduction
This post is meant to serve you as a definitive guide to crafting your optimal application strategy. As it is quite lengthy, I have divided it into five subsections for you to navigate according to your interests:
- Why do you need an application strategy?
- How many law firms should you apply to?
- How should you choose which firms you apply to?
- When should you apply?
- What opportunities should you apply for?
1) Why do you need an application strategy?
As we are reaching the middle of September and the 2025 application cycle is properly kicking off, it is the perfect moment for you to start considering how to construct your application strategy. Clarifying your goals and devising an appropriate plan is an underrated but essential element of maximizing your chances of success in a very competitive process. However, this statement might strike some of you as odd – what is there to strategize so much about? Shouldn’t you simply start writing and submitting applications?
To illustrate the importance of having an application strategy, let me share you a story from my personal experience in my first application cycle. I begun the year knowing my main goal was to secure a TC at a top firm (though I had no further idea as to which type of firm it should be), but I did not think too much about how exactly I should obtain that end. In September and early October, I started doing what everyone else at my university was doing: investing time in attending law firm events, reading the news from time to time, and taking part in some extracurriculars to add to my CV.
At that time, I was very pleased with my efforts relative to my peers, and I felt I was progressing well. Come the end of October however, I already heard from some friends that they had submitted applications at a couple of law firms – and their deadlines had already passed. This was an initial warning sign which put me on guard, so I decided to actually start researching and writing some applications. Nonetheless, as I had no previous experience with application researching and writing, the initial process was slow and frustrating. Simultaneously, academic life became significantly more intense, with deadlines for new formative and projects almost every week. As such, I begun procrastinating on my applications. Then, I once again found myself shocked to find out, this time at the end of November, that several deadlines for firms I was interested in had passed. This time, I became really annoyed at myself and started understanding the urgency of the situation. I looked up an application tracker and noted down dates.
To my horror, I realised 4 or 5 firms I had intended to apply to had a deadline that very week. Another 4 or 5 all had deadlines the next week, and so on until the end of December. I thus begun researching and writing, but I did not have more than half of a day to dedicate to any firm. All my applications were rushed – my why law reasoning wasn’t convincing, I did not identify any law firms’ unique selling points, my writing style was verbose, my structure unclear, and the application was riddled with typos and errors. In that cycle, I did not end up progressing past the application stage even once. I imagine many of other applicants will have had similar experiences.
Next year, I took my career goals a lot more seriously. In early September I constructed a through and application strategy and followed my detailed plan every week until the winter. I ended the cycle with four VS offers at MC/elite US firms and then converted to three TC offers. While my application strategy was by no means the only factor, I am convincing I would not have been nearly as successful as I was without it. To list just some of the benefits which make a well-constructed strategy essential for maximising chances of success:
- It enables you to space out your efforts to avoid felling overloaded at the end.
- It gives you more time to conduct through firm research, to draft and redraft your applications to improve quality, and to proofread extensively to find any errors.
- It enables you to hold yourself accountable and avoid missing out on applying for firms that could have been the perfect fit.
2) How many law firms should I apply to?
A first important point to consider is how many applications you will aim to submit by the end of the cycle. The question as to the ideal number of VS/TC applications is a controversial one. Firstly, it is not the kind of question that admits of a simple answer. Instead, it will be highly depended on the situation and career interests of each applicant. Secondly, there is significant substantive disagreement as to what approach is more successful. Some top recruiters and top applicants advise to be 100% focused on producing the highest possible quality of applications and to therefore only choose around 6-8 firms. Others argue that applications are more of a number's game, as the success rate at some top firms in the City is bellow 1%. Thus, they see the application process as a “number’s game” and advise on applying to as many firms as possible - sometimes in excess of 50 or 60.
I have known candidates who have been successful with both approaches, and I think there is some truth to both perspectives. On the one hand, as we well know, the application process is extremely competitive. Hence, there is not much of a point in submitting an application which does not have a high quality of research and high-quality written answers - it will have virtually no chance of being progressed. I have known people who were initially writing applications very quickly and got rejected 20 or 30 times consecutively. Upon changing their strategy to a quality-focused one, they progressed with half of the firms they subsequently applied to.
