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I was actually having a conversation about this with 2 trainees at Latham's open day yesterday. One of them recommend doing about 20 applications - I think that's close to the number of apps he actually submitted - the other one did only 2 apps but also recommended doing close to 20. They were both working full time jobs when they were applying. The first guy said that once you've done 7 really high quality applications which have made it to the next stage, then you would've covered about 90% of the application questions that come up for all the firms.

Interestingly, just before the trainees came down for the networking, a partner had finished giving a talk and she mentioned that she was appalled whenever she would hear people say that they've submitted 3 or 4 applications in a day. When she was applying about 15 years ago, she would spend about 5 days researching a firm before applying. She treated it like a full time job and said that she submitted lots of applications, but didn't give a specific number.

If you can invest your time and energy in writing 30 well-researched and high quality applications, then fair play to you. However, the point of diminishing returns would probably be after 10-12 applications.