Legal Recruitment Blog

HAPPY NEW YEAR FOR 2010 - We hope that you all have a prosperous and peaceful New Year and look forward to working with you in 2010. Best Wishes from the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment Team (Hannah, Pete, Sara, Jonathan, Pearl and Clare). I hope to update the blog more often in 2010, and plan to add sections both to the blog and also to the website in 2010, with toolkits for CV preparation and checks, marketing and speculative search plans, interview guidance including online interview practice tools.

Christmas is almost upon us, and I take the opportunity to provide a list of possible Christmas presents for lawyers and recruitment consultants, as well as shamelessly plug our own Christmas present ideas for solicitors, barristers, paralegals and anyone else. Firstly, www.ten-percent.co.uk/cv.html Gift Vouchers for Careers & CV Writing Services, ranging from £25 to £500. What could be a better present than one that could last a lifetime... www.cafepress.co.uk - lots of interesting T Shirts and cups and things - including a baby outfit with "my mummys a lawyer" - would anyone really be brave enough to send their child off to nursery in this? http://www.carbolicsmokeball.com/catalog/287/Large_Carbolic_Smoke_Ball_Advert_(Unframed_Print)/ This is by far the best present I have seen - a large poster sized version of the Smoke Ball advert - I bet this gets sold to loads of 1st year law students every year.. A bargain at £20.00. (incidentally we dont get any commission for t...

This Article ought to be subtitled “permanent recruitment” as opposed to “temporary recruitment” because as far as I can see the temporary recruitment side of the business is very unlikely to suffer many effects under the recession. Permanent recruitment has always been the more risky end of the business in relation to effects of recession. I can remember starting my consultancy Ten Percent Legal Recruitment back in April 2000 and speaking to an educated lady who was working as a police station visitor at the time, who when I said that I had set up a recruitment agency replied “you had better hope there is not a recession if you are doing permanent recruitment”. At the time I did not think much of this as we had just about finished the Dot.com bubble burst and things were on the up, but I have always remembered her words and wondered if they would ever come to fruition. Of course in the recent recession they clearly have. Permanent recruitment dropped off dramatically as soon as the re...

A recent phenomenon has emerged in the world of recruitment and it relates to candidates looking for work. In the last four weeks we have had a number of vacancies in and a number of interviews set up, but we have also had a number of candidates not attend interviews or decide that they do not wish to proceed. The percentage of these is extremely high at present, and very unusual compared with our normal ratio of failure in this area. The first one of these candidates was a specialist solicitor who had expressed a keen interests in a role, sent us a detailed explanation as to why she fitted the bill and when we finally managed to arrange an interview for her decided that it was going to be too difficult to take time off in the short term, and she would only be able to attend an interview in the medium term. Unsurprisingly the firm had a number of applicants and did not bother interviewing her. The second candidate was an experienced commercial solicitor who expressed an interest in a j...

A Forum recently had a post on entitled "Boycott Recruitment Agencies and Greedy Bosses!!" The post reads "Recruitment Agencies are cherry picking their clients & have no courtesy to reply back to your messages unless you call them!! They say they have hundreds of applications to review but by the time they have looked at your CV it’s too late - the dream job you desire is long gone." As a recruitment consultant I have to say that this probably appears to be the perception at present (we cherry pick the best solicitors and ignore the rest including most NQs). The truth is that we are being hit very badly by the recession as businesses. Think about it - there have probably been over 15,000 redundancies amongst solicitors in England & Wales since April 2008. This is just less than 10% of the workforce. There are no conveyancing jobs at all anywhere. There are no wills & probate jobs anywhere. Crime jobs are disappearing at a rate of knots as firms close th...

A training contract applicant has very kindly given us a detailed description of an assessment day that recently took place in the North West. It gives a flavour of the typical sort of day you will get in most medium and large law firms.. Here's what happened at the (North West Firm) assessment day. Introductions - we had to write a few facts about ourselves on a side of a4 paper, screw it in to a ball and throw it in the centre of the room, we all then had to go grab a ball and discover who it was and then use that to introduce the person to the group. We then had a group exercise. We were a group of four hikers, lost in a snow storm - in a tent -and had to decide on how many people should look for - and then from a list of 19 items decide which ten should be taken by the people who went for help and what items should remain for the people staying in the tent. I then had a competency based interview. First question 'what is your unique selling point' (i nearly fell off ...

The DWP have awarded Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited a 2 year contract to provide jobsearch support for newly unemployed professionals. At present, the scheme is very much in its infancy, but we have already provided the service to professionals based in the West Midlands and the North West. The scheme works by the Jobcentre Plus Adviser referring their clients through to us, and within 24 hours we arrange an appointment, usually over the telephone as the service is nationwide. This appointment is about 45 mins long, and we cover a whole range of topics, concentrating as required on particular areas. At the end of the consultation we provide an action plan to the job centre and the client, and continue to provide support as required by email. If you want to take advantage of this service, you need to be unemployed, and also speak to your adviser rather than ourselves as the referral has to come from them. Jonathan Fagan is MD of http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ and senior career coach at http...

