Legal Recruitment News

Newsletter
Welcome to the May edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update, locum availabiity and new candidates. Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD and non-practising solicitor of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent

Job Market Update – May 8th
April-May 2014 – summed up in a few sentences:
* Permanent vacancies up
* Locum vacancies up in April
* Conveyancing up – severe shortage of NQ-5 year PQE solicitors
* Commercial Property – severe shortage of all candidates
* Continued increase in vacancies attracting only poor quality or very few applications.
* Market outlook – still buoyant.

Statistics
Current live vacancies: 550
New permanent vacancies added in April 2014: 44
New candidates registering: 105
Average ‘Job Strength Factor’ for new vacancies in April: 3
Increase/Decrease in new vacancies from previous month: -15%
Increase/Decrease in new candidates from previous month: -14%

CIPS UK Services Report for past 4 weeks:
* Activity and new business both increase at sharp rates
* Employment up sharply in line with positive expectations for growth
* Cost inflation continues to weaken

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment publishes the number of new vacancies, new candidates and indicate the increase or decrease from the previous month. We aim to assist the legal profession by showing the market from our perspective. Traditionally our clients have been high street law firms and smaller niche commercial practices.

The average job strength gives a good indication of the market because:

1. A Poor Job Strength on vacancies indicates a struggling market. When trade is bad, employers seek options for increasing turnover which usually also involves contacting recruitment agencies in the hope that they have candidates with their own following and not looking for a salary.
2. A Strong Job Strength on vacancies indicates a buoyant market, particularly if it is in connection with an increase in numbers of new vacancies.

Vacancies are each graded 1-5, with 5 being a very strong vacancy and 1 being a very weak vacancy.

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.

4 in 10 Lawyers would not encourage anyone to follow in their footsteps

A new survey has been commissioned showing that 4 out of 10 solicitors would NOT encourage anyone to follow in their footsteps.

Wesleyan for Lawyers managed to get hold of 103 ‘lawyers’ to conduct this poll, which is pretty poor considering there are over 120,000 solicitors on the Roll in the UK and considerably more support staff and non-qualified fee earners. Very unrepresentative and a bit of a non-news story!

However I suspect the real figure is something above 60%.

Why? 7 reasons.

1. I cannot imagine anyone who deals with the Legal Aid Agency wanting to encourage anyone else to follow in their footsteps.
2. High street solicitors who have not got to partnership status are unlikely to suggest to anyone else that it really is a good idea to run up debts of £44,000 going through the education and training bits before earning a maximum salary of £40,000 for the remainder of their career.
3. City lawyers in my experience seem to hate their jobs, themselves, the long hours and the lack of much of a life, even though they are getting paid considerable sums of money. Whilst they may want to attempt to glamourise their roles in the firms and essentially call it a vocation, I suspect a lot would not suggest following them.
4. Newly qualified solicitors outside the Magic Circle firms must look at their loans and overdrafts and wonder how and why on earth they ever got to the position they are in.
5. Lawyers who have gone off to work in local authorities and as lecturers must again look at how hard they worked, what they gave up and the debts they have had to work through and pay off and wonder why they ever bothered.
6. Partners who spend about 70 hours in the office each week with work at the weekends as well catching up with paperwork are hardly likely to want to encourage anyone else to follow them.
7. Any lawyer who has the pleasure of regularly dealing with the Courts is not exactly going to speak about their experiences with any glowing reference.

So assuming there are 120,000 solicitors in England & Wales, I reckon this must surely account for over 60,000 of them. With this in mind, I think the Wesleyan survey is probably not too far away.

How many lawyers have called for a plumber or electrician to come and do some work, discovered their daily rate is not far off and sat back and wondered if only?

There again, if the same poll was undertaken with GPs and consultants, how many of them would encourage anyone to follow in their footsteps?

Are we as professionals always liable to winge about our existence, regardless of how good or bad it is?

Jonathan Fagan is a Solicitor (non-practising) and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment.

Permanent Candidate Registrations in the last 3 days
Email us to request a CV or register vacancies by clicking here – Locum or Permanent

23057 November 1994 qualified crime solicitor with duty status and higher rights of audience. Looking for freelance duty or HCA posts in the North West.

23060 2007 qualified commercial property solicitor looking to return to the profession post career break. Looking for a part time post in North East Hampshire, Surrey or Reading. Speaks fluent German.

23061 Conveyancing paralegal with over 2 years experience. Looking for a post in Central London.

23062 September 2014 qualified solicitor with experience in family and child care law, residential property, property litigation, mental health and regulatory law. Looking for a family law post in London or Surrey.

23063 June 2014 qualified crime solicitor and accredited police station representative with further experience in VHCC work, regulatory law and family law. Looking for a crime or fraud post in London.

23064 September 2014 qualified local authority solicitor experienced in all aspects of in house local authority work including planning, commercial property, commercial contracts and commercial and civil litigation. Looking for a planning post in London and the Home Counties.

23065 1988 qualified commercial property solicitor. Looking for locum post either in house or in private practice following short career break. Looking for posts in West Yorkshire, Manchester and Derbyshire or the Midlands.

23066 Conveyancing paralegal with experience since October 2012. Looking for a post in Manchester and the North West.

23067 July 2011 qualified immigration solicitor and senior immigration caseworker with OISC Level 3 accreditation. Looking for a post in the Midlands.

23068 Highly experienced company commercial lawyer with experience dating back to 2006. Experienced in commercial contracts, IP and trademarks and commercial litigation. Looking for a company commercial or IP post in London, Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire and Buckinghamshire.

23070 Personal injury fee earner handling own caseload of RTA, EL and PL claims. Over 14 years experience. Looking for a post in South or Mid Wales or around the Bristol/Bath areas.

23071 2001 qualified wills & probate solicitor dealing with will drafting, lasting powers of attorney and probate matters. Looking for a post within a 45 minute commute of Slough.

23076 September 2006 qualified employment law solicitor experience in both contentious and non-contentious matters. Looking for a post in London, Essex or North Kent.

23077 Conveyancing paralegal with over 12 months experience looking in London.

23080 Legal assistant and legal receptionist with conveyancing and wills & probate experience. Looking for a post in Central London.

23081 Legal cashier with over 3 years experience. Looking for a post in the Midlands.

23088 Legal executive specialising in conveyancing with experience dating back to 1990 in residential, commercial and agricultural property. 5 years experience working in the property department of the LA as well as private practice experience. Looking for a post in Shropshire, West Midlands, South Cheshire or North and Mid Wales.

 

New Locums

22953 1974 qualified senior litigation solicitor, working as a professional support lawyer covering insurance law and regulatory law. Looking for similar locum post as a professional support lawyer, document reviewer and legal support. Looking for posts in London and the South East. Speaks French and some knowledge of Spanish and Italian.

22959 2009 qualified FILEX legal executive specialising in claimant personal injury, RTA, OL, EL. Looking for locum or permanent posts. Willing to travel as far as Worcester, Swansea or Cardiff for contract position or around Herefordshire for a permanent post.

22961 2003 qualified family law solicitor experienced in all aspects for family and child care law, both privately and publicly funded. Further experience in residential conveyancing. Looking for family/child care locum posts in South, North or West Yorkshire.

22962 1990 qualified corporate commercial solicitor with extensive experience in corporate finance, non contentious trademark work, compliance and company secretarial work. Looking for locum or permanent posts in the South West of England including Wiltshire or London.

22967 December 2002 qualified wills & probate solicitor. Looking for locum posts anywhere in the South East, Oxfordshire and surrounding counties.

22993 1980 qualified property solicitor with experience in both residential and commercial conveyancing. Looking for locum posts within a 40 mile radius of Northampton.

