How Swan Legal Search Automated Hundreds of Hours of Manual Work with Firm Prospects
Challenge
Swan Legal Search is the West Coast's leading legal search firm. For over 25 years, its recruiters — many of them former practicing attorneys — have placed thousands of attorneys at law firms across California and the Pacific Northwest.
That growth used to run on manual labor. Two to three full-time staff spent their days uploading and updating every candidate and every job by hand, just to keep Swan's data current enough to work with.
Approach
Swan has been a Firm Prospects client since 2018, and has run the API integration for the past two years. Swan's team, led by Chief Technology Officer Jack Clearman, built custom AWS middleware that pulls Firm Prospects data into a heavily customized Salesforce environment every few hours — no manual re-entry required. On top of that pipeline, Swan layered automated alerts that flag matching job openings the moment they open up for candidates its recruiters are already working.
"They were uploading every single person and updating them and updating every job… that saved us hundreds of hours because of the API," Clearman said.
Solution
What sets Swan apart is what they built on top of the integration: a proprietary candidate-to-recruiter matching model, trained on each recruiter's own historical placement patterns and powered by Firm Prospects data.
Two years into the integration, Swan has found the data clean enough to build real infrastructure on top of — not just a dashboard to check.
Results
What’s next
Swan is now building an anonymized careers portal that surfaces Firm Prospects job and market-trend data publicly, credited "Powered by Firm Prospects" — turning the same data pipeline that eliminated its manual admin work into a client-facing product.
"When you use a cloud service like AWS with AI and a great data source, which Firm Prospects is, you can do so much," concluded Clearman.
