You Cannot Apply Your Way Out Of The Trench
I spoke to a law graduate today who is actually doing the work.
Printed CVs, walked into receptions, handed over in person. Coffee catch ups asked for, booked, turned up to on time. Follow up emails sent without being told to send them. Referrals requested out loud, in words, to actual humans. Her LinkedIn needed a tidy up so we went through it together, banner included, headline included, the whole thing. She is going to polish it up this week.
She left with a plan. I sat there afterwards feeling quietly emotional about it, because she is doing what almost nobody does, which makes her the exception when she should be the rule.
So this one is for the rest of you. With love, as always. Tough part first.
The bare minimum is not a strategy
Most people are doing a version of this. Opening LinkedIn, opening Seek, scrolling until something says "Graduate Lawyer", clicking apply, uploading the same CV they used last time, closing the laptop, feeling productive.
That is not a job search. That is reacting to a job search someone else is running.
By my rough estimate it is about twenty per cent of the work. Not zero. Applications matter, someone has to receive the thing. It is just the smallest and most passive part of the whole exercise. It is also the part that puts you in a queue of four hundred people who all did exactly the same amount of effort as you.
Will it eventually work? Possibly. It might take you eighteen months instead of five. If you have decided that is the trade you want to make, genuinely fine, go in peace, that is a legitimate choice and I am not the boss of you.
What I will not accept is the same person doing the twenty per cent version and then arriving in my DMs six months later to tell me the market is broken. I will ask you what else you did. If the answer is nothing else, we are going to have a conversation about it. I will be kind while I say it but I will still say it.
The other eighty per cent is the uncomfortable part. Warm approaches. Speculative applications to firms with nothing advertised. Asking people you already know for a twenty minute call. Turning up to the profession's events where the average age is fifty five. Following up when nobody replied the first time. Building something people can find before you need them to find it.
I have written before about why the graduate trench of despair exists as a structural feature rather than a personal failure, as well as about what the clerkship system actually rewards when it says grades do not matter. None of that changes the fact that you still have to walk through it.
Start with the boring infrastructure. My Job Search Tracker is free and it exists so you can see, in one place, exactly how much of the eighty per cent you have actually done. Most people are shocked the first time they fill it in honestly.
Now, the LinkedIn part, because I need to be precise about this
I tell law students to build a presence on LinkedIn. I stand by that. What I do not, and will, tell you to do is turn up cold and start begging.
There is a very particular way this works and sometimes, getting it wrong might be worse than doing nothing.
Think of LinkedIn as a cocktail party that has been going for years before you arrived. You can walk in the front door and shout GIVE ME A JOB across the room. People will look at you. Some of them will feel sorry for you. Nobody will introduce you to anyone.
Or you can come in properly, with grace and good spirits.
Say hello to one person. Get introduced to another. Say something interesting about the thing you actually care about. Congratulate someone on their news and mean it. Be the person other people are glad turned up. Then, months later, when you mention you are looking, three people already know who you are and what you are about. One of them says a sentence about you in a meeting you will never hear about. Maybe you are top of mind for a new that won’t have to be advertised because you got first dibs, and you took it with hands (this happens every day).
Same room, same person and a wildly different outcome. The difference is entirely in the order of operations.
You are trying to be known for something before you need something. Not famous, known but a point of view, a body of work however small, a handful of relationships that are real. That is an asset. Assets take time to build, which is why the answer to "when should I start" is embarrassing. It is also why the answer to "is it too late" is never.
Yes, you have to pay the cringe tax too.
The first post is horrific. Everyone from your tutorial will see it. You will reread it eleven times after you publish. That feeling is the price of entry, it is not a signal that you are doing something wrong. I have written a whole piece on why confidence is a skill rather than a personality trait if you need convincing. Sets and reps. That is the entire method here. You can’t avoid it, I’m sorry.
What to actually post: who you are, why you chose law, what kind of work you are drawn to and why, what you do outside the degree, what you are reading or thinking about in your area. Personality is allowed. Personality is the point. You are not writing a second CV.
If you want a starting ramp, my first ten post prompts are free and they are designed for exactly this moment. If you want the profile itself sorted properly, the LinkedIn Visibility Toolkit is the one I gave the graduate I met this week. I have also written about why the legal influencer thing is not going away whether the profession likes it or not.