23000 1983 senior commercial litigation solicitor looking for locum posts anywhere in the UK.

23012 March 2003 qualified conveyancing solicitor with a further 16 years as a qualified FILEX legal executive Experienced in residential conveyancing, wills & probate and light commercial work. Looking for locum or permanent posts in the West Midlands.

23049 November 1999 qualified employment law solicitor with over 6 years specialist experience and a background in general civil litigation. Looking for locum posts in the North East of England.

23053 1988 qualified highly experienced commercial and residential property solicitor. Looking for locum posts in London and the South East and available immediately. Hourly rate – market rates.

 

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
We are a specialist legal recruiter, covering the whole of the UK. A large proportion of our vacancies are based in London and the South East, but we do assist firms elsewhere on a very regular basis. Over 10,500 lawyers are registered with us and we have access to a range of external and internal job boards and websites where we do not have candidates available ourselves. We also assist with recruitment advice and assistance, regularly advising partners and practice managers on suitable salary and package levels.

Our company is unique for a number of reasons, including the fact that we are not shy to publish our fee structure and also donate a chunk of our profits to charity each year. We offer unlimited permanent and locum recruitment for a fixed fee of just £60 per month (terms apply) or 15% one-off fees for permanent and 18% for locum. We donate 10% of our profits annually to charity, hence our name.

At present we have three recruitment consultants, Jonathan Fagan, Clare Fagan and Pete Gresty, together with our finance director Pearl McNamara. Together we have over 40 years of experience in the legal profession. Jonathan Fagan is a qualified solicitor and still (reluctantly!) undertakes litigation on behalf of the company when required. He also provides a career coaching service to qualified lawyers and law graduates, although this is on a very selective basis.

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment also owns Interim Lawyers, a specialist locum service, charging 18% fees for placements. We also own a further 45 domain names and websites. We operate an outsourced UK based typing service as well and are preferred suppliers to a number of institutional clients and law firms across the UK and overseas.

The Ten-Percent Group of Legal Recruitment websites gives 10% of annual profits to charity (hence our name). We have carried on with this tradition since we formed the company 14 years ago. So far over £51,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our newsletter and look forward to hearing from you if we can assist further.

Warm regards

Jonathan Fagan
Consultant

Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan

Legal Recruitment News is produced by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – you can view all versions of the e-newsletter at www.legal-recruitment.co.uk. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment was established in 2000 and donates 10% of profits to charity, hence the name.

Interim Lawyers – www.interimlawyers.co.uk
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – www.ten-percent.co.uk
Legal Recruitment Newsletter – www.legal-recruitment.co.uk

T: 0207 127 4343
E: jobs@interimlawyers.co.uk
E: jobs@ten-percent.co.uk

Interim Lawyers
27 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AX

Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited
2nd Floor
145-157 St John Street
London
EC1V 4PY

Legal Recruitment News – April 3rd 2014

Welcome to the April edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update, becoming an expert in 10,000 hours, locum availabiity and new candidates. Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD and non-practising solicitor of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent

Job Market Update – April 3rd

April 2014 – summed up in a few sentences:
* Permanent vacancies up
* Locum vacancies up on March but still lower than an average month
* Conveyancing up
* Crime down
* Litigation up
* Further increase in vacancies attracting no, poor quality or few applications.
* Market outlook – still buoyant.

Statistics
Current live vacancies: 549
New permanent vacancies added in March 2014: 52
New candidates registering: 122
Average ‘Job Strength Factor’ for new vacancies in March: 3.5
Increase/Decrease in new vacancies from previous month: +67%
Increase/Decrease in new candidates from previous month: -24%

KPMG Job Market Report for past 4 weeks:
* Faster rise in permanent placements but growth of temp billings eases
* Salaries for permanent staff increase at sharpest rate since October 2007
* Candidate availability declines at stronger pace
(this is very similar to our findings)

Comment from KPMG Partner:
“Britain appears to be suffering from a clash of confidence. With permanent appointments rising at the strongest rate for almost four years, employers appear determined to show they are secure enough to make long-term commitments. Candidates, on the other hand, are less certain, preferring to stay put than advance their careers in a new environment.

Temporary placements are falling and with starting salaries rising at their highest rate for almost seven years, all the indications are that any concerns over job security may be unwarranted. Those in the North are recruiting hardest and fastest, and even the slowest area – in London – is seeing a marked increase. The hope now must be that employees and employers rethink their approach and the clash of confidence is replaced by a meeting of minds.”

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment publishes the number of new vacancies, new candidates and indicate the increase or decrease from the previous month. We aim to assist the legal profession by showing the market from our perspective. Traditionally our clients have been high street law firms and smaller niche commercial practices.

The average job strength gives a good indication of the market because:
1. A Poor Job Strength on vacancies indicates a struggling market. When trade is bad, employers seek options for increasing turnover which usually also involves contacting recruitment agencies in the hope that they have candidates with their own following and not looking for a salary.
2. A Strong Job Strength on vacancies indicates a buoyant market, particularly if it is in connection with an increase in numbers of new vacancies.
Vacancies are each graded 1-5, with 5 being a very strong vacancy and 1 being a very weak vacancy.

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.

Permanent Candidate Registrations in the last 3 days

02041613 Family Panel member with some litigation, looking around Essex.
31031442 Legal Cashier with over 10 years experience with same firm, looking in Kent.
25031449 Conveyancing Solicitor, NQ, looking in Reading.
02042245 Junior Litigation Paralegal looking around London. County Court experience.
02042127 Family Solicitor, 5 years PQE, looking around Essex.
02042030 Conveyancing Solicitor, 5 years PQE, with commercial mortgage experience as
well. High end, central London – FT or PT. £60k+ salary.
02041935 Planning Solicitor from private practice. NQ level. Midlands or London.
02041113 Wills & Probate Solicitor, PT, looking in N London or Herts. 10 years PQE.
01041336 Family Solicitor 10+ years PQE, looking around Hampshire and Dorset.
24031946 Duty Solicitor from Legal 500 firm looking around Yorkshire. Junior.

Locums Available Immediately

01041029 Locum Conveyancing Solicitor, just finished a 6 month assignment, looking around London and the South East.
21837 May 2009 qualified litigation solicitor, experience in civil and commercial litigation, dispute resolution, property litigation, employment law (contentious and non-contentious) and debt recovery.
21816 Senior solicitor, experienced in residential and commercial property and tax law. Also able to carry out wills & probate work. Looking for locum posts in London.
21807 1998 qualified commercial property solicitor working as a property consultant. Experienced in landlord & tenant as well as commercial property.
21759 November 2000 qualified litigation solicitor with experience in general civil litigation, contentious probate, insolvency & bankruptcy, debt recovery and professional negligence. Looking for locum post in London, along the M4 corridor including Reading.
21724 Litigation fee earner with over 10 years experience in personal injury, both claimant and defendent, (RTA, EL, PL).
21707 1986 qualified locum conveyancing solicitor dealing with a mix of residential and commercial conveyancing.
21690 September 2010 qualified wills & probate solicitor dealing with contentious and non-contentious wills, probate and trusts.
We have over 700 candidates registered for locum work.

