Legal Recruitment Blog

A message for all law students in their 1st, 2nd or even 3rd year.  Make one New Years Resolution as follows: "I will not get a 2.2 degree. I will work harder and get a 2.1." In fact you could make two resolutions - the other resolution would be to get as much legal work experience as you possibly can but this does not add as much to your career at this stage as the first resolution so we will stick with this! If you do not get a 2.1 or 1st class degree (and it seems a lot easier these days at certain Universities to get the latter), your legal career will be damaged. Forever. And Ever. And Ever More. 'What a load of nonsense' I hear you say.  'Why would my career be affected in 20 years time by a degree I get when I am 21 years old?' Why indeed! Unfortunately the legal profession is relatively easy to enter at a certain level, but very difficult to enter at another level. The difference is the salary you will earn for the rest of your career....

The Employment Allowance - new tax break for small firms The Employment Allowance was brought in for the last budget announcement. It appears to be a rather generous tax break which in return for ticking a box when doing PAYE online, SMEs get £2k knocked off their national insurance bill. There seems nothing else to it and apparently it also includes directors' salaries. This may be an attempt to encourage more limited companies to pay more of their senior staff in wages rather than dividends. We received an interesting update recently from a business magazine which included a link to the government's employment allowance calculator - www.employmentallowance.com/allowance-calculator . The start date is April 2014. Lets hope it turns out to be as good as it sounds.. 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 Data...

Retaining Staff after Christmas - A Guide It is well known in recruitment circles that one of the best times to pick up new quality candidates is between Christmas and the New Year. There are a number of reasons for this but the main ones we seem to come across time and again are below. Most of these are avoidable as you will see: Inappropriate comments or behaviour at the staff Christmas party. No staff Christmas party arranged. No Christmas bonus paid. No Christmas cards, presents or bonus paid. No bonus paid despite one being promised (and/or pay rise). Lawyers having too much time to think about their workplace and colleagues when not at work. No chance of any progression and no real plans for the future indicated by the firm. Being called into work between Christmas and the New Year when other senior staff in the firm are still off work (good time for job hunting). No spirit of Christmas shown on the last day before the Christmas break (it is so easy to break ...

Reference Checks - Lessons Learned In this day and age, with LinkedIn, Facebook, Company-check.co.uk (very useful resource) and all the other online tools available, one would imagine that it is very difficult indeed for anyone to attempt to submit a CV and not be fully checkable. Unfortunately there are still those out there who try and a recent experience of a candidate registering for locum work has meant a tightening of our procedures as to who gets to register and be introduced for work. A candidate registered with us and started to express an interest in locum and consultancy posts. We were a little bemused by the CV because it had numerous sections on that were more than just a little ambiguous in terms of the work undertaken in the recent past. A check online did not reveal very much at all, but we received a tip off from a firm to say that the candidate's name had been changed slightly and in fact he had received a rather lengthy prison sentence for a ...

The Legal Practice Course - time for a change? We recently had a look at a few statistics surrounding the Legal Practice Course. The current cost of undertaking the Legal Practice Course at the College of Law ranges from £10,845 to £13,905. The Graduate Diploma in Law is £7,240 to £9,820 (depends on location). Wolverhampton University fees, as a comparison, are £9,010 for the Legal Practice Course and Manchester Metropolitan charges £5,560 for the Graduate Diploma in Law. According to government statistics there were 93,575 law undergraduates in 2011-2012. In 2011-2012 there were 4,869 training contracts available. Assuming that over half of these are people who don't want a training contract, or go down the BPTC route, this still leaves a lot of potential candidates out there who are not going to get qualified - the figure does not include those entering via the GDL route. If you consider that since 2008 the training contract figure has not increase...