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.

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 – September 2013

Welcome to the September edition of Legal Recruitment News, including a Legal Job Market Update, Latest Candidate Registrations and articles on the Cooperative Legal Services profit slump, a duty solicitor debacle and supplying ‘free’ services to clients.

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). Articles contained within the e-newsletter can be found also at www.ten-percent.co.uk and www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.co.uk

Stop Press: £60 Membership Deal for Review
Since July 2011 Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment has offered a deal whereby law firms with less than 100 staff pay £60 a month for 5 years and enjoy unlimited recruitment at all levels. At present we have 85 law firms signed up. Some firms are more active than others, but we have members who use us to cover their locums annually, others who recruit once every few years, and others who are constantly on the lookout for new staff. All our members benefit from the lower costs involved in using the scheme rather than one-off recruitment agency services or paying for Law Society Gazette advertisements.

The price and system will be reviewed for new applications once we acquire 100 members. 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. We anticipate, following our review, that there will be an increase in the monthly fee for new members and a staggered fee system for firms of differing sizes.

If you would like to be one of the last 15 firms to benefit from the £60 universal fee for 5 years before we complete our review, please get in touch as soon as possible – full details about the scheme can be found at www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services

Job Market Update – September 4th
The legal job market has been mixed in August. We suspect that the lack of a continued rise in recruitment numbers relates to the following things:

Partners’ Holidays. Everything always seems to stop at some firms until mid-September. Partners return to work after lying on the beach thinking about how to increase profits and we get lots of phone calls looking for extra staff.
Spouse Job Posting. At smaller firms Partners’ wives/husbands decide that their spouse needs an extra pair of hands. The call is made at the end of July prior to a holiday. After the holiday the vacancy disappears as the partner (and their spouse) realises the effect the recruitment will have on profits.
Brainstorming In House. Some posts are sent in to us from in house legal departments following a brainstorming session in a quiet period in July. In September the board meet to veto the idea and the vacancy is indicated as filled.
Housing Market Falls. In the summer the market drops off a bit. Buyers, sellers and conveyancers all go on holiday, which means that the work drops off and recruitment no longer seems so urgent.
The National Trust. In August Lawyers have better things to think about than recruitment, including days out to the zoo, local museums and National Trust properties. It is the school holidays after all!
Mid-September tends to be a busier month as a result of the above, when lawyers get back to work.

August has seen the following occur so far:

Family Solicitors – redundancies still occurring in all areas outside London. How the Cooperative Legal Services ever thought they could make money by obtaining an LSC franchise in family law is just beyond me.
Increase in locum availability from the last week of August. Decrease in locum assignments.
Candidate registrations for locum work are up. New permanent solicitor registrations are up slightly (92 new candidates in August compared with 82 in July).
Vacancy posting increased at the start of August before tailing off as we get into the autumn. Main activity has been residential conveyancing followed by wills & probate and commercial property. No personal injury (apart from a locum role) and the same for family law (excluding LSC family supervisor recruitment in London).

Has the Co-operative gone completely mad?
In recent times it has been reported that the Co-operative has lost over £3.5 million via its legal division, but at the same time it plans to introduce apprentice-style online legal career training to new employees.

The Co-operative has been offering legal services for some time. Salaries appear to be higher than on the high street and the Co-op has never seemed particularly bothered about recruiting staff with particular qualifications – ie solicitors – and are more concerned with experience.

At the same time they have an LSC family contract and took on a whole tranche of family lawyers including a high profile lawyer from TV Edwards.

It must be asked though – which executive at the Co-op thought there was money to be made in legal services like LSC funded family law work? How does the Co-op plan to make legal services a sustainable service like their funeral arm? Did they really look into the market in any depth before taking the plunge?

One would have thought that it doesn’t take much research to work out that a high profile family lawyer from TV Edwards earning say £65,000 is going to need to do about £190,000 worth of work in a year (or add value to the business for the same amount) to justify their existence. How on earth would this happen when most LSC funded family law work is paid at a rate that would require a solicitor to bill 100 hours a week to get anywhere near to this?

Yes, but the probate is where the money is. This is almost certainly true, but how many people feel comfortable talking about probate to a funeral director or a call centre operative recommended by a funeral director? How many prefer to speak to the local solicitor who will almost certainly be cheaper, and also be considered by the client to be more accessible and available than a legal adviser speaking to them via the telephone from Cardiff?

Have the Cooperative gone completely mad? Quite possibly. After all they did buy up rather a lot of toxic debt from a building society lending to anyone and everyone around that well-known boom town of Stoke-on-Trent…..

