Skip to main content

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

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Overpaid Charity CEOs - top 40 of high paid employees - updated 2022

In 2014, we wrote an article about high pay in the charity sector after the Charity Commission started to require all charities to disclose pay of senior executives earning more than £60,000.    We have updated the list for 2022, with a comparison chart so you can see the difference between 2014 and 2022. We have included the source of the most recent salary levels and the year refers to the accounts year we extracted the salary information from.   2022 Top 40 Chart of High Paying Charities Charity Highest salary Year Consumers’ Association £390k-£400k 2020 MSI Reproductive Choices £240k-£250k 2020 Save the Children International £285k-£300k 2020 Cancer Research UK £240k-£250k 2020 The British Red Cross Society £170k-£180k 2020 Age UK £180k-£190k 2020

Is it possible to work as a Paralegal when you are a Qualified Solicitor

  This question comes up all the time and is quite a common query that we imagine the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) are getting better at answering due to the sheer number of people asking the question. Many years ago the advice seemed a bit varied at times, but we have recently had a candidate who wanted to work in a locum role in the short term and waiting to go back on the Roll and get a practising certificate after some time spent outside the profession. She has been given fairly concise advice on whether she could work as a paralegal whilst waiting to be readmitted which we are repeating here. This article is written as a discussion point and is not intended to be advice in any shape or form. For full advice on your particular set of circumstances please speak to the SRA (or whoever else you like, but please do not depend on the information in this article!). The SRA have a simple online test to determine if you need a practising certificate and this i

What questions are asked in an Investors in People Assessment?

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