I ended up applying to 40 firms, around 25 of which I applied to in the month of January alone! Again, I do not recommend this approach as it was very tiring (I had little guidance at the time and this is the reason why I am so excited to be able to help TCLA members so that they do not make the same mistakes) but I think that you can work out how to efficiently conduct research and write an application answer such that you do not need to overthink every application.
Writing high-quality applications is important, but only up to a certain extent. There are diminishing marginal returns on the amount of time you put into each app. The only thing I would absolutely ensure you do is allow yourself a full hour to proofread everything before you submit. Silly errors like typos can sometimes lead to rejection (not all the time, but it is easy to do a really thorough proofread so just leave yourself the time to do it).
By the way, there are not many firms I would leave myself three hours to apply to 🤣 I think that I could probably have applied to some firms (such as
Reed Smith,
Clifford Chance,
Linklaters or
DLA Piper off the top of my head) in several hours as their application forms did not require firm-specific research and I had written many of the same commercial or motivational answers in previous applications. Usually I think a full day's work was enough for me to prepare and submit an average-length application. Some applications definitely took a lot more than that, but here was my average time spent at each stage of the application writing process:
I would spend 1-2 hours thoroughly searching the website and making bullet points of partners who have done interesting work, deals that I would like to have been involved with and more general opportunities which the firm affords trainees. It was a very formulaic process for me after I had done it a few times - when I finished my research I would then be able to use my bullet points to write out a good answer in 45 minutes or so. I would then come back to it at the end of the day (in the meantime I would write the answers to the other questions which would usually just involve editing or tailoring an answer I’d written for another firm) at which point I would change anything that did not sound right or add anything else I had thought of. I would say that for the average application I would spend a total of 3.5 - 4 hours on the firm-specific question, 2 hours on the other questions in total (assuming that you have to alter the word count to a pre-prepared answer or have to edit it to better answer the specific wording of the question at hand) leaving at least 1 hour to proofread. 6-7 hours of work is not too bad and it will often be less (for example, you may be able to literally copy and paste your other answers from another application if it is the exact same question and word count). It will sometimes be more if there are multiple firm-specific questions or a random question (for one firm I had to write about which historical event I would have liked to witness).
Basically once you have done all this I would give it a solid proofread, perhaps have a fresh pair of eyes check it over for typos as well and then click ‘send’. There is no need to agonise over whether you could have written a better sentence here or there - it really won’t make a difference. I found that there was little correlation between whether my application was successful and the amount of time I spent on the application beyond the 6-7 hours I needed to do a proper job of it.
This may not work for everyone and by all means spend longer on applications for your favourite firms, but I hope that this is a useful perspective for those of you who may have thought that you need to spend days or weeks tailoring your applications!
