Legal Recruitment Blog

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...