Law Firm Jobs Monitor — Legal Job Alerts from BigLaw Portals
Pricing
$2.00 / 1,000 job rows
Law firm job openings straight from the portals firms hire through — viRecruit/viGlobal, cvMail, AllHires, WizeHire, iCIMS. 45 portals, robots.txt obeyed: 43 readable, 2 closed by theirs (2026-09-08). Or paste a portal URL. Monitor mode returns only NEW openings; status rows free.
robots.txt that contradicts itself at the same level is read again. src/robots.js (byte-identical with the sibling actor's, as it must be) combines every group naming this client or * and lets the longest matching rule win, as RFC 9309 says; the change is the tie-break. When an Allow and a Disallow of equal length both match, the Allow wins — §2.2.2's own rule, the least restrictive one, and how Google's reference parser reads the same bytes. Yesterday's build took the stricter reading the RFC also permits (R12) and closed those paths; the owner ruled on 2026-09-08 that the standard's own tie-break applies (R13), so a CDN's managed Allow: / above a tenant's Disallow: / leaves the path open. A host whose only rule is a bare Disallow: /, with no Allow anywhere, plainly says no and stays closed. A longer Allow still beats a shorter Disallow.robots.txt read on each of the 38 hosts behind the 45 directory portals: 33 hosts permit the portal path, 3 publish no robots.txt (a 404 is "no rules"), 2 close it. The two closures are the bare Disallow: / hosts refused since 0.1.35 — recruiting.dorsey.com (Dorsey & Whitney) and recruiting.lowenstein.com (Lowenstein Sandler). Thirteen hosts carry the tie and are read again: twelve viglobalcloud.com tenants (Gibson Dunn, Dechert, Troutman Pepper, Fisher Phillips, Akin Gump, Simpson Thacher, ArentFox Schiff, Nutter, Bracewell, Stoel Rives, Jones Day, Davies Ward) and Vinson & Elkins' portal.velaw.com. The five shared-zone tenants that end their file with Disallow: /Admin/ (Steptoe, Patterson Belknap, Baker Botts, Paul Hastings, Blakes) were never affected. So 43 of the 45 directory portals (39 of 41 firms) are readable today and 2 are refused with a free robots-txt row — up from 30 and 26 yesterday. firms.js ROBOTS_CLOSED, the README (directory list, Honest limits, FAQ), the input schema and the Store description all say which, and the daily quality audit fails the day the live verdicts drift from that record.src/qa.js) puts its primaries back on the widest boards now that they are readable, with every threshold re-measured live on 2026-09-08 rather than inherited: viGlobal template A returns to Gibson Dunn (127 rows over 3 requests; title/location/url/job_id/detail_url/category all 100%) with Willkie kept on as its firm-owned alternate; template B returns to Jones Day (96 rows over 5 requests; detail_url 0% by the template's own design) with Mintz and Faegre Drinker as alternates; the category-sweep paging case returns to Jones Day (4 categories, 96 rows over 5 requests) with Blakes and Faegre Drinker behind it. Every case now has at least one alternate, which is a wider bench than before the closure. The Store prefill and selftest.json stay on Faegre Drinker.n1DVFrXkkesLGbkQG — SUCCEEDED, 223.4 s, 1,121 job rows from the 43 readable portals, 7 free status rows: exactly the 2 closed firms as robots-txt rows (each naming its host and path, each with portal_url in RUN_SUMMARY) plus 5 no-openings (Travers Smith, Norton Rose Fulbright, K&L Gates UK, Farrer & Co, Kingsley Napley), sources_ok 43, sources_failed 0, sources_walled 0, nothing partial or truncated. All 45 directory portals are accounted for in RUN_SUMMARY.sources; none vanished. The thirteen firms the tie brought back each served openings: Gibson Dunn 127, Jones Day 96, Dechert 46, ArentFox Schiff 40, Troutman Pepper 37, Fisher Phillips 34, Vinson & Elkins 19, Akin Gump 15, Stoel Rives 7, Nutter 4, Simpson Thacher 2, Davies Ward 2, Bracewell 1 — 430 of the run's rows. That figure replaces the 690-in-130 s sweep measured earlier the same day under the stricter tie reading. Build 0.1.39 is this source plus these numbers; the selftest.json run on 0.1.39 is recorded in the commit that ships it.