Exploring the Faraway City

After the lull, comes the storm. Having smelled the rose after many months, the pure blood was upbeat now. He shifted gears very fast over the next few days. With a little more effort he was able to complete the routine work much earlier, giving him the time for testing his thoughts. He had made up his mind to seek his fortunes in another city, much like Vasco da Gama or Amerigo! New things meant new thrills.

 

He began browsing various websites for more information on the faraway city. Some of the more profound ones had listing of law firms. A few of them also gave out rankings. Some of the so called big and reputed firms also had their offices there. But this was unchartered territory for the pure blood and he was not inclined to take chances. He preferred to be cautious before making a choice. The reliability of random websites was also doubtful. To some extent, he thought aloud, credible information was likely to be covered by the more popular websites such as Legal500.com, Chambers & Partners etc. The pure blood did not want to be too selective either, so he had kept an open mind even with respect to the small and relatively lesser known firms.

 

He jotted down the names of the firms he perceived would possibly have opportunities for him. The next step was to get their contact details. Most law firms in India don’t have their own websites due to restrictions imposed by the Bar Council of India. Hence the only option left was to fish out the details from the websites he had scanned earlier. Some threw up the desired results but some did not. Over a period of nearly 2 weeks he was able to gather contact numbers and email addresses.

 

Now came the most crucial element of implementation – initiating contact through calls and emails. This appeared to be more time consuming and certainly cumbersome at times. Getting to the right person was the eventual challenge. At that time most law firms did not have an established human resources person, let alone a dedicated team. More than often, one person would have an additional responsibility to respond to job applications. And the replies were typical one liners thanking the pure blood for applying and mentioning that there was nothing to suit his profile at the moment. Although they would agree to keep his profile in their database, which initially was a glimmer of hope, similar replies from some more firms assured him that these were standard responses and involuntarily included in replies to job applications. Sometimes his emails would go unanswered. He sent reminders and forwarded the applications but to no avail.

 

He had carefully drafted the cover letter, which was his only chance of introduction. Somewhere he had read that a job application gets about 5 minutes time of attention of the recruiter, so the margin of error was very thin. He had taken equal pains to get his resume in order -after drafting, redrafting, proof reading, down sizing, improving fonts, spacing between lines and paragraphs, increasing page margins… he was able to get the content to 2 pages. This was also a result of his earlier research – the more crisp the CV the better chances of being read. Otherwise it wouldn’t take long to be deleted from the recruiter’s already overflowing inbox. This editing had consumed more than a week’s time before the pure blood was satisfied with the output.

 

In his own database, he had created columns for the researched data as well as the results of implementation. However, the results columns did not fill up as quickly as expected, rather it was slow and at times very frustrating. But a determined pure blood carried out relentlessly. His perseverance bore fruit after about 2 weeks when the first positive response came. The managing partner of a local firm requested her colleague to fix up an interview with the pure blood. The pure blood’s ecstasy knew no bounds that day.

 

The office break was round the corner by now. The pure blood was working full steam to get as many hits as possible. God helps those who help themselves, goes the saying - a consultant also happened to fix a telephonic interview for him. This was for an investment bank looking out for a legal person in their India office located in the faraway city. With 2 successes in 2 days, the pure blood continued his hunt. However, nothing much happened over the next few days and with the impending interview, he now changed tracks and got down to some serious preparation for the same.