| History |
 |
LawCrossing's history as a job site dates back to 2000 when BCG Attorney Search was launched as a legal recruiting firm. LawCrossing in its present rendition was launched in July of 2003 as a job site for lawyers. Today, LawCrossing has expanded into EmploymentCrossing and serves hundreds of thousands of job seekers in every major profession.
Learn more about our mission and rich past:
January
2000 |
BCG Attorney Search (formerly Barrister Consulting Group) launched in Pasadena, California. |
December
2001 |
Planning for commencement of LawCrossing begun with adaptation of Legal Authority database for a job site. |
April
2002 |
 First mock ups of LawCrossing received. Several revisions of final design would be received prior to launch. |
May
2003 |
Initial database completed. Hiring of job editors, job editing team and daily staff to monitor and work with database commenced. |
July
2003 |
LawCrossing launched. |
|
|
This is the 617 South Olive Street building where EmploymentCrossing was first launched as LawCrossing in July of 2003. Plans were formulated for the launch of the site in 2001 in Suite 1210 on the twelfth floor of the building.
|
August
2005 |
Attorney Research Group launched. |
September
2007 |
 LawCrossing honored on the Inc. 500 as the 72nd fastest growing company in America. |
March
2008 |
 EmploymentCrossing launched as the ''umbrella site'' for all the Crossings and containing all of the jobs from each Crossing site. Site redesigned to new present-day design. |
September
2008 |
LawCrossing once again on the Inc. 500 as one of the fastest growing companies in America. |
|
|
|
|
Read an early essay from the Founder of LawCrossing, Harrison Barnes, about why he started the site.
Why I Must Get Attorneys Jobs
As an Attorney, I Found That the Way People Searched for Legal Jobs Did Not Make Sense. Finding a job in the legal field can tend to be quite a challenge. As an attorney, I found myself going through the process several years ago. My job search, like that of many professionals seeking a new position, included perusing job boards to find out who was hiring. As anyone who has ever undertaken a job search involving job boards would probably know, I quickly found myself searching multiple job boards for positions. This was by no means an easy task. I soon caught on that law firms and corporations also posted their openings on their websites. Accordingly, my job search very quickly took on epic proportions and I started keeping a spreadsheet with all of the positions on it that I had applied to on the various job boards.
In addition, I was also using a recruiter for my job search at the time. Since I was using a recruiter, he knew of positions that were not advertised on job boards, as well. With so many different sources of positions out there, I very quickly became somewhat exasperated. My exasperation ran on several levels, but it boiled down to the fact that I was frustrated with the legal hiring industry - there was no central source, no unifying theme in the way that legal professionals can go about finding a position. What is so surprising about this is that there are so many highly intelligent people in the legal industry. Why hadn't any of these people found a way to efficiently centralize all the positions?
I Started a Search Firm To Get Attorneys Jobs
As I investigated all this it occurred to me that I actually enjoyed looking for a job, searching job boards and speaking with law firms and recruiters. I spent several months investigating the recruiting industry and eventually quit my job at a large law firm to become a legal recruiter. This was not an easy decision to make. I had recently purchased a home, had a large car payment and gotten married. To make matters worse, I had no savings. My new wife, to say the least, was not happy. I was making close to $200,000 a year as an attorney, had gone to a top college and law school, clerked for a federal judge and was even teaching law school a couple of evenings a week. Making a decision to become a legal recruiter meant leaving most of these externalities behind and becoming someone completely different. Anyone who has ever changed their focus like this can relate to the difficulty of starting anew. I am sure you too can relate from some of your own life experiences. Most of the recruiters at BCG Attorney Search have also gone through a decision making process similar to this one. This was not an easy decision to make.
Instead of joining an established recruiting firm, I decided to start my own. One of the main reasons I did this was because I was unhappy with the existing state of the legal recruiting industry and knew that I could make a difference there. Having worked with legal recruiters when I was practicing law, I was very unimpressed with the business practices of the majority of them. Very few of these recruiters were enthusiastic about their work or approached their work with the same level of professionalism and focus as a first-rate attorney.
One driving force that made me so interested in the legal recruiting business, however, was the fact that all the legal recruiters seemed to have different leads - it seemed like no two recruiters were able to give you access to the same jobs. It was my firm belief that in order for a legal recruiting firm to be really good and fully able to represent their candidates, they would need to have access to all of the jobs.
