Legal Recruitment Blog

Hmm. Slater & Gordon are struggling - job losses, share value dropping, company turnover plummeting.. Our local radio station seems to have stopped playing adverts mentioning the local law firm brand aged 100 years+ with the added catchphrase "part of Slater & Gordon". Is this going to be a new competition? Guess how long the new legal market entrant is going to last? When are large multinationals and organisations going to realise that high street law is profitable to a certain degree but seemingly very dependent on a relatively small scale operation? Anyone remember the bulk conveyancing operations of the 1990s and 2000s? Barnetts in Southport is a good example. The senior partner there seemed to be the Law Society Gazette favourite whenever a quote was needed on modernising the way high street law firms worked. He was forever commenting on how profitable everyone could be if only they looked to the future. Now look at them - RIchard Barnett was struck off for u

The Sutton Trust, a foundation with the aim of encouraging more state educated school children to attend better quality universities and reach the higher echelons of society, has published a report in the last few days. It has concluded that 74% of judges, 71% of barristers and 51% of solicitors went to independent schools, with 78% of barristers and 55% of solicitors going to Oxbridge. I have to pick fault with this research - when you look at the sources of information used by the Sutton Trust to determine these figures they have basically been through the Chambers Directory. Great. The report seems to have been penned by an academic, but the selective nature of the report makes wonderful headlines but is almost certainly inaccurate to a wide extreme. Damned lies and statistics and all that. There are over 110,000 solicitors in the UK. How many of these are in the Chambers Directory? Does Chambers really list the elite solicitors in the profession? I remember being in practice and