Conveyancing – salary warning

In an expanding market it is quite easy to spot trends, and as of yet we have not seen any marked improvement in salary levels filtering through. Back in 2007 when the market was at its peak it was quite common for candidates to attend job interviews, indicate a salary level and then negotiate for about 1-2 weeks before agreeing to join a firm. On numerous occasions we placed conveyancing solicitors on salaries around London of c.£45-50k plus bonus and package.
These sorts of levels are yet to be seen in the current market, but I anticipate firms starting to up the ante in order to attract more applicants. We have a number of vacancies around the UK where we have simply been unable to get any applications of note at all. Conveyancers are very nervous about making moves from jobs where their salary still reflects the recession levels and it is not going to be long before more of these come back to market.
It may well be time to look at your conveyancing team’s salary levels and make sure you are paying the right amount to retain your staff. Otherwise you could start to see departures as other firms increase their offerings to recruit and expand. If you are paying a 2-3 year PQE conveyancing solicitor less than £30k anywhere in the UK, this is something to seriously consider carefully. Anything over £40k and you are probably secure for the time being.
If you still have your staff on some kind of profit share arrangement dating back to 2008/2009 in the property department it is definitely time to start thinking about moving them into salaried positions. Sooner or later they will start looking elsewhere unless they are making considerable sums of money through this type of arrangement. The market is picking up and it won’t be long before more conveyancers start to dip their toe into the market and see what else they can find.

Crime Duty Solicitors – rota deadline approaching

By way of reminder for any crime firms who are thinking of taking on duty solicitors before the next rota deadline (12th May we think), it is probably time to start putting the feelers out. We have a few firms in Kent looking for duty solicitors on a part time basis (ie the duty solicitors earn most of their income elsewhere) but not a lot else. If you want to recruit, please get in touch – there are plenty of duty solicitors out there. Please note that in order to use us to recruit duty solicitors you will need to join our £60 scheme – further details on request (reply to this email).

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment

We are a specialist legal recruiter, covering the whole of the UK. A large proportion of our vacancies are based in London and the South East, but we do assist firms elsewhere on a very regular basis. Over 10,500 lawyers are registered with us and we have access to a range of external and internal job boards and websites where we do not have candidates available ourselves. We also assist with recruitment advice and assistance, regularly advising partners and practice managers on suitable salary and package levels.

Our company is unique for a number of reasons, including the fact that we are not shy to publish our fee structure and also donate a chunk of our profits to charity each year. We offer unlimited permanent and locum recruitment for a fixed fee of just £60 per month (terms apply) or 15% one-off fees for permanent and 18% for locum. We donate 10% of our profits annually to charity, hence our name.

At present we have three recruitment consultants, Jonathan Fagan, Clare Fagan and Pete Gresty, together with our finance director Pearl McNamara. Together we have over 40 years of experience in the legal profession. Jonathan Fagan is a qualified solicitor and still (reluctantly!) undertakes litigation on behalf of the company when required. He also provides a career coaching service to qualified lawyers and law graduates, although this is on a very selective basis.

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment also owns Interim Lawyers, a specialist locum service, charging 18% fees for placements. We also own a further 45 domain names and websites. We operate an outsourced UK based typing service as well – www.uk-transcription.co.uk and are preferred suppliers to a number of institutional clients and law firms across the UK and overseas.

The Ten-Percent Group of Legal Recruitment websites gives 10% of annual profits to charity (hence our name). We have carried on with this tradition since we formed the company 14 years ago. So far over £51,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our newsletter and look forward to hearing from you if we can assist further.

Warm regards
Jonathan Fagan
Consultant
Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent
£60 Per Month Recruitment Scheme
Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan

Legal Recruitment News is produced by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – you can view all versions of the e-newsletter at www.legal-recruitment.co.uk. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment was established in 2000 and donates 10% of profits to charity, hence the name.

Interim Lawyers – www.interimlawyers.co.uk
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – www.ten-percent.co.uk
Legal Recruitment Newsletter – www.legal-recruitment.co.uk

T: 0207 127 4343
E: jobs@interimlawyers.co.uk
E: jobs@ten-percent.co.uk

Interim Lawyers
27 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AX

Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited
2nd Floor
145-157 St John Street
London
EC1V 4PY

©2014 Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited | Derwen Bach, Glyndwr Road, Mold CH7 5LW

Legal Recruitment News – March 5th 2014

Welcome to the March edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update, becoming an expert in 10,000 hours, locum availabiity and new candidates. Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD and non-practising solicitor of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent

Job Market Update – March 5th

March 2014 – summed up in a few sentences:
Locum work has dropped off. Other agencies have indicated to our candidates that they think firms are currently taking stock and that the locum market will pick up again in a few weeks. We are not entirely sure, but suspect the drop off is simply the bottom of the recruitment ‘wave’ – the job market has always had peaks and troughs and we have just been through a peak. How quickly the wave moves back up again remains to be seen. Permanent vacancies have picked up, but they do this every February/March and this year has been no exception – worryingly we have seen no applications at all for some permanent posts, which is either a sign of a return to a booming market or alternatively a lack of interest in making a move. Market outlook – still buoyant.

CIPS Report for March 2014 – Key findings:
1. Activity and new business growth rates remain sharp
2. Employment growth strongest in four months
3. Confidence in outlook highest since September 2009

Statistics
Current live vacancies: 539
New permanent vacancies added in February 2014: 17
New candidates registering: 160
Average ‘Job Strength Factor’ for new vacancies in February: 2.5
Increase/Decrease in new vacancies from previous month: 0
Increase/Decrease in new candidates from previous month: +40%

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment will now publish the number of new vacancies, new candidates and indicate the increase or decrease from the previous month. We aim to assist the legal profession by showing the market from our perspective. Traditionally our clients have been high street law firms and smaller niche commercial practices, but we do also assist in house legal departments and occasionally larger commercial and regional firms allow us to help out! All of this means that our system will hopefully indicate a snapshot of the market across these areas each month.

A few pointers in relation to the above system:
1. New candidates registering only includes qualified or experienced staff – for example we do not register LPC graduates, secretaries without extensive experience, trainee legal executives without any experience and overseas-qualified lawyers with no UK experience.
2. Job Strength Factor is the grading scheme we use internally to note which vacancies are strong and which are weak. See article below.

Job Strength Factor.
Every month we will publish the average job strength – it gives a good indication of the market because:
1. A Poor Job Strength on vacancies indicates a struggling market. When trade is bad, employers seek options for increasing turnover which usually also involves contacting recruitment agencies in the hope that they have candidates with their own following and not looking for a salary.
2. A Strong Job Strength on vacancies indicates a buoyant market, particularly if it is in connection with an increase in numbers of new vacancies.
Vacancies are each graded 1-5, with 5 being a very strong vacancy and 1 being a very weak vacancy.

Strong vacancies will have the following attributes:
1. A competitive salary.
2. Exclusive or limited access from agencies (ie the firm haven’t sent the post to 10 recruitment companies before us!).
3. Firm with good reputation – both for previous work with us and also generally.
4. Good or excellent prospects.
5. Fields of law that are stable and likely to result in a long term opportunity.
6. Good location – coupled with this our internal assessment of our ablity to fill the vacancy based on current availability from candidates.

Weak vacancies will have the following attributes:
1. Poor salary levels or estimated low salary based on previous experience working with a client.
2. Lots of other agencies involved.
3. Bad reputation on the part of the firm.
4. Poor prospects.
5. Fields of law not likely to be sustainable (consumer credit misselling posts are a good example from recent years!).
6. Poor location – ie a location that we know internally will be difficult to source candidates for.

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.