This may not sound all that significant to you. To me, though, the fact that some legal recruiters had certain jobs and others did not was something that was quite fascinating. When I started my solo recruiting firm, before I worked with a single candidate I spent several months gathering jobs. I started a database on a primitive type software program (a Palm Pilot) and just kept working on it. When I started working with candidates, I am confident I had more positions than any other legal recruiting outfit in my hometown of Los Angeles.
The research involved to get positions in a legal recruiting firm, if it is done right, is profound. Shortly after making my first placement, I began hiring people to work on my database and get more jobs. Soon the commercial database application I had developed was not good enough and I began hiring programmers to develop my own database for me. Then, I started bringing programmers in house. Over the course of starting BCG Attorney Search, I have developed a profound respect for programmers and people who show a commitment to assisting us in new methods of finding jobs for attorneys.
The legal recruiting firm I founded was BCG Attorney Search. We are, in my opinion, the best in the world at getting positions. The largest reason this search firm expanded is due to the quality of our recruiters and the research we do. At BCG Attorney Search we have made research our biggest objective and consistently have more positions than any other American legal recruiting firm. In order to make sure that our research is as well focused as possible, we only do law firm placements.
The issue with running a legal recruiting firm, though, if your objective is to have the most positions, is that—for the most part---only the top law firms use recruiters. In addition, an attorney is realistically placeable only if he or she went to a top law school, or is practicing at a major law firm and is one to five years out of law school or has a large book of portable business. While I firmly believe that every attorney (and I mean every attorney) is placeable, neither I or our talented recruiters have the capacity to work with everyone (as much as we might like to).
Therefore, no matter how well you do your job of gathering positions, at most times we never have many more than 2,500 law firm positions. No matter how much our recruiters want to help attorneys get jobs, they cannot help everyone. In the United States alone, I knew there were more than 2,500 law firm positions. Nevertheless, because BCG Attorney Search could only work with the law firms that used recruiters, this number has only inched up slowly year after year. Furthermore, my objective of getting the most attorneys jobs is limited by our own resources.
Early on in my legal recruiting career, I wanted to make sure of one thing: That the sole objective of my career was to get attorneys jobs. Whether this was done through a legal recruiting firm, or otherwise, the goal remained the same. As a word of advice, I believe that having one single goal is one of the most important things anyone can do for themselves. If you have a single goal that you can focus on, everything else sort of falls into place to help you achieve it.
I Started Legal Authority To Get Attorneys Jobs
One day I was sitting in front of my computer at BCG Attorney Search and a resume came over the email from a student of mine when I had been a law professor. While the law school I had taught at was ABA approved, it was fourth tier and not considered the best law school in the United States. This student was at the top of his class and, like virtually every other student in his law school, had been unsuccessful in securing a position with a law firm when he graduated. I was frustrated because, as a legal recruiter, I knew I could not help him because he was not even an attorney yet.
I called this student and invited him in, anyway. I rewrote his resume for him and helped him do a cover letter. Then I allowed him to send himself out to the 300 or so law firms in the BCG Attorney Search database that were in Los Angeles. Prior to this point, this student had simply applied to the law firms in the NALP guide and also had applied to the occasional listing in his law school's career services office. The most that had ever resulted from this was an interview with a two person law firm.
Out of the 300 applications he sent out, this student got several interviews and secured a position with a mid sized law firm where he made close to $100,000 in his first year. He is enjoying an excellent career today.
Around this same time, the economy was beginning to go into a tailspin. Many of the corporate attorneys I had placed during the boom began to get laid off and, remembering the lesson of the law student, I started inviting them into my office and helping them redo their resume and cover letter as well. Because there were so few corporate openings (and law firms simply would not pay recruiting fees for corporate attorneys) I helped these same attorneys send themselves out to the firms in the BCG database at no cost.
All of these attorneys got jobs.
Word soon spread that I was helping corporate attorneys do this and corporate attorneys and others soon sought out my service to such an extent that I soon had no time for legal recruiting. We ran a "war room" of sorts out of BCG's Los Angeles offices and attorneys came in and assisted each other in building a massive database of every legal employer in California. Things were really crazy and we were operating 24 hours a day out of that office helping attorneys get jobs. The printers were going like crazy all the time.
