Legal Recruitment Blog

I would like to issue a challenge to all the CPD and legal course providers of the changing fields to a new area of law courses and diplomas that are currently doing the rounds in the legal profession: Send me any examples you have of a course delegate in the last 6-9 months (ie since the credit crunch) who has managed to use their investment of £995-£1,500 to secure a paid post in the field they are looking to convert to. I get a call on average once a week from a lawyer asking me for advice as to whether they ought to do these courses, and my advice has been to avoid them like the plague!! I can see no benefit at all from doing them - firms want practical experience, not academic study, and I simply cannot understand the merits of studying yet more law and paying 1-4 weeks salary in order to do so.. Am I being unfair? Do these courses have an effect? Get in touch, give me examples and I can then assist you in selling the courses to the legal profession... I await your response... Jon...

A Hertfordshire firm dealing with personal injury law work issued a press release recently to the Law Society Gazette to say that they are setting up a law firm in South Africa to handle personal injury cases at low cost. The Law Society Gazette talks about this new ground and almost hinting at it being the way for out sourcing in the future. It’s amazing that this continues to be a story, as the firm in question have been peddling these ideas for years, and if you look back through the Law Society Gazette they have featured fairly regularly over the years for promoting outsourcing. Every time something else happens the Law Society jump on it and publish a story, which probably does not reflect the reality very much at all. I suspect this is a case of the LSG being duped by PR into running a headline story... I cannot see what the difference is and why this story has made particularly the front page of the Law Society Gazette as it appears to do nothing but advertise the firm of solici...

In the last few months we have seen a large rise in the number of Legal Service Commission funded posts. It seems that a lot of firms are looking to expand their legal aid departments and take on new staff and a number of practices have applied and been awarded LSC contracts in areas that until recently were avoided like the plague by solicitors firms! We were recently approached by a firm who now have a contract in employment, welfare benefits, debt, housing, community care and mental health work and were on the look out for solicitors and paralegals to join and develop these areas of practice. This has not happened for quite some time, as firms have been concentrating on getting out of legal aid work and do more high street matters such as conveyancing and wills and probate. I think we are seeing a cycle return now with the collapse of the conveyancing market and firms are starting to go back into the legal aid areas. If my memory serves me correctly, the firm who have registered the...

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 ...

Good debt management - our experiences and systems As recruitment consultants, we have spent eight years trying to work out ways to get our clients to pay our invoices in good time, thus ensuring a decent cash flow for our company, but also ensuring that our terms and conditions are adhered to which then benefit the clients as they get generous rebate periods considerations if anything was to go wrong with a placement. In the eight years that the company has been operating, I estimate that on three separate occasions we have had to send bailiffs into firms, and on at least ten occasions we have had to issue proceedings either in the county court or using the small claims procedure. We have tried a whole raft of measures over the years with law firms to get payments made in good time, and this has become the following procedure: When we issue an invoice, we ask the firm to choose their charity for our charitable donation (Ten Percent donates ten percent of annual profits to a charitable...

I recently ran a CV preparation course at a UK University for the Legal Practice Course students there. One of the issues that arose during the seminars was the relevance & importance of activities and interests in a CV, and it was interesting that the vast majority of people there had very little to write down on their CVs. Some had put socialising with friends or going on to Facebook and others had put 'playing with my playstation' or 'reading a crime novel'. Activities and interests are probably the third most important part of your CV. Firstly because when you go for a job interview, you need to have something to talk about with the person interviewing you, and if you have a set of activities and interests, an interviewer can discuss these with you and particularly so if they share something in common. If you do not have anything in common it makes it very difficult to talk about much... I can think of plenty of interviews where I struggle to think of my next qu...

I have read a lot of articles recently from business experts on how to survive the recession and including advice from people who had been through the last two recessions as to how to cope with the downturn in business trade sales and just about everything else. One thing that comes through all my reading is that flexibility is the key to survival. I’ll give you a quick example as to how it has affected our business, Ten Percent Legal Recruitment . Ten Percent Legal Recruitment offers the lowest recruitment fees in the UK for the recruitment of permanent and temporary lawyers with law firms, in house departments and local authorities. We have been charging 15 percent fees for many years now without any increases according to the salary or type of post. Our competitors start their fees at 18 percent and they go up to anything around 35 percent. Since the recession has kicked in, we have been getting requests from firms to lower our fees, which is fairly rare for us as our clients are us...