Permanent Candidate Registrations in the last 7 days

04031401 Wills & Probate with Conveyancing Solicitor. 2 years experience. East and West Midlands. Permanent.
04031306 Commercial and Residential Property Solicitor, 20+ years experience. Available for permanent and locum work in and around London.
04031306 Duty Solicitor looking for a new home from May onwards. London and South East.
04031303 NQ Family Solicitor looking around London.
03031309 Residential and Commercial Conveyancing FILEX looking for permanent posts in East Anglia.
02031132 PI, RTA and credit hire paralegal looking for roles in the North West.
28021156 Advanced Family Panel Member looking for solicitor posts in the West Midlands.
28021022 EL, PL and OL plus lung disease solicitor looking in the North West. 7 years experience.
28020937 Conveyancing Solicitor with lease extension experience looking around Greater London. 4 years experience.
27022337 Mental Health Solicitor – accredited – looking around London. Salaried.
We have over 10,000 lawyers registered with us. To request CVs for a specific vacancy please register your vacancy – Locum or Permanent

Locums Available Immediately
0403141754 Property Locum Solicitor with Litigation experience. Greater London area. £30 per hour decreasing. Full availability April onwards.
04031024 Property Locum Solicitor – Residential and Commercial – available for London and Northern Home Counties from 24th March to 23rd May.
04030923 Property Locum Solicitor – Residential and Commercial – 7 years PQE – available for London and Home Counties. Immediate start.
03031319 Property Locum Executive – Residential and Commercial – 15 years experience. Available immediately nationwide.
4236 Solicitor and STEP member available for Wills & Probate assignments nationwide. Full or part time assignments accepted.
4581 Commercial Property Solicitor Locum looking around London and the Home Counties. Available from 17th March.
15966 Family Solicitor Locum. Available nationwide.
3544 Litigation Solicitor Locum – London and South East. 20 years experience.

We have over 700 candidates registered for locum work.

Become an Expert in 10,000 Hours – is it possible?
At the moment there is a journalist who is trying out the above theory – is it possible to put in 10,000 hours and turn into an expert (link to article on our website here)? The journalist has given up his day job and taken up golf, with the intention of becoming a professional by the time he has completed 10,000 hours of practising and training. At present he is on around 5,000 hours and has a handicap of 4 (he started out having never played before).

Could the same be applied to work environments? If lawyers spend 10,000 hours undertaking litigation cases or complex transactions of a particular type, are they likely to turn into experts?

I am not sure. Personally we have used the services of lawyers at both ends of their career – senior solicitors and also quite junior lawyers. With hindsight on the occasion we had a particularly complex transaction for a senior solicitor to handle, we would have been better with a more junior lawyer dealing.

Why? Because the junior lawyer would have taken more interest in the case and perhaps got the detail right. The senior lawyer, who no doubt had completed 10,000 hours on very similar cases, simply couldn’t really be bothered applying his mind to our problem and did not put the effort in. The junior lawyer may well have done so.

In terms of expertise, the senior lawyer was probably light years ahead. But his application was poorer. His ambition and drive was not there anymore. This is quite common in sportsmen and women as well. When footballers make it to the top they seem to take their foot off the pedal a bit. If a particularly tough tackle is required they sometimes take a step back and avoid it. If scoring a goal requires a head to be thrust forward in a position where the defender could take it off you can almost guarantee that a senior pro will try to protect himself, whereas a more junior player will take the risk.

I suspect the same applies to lawyers. More junior lawyers may in some circumstances be more prepared to take the risk and go the extra mile than senior solicitors who try to minimise the risk and effort required as much as possible.
In recruitment this is very true. I have been recruiting for solicitors firms for over 14 years now, and I would like to think that I can spot a poor vacancy from a rubbish firm pretty quickly. If I do spot one it is likely that I will not do very much work on it, if any. As an inexperienced recruiter starting out it is very unlikely I would have taken the same approach. I would have worked the vacancy and may have spent considerable time sourcing candidates etc.. The client would get a better service from the rookie recruiter than they would from the experienced (yet somewhat cynical) recruiter.

So whilst the 10,000 hours theory may well work – I must attempt to improve my batting performance in cricket by implementing it (not sure my wife will appreciate my efforts) – I suspect that external factors including drive, determination, passion and commitment – also play a very big part in separating out success from failure.

Jonathan Fagan is MD of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment, a non-practising solicitor, author and legal recruitment consultant.

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
We are a specialist legal recruiter, covering the whole of the UK. A large proportion of our vacancies are based in London and the South East, but we do assist firms elsewhere on a very regular basis. Over 10,500 lawyers are registered with us and we have access to a range of external and internal job boards and websites where we do not have candidates available ourselves. We also assist with recruitment advice and assistance, regularly advising partners and practice managers on suitable salary and package levels.

Our company is unique for a number of reasons, including the fact that we are not shy to publish our fee structure and donate a chunk of our profits to charity each year. We offer unlimited permanent and locum recruitment for a fixed fee of just £60 per month (terms apply) or 15% one-off fees for permanent and 18% for locum. We donate 10% of our profits annually to charity, hence our name.

At present we have three recruitment consultants, Jonathan Fagan, Clare Fagan and Pete Gresty, together with our finance director Pearl McNamara. Together we have over 40 years of experience in the legal profession. Jonathan Fagan is a qualified solicitor and still (reluctantly!) undertakes litigation on behalf of the company when required. He also provides a career coaching service to qualified lawyers and law graduates, although this is on a very selective basis.

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment also owns Interim Lawyers, a specialist locum service, charging 18% fees for placements. We also own a further 45 domain names and websites. We operate an outsourced UK based typing service as well – www.uk-transcription.co.uk and are preferred suppliers to a number of institutional clients and law firms across the UK and overseas.

The Ten-Percent Group of Legal Recruitment websites gives 10% of annual profits to charity (hence our name). We have carried on with this tradition since we formed the company 14 years ago. So far over £51,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our newsletter and look forward to hearing from you if we can assist further.

Warm regards
Jonathan Fagan
Consultant

Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan

Legal Recruitment News is produced by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – you can view all versions of the e-newsletter at www.legal-recruitment.co.uk. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment was established in 2000 and donates 10% of profits to charity, hence the name.

Interim Lawyers – www.interimlawyers.co.uk
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – www.ten-percent.co.uk
Legal Recruitment Newsletter – www.legal-recruitment.co.uk
T: 0207 127 4343
E: jobs@interimlawyers.co.uk
E: jobs@ten-percent.co.uk

Interim Lawyers
27 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AX

Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited
2nd Floor
145-157 St John Street
London
EC1V 4PY

Legal Recruitment Newsletter

Welcome to the January edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update, Latest Candidate Registrations and a revisit of psychic New Year predictions from January 2013.
Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD and non-practising solicitor of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent

Job Market Update – January 14th

2013 has been one of the strongest years for growth in the recruitment market for a long time. The KPMG and Recruitment & Employment Confederation Report on Jobs dated 9th January 2014 (monthly report) had the following highlights:

1. Strongest rise in permanent placements since March 2010
2. Temp billings increase at fastest pace in over 15 years
3. Permanent salary growth highest since October 2007
4. Decline in availability of candidates – biggest decline since 2004.

A KPMG partner commented: “Combine the latest job figures with news that business confidence has reached a new high and it’s easy to share the renewed sense of optimism amongst employers. Permanent placements alone have hit a 4-year peak and with temporary hires accelerating to a 15-year high there is clearly room for…job creation. There is speculation suggesting Mark Carney might revise the unemployment benchmark at which an interest rate rise will be considered. The recovery is clearly gaining momentum…employers and individuals will be keeping an eye on interest rates and the impact any changes have on the pound in their pocket before deciding if a new job is the way to go. Some uncertainty still remains because the availability of staff to fill roles has seen a steep fall – the biggest for almost 10 years….The risk is that if it continues employers who are desperate to fill a gap could become stretched beyond their means at the same time as over-inflating the market by offering high salaries just to tempt employees to move.”

A few points here – I am not sure the high salaries issue is relevant to the legal job market – salaries have been so stunted for so long that any movement will simply be to take certain posts back up towards where they ought to be rather than over-inflating them.