Budget is out again, and lots of things relevant to lawyers and law firms: Most important first..... CIGARETTES, ALCOHOL AND FUEL • Alcohol taxes to go up 2% from midnight - putting the price of the average pint up 1p (arrghhh). CAR SCRAPPAGE SCHEME (does this mean someone could start buying up 10 years old cars and sell them on at a profit? Anyone using this idea, please ensure you pay me a fair commission!) • From next month until March 2010 motorists to get £2,000 discount on new cars if they trade in cars older than 10 years • The government will provide £1,000 with the industry expected to provide the other half TAX • Income tax for those earning more than £150,000 to rise to 50% from April 2010 • Tax relief on pensions to be reduced for people on more than £150,000 a year from April 2011 UK ECONOMY • Growth expected to pick up in 2010, expanding by 1.25%. • Economy to grow by 3.5% annually from 2011 JOBS AND TRAINING • All long-term unemployed under 25s to be offered job or train...

We keep hearing reports of this area of law ('get your loan written off'', 'cancel my loan if over £7,000 and under £25,000 and before 2007', 'reduce my debt', 'clear my debt for life' etc.. etc..), being the new potentially big money spinner for a lot of law firms, and have been keeping track of recent developments. A candidate has recently sent us the following feedback from working for one of the operators in this field..."I had been working for x Solicitors who are linked to a claims management firm. As I worked there it became increasingly obvious that there was a lack of independence for us to advise our clients as to the strengths and weaknesses of their claims. Many files did not have claims at all but we were actively discouraged from telling clients upfront that there was no defect in the agreement. Management asked us to advise clients whose files had weak or very poor legal arguments that their files were being sent for further inves...

Recently it has been reported that the law firms in the USA are being badly affected by the global credit crisis. There have been reports in the US of the larger law firms making sudden redundancies, but the reports in the various logs and articles in the US legal news indicate that the actual reality is much worse. Apparently there are teams of lawyers being laid off, firms closing down right across the USA and very little work coming in to keep the remaining firms open and trading. The situation is fairly similar in the UK, except probably not as bad as that. In the last few weeks we have seen a large number of candidates register due to recent redundancies, but I have to say that most of the candidates I have seen coming through have been fairly high earning mid-level solicitors, and probably the sort that could be replaced by a firm with somebody more junior, and with a bit of investment, time and training could probably generate similar fee levels to a more senior solicitor on a h...

Law centres v. Law Firms Is there any difference between doing a training contract at a law centre or working for a part of your career at a law centre, than working in a law firm? This question obviously relates to anyone about to progress or currently in a high street legal career as opposed to a city firm or commercial practice. Is there any difference between work you would do at a law centre or the training there or a local or small high street practice? In terms of a career move, you will probably find that if you work in a law centre, you will get greater exposure and depth to a range of legal issues than you would working in a high street practice. It is also possible that the work you would do would be slightly more interesting than the work in a high street practice as law centres are more likely to pick up more interesting cases. However, the types of law you would deal with in a law centre are dramatically different to those you would expect to be covering on a daily basis ...

What do I do if my training contract is terminated? This started to happen a few years ago when some crime firms were struggling following new reforms by the Legal Services Commission. When a firm got into difficulties or thought they were about to the first thing they did was to terminate training contracts. Another scenario is when firms in recent times have trainee Solicitors due to start 12 months or 24 months in the future and then realise that their finances are not going to permit it. Training contracts are withdrawn and suddenly someone who had made a firm decision to join one particular firm and turned down others finds that they no longer have any training contracts to choose from at all. The first thing to do is not to panic if this happens to you, quite a lot of the time over the years we have seen Trainee Solicitors who have training contracts terminated walk into another post within a few months. Other firms who are still in business or not struggling financially see t...

Dealing with Bullies in the Workplace - A Guide for Employed Lawyers Bullying colleagues and employers can be an absolute nightmare for lawyers. The legal profession is rife with them, particularly as the pressure to achieve targets and billing levels gets higher and higher in difficult economic circumstances. One of the major issues we deal with from candidates and career coaching clients is how to handle bullying colleagues and employers: Bullying is about power and control and the results can be absolutely devastating. At worst the target will eventually leave to work somewhere less unpleasant; at best they will stay; grit their teeth and get more and more miserable, and less and less productive. It is estimated that workplace bullying affects 1 in 4 people at some point in their career. Bullying is about actions that are deliberate, debilitating and repeated. The target will be bullied until they either leave the organization or is totally subjugated. And then the bully will find t...

This comment was sent through by a reader. I should emphasise that it is a comment - I had problems with my blogspot software and hence have had to post it as a blog entry. The comment does not represent my experience or views. Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment . "Very interesting article on bullying in the workplace. In the legal profession there is, in my experience, a higher proportion of female bullies than in other walks of life. that's not to say more women are bullies than men - just that a larger number of the women in the profession have bullying traits. Perhaps that is down to the nature of the job, perhaps it is because it can be harder for a woman to make her mark and feels she has to adopt certain tactics. I experienced bullying from a female solicitor when I was an articled clerk in London; best thing in that case was to get out - which is what brought me up to Yorkshire (apart from my wife). Thereafter the bullies all tended to be men, not prevale...