* groups, Allow: / under a Content-Signal line, Disallow: / at the end) and must be READ — six job rows, one robots.txt read, no status row, nothing counted as refused. The control sits beside it: the same file with the managed Allow: / struck out is a bare Disallow: /, and it must still cost the portal zero requests, still emit the free row naming host and path, and still carry portal_url in its RUN_SUMMARY entry. Mutation-checked in both directions — a parser that gives the tie to Disallow fails the tie cases, one that ignores a bare Disallow: / fails the control.robots.txt that contradicts itself at equal specificity is no longer read as permission. src/robots.js (byte-identical with the sibling actor's, as it must be) still combines every group naming this client (or *) and lets the longest matching rule win, as RFC 9309 says; the one change is the tie: when an Allow and a Disallow of the same length both match the portal path, the path is now closed. RFC 9309 §2.2.2 says a crawler should take the least restrictive rule on such a tie and permits a crawler to be stricter; the house rule (R12) takes that option, because the measured shape of such a file — Cloudflare's managed User-agent: * / Allow: / placed above the tenant's own User-agent: * / Disallow: / — is the tenant opting out, and a header its CDN wrote does not overrule the line the tenant wrote. A longer Allow still beats a shorter Disallow.robots.txt read on each of the 38 hosts behind the 45 directory portals: 20 hosts permit the portal path, 3 publish no robots.txt (a 404 is "no rules"), 15 close it. Two are the bare Disallow: / hosts already refused since 0.1.35 (Dorsey & Whitney, Lowenstein Sandler); thirteen are the Cloudflare-managed tie — twelve viglobalcloud.com tenants (Gibson Dunn, Dechert, Troutman Pepper, Fisher Phillips, Akin Gump, Simpson Thacher, ArentFox Schiff, Nutter, Bracewell, Stoel Rives, Jones Day, Davies Ward) and Vinson & Elkins' portal.velaw.com. The other five shared-zone tenants (Steptoe, Patterson Belknap, Baker Botts, Paul Hastings, Blakes) end their file with Disallow: /Admin/, not Disallow: /, and stay readable — the earlier assumption that all 17 shared-zone hosts carry the tie was wrong by five, which is why this was measured rather than copied. So 30 of the 45 directory portals (26 of 41 firms) are readable today and 15 are refused with a free robots-txt row; firms.js ROBOTS_CLOSED, the README (directory list, Honest limits, FAQ), the input schema and the Store description all say which, and the daily quality audit fails the day the live verdicts drift from that record.sources entry in RUN_SUMMARY now carries portal_url — the robots-txt and error entries too, at the front-door URL the portal would have been read at — so a refusal can be checked against the host's own file without looking the portal up. The WizeHire probe URL is now built from the board slug the fetcher itself extracts (a pasted career-site URL used to double up).src/qa.js) reads no host whose robots.txt closes it: the viGlobal template-A case moved from Gibson Dunn to Willkie (careers.willkie.com, 25 rows; this tenant publishes no job id and no per-job link, so those two carry no floor there), the template-B case from Jones Day to Mintz (careers.mintz.com, 18 rows) with Faegre Drinker as its alternate, and the category-sweep paging case from Jones Day to Blakes (5 categories, 8 rows over 6 requests) with Faegre Drinker (2 categories, 3 requests) as its firm-owned alternate — all thresholds measured on those hosts on 2026-09-07. The template-A case has no alternate: every other template-A tenant in the directory is closed, and a closed host is never read, so a wall on Willkie leaves that case honestly BLOCKED. The Store prefill and selftest.json stay on Faegre Drinker, which is open.* groups, Allow: / under a Content-Signal line, Disallow: / at the end): 0 portal requests, one robots.txt read, the free row naming host and path, and a RUN_SUMMARY refusal with portal_url; the same file ending in Disallow: /Admin/ must stay readable; robots-txt and error entries are held to carrying portal_url. npm test now runs the harness (npm run verify still does). The "41 hosts" wording in 0.1.35's entry, the README and src/http.js was the portal count minus a miscount; the measured host count is 38.2onnLHvJoelJGIuNT — SUCCEEDED, 130.3 s, 690 job rows from the 30 readable portals, 20 free status rows: exactly the 15 closed firms as robots-txt rows (each naming its host and path, each with portal_url in RUN_SUMMARY) plus 5 no-openings, sources_ok 30, sources_failed 0, sources_walled 0, nothing partial or truncated. That figure replaces the 2026-09-06 one (1,146 openings, 134 s) in the README, which predated pacing and the closures. Build 0.1.37 is this source plus these numbers; the selftest.json run on 0.1.37 is recorded in the commit that ships it.robots.txt is now read and obeyed on every host this actor touches. Until this build it never read one. Measured 2026-09-07 across the 38 hosts the directory reads (this entry originally said 41; 38 is the count of distinct hosts behind the 45 portals), two publish User-agent: * / Disallow: / — recruiting.dorsey.com (Dorsey & Whitney) and recruiting.lowenstein.com (Lowenstein Sandler) — and both were