If you’re here because you were just about to send your CV across to our front desk email address ‘frontdesk@bridgelegal.in’, or have in the past, please read this first. Please.

The front desk ID isn’t meant for internship applications – we exclusively use LinkedIn’s Job Post functionality to reach, identify, screen, shortlist, and finally select candidates. Sometimes, the relevant LinkedIn Job Post sets out additional information that needs to be sent to our front desk ID (such as writing samples), but that’s all we expect to receive at the email address.

Why LinkedIn Job Posts?

For one, we only ask for applications when we know that our forthcoming matters require interns; unlike a lot of other organisations that keep adding interns to their line-up, leading to situations such as, “we’re booked solid till next winter”, we only ask for applications when we know that we need interns, as well as what kind of interns we need.

LinkedIn helps us screen candidates by way of useful technology such as screening questions (for example, our recent spate of matters require a Bangalore presence, necessarily), the ability to automate rejection messages (so that you’re not left hanging), and also LinkedIn Messages. We wish we could customise aspects such as the rejection messages themselves, but we need to work with what we have, too.

Remember, the Job Poster and coordinator (most recently me) isn’t a part of the selection team, so while I love to hear from everyone in the DMs, it really doesn’t help to just replicate your application in the form of a message (also, it isn’t very nice to message someone on a personal note only because you want something).

I Don’t Want to Use the LinkedIn Process

To give you a sense of the volume we face, we recently received 201 applications in 48 hours via LinkedIn, a platform we use in order to promote fairness and transparency. It’s objective, it’s efficient, and more than anything else, it helps us organise applications much better than receiving emails 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year.

There’s just no other practical way to ensure we end up going through all screened applications – for example, out of the abovementioned 201 applications we received (we could have received more if we had left the Process open, but that’s a discussion for another day), 44 made it through the screening questions that absolutely had to be answered a particular way to fulfil the needs of the upcoming transactions. 44 isn’t an easy number to work with either, but we’re painstakingly taking the time out to go through all the applications anyway.

I Heard About the Internship Vacancy on Another Platform and Decided to Send an Email

This isn’t the fault of candidates, but an issue arising due to multiple intermediary platforms copy-pasting the LinkedIn Job Description to a Job Post without sharing a link to the Job Post itself (which is the correct way to apply). We don’t like the fact that candidates need to go through this, which is why we always clarify the correct procedure when we are correctly tagged (which almost never happens, for some reason).

Firstly, as we mentioned earlier, we need responses to screening question functionalities that only come with LinkedIn; secondly, it’s unfair to the candidates who take the time out to follow the correct procedure, a procedure whose necessity we have also covered already.

Whatever; Bridge Legal Is Just as Bad as All the Other lAw fIrMS

Before you think this way because you didn’t get a response to your email sent to us, please do consider a few things:

1. We only take on interns when they can learn from practical exposure, which is the point – transactions come and go and are very fluidic, with specific requirements, so we can’t plan too well in advance and create vacancies when there shouldn’t be any;
2. We use LinkedIn’s process because it reaches a wide audience, is equitable in the sense that no one has a head-start, and also gives us tools to use so that we can also send rejection messages – something that isn’t easy to do which is why so many applicants traditionally are left hanging thinking about what happened to their application. We want to avoid this and we need to be efficient in order to communicate the status of your application quickly;
3. We don’t use recruiters / HR / intermediaries and that’s a principled stance so that you get a chance to have your CV looked at by the lawyer who needs you on their team for a project; and
4. We need to put in a lot more time and energy into the internship process than other outfits since we’re a lean team with big transactions on the line – we need specific skill-sets and parameters fulfilled and just because you don’t get selected, it isn’t a reflection of your intrinsic, inherent value – it may even be our loss and miscalculation because we are human(s) too and obviously wish nothing but your success, even if it means proving us wrong.

Okay, I Didn’t Get Selected – Now What?

We highly recommend following the Bridge Legal LinkedIn Page, accessible here.

When we do post the next vacancy, you’ll be sure to know and have a fair chance at applying via a very easy process on LinkedIn. It makes your life easier, as well as ours.

We hope to have a chance to work with you soon, but till then, just a friendly reminder here, please don’t send internship applications to frontdesk@bridgelegal.in, please? It’s the front desk for business queries that ultimately leads us to having the money to pay our interns above the market standard while also giving them actual experience 🙂