Month: July 2015

48 hours … checking in.

So it’s been roughly 48 hours since the launch of biglawrefuge.  Here are some stats:  Ready to be blown away?

Stats

  • 130 total sign ups
  • 3 reviews! (one is mine)
  • 15 job listings (13 are mine)
Screen Shot 2015-07-28 at 10.31.27 PM
This is me.

So … not very impressive at all so far.  That’s ok.  It’s still early in the launch, so there’s definitely room to grow.  Also, OCI season has not kicked into full swing yet for law students, which is when I expect they’d find the site more useful.  However, it does raise the question, “how does one market a new webapp?”  This is something admittedly, that I don’t know the answer to.

What me, market?

My plan was to target legal forums (the top being http://www.top-law-schools.com), and actually it’s the only place I’ve announced biglawrefuge.  I considered also reaching out to various career services departments at law schools around the country, but don’t know whether that’s a good idea or a bad idea.  On the one hand, they might be friendly and circulate the website to their students, seeing how it’s a valuable resource for them.  On the other (more likely) hand, I think they would outright reject the idea for being in “competition with them” or bringing their clandestine statistics to light, or (most likely) they would just ignore me completely.

I’ve also thought about reaching out to some old law professors at SLS to see what they thought.  Actually, while their thoughts would be useful, it would be more useful for them to just tell their students about the site.  I also don’t want it to feel like I’m attacking the law school or any law school in particular.  That’s definitely not my intention.  My intention is to let the stats speak for themselves, and to let law students and lawyers make the judgments.  After all, biglawrefuge is only the platform.

So in the end, I’m pretty much reliant on word of mouth, for now, at least.  Hopefully it starts picking up some steam and law students start seeing the value.  In the meantime, I’ll stay positive and continue to add features.  I recently just added the ability to post up a company review anonymously.  Cool stuff!

Advertisement

Biglawrefuge Launch

transparent

Big Law Refuge Launches

In the past few months, I’ve been working on a side project for law students called Biglawrefuge. Biglawrefuge is a website that makes it easy to share employment data.  My motivation in creating the website is the same motivation that has made news throughout the legal community in the past few years: a need for increased transparency.

Law schools and law firms are extremely secretive about these statistics.  Law schools, for instance, at the lower tiers have been accused of gaming statistics by counting students employed in fields other than law in their job statistics or employing their own grads to inflate their stats.  Law firms on the other hand, often have hard GPA cut offs which make it not worth the while of the law school applicant who comes in under the bar.  My hope is that biglawrefuge will serve as a platform for law school students and graduates alike to share information (anonymously) with each other so that we, as participants in the legal community, can help one another to make better and more informed decisions.  After all, choosing a law firm is a big undertaking.  It’s often made at the beginning of a law student’s 2L year, when that law student only has a vague inkling of the differences that matter among law firms.

In the coming months, I’ll continue rolling out biglawrefuge to more communities and I’ll try to market it more.  Hopefully, with time, it becomes a tool the empowers its users and becomes an indispensable tool for lawyers, future past and present.