What ended up happening, though, is that it all became too much, a lot of it due to the overwhelming costs involved. Soon, this mailing service was getting calls for help even though no formal business had been organized. With the help of some really dedicated people, I soon started Legal Authority. Since this company has been started, it has never made a dime. Nevertheless, this company is the embodiment of my goal to get the most attorneys jobs. To date, Legal Authority has gotten thousands of attorneys jobs and gets more attorneys jobs than any other similar service in the United States.
Unlike job boards, or legal recruiters, Legal Authority helps attorneys find both open positions and also jobs where none may exist. Firms often actually create jobs for attorneys once the attorney has expressed interest in potential employment by simply sending a resume and well crafted letter. Better yet, because there are so many job boards out there and even unadvertised openings, Legal Authority helps attorneys find those as well. Legal Authority is truly an outstanding service and if there is one thing I have done in my life to "make a difference," this is it. The success stories from this business are nothing less than remarkable.
In order to run a business like Legal Authority, you need a lot of people. There are currently over 20 people working here, updating our data literally 24 hours a day. Legal Authority has contact information (we know exactly who is in charge of hiring) for virtually ever American legal employer.
While personal stories may not have a role in my discussion of Legal Authority, I can tell you that starting this business almost destroyed me financially and personally. For over the first year Legal Authority was in existence, I worked 15+ hours a day on it virtually every day of the week. My wife divorced me (largely on the grounds that I worked all the time and was a financial failure) and I came very close to going out of business for financial reasons several times.
While I had made several hundreds of thousands of dollars in my first year as a recruiter, in the first year of running Legal Authority I lost it all—and then some—in order to do something I believed was a higher calling. Along the way, I also had several employees steal from me whom I thought were also dedicated to the mission of getting attorneys jobs. It was around this same time I realized that I needed to surround myself with people who shared my vision of getting attorneys jobs.
I do not resent starting Legal Authority at all. Everything that is good in this world and every positive change is not easy. Each new challenge with Legal Authority has only motivated me further. I know that there are numerous, numerous lives of people everywhere that have been bettered through our efforts. I am sure you can say the same for your work. This is something that gives both of us lives of substance and meaning.
I gave Legal Authority everything I had because I knew I was doing something meaningful for the world.
The problem with Legal Authority is that it is expensive-and it is therefore quite exclusive and high end. While the attorneys who counsel people on their job search consider their work like public interest work (and are paid similarly), the costs of gathering data, rewriting resumes and cover letters, printing, shipping and so forth are substantial. Accordingly, from an attorney's perspective, the cost of Legal Authority can be expensive. In most cases, attorneys spend over $500 (most often more) to get a position through the service. It is not a lot of money to get several jobs; however, it is still a lot of money to most people.
My personal problem with Legal Authority then is that it is somewhat exclusive given the money issue. My problem with BCG Attorney Search is that it too, is exclusive because there are very few attorneys we can work with because recruiting firms, by their nature, have very high standards for the types of attorneys they will work with. Another problem with BCG Attorney Search is the number of jobs we can recruit for.
The Idea For LawCrossing Was To Provide a Low Cost And Super Efficient Way For Attorneys To Get Jobs
More than two years ago I realized that all this enormously expensive Legal Authority data that was being worked on and updated 24 hours a day could be used to get attorneys jobs in other ways besides doing a mailing. My thought was that employers in this massive database could all be contacted to learn of their job openings. Since LawCrossing would not charge anything to post these employers jobs, the employers would all willingly provide their openings and allow LawCrossing to advertise them. (I was right, by the way.)
In addition, I knew that with the multitude of other job sources out there, I could centralize jobs in one place. That was how the thinking for LawCrossing went. I also knew that I could charge far less access to these jobs than I have to charge for Legal Authority and I also knew the service would not have to be so exclusive like BCG Attorney Search. That is how the idea for LawCrossing came about.
Without getting into specifics, starting LawCrossing was just about the hardest thing I have ever done. Over 20,000 hours worth of work went into the site before it was ever launched. Who knows if it will ever pay off. Who cares, though? It works.
I hope you can see that LawCrossing combines the best of what I learned to do at BCG Attorney Search (get jobs for attorneys) and at Legal Authority (provide access to the most jobs). There is nothing else like LawCrossing out there and there most likely never will be. I am certain there is room for improvement at LawCrossing and always will be as well. We need to get more jobs and we will continue to make that our first priority. We want to get you your next job. In the interim, LawCrossing will provide you with the most knowledge about the market of any provider—anywhere.
|
|
|
|
|