Does any of this benefit solicitors firms in competition with organisations like the Co-operative? Who knows…..

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 last 12 hours

03091839 Locum Conveyancing and Commercial Property Solicitor. National coverage. Available 30th Sept onwards.
03091655 Locum Commercial Property Solicitor. 20 years experience. National coverage.
02092125 Wills & Probate Solicitor, 10 years PQE. Looking in Devon and Cornwall.
02090951 Conveyancing Solicitor Locum – South Coast. £29 per hour.
02071837 Duty Solicitor looking for posts in East and Central London. Salaried.
02091114 Employment Solicitor Locum. London. £20 per hour.
02090957 Family Solicitor Locum. 20 years PQE. National coverage.
01092217 Commercial & Civil Litigation Solicitor. 1 year PQE. London and South East.
01091850 Family Panel Solicitor looking around London. Salaried role.
31082216 Conveyancing Solicitor looking in central London. Permanent. £45k.
29082017 Conveyancing Solicitor with experience in managing volume operation. London. Permanent roles.
29081534 Litigation and Child Care Solicitor – Camarthenshire. 10 years PQE.

The Duty Solicitor and LSC Debacle

A recent case we have been involved in as recruiters as finally hit the big time. The LSC have been heavily criticised by an MP for their dealings with a duty solicitor. Yesterday Steve McCabe MP stood up in the House of Commons and delivered a speech to question the relevant minister about the matter. I have pasted below his press release, sent out shortly before the speech was made.

The link to the Hansard entry is: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmhansrd/cm130903/halltext/130903h0002.htm#13090344000002 – gives a bit of information as well about the government’s plans.

We are involved in the case as the recruitment agency who introduced Mr Majid to Knights Solicitors. This was a last minute introduction, done before a duty solicitor rota deadline in 2010. Mr Sajjad Khan/Ahmad, the senior partner at Knights Solicitors, was arrested by police and is currently due to appear before the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal.

Press Release from Steve McCabe: MP slams Legal Aid Agency in House of Commons debate

Steve McCabe, Member of Parliament for Birmingham Selly Oak, is due to bring the Legal Aid Agency, formally the Legal Services Commission, to task over its unfair treatment of a constituent in an adjournment debate in the House of Commons on Tuesday 2 September 2013.

Steve McCabe was first contacted by Kamran Majid in summer 2011 when he asked Steve to take up his case. Since then Steve has been trying to get a meaningful and genuine response from the Legal Services Commission (LSC) but to no avail.

Mr Majid was taken on as a solicitor by a firm which were under investigation by the LSC for large scale fraud. Despite this the LSC allowed Mr Majid’s Duty Solicitor submission to be registered with them in May 2010 but then 20 days later the LSC terminated all legal aid contracts held by Knights Solicitors. This meant that Mr Majid could not undertake any of the legal aid work the LSC had previously approved him to do.

Mr Majid requested that he transfer his legal aid work to another solicitors firm as the LSC had done with 15 other solicitors. However, the LSC refused to do this and did not offer any meaningful explanation; it seemed the LSC were somehow implicating Mr Majid in the alleged fraud at Knights Solicitors. This had grave consequences for Mr Majid who felt his reputation was irrevocably damaged; he was put under considerable financial strain and left without employment for 7 months.

After persistent enquiries from both Steve McCabe and Mr Majid the LSC decided to admit that they actually did make an error in allowing 15 other duty solicitors in similar positions to Mr Majid to pursue legal aid work. This happened before and after the sanctions taken against Knights Solicitors. Although the LSC admitted an error they did nothing to correct it and allowed the 15 other solicitors to enjoy a benefit which they denied to Mr Majid.

Steve McCabe also brought this matter before the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman but no satisfactory response from this body.

Steve McCabe MP said:
“I have called this adjournment debate as I do not believe that the LSC, which is a publicly funded body, have acted in a proper way towards my constituent. I do not feel that at any point they have helped me with my enquiries and it appears they have purposefully tried to mislead both myself and Mr Majid.

“The crux of the matter is that the LSC penalised my constituent but allowed 15 other solicitors an opportunity they denied to my constituent. This is clearly unfair and we need to know how they made a ‘mistake’ before and after Mr Majid’s case but can claim they got it right for him. I also want to know why the LSC approved my constituent’s contract with Knights Solicitors if the very same firm was under investigation for fraud and was being shut down only days later.

“Does the LSC not have a duty to protect solicitors that carry out legal aid work? In my opinion Mr Majid is an innocent victim of public bureaucracies who have protected themselves rather than the innocent party and I hope the Minister will pursue this matter. We are talking about several million pounds being lost in fraud and these people at the LSC covering it up and picking on an innocent man. It’s an utter disgrace.”