Secondly, as law firms see massive increases in the property market it is likely that investment will occur in expanding operations and hence the number of conveyancing fee earners needed is set to rise. There is still a lost generation of conveyancing lawyers, some of whom are locums and others quite happy in other fields.

Incidentally if you are reading this and thinking of becoming a conveyancing locum, now would be a good time to start! Let us know – our www.interimlawyers.co.uk contains a lot of information about working as a locum including locum rates. We have managed to keep a couple of our regular property locums in constant employment since the start of the summer with short term and medium term assignments. This was until recently a very rare thing to do. One of our locums came back to the profession after a 4 year break and has not stopped working since.

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.

Candidate Registrations in the last 7 days

140114 Residential and Commercial Conveyancing Locum Solicitor – Greater London area. Taking bookings for 2014.
130114 Residential and Commercial Conveyancing Locum Solicitor – North London and Hertfordshire. Long and short term.
1301141620 Residential Conveyancing Locum Solicitor – South and Central London – £25 per hour.
13011603 Residential & Commercial Conveyancing Locum Solicitor – West London – £25 per hour.
13011425 Business Crime Solicitor – permanent – available immediately.
13010823 Litigation Solicitor with Privy Council experience. London. General practice work. Permanent.
13011538 Conveyancing Solicitor looking for permanent or contract post in and around Exeter.
13011149 Conveyancing Locum – Res and Com – taking bookings for 2014. London and South.
13011134 Conveyancing Locum – available for East Anglia. Taking bookings for 2014.
10010843 Wills & Probate Solicitor looking for posts in and around Bedfordshire. 5 years PQE.
09012232 Commercial Property Locum Solicitor looking around West London and Middlesex.
08011216 Commercial and Residential Property Locum Solicitor available for Manchester, Midlands, London and South.

We have over 10,000 lawyers registered with us. To request CVs for a specific vacancy please register your vacancy – Locum or Permanent

A Psychic’s 2013 New Year Predictions Revisited

Last year we carried an article in our January Newsletter about predictions for 2013 by an expert online psychic, Craig Hamilton-Parker (taken from www.psychics.co.uk). We have also included his 2014 predictions below to see how he does when we revisit in 2015.
Mr Hamilton-Parker charges £1.53 per minute for his services via telephone consultations.

Online Psychic Predictions for 2013 – how many did Craig get right?
1. War in the Middle East – February. Israel will attack Iran. Incorrect. Thank goodness.
2. Terrorist attack on Chicago in the summer. 1/2 marks – Boston in April.
3. Syrian uprising to continue. Iran to invade. 1/2 marks. Iran hasn’t invaded.
4. Poor grain harvest to occur in Russia. Incorrect. Up 30% on 2012.
5. Robert Mugabe will be assassinated in the Autumn. Incorrect.
6. Revolution in China – June 2013. China to split up. Incorrect.
7. Google will be attacked by terrorists. Incorrect.
8. Search engine to be released in Europe – funded by the EU. Incorrect.
9. Spain’s economy to fall apart. Incorrect.
10. Ed Milliband to be replaced by Yvette Cooper. Incorrect.
11. Nick Clegg to fight off a challenge from Vince Cable. Incorrect.
12. Victoria Beckham to launch a range of maternity clothing. Not entirely sure so half marks!
13. Kate Middleton to announce she is pregnant in May 2013. Impossible.
14. Simon Cowell to become more spiritual. Is there any way of assessing this?

Total score (allowing for the Victoria Beckham maternity wear prediction as it is not clear whether or not she has produced a range): 2 out of 14.

Craig’s predictions for 2014:

1. The Dalai Lama will be taken seriously ill.
2. Pope Francis will initiate a new spiritual mission to help the mentally ill.
3. Syria will be partitioned into Alawite and Sunni provinces. Assad will go into hiding.
4. Gunman rampage in Kansas. Similar attack on the London underground.
5. Strange luminous plankton seen under the sea that cannot be explained by scientists.
6. Remains of an ancient civilisation uncovered in Greenland.
7. Oprah Winfrey launches new spiritual chat show bringing many world religious leaders to book.
8. UK postal strikes backed by other trade unions and transport brought to a standstill.
9. Nick Clegg resigns
10. Massive fire in Mexico City
11. New Orleans flooded again
12. Factory explodes in Southern USA causing a chemical cloud.
13. Australia has biggest bush fire ever.
14. Japan builds a nuclear bomb
15. US economy soars ahead.
16. Massive riots at the Brazilian World Cup.

If you would like to make your own predictions for 2014 please visit www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.co.uk and add your comment to this article. We will then revisit them all in January 2015.

Recent Salary Levels and Hourly Rates

In case of interest, here is a selection of recent salary levels we have come across.
In House Counsel – large multi-national plc – South of England – £65k plus package.
Locum Conveyancing Solicitor – Manchester – £25 per hour.
Locum Conveyancing Solicitor – South Coast – £25 per hour.
Salaried Conveyancing Executive – South London – £30k
Salaried Conveyancing Solicitor – South London – £30k
East Midlands Conveyancing Solicitor Locum – £20 per hour
West Midlands Wills & Probate Solicitor Locum – £35 per hour
Salaried PA and Receptionist – Central London – £25k
Commercial Property Solicitor Locum – Central London – £30 per hour
Paralegal North London – £18k
East Midlands Wills & Probate Partner – Permanent – £45k
London Conveyancing Permanent – Solicitor 5 years PQE – £35k and £42k

Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan

Charity Donations

The Ten-Percent Foundation is still determining its charitable donations for 2013. We like giving money to legal charities or charities with links to solicitors or charities operated or established by solicitors. So far in 2013 we donated money to two Lincolnshire charities at the behest of Hodgkinsons Solicitors, Merseyside Welfare Rights and Alder Hey childrens hospital. We also expect to donate to the CAB, a new charity set up to provide dogs for injured soldiers and the British Stammering Association.

If you have any suggestions please email Jonathan Fagan at jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk. The foundation likes to donate sums of around £500-£1,000 although we donate larger sums as well. No form filling is required and we prefer specific projects or smaller charities.

The Ten-Percent Group of Legal Recruitment websites gives 10% of annual profits to charity. We have carried on with this tradition since we formed the company 13 years ago. So far over £51,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our newsletter and look forward to hearing from you if we can assist further.

Warm regards

Jonathan Fagan
Consultant

Legal Recruitment News is produced by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – you can view all versions of the e-newsletter at www.legal-recruitment.co.uk. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment was established in 2000 and donates 10% of profits to charity, hence the name.

Interim Lawyers – www.interimlawyers.co.uk
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – www.ten-percent.co.uk
Legal Recruitment Newsletter – www.legal-recruitment.co.uk

T: 0207 127 4343
E: jobs@interimlawyers.co.uk
E: jobs@ten-percent.co.uk

Interim Lawyers
27 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AX

Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited
2nd Floor
145-157 St John Street
London
EC1V 4PY

Legal Recruitment News – December 3rd 2013

Welcome to the December edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update and articles on whether elocution lessons are necessary for anyone from the north wanting to progress in London with larger firms, the Legal Practice Course, conveyancing, 2 sample covering emails and a brief outline of the new Employment Allowance worth up to £2k per year per employer. Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD and non-practising solicitor of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Job Market Update – December 3rd

Our final Legal Recruitment Market update for 2013. It is has been a very mixed year. In January 2013 I wrote that December 2012 had been one of the quietest months we had seen in 12 years of trading, and this had followed a downward spiral in work that started in October 2012.

January was much the same, but from February 2013 onwards we have seen high levels of recruitment activity across the job markets, both permanent and locum. Obviously various factors have been at work in this, affecting sectors differently. For example we have seen large numbers of personal injury solicitors laid off, vacancies disappear and candidates attempt to reinvent themselves as litigators. Similar things have happened in the legal aid sector. Crime solicitors have been falling over themselves to get off the sinking ship and crime recruitment has been minimal to say the least.