Keep it ethical, keep it strategic, keep it professional.
I do not need to spell this out for you, you are a law student, you can already feel where the line is. The test I used to use is simple: would my mum be proud of this and would a future CEO reading it in ten years think well of me. If it passes both, post it. If you are genuinely unsure, send it to me and we will sanity check it together, though I suspect you already know the answer.
The part I say out loud that nobody else will
Law school promised you a law degree but it did not promise you a job. Those are two entirely separate transactions and only one of them was ever guaranteed.
Nobody in the system is incentivised to tell you this at an open day. Law students are, from an institutional perspective, an excellent product line. Australia has a serious credential habit, tertiary education carries enormous social weight here. The degree is expensive in every currency that matters: time, money, energy, HECS, the years of your twenties you cannot get back. Some of you have parents or grandparents paying for it, which is wonderful, mazel tov, genuinely. Some of you have taken the debt on yourselves. Some of you are the first in your family to do any of this and are working it out from scratch, like I did.
Whichever one you are, you deserve to be told the truth about what happens on the other side of the ceremony.
I came through this fifteen years ago. The trench was there then and it is still there now. It is called the graduate trench of despair for a reason and not everyone makes it through, which is not a moral judgement on anyone, it is just supply and demand of a market doing it’s thing. Getting through it demands discipline, grit, humility and a tolerance for rejection that law school does not teach and does not test. Those same qualities are, conveniently, the ones legal practice will ask of you almost every week that you practice.
Some of you will not want to do that and I want to be very clear that this is completely allowed. A law degree is never wasted. A piece of paper certifying that you are an intelligent person capable of applying yourself to something difficult for a sustained period is a genuinely good thing to own. Some of you were never meant for practice. Some of you will build something better sideways. I have written about the scenic route for precisely this reason.
On AI, I am not going to fearmonger and I am not going to pretend. It is reasonable to expect it to change what junior legal work looks like as well as how much of it there is, though the scale and the speed are genuinely not settled at the time if writing in mid-2026. We will adjust, the profession always does, eventually, loudly. I have set out the honest version of that in the legal AI playbook. What it means for you right now is straightforward: the relational, human, reputational parts of your career are the parts that compound, so build those hardest.
Getting a job after law school is a full time job in itself. Almost nobody tells you that but I will keep telling you.
What to actually do this week
August is almost here, which historically means recruitment activity picks up. Use the runway.
Fill in the Job Search Tracker honestly. Every application, every warm approach, every follow up. Look at the ratio of passive to active. Sit with it.
Book three conversations. Not applications, conversations. Someone one year ahead of you, someone five years ahead, someone in a role you are curious about.
Fix the profile before you post. Photo, banner, headline, about section. The LinkedIn Visibility Toolkit walks you through it, or Part Five of the Ungatekept Guide covers recruitment, applications, interviews, networking and LinkedIn in one place for ten dollars.
Post once. Use the free prompts. Pay the cringe tax. Then do it again next week.
Follow up on everything that went quiet. One polite message. Most people never send it and it could make all the difference.
If you want the personalised version, I offer a LinkedIn and CV audit plus a one to one session if you want to build the whole strategy with me. Some of you will hustle to pull together the money for that and it will be worth it. Some of you cannot or do not want to, which is exactly why the tracker, my online content and the prompts are free.
There is no version of this where the resources are the reason you did not do the work, okay?
One last thing
You are an intelligent person surrounded by other intelligent people. Most of you got the marks, met the standard, did what was asked and received the reward. This may be the first time in your life that doing everything right, putting in the effort but it has not produced the outcome (yet). That is disorienting for ambitious high-achievers who were “a pleasure to have in class” in a way nobody warns you about.
Everything you want is on the other side of fear and cringe.
If you want something you have never had, you are going to have to do something you have never done.
Most of that something is unglamorous, repetitive and slightly embarrassing (at first). You are at the bottom of a ladder again after years of climbing a different one. It is humbling but it is also temporary.
Your career is a marathon. Save some energy for the back half.
You are going to do amazing things. Go and be a bit brave about it.
Mel 💖
