City Tracker
The application process should not be a guessing game
City Tracker exists because I spent four years on the wrong side of an information gap, and I did not think anyone else should have to.
I applied to City law firms for four years. I was rejected more than seventy times. I ultimately received training contract offers from Freshfields and Latham & Watkins.
For most of those four years I checked the TCLA forum several times a day. Not because I enjoyed it, but because it was the only place anything was visible. I was trying to reverse-engineer a process nobody would explain: when had people applied, who had heard back, what did silence mean, had the scheme already filled up, was I still in with a chance, or had a decision been made about me weeks ago that nobody had bothered to send?
I was piecing it together from scraps. A comment here, a screenshot there, someone saying they had an assessment centre invite for a firm I had applied to a month earlier. That was how I found out where I stood.
TCLA was, and remains, an invaluable gathering place for applicants. City Tracker is not trying to replace that conversation. It is the structured companion to it: a tool built to answer the questions a discussion thread cannot reliably answer.
The information existed. It was just scattered across hundreds of forum posts, held by people who had no way to share it properly, and useless by the time you found it.
I haven't applied yet. Have I already missed my chance?
A rolling deadline used to turn every application into a guessing game. I would find a firm I wanted to apply to, then immediately wonder how many people were already ahead of me. Had interviews started? Was there still any point in spending three evenings on the form, or should I put that energy somewhere else?
I would comb through TCLA threads, searching the firm name and trying to reconstruct the answer from scattered posts. I often finished the search no wiser, only more anxious.
The answer I needed was simple: show me how many applicants have reported applying, whether anyone has started progressing, and how many people are still waiting.
Track. Check in. Know where you stand. Add the firms you care about, record what changes, and use the live picture to decide where your time is best spent.
What the opacity actually costs
The hardest part was never the rejection. It was not knowing. Not knowing meant you could not make decisions.
You cannot prioritise if you do not know which rolling firms are still genuinely open and which have quietly filled their places. You cannot judge whether to spend your best week on one more application to a firm that stopped reading in November. You cannot tell the difference between a firm that is slow and a firm that has already said no without telling you.
So you apply everywhere, spread thin, and hope. That is not a strategy. It is what you do when you have no information, and it punishes exactly the people who can least afford to waste the effort: those without contacts, without insider knowledge, without someone in the family who already knows how this works.
What City Tracker does
It makes the pattern visible, using the only data that actually reflects reality: what applicants themselves are seeing, right now.
- Your applications in one place, with fixed deadlines as dates and rolling schemes flagged as apply-early, so you know when to start writing rather than when the door shuts.
- Live activity, so you can see when a firm's process starts moving, rather than refreshing a forum hoping somebody posts.
- Waiting-time evidence, so you can see typical response times instead of guessing whether three weeks of silence means anything.
- Alerts for the firms you care about, so you find out when something moves without checking a forum five times a day.
The aim is not to give anyone an unfair advantage. It is to take an advantage that some people already have, through contacts and luck and knowing the right person, and give it to everybody.
How it is built
Nothing here works unless people trust it with their applications, so a few commitments:
- You can use it without an account. As a guest, no name and no email address are stored. Just a random session cookie.
- Sharing is opt-in and separate. The planner and historical evidence work without contributing to Live Data.
- Live Data does not publish your identity. It shows a firm, scheme, status and rounded time, never your name, email, exact date or complete timeline. Aggregate comparisons stay hidden until the privacy threshold is met.
- You can leave completely. One button downloads everything held about you. Another deletes all of it, permanently and immediately.
- Your data stays in the UK, on encrypted storage.
There is a plain-English privacy notice that explains all of it, including the parts that are less comfortable. It is worth two minutes.
Where this is up to
City Tracker is new and it is small. The live picture only becomes genuinely useful as more applicants make a fifteen-second weekly check-in. Every honest Still Waiting, Rejected or progression update helps another applicant replace anxiety with perspective.
If something is broken, wrong, or missing, I would rather hear it than not. Tell me.
David FitzGerald
contact@citytracker.city
City Tracker is an independent personal project. It is not operated by, affiliated with, or endorsed by any law firm.