On the other hand, it is undeniable that luck is also a very significant factor, and that you should therefore aim to maximize your chances by submitting a high number of applications. In my own experience, some of the applications I had spent most time and effort on, and which I thought had some of my best writing, ended up being rejected at first stage. At the same time, some of the applications which I knew had some room for improvement ended up being progressed and eventually secured me TC offers. In my opinion, this could not be accounted by anything other than the role of luck - if anything, the firms that ended up progressing me tended to be the firms which I would have expected to be more selective. As such, I don't think you can ever write to a high enough standard that you eliminate the luck factor. Graduate recruitment teams review dozens and sometimes hundreds of applications per day, they have to reject the vast majority, and there is no perfectly objective metric to assess your application on. Some recruiters might place more emphasis on grades, some on your work experience, some on how convincing your motivations are and the quality of your written answers, some on WG/SJT scores, some on your university and degree, some on your extracurriculars and prizes, and so on. When comparing two strong applications that score well most of these categories, there is an unavoidable element of subjectivity in the recruiter's choice as to what criteria to prioritize. Since you don't know beforehand what a particular recruiter's attitude will be on the day they review your application, there is a strong argument to be made to apply to as many firms as possible. This is the only way to maximize your chances of having your application assessed by a recruiter who happens to place more emphasis on the criteria you score best in. From my personal experience, the very best of candidates (who do very well in all the aforementioned categories) only end up with a VS offer for every 1/3-1/4 of their applications.
Where does this leave you? In my opinion, as with many other things in life, the truth often lies, unclaimed, in the middle. The strategy I would advise you to employ, and the one which led to my success, is to aim to submit as many high-quality (but not necessarily absolutely perfect) applications as possible. That is, you should never submit an application just for the sake of a theoretical chance of progressing if you have not spent a sufficient amount of time researching the firm, and then writing and reviewing the application. At the same time, you cannot only be focused on attaining the absolute best – to illustrate this point, imagine you are conducting your firm research. First, you spend several hours exhausting all online resources: not only the big ones like the firm’s website, Chambers Student and the Chambers and Legal 500 rankings, but also all the legal press publications like Law.com and The Lawyer. While this is still a significantly better effort than the vast majority of applicant put in (and in my experience, definitely suffices for success), if you are 100% focused on quality you can go above and beyond that. You can reach out to many of the firm’s lawyers on LinkedIn, complete Forage experiences, contact recruiters, look for the firm’s podcasts or YouTube videos, seek to attend lots of events with the firm, and so on and so forth. Evidently, in this process you can definitely get past a point of diminishing returns – you should not spend 50 hours of work on every application to ensure you get to that absolute 100% level of quality. Assuming for illustrative purposes that writing quality could be quantified, you will have much better chances of securing a TC by sending 20 applications at 95% potential quality rather than sending four applications closer to 100%.
Thus, I think you should focus on starting to write high quality applications, and then try to write as many as you can. You might find that at the beginning it takes you longer to write great answers, but as you go through the application process and you improve your research and drafting skills, your pace might significantly improve. Initially, it took me around 2-3 weeks to have a great application, but by January I could write an application at the same level of quality in around 2 days. You will have to assess your own availability and pace to estimate how many applications you can aim to submit.
Finally, are there any actual concrete recommendations to leave you with? Firstly, in most circumstances, if you want to have at least a decent shot at securing a TC, you should not aim at anything under 10 applications. Secondly, assuming you are in a position to invest a substantial amount of time and effort in this application cycle, I think submitting around 20 high-quality applications should be attainable for most candidates. From personal experience, most people who have secured a TC have submitted at least around this number of applications. Finally, assuming you can make applications your absolute priority, it is possible to end up submitting around 40-50 good applications by the end of the cycle.
3) How should you choose the law firms you apply?
While a higher number of good applications increases chances of a VS/TC offer, you should definitely avoid applying for a law firm you have no genuine interest in. Firstly, it is difficult to present convincing fictitious motivations, and recruiters are likely to catch on to it. Secondly, there is no real point in dedicating two years of your life to a job involving work you will dislike. Unfortunately, there are many stories of trainees who end up feeling trapped in their job and how end up wishing to ‘upgrade’ their TCs.
Nonetheless, you also should not be overly selective. An interest in a law firm is neither something you are born with, nor does it appear like love at first sight. It is rather something that you develop as you are learning about a firm’s unique selling points and the work in its practice areas. Thus, before you rule out lots and lots of law firms you feel no initial attraction towards, consider investing some time in reading about the firm and understanding its work and business.
In terms of practical advice for your application strategy, I think choosing the law firms to apply to should involve two steps:
- Step 1: Gouging initial interest: at this step, your aim is just to get an overview of the legal landscape in the UK and come up with a longer list of firms you could potentially want to apply for. Factors to consider are the type of law firm, seats, practice area reputation, location, salary, training, culture are all factors which you can and should consider. As you cannot invest too much time researching any particular firm here, the best resources are publications with firm overviews, including the Chambers Student Guide, The Lawyer, and TCLA.