Bullying colleagues and employers can be an absolute nightmare for lawyers. The legal profession is rife with the problem as far as we can see (we get a lot of calls to our career coaching service specifically on this subject), particularly as the pressure to achieve targets and billing levels gets higher and higher in difficult economic circumstances. Bullying is about power and control and the results can be absolutely devastating. At worst the target will eventually leave to work somewhere less unpleasant; at best they will stay; grit their teeth and get more and more miserable, and less and less productive. It is estimated that workplace bullying affects 1 in 4 people at some point in their career. Bullying is about actions that are deliberate, debilitating and repeated. The target will be bullied until they either leave the organization or is totally subjugated. And then the bully will find their next target. How to Identify and Deal with Bullying: 1. Understand what bullying is a...

Legal Job Market Report just released 1st March 2009 - http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/weeklyreport.htm

I would like to issue a challenge to all the CPD and legal course providers of the changing fields to a new area of law courses and diplomas that are currently doing the rounds in the legal profession: Send me any examples you have of a course delegate in the last 6-9 months (ie since the credit crunch) who has managed to use their investment of £995-£1,500 to secure a paid post in the field they are looking to convert to. I get a call on average once a week from a lawyer asking me for advice as to whether they ought to do these courses, and my advice has been to avoid them like the plague!! I can see no benefit at all from doing them - firms want practical experience, not academic study, and I simply cannot understand the merits of studying yet more law and paying 1-4 weeks salary in order to do so.. Am I being unfair? Do these courses have an effect? Get in touch, give me examples and I can then assist you in selling the courses to the legal profession... I await your response... Jon...

A Hertfordshire firm dealing with personal injury law work issued a press release recently to the Law Society Gazette to say that they are setting up a law firm in South Africa to handle personal injury cases at low cost. The Law Society Gazette talks about this new ground and almost hinting at it being the way for out sourcing in the future. It’s amazing that this continues to be a story, as the firm in question have been peddling these ideas for years, and if you look back through the Law Society Gazette they have featured fairly regularly over the years for promoting outsourcing. Every time something else happens the Law Society jump on it and publish a story, which probably does not reflect the reality very much at all. I suspect this is a case of the LSG being duped by PR into running a headline story... I cannot see what the difference is and why this story has made particularly the front page of the Law Society Gazette as it appears to do nothing but advertise the firm of solici...

In the last few months we have seen a large rise in the number of Legal Service Commission funded posts. It seems that a lot of firms are looking to expand their legal aid departments and take on new staff and a number of practices have applied and been awarded LSC contracts in areas that until recently were avoided like the plague by solicitors firms! We were recently approached by a firm who now have a contract in employment, welfare benefits, debt, housing, community care and mental health work and were on the look out for solicitors and paralegals to join and develop these areas of practice. This has not happened for quite some time, as firms have been concentrating on getting out of legal aid work and do more high street matters such as conveyancing and wills and probate. I think we are seeing a cycle return now with the collapse of the conveyancing market and firms are starting to go back into the legal aid areas. If my memory serves me correctly, the firm who have registered the...

Recently Ten Percent Legal Recruitment was assessed for the investor in people accreditation. We worked very hard on this and spent some time as a company ensuring that all our procedures and policies were in place and that our staff were aware of the various requirements of the Investor in People process. We wondered how the assessment would go and also what the questions were likely to be during the interviews. The assessor was very friendly and explained from the outset what she was wanting to do and we were already aware that we would have thirty minute interviews with the directors and managers and twenty minute interviews with the staff. We also had the Investors in People programme so we were able to look and see what the actual questions would be based on, but there was nowhere to indicate what questions would be asked in the investor in people assessments. So if this helps anyone else, here are the questions we were asked in our investors in people accreditation: The assessor ...

Good debt management - our experiences and systems As recruitment consultants, we have spent eight years trying to work out ways to get our clients to pay our invoices in good time, thus ensuring a decent cash flow for our company, but also ensuring that our terms and conditions are adhered to which then benefit the clients as they get generous rebate periods considerations if anything was to go wrong with a placement. In the eight years that the company has been operating, I estimate that on three separate occasions we have had to send bailiffs into firms, and on at least ten occasions we have had to issue proceedings either in the county court or using the small claims procedure. We have tried a whole raft of measures over the years with law firms to get payments made in good time, and this has become the following procedure: When we issue an invoice, we ask the firm to choose their charity for our charitable donation (Ten Percent donates ten percent of annual profits to a charitable...

I recently ran a CV preparation course at a UK University for the Legal Practice Course students there. One of the issues that arose during the seminars was the relevance & importance of activities and interests in a CV, and it was interesting that the vast majority of people there had very little to write down on their CVs. Some had put socialising with friends or going on to Facebook and others had put 'playing with my playstation' or 'reading a crime novel'. Activities and interests are probably the third most important part of your CV. Firstly because when you go for a job interview, you need to have something to talk about with the person interviewing you, and if you have a set of activities and interests, an interviewer can discuss these with you and particularly so if they share something in common. If you do not have anything in common it makes it very difficult to talk about much... I can think of plenty of interviews where I struggle to think of my next qu...