Today Adam Smith, Esq. takes great pleasure in announcing the launch of a new company dedicated to rationalizing and bringing a measure of order, efficiency, and transparency to a dysfunctional market at the heart of our industry: JD Match.
The Wall Street Journal Law Blog (the talented and highly professional Ashby Jones) broke the story this morning, calling the current system “Byzantine.”
Here are a few of the (many) kind things he had to say:
It’s not often that we write about just-announced products designed for the legal industry.
(Frankly, we typically prefer to wait until all the initial public-relations hoo-ha dies down and the marketplace has had a chance to react to the product.)
But we’re going to make an exception this morning for a product whose very idea has piqued our interest.
The service is called JD Match, and its premise is to link law students looking for jobs with hiring law firms without a lot of the wasted time, effort, expense and overall agony brought on by the current law-school hiring process, with its interviews and fly-backs and courtship and disappointment.
JD Match, which is largely the brainchild of law-firm consultant and writer Bruce MacEwen, who will serve as the company’s president, will “match” law students with firms, much in the way matching services pair up medical students and residency programs.
[…]Already, the service has landed one large firm: K&L Gates. The firm will use JD Match to help recruit summer associate positions this fall.
“It’s about time someone took the bull by the horns to address the antiquated method firms are forced to use to recruit students,” said Peter Kalis, the firm’s chairman, in a statement. “Change is a necessity, and I, for one, am looking forward to this 21st century solution.”
In the wake of that announcement, I wanted to take a moment to thank the people who have been working with us for the past several months to make this possible:
- The invaluable support of an AmLaw 15 firm which, out of modesty, prefers to remain nameless. We are deeply in their debt not just for the counsel and advice they have provided us, but for their demonstrating courage and leadership in the industry-with more than rhetoric.
- The inspired and graceful creative services of faucethead creative, our graphic arts team.
- The rigorous, disciplined, and highly effective website development work behind the site we’re launching tomorrow, provided by Desktop Solutions
- Aided by our crack programmers in India, Soft Prodigy
- The gifted and highly experienced copywriter who has helped us craft what we want to say in plain and direct English.
- The two law professors who have developed the algorithms at the heart of our new venture, Kevin Quinn and Andrew Martin.
- The folks we’re relying on to help us get the word out.
- Our extraordinarily responsive and buttoned-down friends providing customer support.
We also thank the AmLaw 30 firms who have signed up as charter members, and the forward-thinking law schools who have helped us hone our offering and who understand the benefits it could provide for their students.
And you can follow JD Match on Facebook and Twitter: @JDMatch