However the buoyant jobs market in law has been driven again by the house prices. We have seen an upsurge in locum and permanent residential conveyancing jobs and assignments. This started in the summer and has carried on into the autumn, showing no signs of calming down as we approach Christmas. November and December are being/have been busy.

Similarly there have been increased activity levels in the commercial sector, particularly on the locum and consultancy side of things.

New candidates have started to become more scarce. I ought to say ‘good’ new candidates are getting more scarce, because we always get plenty of weak ones (this month’s inappropriate applicants included a bingo caller and a boxing ring dancer – both applying for solicitor posts).

The scarcity of candidates is apparent particularly in the conveyancing market. What has happened is that a large number of conveyancing lawyers lost their jobs between 2008 and 2012. Redundancies were still occurring as late as November-December 2012.

Quite a few of those who left their firms have been lost to the profession. I see this from CVs we get in – candidates went off into other areas of law, they left the legal profession completely or alternatively they retired early etc.. Very few of these are now employable again in the eyes of recruiters and a good number of candidates do not wish to be!

As a result we have a shortfall of conveyancers across the profession. I suspect this will become more apparent as we approach the start of the property buying season in April 2014.

Incidentally if you are reading this and thinking of becoming a conveyancing locum, now would be a good time to start! Let us know – our www.interimlawyers.co.uk contains a lot of information about working as a locum including locum rates. We have managed to keep a couple of our regular property locums in constant employment since the start of the summer with short term and medium term assignments. This was until recently a very rare thing to do. One of our locums came back to the profession after a 4 year break and has not stopped working since.

The job market is still evolving. January & February should be quiet this year as we reach the bottom of the recruitment cycle, but this has not happened as planned in December so who knows what will happen.

Wishing all our clients, candidates and readers a very peaceful Christmas and a prosperous New Year.

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.

Current Vacancies

Recent permanent vacancies in over last few days:

Conveyancing roles
South East London, Dartford, Bromley, Middlesex (assistant level), Kent, South West London, North London, Leicestershire, Central London (2-3 years PQE), Luton, Milton Keynes and St Albans.

Company Commercial
Derbyshire (2-4 years PQE)

Personal Injury
East London, Essex, Glasgow, Manchester.

Costs – Manchester, London, Essex.
Litigation – Kent.

For a full search of the vacancy database please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/vacancies. Please remember that we are in the Christmas season and recruitment can be very slow indeed. Conveyancing seems to be the only pressing recruitment taking place.

Elocution Lessons – a vital part of a move from the North to London?

There has recently been a flurry of articles and comments in the media about the legal profession being traditional, conservative and middle class with a bias against anyone not conforming with the norm. This includes those with strong regional accents applying for work in the London city firms.

For years I have been (rather contentiously I suspect!) advising any northern-based students and graduates that one of the best ways of getting ahead in London is to take elocution lessons and learn to speak without a regional accent. Over the years very well known presenters and actors have confessed to having stifled their accents to get ahead, and I remain convinced that accents, particularly strong northern and midlands accents, can and will hold people back in London.

After all, for most people living and working in central London, the north consists of tourist destinations to spend time at – Manchester, Liverpool and the Lake District, and Wales is somewhere for a stay in a weekend cottage. Clients are always amazed when I attend appointments in London having just travelled down from North Wales (where I live) and taken less time than they have to get from Surrey.

I suspect it is fair to say that there is a South East / Remainder of the Country divide that transcends all aspects of society, including recruitment.

Think about what you hear whenever someone from the West Midlands speaks. In your brain (unless you are from the West Midlands yourself of course) do you immediately think “this person is intelligent, confident, persuasive” or do you think “this person is a bit simple?”

Studies have been done to demonstrate that very negative perceptions are held by listeners when hearing particular regional accents.

Whilst this may well be changing and Southerners become more accepting of Northerners (and vice versa), in the meantime I think it leaves Northern graduates at a disadvantage compared with their Southern counterparts if elocution is not considered.

I once career coached a graduate who had straight AAA at A Level from a state school, a very high 2.1 degree from a good northern university, lots of relevant work experience and a good all round extra-curricular track record. I gave plenty of advice, but I reckon the one piece of advice that would have made the most difference was for her to go and get elocution lessons. Her accent was very strong Merseyside and I am convinced to this day that she will be discriminated against because of this by recruiters in the South for the earliest part of her legal career.

The North/South divide does not just work one way. I can remember attending an interview many years ago for a training contract with a Bradford law firm of good size and using my wife’s West Yorkshire family home address in order to secure this. After I had muttered a few words one of the partners piped up with “you’re not from round these parts are you?” which possibly blew me out of the water (if it wasn’t my general unsuitability to be a lawyer!).

As coincidence has it, I have recently been emailed by a former City law firm partner who has developed an elocution course that will be most relevant to anyone reading this and contemplating elocution as an option. Information can be found at www.speechandpronunciation.com

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 Metropolitcan 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 increased, it means that there are probably well over 100,000 law graduates since 2008 who have not entered the legal profession via the solicitor route.

Thinking through the cost of the LPC – if you now complete this and get a training contract on the high street, assuming your salary remains less than £16,000 for the first two years of your training and less than £25,000 for the next two years, you are going to take about 6 years to pay off the fee (paying it at £200 a month). A mortgage and a family must remain a very distant possibility for most NQs at the moment.

Does this level of cost really create a sustainable future flow of potential trainee solicitors, or just deter those who do not have relatives and connections already in the business? Has the time come to restrict the academic institutions from providing LPC courses to those who stand little or no chance of ever progressing with a legal career?

Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan

Conveyancing Boom and Bust – a potted history

Residential Conveyancing jobs have been the number one area of law where Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment have successfully assisted law firms, solicitors, legal executives and licensed conveyancers for over 13 years. When we first set up Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment, back in April 2000, over 50% of our vacancies were from solicitors firms looking to take on extra conveyancing staff.

Since then, we have watched a cycle of recruitment follow. Mainly upwards, but with major blips.

Firstly, when the invasion of Iraq occurred in 2003, we watched as solicitors firms began to cancel their job vacancy postings. This was a temporary blip because secondly we watched as the property market boomed and boomed some more. Apart from the Gulf War and the occasional World Cup and European Cup, the demand for conveyancing staff did not diminish for 8 years.

From 2000 to 2008 conveyancing vacancies increased from being 50% of our vacancies to about 80% of our vacancies. We thought it would never end. Extra staff were employed, we invested in IT systems to handle the workload, purchased websites (www.conveyancing-jobs.co.uk is one of ours) and started to plan our retirement.

Alas, by about May 2008, we started to notice that our recruitment consultants were not placing candidates. At first we thought the consultants were doing something wrong. Did they have the wrong text in advertisements? Were they failing to put the work in? We stopped sighing whenever a law firm telephoned with a conveyancing vacancy and started to chase anything coming through the door.

At no point did we even think the market had dropped. Even with the Lehman Brothers and all the other dodgy banks collapsing did it register in our minds that the conveyancing market had collapsed at the same time as the financial markets.

Suddenly nobody wanted conveyancing staff.

We got angry telephone calls from candidates to ask why we couldn’t find work for them. What were we doing? Did we not care? Why were we advertising jobs that didn’t exist? Candidates started to get in touch with horror stories. Firms like Crust Lane Davis, a rapidly expanding volume conveyancer, collapsed. One of their partners went to prison. Mortgage practices which appeared to be fairly accepted and allegedly commonplace were suddenly becoming ‘fraud’. Mortgages ceased to exist. Nobody wanted the risk anymore.

