The first thing we'll do is to wire all the law students. That's the premise of eAttorney, a Web site that is attempting to capture the loyalty of lawyers by helping them get their first job through an online legal recruiting service. The site is one of several vying for the attention and dollars of one of the more tradition-bound professions. American Lawyer Media recently spun off its Law News Network, which has merged with Law.com. Those relatively new entrants into the online legal market face Net pioneer FindLaw and a host of smaller competitors."Lawyers have billions of dollars in buying power; you just have to get them used to using your site," says Sam Kellett, the 28-year-old CEO of Atlanta-based eAttorney, formerly called Attorneys at Work. "We want to get them while they are young and build brand loyalty."
Every fall law firms descend on the nation's law schools to recruit students. EAttorney has automated the process by developing an Internet recruiting tool. The company has sold the service to 26 law schools and about 300 firms, according to Kellett.
Law schools, students and firms that subscribe to eAttorney go to the site to schedule interviews and post resumes, recruiting guidelines and other info.
Kellett aims to build a legal portal on a foundation of Internet services for attorneys. But getting lawyers to depart from precedent may take some doing.
Shearman & Sterling, a white-shoe New York law firm, did not exactly embrace Internet recruiting. "To be honest with you, not many of us were happy with having to change our methods," says Pepper Lunsford, the firm's recruiting coordinator. "But when the law schools require us to go on [eAttorney], we have to go with it."
Kellett also is marketing the recruiting service to firms as a way to hire attorneys without using expensive headhunters. Legal recruiters usually charge 25 percent to 30 percent of each new hire's annual salary – which is typically in the six figures – as a fee. EAttorney charges an annual fee between $1,000 and $7,500, depending on the size of the law firm, to use its service. "You essentially distintermediate the headhunter," Kellett says.
But using the Internet to hire a partner at a blue-blooded firm seems to strike some in the legal world as a tad declasse. "Our experience with these online databases is that a lot of the attorneys that submit resumes are not the best quality candidates," Lundsford says. "It's nice going through a headhunter because the headhunter knows the firm and what we're looking for, rather than us weeding out 90 percent of resumes."
Still, Lundsford concedes, that may change if lawyers continue to adopt the Internet as a business tool.
San Francisco legal recruiter Avis Caravello isn't exactly
feeling threatened by the Net, however. "There will still be a market
for people who want to squeeze the peaches and touch the cashmere,"
she says. "I have no doubt that you'll scoop up a couple of good
resumes [on the Internet]. But if you are interviewing people
you've never met before based on a resume, you're going to start
losing [attorneys'] billable time."
Created by Kellett as an MBA project, eAttorney will find formidable competitors for lawyers' loyalty in Law.com and FindLaw. Law.com site is a descendant of Counsel Connect, an early proprietary online service for lawyers operated by American Lawyer Media. The service migrated to the Web but lost millions of dollars before being shut down after Time Warner (TWTC) sold American Lawyer Media to investment bankers Wasserstein Perella in 1997.
San Francisco-based Law.com will relaunch in December. "The goal is to offer everything from cradle to grave on the Internet for lawyers," says Wasserstein VP Anup Bagaria. Law.com will operate independently from American Lawyer but will continue to receive news and information services provided by the company's national and regional newspapers and magazines.