Free Services – are they ever appreciated?

I am not sure if a study has ever been done of these, but a recent experience has made us re-evaluate our own offerings. One of the services Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment offers is ‘free CV checks’. This involves lawyers and law students sending us their CVs for us to give them the once over before replying with our general impressions. We pride ourselves on offering this service without any reference to our paid CV services or our recruitment agency work, although we naturally hope that visitors come back and use us.

This week I received a CV from a law graduate requesting a free CV check. I had a look through and replied with feedback to say that his CV was unlikely to get him any interviews and needed work. I gave him a few pointers where improvement was needed and also suggested that he may want to get legal work experience to improve his chances (he didn’t have any).

Ten minutes later I received an email informing me that our response was unprofessional and besides what did we know anyway – we weren’t recruiters… I emailed back to point out that it was a free service, we are recruiters and have over 10 years of experience advising on CVs for senior partners and district judges through to law students.

Ten minutes after this I had obviously so enraged this law graduate with my response that he telephoned me. The conversation was fairly brief (I hung up) but in essence the law graduate demanded to know why we had criticised his CV and what gave us the right to give him such negative advice.

After experiencing this and other similar instances of free services provided by our company (one involved finding a graduate a training contract which they didn’t bother turning up for), we have come to realise that it doesn’t matter what price you charge for a service, people always have similar expectations of the service.

A free session of legal advice from a law firm is going to be provided to someone who will have the same expectations of the session if he had paid for it. The graduate described above would have probably responded in the same way if I had charged him the £64.99 we usually charge for a full CV review.

Sometimes I question whether a free service has any effect at all on increasing future business levels. Perhaps charging for a service is the best option to avoid feeling angry, if nothing else?

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

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

Newsletter
Welcome to the August edition of Legal Recruitment News for Employers. We have included a market update, articles on getting fired, solicitors with following and Google adwords.

Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Job Market Update – August 7th
A new MarkIt Report shows strongest growth in Service Sector since 2006.

The July 2013 report by MarkIt and the Chartered Institute of Purchasing and Supply (CIPS) shows that the UK service sector expanded at its quickest pace for over six-and-a-half years in July as new business continued to rise strongly amid evidence of an improvement in market conditions.

Full article available at: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/legal-job-market-report-august-12th-2013

CV Reviews – Volunteers Wanted

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment have been operating a Legal Careers Service for over 10 years. Every August we think of something new to do – one year we contacted all the law departments at various universities to offer our services, another year we offered University Law Societies free careers products.

Full article available at: http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/cv-reviews-volunteers-wanted-for-free.html

What Role do Recruitment Agencies have in a post-recession world?

Recruitment has always been at the more risky end of the service sector in relation to effects of recession. I can remember starting my consultancy Ten Percent Legal Recruitment back in April 2000 and speaking to an elderly lady who was working as a police station visitor at the time. When I mentioned that I had set up a recruitment agency she replied “you had better hope there is not a recession if you are doing permanent recruitment”.

Full article here: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/role-of-recruitment-agencies-in-the-post-recession-world

10 Ways to Get Fired

Not that this comes up very often, but it is harder to get fired from a job than you would imagine.
That said, a recent experience with an employer in North Wales indicates that it is possible to be fired for wearing a pink shirt, getting pregnant (the same employer was witnessed to observe that pregnant women were ‘bad for business’) or costing too much money.

So here are the 10 best ways to get (almost) instantly fired.

Full article available at: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ten-ways-to-get-fired

I want to get out of law and am completely fed up, what can I do?

This relates to a number of queries that have come into the Ten Legal Careers Centre over the last six months, although the level of enquiries of this nature has dropped (excluding crime solicitors).

Redundancy or threat of redundancy is one of the main reasons for this enquiry. Lawyers take the opportunity that redundancy presents to reconsider their lives and their positions and to perhaps decide that remaining in the legal profession is something they do not need to do at present, particularly when there are so few jobs currently out there in some fields.

Full article available at: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/i-want-to-get-out-of-law-and-am-completely-fed-up-help

Using a Personal Statement on a CV
One thing that is often apparent on CVs is that people seem to take the wrong approach to their personal statement on the CV. It seems to be the accepted norm that the personal statement is used to put down quite a bland description of what the individual perceives to be their skills. This means that the CV ends up with something along the lines of….

Full article available at: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/using-a-personal-statement-on-a-cv

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.