An entrepreneur in North Wales, managed to persuade the local banks to stump up just short of £1 million to buy residential property. When he defaulted and the banks went to repossess the properties, they discovered that there was little value left. The properties had all been purchased less than 12 months beforehand, but already the sale prices had plummeted.

Between 2008 and 2011 we saw hardly any conveyancing posts. Conveyancing accounted for less than 2% of our turnover – the remainder being made up with our other areas of business – accountancy, legal cashiers, litigation solicitors, locums and specialist career coaching.

Conveyancing candidates registered with us by the bucketload. We started to hear sad tales of middle aged conveyancing lawyers who had been with the same firm for many years suddenly finding themselves on the scrap heap. Others commenced alternative careers. We came across conveyancers working as shelf stackers in Tescos, delivery drivers, salesmen, charity workers, care assistants and stock market traders.

At the same time solicitors’ firms started to exploit the situation by demanding that conveyancing staff took a percentage cut of the work they did instead of a salary, or worked only if they had their own ‘following’ of developer clients. Of course this rarely generated enough work to survive on or pay the mortgage.

This really was the dark ages in the conveyancing world!

However, this year we appear to be back in the boom times. Candidates are getting increasingly harder to source, the market is much brighter post-2012 and recovery is well under way. Conveyancing is booming yet again in London and the South East, and as a result we are expecting a steady increase in demand across the country from 2013 through to 2015.

When will the next collapse occur? Will the generation made redundant between 2008 and 2011 get back into the legal profession? Who knows…

Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan

2 Sample Covering Emails – with our compliments

Example Covering Letter Template 1
Email (for agencies)
I am a 5 year PQE Solicitor currently working In House, handling a general company commercial caseload on behalf of a multi-national manufacturing company. Present caseload includes Corporate Commercial, Employment, Commercial Contracts and Commercial Litigation. My experience is extensive.

Notice period is 3 months and my current package includes a basic salary of £84,000, pension contribution, a company car and an annual bonus.

I am looking for in house roles in London at a salary level higher than my current and I seek a move to further my career.

Please register my CV, keep me informed of any vacancies arising and refrain from sending out my CV to prospective employers without my consent.

Many thanks.

Albert Denning

—————————————————————————–
Example Covering Email Template 2
Email for direct applications to companies

Dear Sharon,

Further to your advertisment on Reed.co.uk please find attached my CV. I should very much like to apply for the role. I am an In House Counsel (and qualified solicitor) with over 20 years experience. I currently work in house for a multi-national service sector company handling a general company commercial caseload.

My caseload includes all aspects of corporate commercial law (I attend company board meetings as company secretary), employment (contentious and non-contentious including tribunal advocacy), commercial contracts (over 75 sets of T&Cs reviewed each week) and commercial litigation (over 500 matters issued in the County Court and High Court). My experience is extensive (match the job description in this paragraph).

I seek a move to further my career and note that the role (say a bit about the role and the company).

My notice period is 3 months, which may or may not be flexible, and my current package includes £94,000 as a basic salary plus employer pension contribution, a company car and an annual bonus.

Many thanks for considering my application and I look forward to hearing from you.

Warm Regards

George Best
Mobile number

————————————————————

Covering emails should always be kept very brief, straight to the point, and not attached to emails as covering letters. As a recruiter I really don’t care if you think of yourself as confident, bubbly, veracious and a go-getter. I used to keep sheep and this description could probably fit most of these. Needless to say my sheep probably stood as much a chance as you of finding work if you think it necessary to write this sort of rubbish!

For Careers advice and assistance please visit our Careers Shop –  www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop

Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor (non-practising), recruitment consultant and career coach to the legal profession since April 2000.

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..

Charity Donations

The Ten-Percent Foundation is still determining its charitable donations for 2013. We like giving money to legal charities or charities with links to solicitors or charities operated or established by solicitors. Recently we donated money to two Lincolnshire charities at the behest of Hodgkinsons Solicitors, Merseyside Welfare Rights and Alder Hey childrens hospital.

If you have any suggestions please email Jonathan Fagan at jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk. The foundation likes to donate sums of around £500-£1,000 although we donate larger sums as well. No form filling is required and we prefer specific projects or smaller charities.

The Ten-Percent Group of Legal Recruitment websites gives 10% of annual profits to charity. We have carried on with this tradition since we formed the company 13 years ago. So far over £51,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our newsletter and look forward to hearing from you if we can assist further.

Warm regards

Jonathan Fagan
Consultant

Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent
£60 Per Month Recruitment Scheme

Legal Recruitment News is produced by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – you can view all versions of the e-newsletter at www.legal-recruitment.co.uk. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment was established in 2000 and donates 10% of profits to charity, hence the name.

Interim Lawyers – www.interimlawyers.co.uk
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – www.ten-percent.co.uk
Legal Recruitment Newsletter – www.legal-recruitment.co.uk

T: 0207 127 4343
E: jobs@interimlawyers.co.uk
E: jobs@ten-percent.co.uk

Interim Lawyers
27 Old Gloucester Street
London
WC1N 3AX

Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited
2nd Floor
145-157 St John Street
London
EC1V 4PY

©2013 Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited | Derwen Bach, Glyndwr Road, Mold CH7 5LW

Legal Recruitment News – October 2013

Welcome to the October edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update, Latest Candidate Registrations and articles on new changes to Google, a potted history of conveyancing recruitment and statistics on entrants to the legal profession and the cost of the LPC. Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD and non-practising solicitor of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Register Vacancies – Locum or Permanent

Membership Scheme under Review

Since July 2011 Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment has offered a membership scheme. Law firms with less than 100 staff pay £60 a month for 5 years and enjoy unlimited recruitment at all levels. The system operates in a similar way to a fixed rate mortgage. You can set your recruitment agency fee outgoings for 5 years at a very low price. If you would like to be one of the remaining firms to benefit from the £60 fee for 5 years please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services.

Job Market Update – October 8th

September has remained a busy recruitment month, with increasing numbers of locum assignments coming in, coupled with increasing numbers of permanent posts. For example, on one Friday morning in the last few weeks we took details of 7 permanent vacancies from law firms across the UK. Last Friday we took 6 new locum assignments in the space of a few hours.

Main area has remained residential conveyancing with some commercial property. Wills & probate has not picked up as much as we thought it was going to, but vacancies still trickle in from time to time. Litigation has gone very, very quiet indeed.

Crime vacancies have not really materialised this year – the rota deadline is less than 6 weeks away but nothing has cropped up in any serious quantities compared with times gone by. Duty solicitors have only been requested by three of our member firms this year. Contrast this with vacancy numbers a few rota slots ago where we had over 50 separate law firms asking for duty solicitors.

Family law is now a bit of a dead zone. Absolutely nothing going on really. LSC work is the same – apart from a few very brave firms opening offices across the country to try and take advantage of the legal aid deserts that are now clearly in existence – it is not an area for high levels of recruitment.

We have seen an increase in corporate commercial and in house roles, which marks a bit of change as these areas have traditionally been very quiet indeed recently.

So in summary we are seeing a very busy market still, mainly fuelled by the property sector again and recruitment back to levels not seen for over five years.

If you are thinking of undertaking conveyancing locum work, now would be a good time to start! Let us know. We have been keeping a couple of our regular property locums in constant employment since the start of the summer with short term assignments. This was until recently a very rare thing to do.

