History
LawCrossing was started by A. Harrison Barnes, himself an attorney, after he saw that lawyers like him did not have one single dedicated website through which to apply for jobs in the legal industry. His concept was simple – instead of making lawyers and other legal industry professionals pursue different general public job boards, why not have just one site that is dedicated to their profession.
Barnes also found out that most law firms posted the job openings that they had on their websites. But most attorneys did not realize this fact or did not know how to go through each and every law firm website without spending a lot of time. So he came up with a way where lawyers could find openings all over the country in the particular legal practice area they were interested in all in one place.
So Harrison Barnes switched from being a lawyer to getting lawyers jobs. For this he established BCG Attorney Search – a legal recruiting firm. For him, this meant giving up a cushy job in a top law firm and starting the company with hardly any savings and huge financial commitments. This is how much he believed in his vision.
After quitting his job, Barnes’ started his company in his home and started building a database of his contacts on a Palm Pilot! The biggest flaw that he saw in the legal recruiters then and even today is that most of them serve only certain clients and have access to certain openings. No two recruiters will have access to the same law firm, which means that they are all limited in presenting the lawyers they hope to place.
BCG Attorney Search soon grew big enough to grow out of Barnes’ home and he shifted to a building in Pasadena, CA. But after running BCG Attorney Search for some time he noticed another issue that nobody had solved till then. Very few top-level law firms work with legal recruiters and they want lawyers who have gone to top law colleges and are working in top legal firms. This means that tens of thousands of perfectly good lawyers and law firms are left out and have no way of getting in touch with each other, except by chance.
Plus, with BCG Attorney Search, Barnes was limited by the number of attorneys he could place because of the number of recruiters that he had. So Barnes started another company – Legal Authority, which also helps attorneys get jobs by offering a full service package – helping them rewrite their resumes, helping them mail their resumes to hundreds of law firms and putting them in touch with law firms across the country.
Out of the experience gained from running BCG Attorney Search and Legal Authority was born LawCrossing. With LawCrossing Barnes’ aim was to offer attorneys from all backgrounds access to jobs with law firms across the country. Using the contacts and database created while setting up and running BCG and Legal Authority he set up LawCrossing. LawCrossing’s USP is that it is a low-cost way for lawyers to get in touch with law firms quickly.