- Step 2: After you have made up a list of firms, you will then have to decide which of those you plan to actually apply for. For this step, there are three factors a candidate should consider:
- The level of interest you have in each firm – to determine your level of interest, you should expand on the research you have conducted at the first step. It is arguable that among the many factors you should consider, the availability of preferred seats and practice area strengths are the most important. This is because the practice areas you experience in your TC are the only ones you can qualify in – and that will be the decision with the biggest impact on your career as a commercial solicitor. As such, you would be well advised to read some introductory pieces explaining the work of different practice areas (such as the ones offered by Chambers or in TCLA’s courses) or to complete some virtual work experiences. After you have identified the practice areas of interest, you can use the Chambers UK Guide 2024 to find the best law firms for each.
- The level of interest each firm is likely to have in you: since an application is a two way street, you also must consider whether a firm you are interested in is likely to be interested in you. Consider what the firms says they are looking for/is generally known to look for – how much will they care about your grades, your university and degree, and specific skills and attributes. You should then aim to prioritise applying for law firms that are emphasizing your strengths and avoid applying for the firms that would take the biggest issues with your weaknesses.
- Diversification: many applicants make the mistake of only applying for elite US/MC/SC firms. Like for a financial investment, when investing your time and effort you should seek maximize success chances by not putting all your eggs in one basket. Even if a candidate has a strong interest in once particular category of firm, they should diversify by sending at least a few other applications to different types. This includes City and international law firms, large national, regional and high street firms. If your objective of becoming a commercial solicitor takes priority over the type of firm, it is not a sensible strategy to only apply to the highest echelon of firms. Furthermore, even if your primary objective is to work on the highest value cross-border work at US/MC/SC firms, it is still better to have a diversified application approach. If you are unsuccessful in your direct applications for the firms you are most interested in, you might have a higher chance of eventually ending up there as a solicitor if you first do your TC elsewhere. Part of the reason why the TC application process is so competitive is that firms have to invest a lot of money and time in the programme. From the SQE course and exams fees to maintenance grants and high graduate salaries, many firms are not getting a proportional return on the investment during the TC period. This is because at trainee level you will not be able to provide clients with direct legal counsel – and the rates firms can charge clients on a billable hour of a trainee’s time are significantly lower than after qualification. However, after one becomes a solicitor, they become very profitable for their law firms. Based on current figures, estimates are that an NQ at a top firm can bring in in excess of 500,000 pounds of profits after deducting their salary and taxes. As such, the bargaining position when applying for junior associate roles changes dramatically compared to when applying for a TC. In a hot market, it is not uncommon for firms to pay referral bonuses and signing bonuses in the tens of thousands of pounds. All that is to say, a lateral move after qualification might give you significantly higher odds of getting into your dream firm.
4) When should you apply?
After figuring out roughly how many firms you want to apply for, and you decide on which firms to prioritize, it is essential to make an application schedule. This will enable you to space out your efforts and hold yourself accountable over the next four months, which will ensure you do not get overloaded come December. While the details of constructing your schedule will vary based on your personal circumstances, by and in large you can follow these steps:- Look up the deadlines for each firm and whether the application is rolling or not.
- Note them down into your calendar, so you can properly visualize the next period.
- Allocate a period from 4-5 days to a maximum of two weeks for the completion of each application.
- At the beginning, you can allocate a longer amount of time for the completion of your first applications. However, as you become more familiar with the research and writing process, and you require less reviews and input from other people, you will pick up pace and you should be able to finish an application in 4-5 days.
- In allocating your timeslots for each application, unless there is an impending deadline for other firms, prioritize rolling applications first.
- With experience, the quality of your research and writing will improve. Thus, if there are firms you are particularly interested in who also have a non-rolling process, I would advise you to allocate them a week later on in the application cycle. This will also give you more time to seek to interact with the firm through an event or a virtual work experience.
- If you are also applying/attending open days and other firm events that you could mention in your application, try to allocate an application timeslot subsequent to the event.
5) For what opportunity?
Firstly, for each application you will need to decide whether you are pursuing vacation schemes or direct TC. With some firms, which announced that they only recruit through vacation schemes, you will not have a choice in this regard. With others, although they might open applications for the direct TC track, they will still primarily recruit through vacation schemes. This is why the general rule is that you should not pursue direct TC applications. Firms like to get to know candidates over a longer period of time before making them am offer. As brilliant as an applicant might be, it will be substantially more difficult to convince a firm to commit to making a substantial investment into their training after only meeting them for a day during an Assessment Centre. This is why you should only choose to pursue a direct TC instead of a VS application if:- You have extensive experience working in the legal field (paralegal roles, previous vacation schemes etc) you should prioritise direct TC applications, or
- The firm is known to recruit a substantial part of its cohort from the direct TC track, or
- You have specific visa requirements, or
- The VS application window is closed but the TC application window is still open
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