The new KPMG report on the UK job market confirms our individual agency findings. This shows:

Marked increases in both permanent placements and temp billings
Permanent salary inflation sharpest since February 2008
Vacancies continue to rise at marked pace
Candidate availability falls further

One of the partners at KPMG, Bernard Brown, comments:

“With another month of data showing a strong rise in the number of appointments and job offers on the table, it seems that business is warming to calls for investment from Mark Carney. Improved market conditions, higher activity levels amongst clients and generally stronger levels of confidence amongst employers are certainly one of the major factors underpinning the latest rise in placements. Only last week the Bank of England argued that recovery will only be sustainable over the long term if regions beyond London grow strongly. The North is showing strongest growth, with the Midlands driving a rise in temporary placements. It’s a sign that local economies are picking up and gives hope that economic recovery is not dependent on one area or sector.

He expresses concern that employees are clearly still not sharing employers’ growing faith in recovery. Demand for staff may be up, but the number of individuals putting themselves on the market has dropped for the fifth consecutive month. He goes on to say “perhaps the pay on offer has to rise to encourage staff to ‘make the move’. If it doesn’t we could be about to witness a growing gap between what the employers need and what employees are prepared to do.”

We have noticed this ourselves. For example, one of our member law firms is recruiting for a private client solicitor in the Leicester area, and applications have been very sparse. Last year we would have had a good number of candidates applying.

The job market is changing…..

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.

Hummingbird and recent Google changes

Hummingbird is the new Google change to the search engine rankings and results, fresh off the blocks at the end of September. Law firms may well have seen their natural rankings change quite dramatically.

It has now got to the point where SEO work is virtually impossible. Whilst there are still many overseas SEO companies offering paid links, guaranteed placings and link farming, no-one knows anymore whether they are signing their own search engine execution when Google blacklists them or a blank cheque to make huge amounts of money from being number one.

Hummingbird is designed to let Google quickly parse entire questions and complex queries and return relevant answers, as opposed to looking at queries on a keyword-by-keyword basis. Google says that Hummingbird is paying more attention to each word in a query, ensuring that the whole query — the whole sentence or conversation or meaning — is taken into account, rather than particular words.

The company has an ongoing strategy to become less dependent on keywords, which has major implications for SEO. You can’t just write “solicitors in Preston” everywhere on your website anymore and pop up at number one.

It’s probably going to be very important to give Google as much information about your site as possible in order for the search engine to “understand” it.

One of the main changes that Hummingbird has introduced is encouraging business owners to use Google+ as much as possible in order to allow Google to compete with Facebook. If you are not already signed up with Google+ you may want to consider doing so.

Conveyancing Boom and Bust – a potted history

Residential Conveyancing jobs have been the number one area of law where Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment have successfully assisted law firms, solicitors, legal executives and licensed conveyancers for over 13 years. When we first set up Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment, back in April 2000, over 50% of our vacancies were from solicitors firms looking to take on extra conveyancing staff.

Since then, we have watched a cycle of recruitment follow. Mainly upwards, but with major blips.

Firstly, when the invasion of Iraq occurred in 2003, we watched as solicitors firms began to cancel their job vacancy postings. This was a temporary blip because secondly we watched as the property market boomed and boomed some more. Apart from the Gulf War and the occasional World Cup and European Cup, the demand for conveyancing staff did not diminish for 8 years.

From 2000 to 2008 conveyancing vacancies increased from being 50% of our vacancies to about 80% of our vacancies. We thought it would never end. Extra staff were employed, we invested in IT systems to handle the workload, purchased websites (www.conveyancing-jobs.co.uk is one of ours) and started to plan our retirement.

Alas, by about May 2008, we started to notice that our recruitment consultants were not placing candidates. At first we thought the consultants were doing something wrong. Did they have the wrong text in advertisements? Were they failing to put the work in? We stopped sighing whenever a law firm telephoned with a conveyancing vacancy and started to chase anything coming through the door.

At no point did we even think the market had dropped. Even with the Lehman Brothers and all the other dodgy banks collapsing did it register in our minds that the conveyancing market had collapsed at the same time as the financial markets.

Suddenly nobody wanted conveyancing staff.

We got angry telephone calls from candidates to ask why we couldn’t find work for them. What were we doing? Did we not care? Why were we advertising jobs that didn’t exist? Candidates started to get in touch with horror stories. Firms like Crust Lane Davis, a rapidly expanding volume conveyancer, collapsed. One of their partners went to prison. Mortgage practices which appeared to be fairly accepted and allegedly commonplace were suddenly becoming ‘fraud’. Mortgages ceased to exist. Nobody wanted the risk anymore.

An entrepreneur in North Wales, managed to persuade the local banks to stump up just short of £1 million to buy residential property. When he defaulted and the banks went to repossess the properties, they discovered that there was little value left. The properties had all been purchased less than 12 months beforehand, but already the sale prices had plummeted.

Between 2008 and 2011 we saw hardly any conveyancing posts. Conveyancing accounted for less than 2% of our turnover – the remainder being made up with our other areas of business – accountancy, legal cashiers, litigation solicitors, locums and specialist career coaching.

Conveyancing candidates registered with us by the bucketload. We started to hear sad tales of middle aged conveyancing lawyers who had been with the same firm for many years suddenly finding themselves on the scrap heap. Others commenced alternative careers. We came across conveyancers working as shelf stackers in Tescos, delivery drivers, salesmen, charity workers, care assistants and stock market traders.

At the same time solicitors’ firms started to exploit the situation by demanding that conveyancing staff took a percentage cut of the work they did instead of a salary, or worked only if they had their own ‘following’ of developer clients. Of course this rarely generated enough work to survive on or pay the mortgage.

This really was the dark ages in the conveyancing world!

However, this year we appear to be back in the boom times. Candidates are getting increasingly harder to source, the market is much brighter post-2012 and recovery is well under way. Conveyancing is booming yet again in London and the South East, and as a result we are expecting a steady increase in demand across the country from 2013 through to 2015.

When will the next collapse occur? Will the generation made redundant between 2008 and 2011 get back into the legal profession? Who knows…

Jonathan Fagan is a solicitor, qualified recruitment consultant and Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed here – www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan

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 Metropolitcan 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 increased, it means that there are probably well over 100,000 law graduates since 2008 who have not entered the legal profession via the solicitor route.

Thinking through the cost of the LPC – if you now complete this and get a training contract on the high street, assuming your salary remains less than £16,000 for the first two years of your training and less than £25,000 for the next two years, you are going to take about 6 years to pay off the fee (paying it at £200 a month). A mortgage and a family must remain a very distant possibility for most NQs at the moment.

Does this level of cost really create a sustainable future flow of potential trainee solicitors, or just deter those who do not have relatives and connections already in the business? Has the time come to restrict the academic institutions from providing LPC courses to those who stand little or no chance of ever progressing with a legal career?

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes the Legal Recruitment blog, an award-winning selection of articles and features on legal recruitment and the legal profession. You can contact Jonathan at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visit one of our websites.

Charity Donations

The Ten-Percent Foundation is still determining its charitable donations for 2013. We like giving money to legal charities or charities with links to solicitors or charities operated or established by solicitors. Recently we donated money to two Lincolnshire charities at the behest of Hodgkinsons Solicitors, Merseyside Welfare Rights and Alder Hey childrens hospital.

If you have any suggestions please email Jonathan Fagan at jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk. The foundation likes to donate sums of around £500-£1,000 although we donate larger sums as well. No form filling is required and we prefer specific projects or smaller charities.

The Ten-Percent Group of Legal Recruitment websites gives 10% of annual profits to charity. We have carried on with this tradition since we formed the company 13 years ago. So far over £51,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.

We hope you have enjoyed reading our newsletter and look forward to hearing from you if we can assist further.

Warm regards

Jonathan Fagan
Consultant

Legal Recruitment News is produced by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – you can view all versions of the e-newsletter at www.legal-recruitment.co.uk. Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment was established in 2000 and donates 10% of profits to charity, hence the name.

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