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

Newsletter – June 2013 – Legal Recruitment News

Welcome to the June edition of Legal Recruitment News. We have included our job market update, new candidate lists, articles on retirement options and current hourly rates & salaries recently observed across the UK.

Legal Recruitment News is written by Jonathan Fagan, MD of the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment group (Interim Lawyers, Ten-Percent £60, Ten-Percent Legal Careers and TP Transcriptions).

Job Market Update – June 4th

The job market in April and May has been busy. Very busy indeed. It appears that the property market is back on the move again, or at least a good number of conveyancing transactions are being undertaken. Whether this is a good solid sustained recovery or whether it is because sellers are being more realistic with their prices in some parts of the UK remains to be seen.

This is having a knock-on effect for legal recruitment. In quite a few areas law firms are starting to think about how to cope with the increase in work and looking at taking on additional staff. Locum and contract bookings are up this year – partly because more firms are recruiting consultants on an ongoing basis for 1,2 or 3 days per week to cover the increased amount of work.

So far this year (April 2013 onwards) we have seen more genuine permanent salaried property and private client jobs than we did in the whole of 2010.

There have been a lot fewer firms registering commission only posts with us as well or recruitment for solicitors with following. I sense a growing realisation amongst law firms that the majority of lawyers want to work for a salary, and in an expanding market paying commission or finding anyone with a following prepared to move is extremely hard.

Commercial posts seem to be continuing on an unsteady line – some times we hear of the medium to large firms recruiting at all levels, and the next we hear of redundancies. Furthermore I am aware of a good number of commercial vacancies falling into the ‘fishing expedition’ area of recruitment – ie the firms are checking to see who is out there or the HR departments are busy justifying their existence! I am aware of this through career coaching in recent weeks and lawyers expressing their frustration at applying for vacancies only to be told that they are ‘on hold’.

In terms of litigation work, the market is fairly quiet. We see occasional new vacancies coming in for civil litigation and family work (privately funded), but very rarely do we see employment law posts or insolvency. Whether this is because they are now the domain of law firms with insurance policy products or Peninsula style work is another matter entirely.

One area that has definitely hit rock bottom is crime. I suspect no crime practitioner needs us to say this, but hardly any recruitment occurred in the last duty solicitor rota deadline week. This is unheard of – we usually get inundated with enquiries, whether or not firms go ahead and recruit. I suspect that this will continue until best value tendering comes into play. On that front, I should say that I fully expect just about every crime firm to put a tender in. Whether or not they do so in their own names or in some new start up to hide the fact it is them, I am convinced that the dog-eat-dog environment that senior partners of specialist crime firms operate in will stop any unified response to the whole affair. I really hope I am wrong in this assumption, although it is hard to see at the moment how anyone can possibly see a long term future in crime as a qualified and skilled professional lawyer. Even more interesting will be the fact that if Stobarts Legal move into the Legal Aid arena, their lawyers will inevitably be getting paid less than the truck drivers who work for Stobarts.

Overall outlook? I agree with the recent Reed job market report – we are back up to 2008 levels for permanent recruitment, although 2008 was still not a wonderful year compared with the 2005-2007 property and recruitment boom!

We now have over 80 law firm members in the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment £60 per month service (unlimited recruitment). It is likely we will close the scheme to new members when we get to 100 law firms and review the service before allowing any new applications. If you want further details on this option please visit our website.

Locums
We are now officially in the locum season. Assignments are now coming in regularly on an ongoing basis as firms recruit for 1-3 days per week (locums give you the flexibility to expand and contract as work ebbs and flows), covering for solicitors moving on and those more urgently needed to cover annual or sick leave. www.interimlawyers.co.uk is our specialist site for locum and contract assignments.

Questions
Any questions regarding the above? Contact me via LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com/in/jbfagan),Facebook, Twitter (@tenpercentlegal) or old fashioned email – jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk

Jonathan Fagan, June 4th 2013.

10 Most Recent Candidates
Selection of new candidates registered in the past 24 hours. Got a permanent vacancy or locum assignment? Get in touch and we will send over CVs to assist, sometimes almost immediately. Over 10,000 solicitors and legal executives are registered with us.
E: cv@ten-percent.co.uk
Twitter: @tenpercentlegal
Tel: 0207 127 4343

03061603 Commercial & Residential Property Solicitor – Bristol and South West. 2013 qualifier. Developer experience.
03061353 Wills & Probate Solicitor – 12 months PQE. Bristol or Birmingham.
31051637 Commercial Property Solicitor – 6 years PQE. London
28051244 Conveyancing Solicitor Locum – £30 per hour for annual leave cover – August onwards. London and South East.
04060846 Family Solicitor – 2 years PQE. Full range of work – high volume and quality cases covered. London and South East.
01062327 Commercial Litigation and Commercial Contracts Solicitor – 3 years PQE. £40k salary. London.
31051934 Family Solicitor Locum, 20 years PQE. South West, Thames Valley and South East.
31051727 Conveyancing Solicitor Locum, 6 years PQE, available from 19th June – London and surrounds.
31051307 Commercial Contracts and IP Solicitor – relocating to London. 2013 qualifier.
31051019 Residential and Commercial Conveyancing Solicitor Locum – Essex, Herts and East London. Available from 13th June.

