Ask a Recruitment Consultant – questions this month on our chat bot
Questions sent to us via our Chat service online, together with general career questions emailed across. We do our best to answer all queries, sometimes after a fairly lengthy delay if we are busy!
Q: I am currently studying to become a solicitor and I have been looking for a placement or a day of voluntary work in legal department where I can develop my skills further. Ideal would be to get a job placement, but I could start with a bit of voluntary work to enable me to get and acquire the necessary experience that is required to get into the legal placement job. Will be much appreciated.
A: Ten-Percent Legal are unable to assist, but we do have a page called the Job Creation Scheme. This was set up so if anyone contacts us with opportunities for work experience we can refer these to interested graduates. Please visit https://ten-percent.co.uk/work-experience/ for details.
Q: Why don’t you give full details of locum assignments in your email updates?
A: Usually because we don’t have any further information to give you because the firms have not given it to us, but also because we are reluctant to identify law firms to locums. Firstly, a lot of law firms do not want their identities revealing generally and secondly because there are a small number of ‘rogue’ locum solicitors out there who will start bombarding the law firm with emails and phone calls to chase up. Not only is this a detriment to our business but also law firms tend not to like it! If your CV gets sent by two agencies and you don’t actually know who the firm is, whichever agency sends the CV first usually gets the assignment, without any issues for you to be concerned about. Naturally its nice when firms give us the assignment on an exclusive basis, but this is not always the case.
Q: I have a law degree from Iran and I will soon be graduating from University of Law in which I am studying GDL. I have only been in this country for almost 2 years therefore have very little experience in the field or the UK working environment in general. Needless to say I have applied to some firms and other jobs, but I have mainly been accepted for the volunteer positions which I am grateful for.
A: See https://ten-percent.co.uk/work-experience/
Q: I hope this email finds you well. I am a TV Producer looking to change career and become a media lawyer. With close to ten years experience in the TV industry producing a mix of TV shows and digital and commercial content I have a good solid knowledge of the media. One of the reasons I am interested in changing careers is due to the working hours that being a TV professional often commands. I was therefore wondering, are there jobs within media law that can offer normal 9-5 working hours? Or am I wasting my time even considering this as a possibility? I hope you don’t mind me asking, I’m just trying to do some research as training in law would require me to do a conversion post grad which is costly and I’m not wanting to pay out excessive amounts in money and time only to discover it’s the same if not worse than TV.
A: Hmm – no. Definitely not. Anyone out there know anyone in media law who works 9-5 hours? We certainly don’t. I think that if you are making a career move into law to work less hours you probably need to get in touch with a few solicitors on forums to ask what they think about it. I suspect the answers may well be laced with a bit of humour and surprise that anyone could think lawyers work less hours than TV industry professionals. Generally I suspect you would have to look at another profession if this is the main criteria. Accountancy perhaps?
