Pitching Law Firms as Hip
An interesting article in today’s paper about law firm recruiting efforts. It’s about using videos as recruiting tools, about attracting youngsters comfortable with YouTube. “The firms hope to persuade students that their lawyers, and by extension the firms, are young-thinking and hip.”
Results are mixed. The article quotes Brian Dalton, senior law editor at Vault: “A lot of them [law firm recruiting videos] come off seeming like hostage videos.”
The article also refers to four videos produced by Greenfield Belser for Choate Hall & Stewart as exceptional!
The Choate videos (costing a total of $75,000) mimic those ads for Apple computer where the big, dumb guy represents Windows, and the hip, smart dude represents Macintosh. The dumb guy is an associate at a Big Law Firm who spends his days (including his vacation days) toiling through mounds of mundane work. The smart gal works at Choate. She gets to do lots of interesting work, and she doesn’t spend all her time working.
Note: I suppose that — one of these days — we’ll be hearing about some lawsuit that goes like this. Some Big Law Firm posted a recruiting video suggesting that new associates get to do all sorts of important things. A new associate goes to work for that firm and then — after two years of spending 60 hours a week in document review — claims the video — which bears little relation to reality — just goes to show that the firm doesn’t stand by its claims.
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David Lat (Above the Law) has some interesting comments about the article. Apparently, he’s no big fan of Karen Donovan, who’s been writing about law firm marketing efforts of late.
ATL also has this post about a recruiting video (also mentioned in Donovan’s article) that never got posted by Quinn Emanuel.
Note: Seems as if upper management at some firms still haven’t gotten that message about treating women as equals.
Over at Void for Vagueness, Brian Dalton writes:
So, I’m quoted in the New York Times today. Cool, right? Not exactly.
As David Lat correctly points out, this is a paraphrase of something he wrote in the NYObserver. In my defense, I did make it clear to the reporter that the “hostage” line was not my own.
Anyway, now I’m the Carlos Mencia of people who get quoted in articles about law firm recruiting.
