Cover letters, and the why-this-firm question

A covering letter is one page that answers three questions. An application form asks the same three with a word count attached and the paragraphs relabelled. If you can answer all three about a particular employer without using a single adjective about them, the letter is already better than most of the pile.

Why this firm, and why most answers fail it

The weak answer is a paragraph of praise. The firm is prestigious, global, innovative, has a collaborative culture and an excellent reputation in the market. Every one of those sentences is true of the hundred firms the candidate did not write to, which is the problem: the paragraph proves nothing except that the website was open.

The second weak answer is the mission statement handed back. A firm that describes itself as putting clients at the heart of everything it does does not need to be told so by an applicant. A recruiter who wrote that copy recognises it immediately.

A strong answer has a verifiable fact in it, and then a sentence about why that fact matters to you. The fact does the work of the adjective. “You hold legal aid contracts in housing and in debt, and the housing work is what I want to do” cannot be said about a firm that holds neither, which is exactly why it is worth saying.

The facts you can actually cite

All of these are published, free to check and specific to one employer. Not one of them requires an inside contact.

• What the firm is contracted to do. 4,700 offices hold a legal aid contract, and the Legal Aid Agency publishes which categories of law each one covers. If you are applying to a firm that holds a family and a mental health contract, say which of those you want and why.
• Where it is, and how many offices. Only 14.2% of legal aid offices are in a London postcode. If a firm has two offices in the same county, a letter about its international reach is addressed to a different company.
• How it is constituted. Companies House publishes the company structure, incorporation date, registered office and filing history for the 12,930 companies that identify as solicitors’ practices. A firm incorporated in 2019 that has grown to four offices is a story; a 140-year-old partnership is a different one.
• Who else works there. 3,097 distinct employers are named on the CILEx Regulation register, and the regulators’ registers show how many authorised people each employer has. A firm with chartered legal executives doing its litigation runs differently from one that does not.
• What a set of chambers practises. Every barrister’s declared practice areas are on the Bar Standards Board’s register, chambers by chambers. For a pupillage application that is the difference between naming a practice area and naming the two members whose work you have read.

Here is the kind of fact that is sitting in the open, for the legal aid sector: how many offices are contracted in each category of law.

Twenty-three offices in the country hold an education contract. If one of them is the firm you are applying to, say so: the figure is public and checkable.

The employer data on this site is built from those registers, and the sortable version is what the Data plan opens.

Why this area of law, when commercial law is not the only answer

The question is usually printed as “why commercial law”, because the firms that ask it most are commercial firms. If you are applying to one, answer it about the work and not about the money: a transaction you followed, a regulatory change you have read about, a sector you already know something about from a previous job.

It is worth knowing that commercial work is not where most of the profession is. On the Bar Standards Board’s register, this is what self-employed barristers say they practise.

Crime is the largest declared practice area at the self-employed Bar, and barristers can declare more than one, so the columns overlap. The point for an application is narrower: “why this area” is a real question with a real answer, and the answer “because it is the most competitive” is not one.

Why you

This is the paragraph that goes wrong by being modest or by being a list. What it has to do is connect something you have already done to something the employer actually needs, and a job outside law is usually better material than another mention of your degree.

Three years in a contact centre is three years of difficult conversations with people who are upset, which is most of what a legal aid practice does on the phone. A supervisory shift in hospitality is responsibility for other people’s mistakes under time pressure. Say the thing and then say what it taught you, in that order, in two sentences.

Where the application asks for a competency — resilience, teamwork, commercial awareness, attention to detail — the structure that works is the ordinary one: the situation, what you were asked to do, what you personally did, and what happened as a result. Most weak answers spend three sentences on the situation and one on the result. Invert that.

The shape of one page

1. The opening sentence, which is not an announcement

   “I am writing to apply for a training contract” tells the reader what the envelope already told them. Open with the reason you are writing to this employer, in one sentence, with a fact in it.

2. Why this employer

   Two or three sentences, each built on something checkable, each followed by why it matters to you.

3. Why this work

   What you want to do, and the evidence that you have looked into it rather than inherited the idea.

4. Why you

   The strongest one or two pieces of evidence you have, written as events rather than as qualities. Not a summary of the CV: the reader has the CV.

5. A close that does not grovel

   One line. Available for interview, thank you for considering the application and nothing about how this is your dream.

Openings to delete

• “I am writing to apply for…”
• “I have always been passionate about the law…”
• “Ever since I was a child…”
• “As a highly motivated and ambitious law student…”
• “Your firm’s prestigious reputation…”
• “Dear Sirs”, where the advertisement names a person.

Each of these is a sentence a screener has read several times already today, and each one spends the only line of the letter you can be certain will be read.

Written application questions are the same job with a word count

Most large employers have replaced the letter with a form: three or four boxes of 200 to 500 words. The questions recur across the market, which is why they are worth working on once rather than drafting from scratch for every application. The common set is why this firm, why this area of law, a time you worked in a team, a time something went wrong, a commercial story you have followed and what you think about it, and — increasingly — a question about what you would do in a described situation.

A word limit is a scoring instrument. An answer at 160 words of a 300-word limit reads as having nothing more to say, and one that runs to the character and stops mid-clause reads as unedited. Write long, then cut the adjectives: it is almost always the adjectives.

What nobody publishes

No employer publishes how it marks a written answer, and no regulator requires them to. There is no published figure for how many applications are rejected at this stage, and no list of which firms read covering letters at all rather than scoring the form boxes. Anyone who tells you a named firm’s marking scheme is repeating a rumour.

Next: every interview stage, and what each one is testing.

Assize Careers is not a regulator, professional body, university, law school or official careers service, and it is not part of or endorsed by one. Nothing on this site is legal advice.