being read on every run, Dorsey on the default input. Now, before a host is asked anything, its robots.txt is read once per run (this actor's own identity, paced like any other request, one retry if it did not answer), and the exact path is checked: a disallowed path is never requested and the firm gets a free robots-txt row saying robots.txt disallows <path> on <host>; a host whose rules could not be read is not requested that run, with that reason; a 4xx robots.txt is no rules. This applies to directory firms, to pasted portal URLs (both probe candidates), to WizeHire's API hosts, and to any host a portal redirects to — redirects are now followed by hand so each hop is checked and paced. RUN_SUMMARY gains sources_robots_refused; a refusal is never a failure, never fails the run and does not trip failOnSourceError. The reader (src/robots.js) is byte-identical with the sibling actor's; groups are matched by exact product token (DockhandLegalJobsMonitor, or the family token Dockhand), never by prefix — cvMail's host lists User-agent: DOC under Disallow: /, which a prefix match would have read as closing all eight cvMail boards. The 18 viGlobal hosts on Cloudflare-managed robots.txt (two * groups, Allow: / above Disallow: /) were read under RFC 9309's tie-to-Allow rule in this build; the next entry reverses that under R12.apply.faegredrinker.com, firm-owned viGlobal domain, robots.txt closes only /Admin/; measured 2026-09-07: 18 openings over 2 categories, 3 requests). The quality audit's viGlobal alternates moved with it, with thresholds measured on that portal.cf-mitigated: challenge header recognised on any status.RUN_SUMMARY carries sources_walled and all_sources_failed, each walled entry in sources carries walled: true, the wall is logged in full as an error, and the run succeeds with its free error rows. A portal that genuinely would not answer still fails the run when it is the only one, and failOnSourceError still fails on anything, challenge included.viglobalcloud.com domain on 2026-09-06, and the 17 directory firms hosted there began serving some clients an HTTP 403 challenge page instead of their listings — while the same URLs answered normally from the Apify platform (Jones Day: 96 openings, measured the same hour). The free error row for such a portal now names the challenge and states that no workaround was attempted, instead of reading "HTTP 403" as though the portal had broken. The 7 viGlobal firms on firm-owned domains are unaffected. See Honest limits in the README.dorsey; moved to faegre-drinker on 2026-09-07 when Dorsey's robots.txt was found to close the portal) rather than the vendor's shared one, so a bot-management change on that shared domain cannot decide whether the sample run returns rows.DockhandLegalJobsMonitor instead of a Chrome browser string. That string was the whole "iCIMS bot wall": the firewall in front of Latham's five career sites challenges a request that claims to be a browser but is not one, and had answered every build so far with HTTP 405 from any network. Named honestly, all five tenants answer normally: 129 US openings measured over 3 pages (matching the 129 job URLs in the tenant's own sitemap), 27 UK, 9 Europe/Middle East, 8 Europe/Asia, 1 France. The quality audit now calibrates iCIMS like every other platform and walks its paging live against the sitemap count. The directory stands at 45 verified portals; a full platform sweep on 2026-09-06 returned 1,146 openings in 134 seconds with no errors.&toString;) stays as written instead of splicing function text into a row.À temps plein, which reached the dataset raw because the decoder knew a short hand-picked list; it now knows the whole –ÿ set and tells À from à..actor/output_schema.json): the run's Output tab and the API's output field now link straight to the rows as the overview table, JSON and CSV. Apify Store requires it before an Actor can be published. Nothing about the rows, the portals or the price changed.firm, platform, job_id, title, practice_area, department, location, remote, pqe, experience_level, employment_type, salary, category, posted_at, url, portal_url, scraped_at. A field the source does not publish is null, never invented.maxJobsPerFirm caps what each portal delivers, never how far its feed is read.status + note row — nine values, all listed in the README — and only delivered job rows are ever charged.429/5xx — is asked again up to three times over a few seconds before a portal is called broken. A host that really is down still gets its free error row, and that row now names the host, the attempts and the underlying reason instead of a bare "fetch failed". A portal that answers "no" is never asked twice.