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.
