Legal Recruitment Blog

I have read a lot of articles recently from business experts on how to survive the recession and including advice from people who had been through the last two recessions as to how to cope with the downturn in business trade sales and just about everything else. One thing that comes through all my reading is that flexibility is the key to survival. I’ll give you a quick example as to how it has affected our business, Ten Percent Legal Recruitment . Ten Percent Legal Recruitment offers the lowest recruitment fees in the UK for the recruitment of permanent and temporary lawyers with law firms, in house departments and local authorities. We have been charging 15 percent fees for many years now without any increases according to the salary or type of post. Our competitors start their fees at 18 percent and they go up to anything around 35 percent. Since the recession has kicked in, we have been getting requests from firms to lower our fees, which is fairly rare for us as our clients are us...

40 percent of conveyancing firms report redundancies (surely more than this???!!) The Law Society Gazette reported a while ago that 40 percent of law firms had made redundancies in their conveyancing departments. This was based on a survey of 1300 firms who were all clients of one particular company. About 33 percent of firms said that the slump had not affected them and that there was no freeze on recruitment and that things were continuing as normal. Richard Barnett, of Barnett Solicitors, who is also head of a law society conveyancing body said that he could not believe this was possible, that firms were in all probability putting their heads in the sand. I can agree with Richard Barnett as the evidence on the ground is simply overwhelming to show that almost every firm has ceased to recruit conveyancing solicitors and in quite a lot of circumstances, this has also affected other departments, including wills and probate, family, litigation, crime and anything else a high street fir...

"I don’t have any legal experience in my career to date although I do have prior work experience in different careers." This came up quite regularly in a recent seminar session at a University. Quite a lot of the students said that they did not have legal experience but had former careers in other fields. However, when we went through this in further detail, quite a lot of the students actually did have work experience to a certain degree and it was just a case of getting it out of them. A couple of examples were two students who had been directors or involved in the running of claims management companies and another student who had worked as an employment officer; there were also students who had been contract officers, employment managers and even IT consultants. A quasi-legal role is one that involves some element of law but not actually working as a lawyer. Examples would include someone dealing with race equality or employment issues or somebody handling contract negotia...