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Predictions for 2011 in the legal job market

Happy New Year to all our readers! Here follow our 2011 Legal Recruitment and Legal Job Market Predictions:

1. The job market is going to heat up, with demand particularly strong for experienced career paralegals, support staff and legal cashiers. The reason for this is that a lot of firms are starting to realise that they do not necessarily need to recruit solicitors to undertake fairly straightforward transactional work and instead can get paralegals and unqualified executives for a lot less money.
2. As this happens, salary levels are going to stay low for solicitors. I do not see any improvement on salaries within the next 2-3 years.
3. The majority of experienced unemployed non-qualified fee earners will find work very quickly, and as this happens more firms will then grudgingly give up on looking around for cheaper options and move back into recruiting solicitors again.
4. We think that by the middle of 2011 legal recruitment will be at similar levels to 2007-2008 and a lot of firms will be struggling to recruit good quality candidates in most areas, apart from NQs in and around the South East and London.
5. The Legal Services Commission changes will continue to affect legal aid fields, but we still expect to see a very busy period in April and October when the duty solicitor rota deadlines come up.
6. On the commercial side it will remain fairly busy but only at 2-7 years PQE. Anything too junior and too senior is not going to attract very much interest.
7. Hotspots for 2011 will be:
London
Kent
Yorkshire
South Wales
East Midlands

Coldspots:
North West (especially Manchester)
South West
East Anglia

We will have a look back at these predictions in 2012 and see how close we were....

Happy New Year! Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment.
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment - Online Legal Recruitment for Solicitors, Legal Executives, Fee Earners, Support Staff, Managers and Paralegals. Visit our Website to search or download our Vacancy Database or view our Candidate Database online.

Our Legal Careers Shop has eBooks on CV Writing for Lawyers, Legal Job Interview Guide, Interview Answers for Lawyers, NQ Career Guide, Guide to Finding Work Experience or a Training Contract and the Entrants Guide to the Legal Profession. To visit our Sale/Clearance section please click here.

www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop

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