Legal Recruitment Blog

Earlier in the summer Eversheds published a report or made a press statement to say that recruitment agents ought to be forced to promote diversity and equal opportunities and that the blame for failing to do so in law firms lay firmly at the doors of recruitment consultants. (If I have misrepresented Eversheds in any way with this, please accept my apologies and Eversheds, feel free to write to me). I agree partly with Eversheds in this matter. There are very few recruitment agencies, including ourselves who measure equal opportunities and diversity when candidates register with agents on their websites or presumably by sending a CV by post. In fact, the call from Eversheds has made me think twice about it and Ten Percent will shortly be adding a selection of equal opportunities questions at the bottom of every registration form so that we are able to quantify sex, ethnic origin and possibly age as well. I have considered it before, but decided against it on the basis that some candid...

I wonder if you can help me. I am a mortgage advisor with two to three years experience and I want to know whether it is worth me taking the law conversion course to qualify as a solicitor. What are my chances of getting a training contract and how easy will it be for me to qualify? Will it be a waste of money? This was a query raised yesterday by a caller. It’s quite a common query for people to want to raise as the cost of the conversion course is so extreme. There are very few other professions that get away with charging so much money to their potential intake in order to qualify. In fact, teachers get paid to train and so do doctors. Surveyors don’t seem to have to spend so much money and neither do architects. However lawyers get hit for rather an extreme amount. It is not even clear why the colleges have got away so long with the legal practice course being so expensive. These days with a good proportion of legal aid solicitors earning less that the other trades surrounding...

Alternative career options for conveyancers In recent times it has become a common query on our careers site for advice on alternative career options for conveyancing lawyers. In one way it is quite interesting how people get very worried in blips like the current market dips so quickly and don’t look at the longer term side of things. It is clear that there will be conveyancing jobs sooner or later, as housing markets do not tend to just collapse and never come back again. People still need to buy and sell houses, and there are also people out there who want to buy houses to let them out, particularly if the market drops and a lot of houses become available at quite a cheap price. However the query is often that they don’t want to practice in conveyancing anymore and what other options are there out there for conveyancing lawyers. The same thing happened last year when crime solicitors started to feel the pinch with the Pleasant report that was so well written by Lord Carter came int...

I received a request for help yesterday from a law student approaching his final exams and wanting to know whether he should commit to doing the legal practice course and spending the thousands of pounds on it and getting into lots of debt. He explained that he needed a commercial loan in order to do this. The advice in such circumstances is very simple. If you know what it is that a solicitor does and have good work experience, expect a 2:1 degree and are fully committed to a career in law, then yes, you should spend the money to do the LPC even if you do not yet have a training contract lined up. A lot of people get their training contracts whilst they are doing the LPC and it is fairly common to finish doing the LPC and then get placed. If you have no legal work experience, and are not entirely sure that you want to be a solicitor or have a predicted third class degree or low 2:2 with no hope of getting a 2:1, I would strongly advise you to think twice. Competition to get training c...

I received an email yesterday from a student who had decided to become a lawyer, has signed up to do their graduate diploma of law and legal practice course and was wondering what to do next. She said she was feeling a bit overwhelmed as to what she ought to be doing in the meantime. Apart from the obvious advice that we always give, which is to make sure you really do want to be a lawyer before signing up to do these courses and spending over £12,000, that is to get some experience in exactly what it is a solicitor does in practice. However now is the time to be thinking about what you ought to be thinking, so the same advice. The first step I advise everyone to take when considering a legal career is to go and get experience in exactly what it is a solicitor does in practice, and how their work fits in with everyone else’s. For example, you do not need to necessarily go to a solicitors firm and get work experience (which is very hard to get these days anyway) as you could simply go t...

In the current climate with lots of conveyancing and property solicitors currently out of work, law firms could perhaps try the techniques used by the BBC in the recent television programme “The Apprentice”. It would be quite simple to do this and perhaps a law firm could try it out and let me know how they got on. Firstly you put an advert for a conveyancing solicitor somewhere prominent and receive hundreds of applications. You sift these down to perhaps ten and ask them all to come to a selection day at your offices. Find a time when your wills and probate partner is available as it is often these particular characters who are the grumpiest and most awkward in a law firm, particularly when interviewing potential employees. They also tend to fancy themselves as advocates as they don’t get much experience of the non-contentious side. You can have perhaps five tasks in the morning and at the end of each one, you could fire one of the potential applicants. The first task could be to put...

I thought it may be worth adding a note to the blog about conveyancing in London because we are getting a lot of enquiries and a lot of worried candidates at present. I estimate that at present we are getting about ten new CVs a day from conveyancing lawyers in and around London looking for work. Bearing in mind it takes us in the region of about 20 minutes to process each application, register the candidate and add them to our databases, we’re starting to have to introduce a backlog to conveyancers. At present, there are not the vacancies out there to justify the work being put in. I make no apology for this as at the end of the day, Ten Percent is a commercial organisation and with the market getting very tight we have to focus resources on specific areas and conveyancing in London is not one of them. As a result of this, some candidates will find that there is a considerable delay before they get an acknowledgement off us to say that we have registered them. At present, the backlog ...