Legal Recruitment Blog

A Forum recently had a post on entitled "Boycott Recruitment Agencies and Greedy Bosses!!" The post reads "Recruitment Agencies are cherry picking their clients & have no courtesy to reply back to your messages unless you call them!! They say they have hundreds of applications to review but by the time they have looked at your CV it’s too late - the dream job you desire is long gone." As a recruitment consultant I have to say that this probably appears to be the perception at present (we cherry pick the best solicitors and ignore the rest including most NQs). The truth is that we are being hit very badly by the recession as businesses. Think about it - there have probably been over 15,000 redundancies amongst solicitors in England & Wales since April 2008. This is just less than 10% of the workforce. There are no conveyancing jobs at all anywhere. There are no wills & probate jobs anywhere. Crime jobs are disappearing at a rate of knots as firms close th...

A training contract applicant has very kindly given us a detailed description of an assessment day that recently took place in the North West. It gives a flavour of the typical sort of day you will get in most medium and large law firms.. Here's what happened at the (North West Firm) assessment day. Introductions - we had to write a few facts about ourselves on a side of a4 paper, screw it in to a ball and throw it in the centre of the room, we all then had to go grab a ball and discover who it was and then use that to introduce the person to the group. We then had a group exercise. We were a group of four hikers, lost in a snow storm - in a tent -and had to decide on how many people should look for - and then from a list of 19 items decide which ten should be taken by the people who went for help and what items should remain for the people staying in the tent. I then had a competency based interview. First question 'what is your unique selling point' (i nearly fell off ...

The DWP have awarded Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited a 2 year contract to provide jobsearch support for newly unemployed professionals. At present, the scheme is very much in its infancy, but we have already provided the service to professionals based in the West Midlands and the North West. The scheme works by the Jobcentre Plus Adviser referring their clients through to us, and within 24 hours we arrange an appointment, usually over the telephone as the service is nationwide. This appointment is about 45 mins long, and we cover a whole range of topics, concentrating as required on particular areas. At the end of the consultation we provide an action plan to the job centre and the client, and continue to provide support as required by email. If you want to take advantage of this service, you need to be unemployed, and also speak to your adviser rather than ourselves as the referral has to come from them. Jonathan Fagan is MD of http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ and senior career coach at http...

Budget is out again, and lots of things relevant to lawyers and law firms: Most important first..... CIGARETTES, ALCOHOL AND FUEL • Alcohol taxes to go up 2% from midnight - putting the price of the average pint up 1p (arrghhh). CAR SCRAPPAGE SCHEME (does this mean someone could start buying up 10 years old cars and sell them on at a profit? Anyone using this idea, please ensure you pay me a fair commission!) • From next month until March 2010 motorists to get £2,000 discount on new cars if they trade in cars older than 10 years • The government will provide £1,000 with the industry expected to provide the other half TAX • Income tax for those earning more than £150,000 to rise to 50% from April 2010 • Tax relief on pensions to be reduced for people on more than £150,000 a year from April 2011 UK ECONOMY • Growth expected to pick up in 2010, expanding by 1.25%. • Economy to grow by 3.5% annually from 2011 JOBS AND TRAINING • All long-term unemployed under 25s to be offered job or train...

We keep hearing reports of this area of law ('get your loan written off'', 'cancel my loan if over £7,000 and under £25,000 and before 2007', 'reduce my debt', 'clear my debt for life' etc.. etc..), being the new potentially big money spinner for a lot of law firms, and have been keeping track of recent developments. A candidate has recently sent us the following feedback from working for one of the operators in this field..."I had been working for x Solicitors who are linked to a claims management firm. As I worked there it became increasingly obvious that there was a lack of independence for us to advise our clients as to the strengths and weaknesses of their claims. Many files did not have claims at all but we were actively discouraged from telling clients upfront that there was no defect in the agreement. Management asked us to advise clients whose files had weak or very poor legal arguments that their files were being sent for further inves...

Recently it has been reported that the law firms in the USA are being badly affected by the global credit crisis. There have been reports in the US of the larger law firms making sudden redundancies, but the reports in the various logs and articles in the US legal news indicate that the actual reality is much worse. Apparently there are teams of lawyers being laid off, firms closing down right across the USA and very little work coming in to keep the remaining firms open and trading. The situation is fairly similar in the UK, except probably not as bad as that. In the last few weeks we have seen a large number of candidates register due to recent redundancies, but I have to say that most of the candidates I have seen coming through have been fairly high earning mid-level solicitors, and probably the sort that could be replaced by a firm with somebody more junior, and with a bit of investment, time and training could probably generate similar fee levels to a more senior solicitor on a h...

Law centres v. Law Firms Is there any difference between doing a training contract at a law centre or working for a part of your career at a law centre, than working in a law firm? This question obviously relates to anyone about to progress or currently in a high street legal career as opposed to a city firm or commercial practice. Is there any difference between work you would do at a law centre or the training there or a local or small high street practice? In terms of a career move, you will probably find that if you work in a law centre, you will get greater exposure and depth to a range of legal issues than you would working in a high street practice. It is also possible that the work you would do would be slightly more interesting than the work in a high street practice as law centres are more likely to pick up more interesting cases. However, the types of law you would deal with in a law centre are dramatically different to those you would expect to be covering on a daily basis ...