Locuming as a Retirement Option
Options on retirement and locum work

A fairly common call at the moment is from senior solicitors in smaller practices asking about options on retirement or semi-retirement. Quite a few are aware of the option of going off to do some locum work, but very few are aware of what this entails and the various options you have available.

Firstly you need to think about what you want to get out of retirement. Do you want to undertake regular activities on a weekly basis, or do you want to spend certain times of the year away from home and family? Locum work falls into three categories usually – firstly assignments that are close enough for you to get to, secondly assignments that will require you to experience the delights of the Premier Inn chain (I can recommend them compared with Travelodge!) and thirdly assignments that are part time and ongoing.

A good number of retired solicitors think they will just do local assignments but realise pretty quickly that if they need money this will not be enough to sustain them. Furthermore it is very unlikely that recruitment agents will put work your way if they have the option of one very flexible solicitor who takes every assignment sent to them or you – a very specific solicitor.

Others think that it will be possible to get full time permanent work for a few years before winding down. Again this is very unlikely. After all, if you are reading this and currently a senior partner, would you employ yourself? Think very carefully and be honest! Your salary expectations will be extremely high for a good guess, and unless you have a good quality following of clients you are not going to be in much demand from other law firms. Age can be a very limiting factor in the recruitment business for a lot of firms, particularly smaller ones. There is always concern that a semi-retired senior partner is going to be arrogant, impossible to work with and extremely slow.

The best way of approaching retirement using locum or contract work is to accept it for what it is – sporadic, a bit of a nuisance, but fairly profitable if you are able to demonstrate flexibility.

If you have a lot of commitments during the week – ie golf club one day, caring for grandchildren another, walking in the hills for a third day, it is definitely not for you. I would recommend keeping an eye out for ongoing part time consultancy work instead. Usually advertised as locum it is the solution for anyone looking to scale down their working life but keep a steady income flowing through the door. It won’t make you very much but it will maintain an enjoyable retirement if you like golf, cooking, fine wines, grandchildren time or similar interests….

One of the other questions asked is how much work you can expect as a locum. It used to be the case that you could guarantee 9 months out of every 12 months, but I would estimate that this is probably currently running at about 6 months out of every 12 months for most people. It all depends on your circumstances…

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and regularly writes theLegal 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 in the process of determining its charitable donations for 2013. We now have a pot of about £10,000 to donate. We were hoping to complete donations before the end of March but this has dragged on due to our increased workload! 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 Alder Hey childrens hospital and Thurrock CAB.

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 from time to time. 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 £48,000 has been donated to charities in the UK and Africa including LawCare and the CAB.

Recent Salary Levels and Hourly Rates for Solicitors

Recent salary levels seen by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment from actual placements and locum assignments.

1. 5 year PQE Conveyancing solicitor – Essex – £35,000.
2. 10 year PQE Conveyancing solicitor – SW London – £42,500.
3. Wills & Probate Legal Executive – Hampshire – £23,000.
4. Residential Conveyancing HNW Solicitor – Central London – £55,000
5. Residential Conveyancing HNW Solicitor – London West End – £45,000
6. Family Solicitor – Milton Keynes – £30,000
7. Family Locum – Devon – £35 per hour.
8. Family and Litigation Locum – Mid Wales – £25 per hour.
9. Conveyancing Executive – SW London – £23,000.
10. Commercial Property Solicitor – 5 years PQE – Bristol – £42,000.
11. NQ Tax Solicitor – London – £55,000.
12. Conveyancing Locum – SW London – £30 per hour.
13. Conveyancing Locum – Surrey – £35 per hour
14. Conveyancing Locum – ILEX – Surrey – £20 per hour.
15. Conveyancing Locum – Solicitor – Central London – £25 per hour.
16. Wills & Probate Locum – Middlesex – £25 per hour.
17. Wills & Probate Locum – Yorkshire – £17 per hour.
18. Conveyancing Fee Earner – Milton Keynes – £11 per hour.

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