Reading Time: 2 minutesOpen plan offices are the bane of our lives as recruiters. Some firms insist on them, as it is good for the boss – he sits in a nice large office at the end of the hall containing the workers, and has a significant amount of credibility. The workmen all huddle around desks set out…
Reading Time: 2 minutesConveyancing is usually divided into two areas of work in a high street setting – firstly there is residential conveyancing, and secondly there is commercial conveyancing. The difference is exactly that – one is houses for individuals or investors, the other is offices and premises for business or commercial interests. On the whole, high street…
Reading Time: 2 minutesFamily law tends to be concentrated at the high street end of the legal profession, with the majority of family lawyers dealing with matters for both private or Legal Services Commission-funded (legal aid) clients, where there is probably one large asset (a house), a couple of children, and warring parents. Family law is divided up…
Reading Time: 2 minutesWills & probate is a real hybrid for law firms. There are some people dealing with private client work at very large law firms dealing with clients having millions of pounds of assets, and the majority working in regional and smaller practices dealing with the full range of work from unemployed pensioners with no assets…
Reading Time: 2 minutes(also applies to the term ‘Company Commercial Solicitor’) A company commercial solicitor is usually well paid, deals with a lot of administrative work, and spends an inordinate amount of time being nice to directors of companies from back bedroom start ups through to blue chip multinationals. In essence, company commercial work is all to do…
Reading Time: 4 minutesA locum solicitor is a lawyer who works on a short term basis only – sometimes for a few hours, and other times for a few years – to cover for absent members of staff. Commonly used in local authorities, where staff always seem to require more cover than in private practice (I would imagine…
Reading Time: 2 minutesA crime solicitor used to have a little bit of credibility about him/her, but in recent times it has almost become an embarrassment to be one. Rates for the work haven’t gone up in years, and currently a crime solicitor could earn more working the night shift at Asda stacking shelves than going to a…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion: Hi there – I would be very grateful if you could please give me so advice. I feel as if my law career is going nowhere. I have nearly 3 years continuous paralegal experience which i have gained in different departments. I spent 2 and a half years with one firm and i have…
Reading Time: 2 minutesPQE stands for ‘Post-Qualified Experience’, and is usually given in years or half years for solicitors and also for legal executives as well. For example, if a solicitor was admitted to the Roll in England and Wales in September 2005, he/she would have 5 years PQE by September 2010. It usually refers to every year…
Reading Time: 2 minutesBonus schemes are either loathed or hated in equal proportion by solicitors. I recently read an article about recruitment consultant’s salaries, which was talking about the average bonus given to consultants and the way it was done. It was surprising to find that in what is considered a sales orientated environment, most consultants were getting…
Reading Time: < 1 minute“Hello, I’m an LPC graduate, can you help me find a training contract?” A telephone call we receive on a very regular basis. The very quick answer to this query is usually no, followed by a very pregnant pause. The person telephoning almost sounds surprised! I am more surprised that someone has been on our…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteA sole supplier arrangement is one where a recruitment agency handles all the aspects of recruitment for a specific vacancy or length of time. Firms can benefit from being able to hand over the entire recruitment process from start to finish, with the exception of the interview itself. Where you see this term in adverts…
Reading Time: 3 minutesFor the last five years, a UK university has invited me in to talk to their LPC students about their CVs. I receive a copy of the CVs beforehand, assess them, and then base my talk upon each groups’ CVs when I go and talk. Some years I find the standard to be very mixed…
Reading Time: 3 minutesAt some stage in a solicitors career, this conundrum will almost always arise. It usually follows the stint of a locum in a firm for a longer period of a few weeks, and someone in the firm discovering that the locum is getting paid more than one of the junior partners for doing a much…
Reading Time: 2 minutesQuestion: I am thinking of going back to uni to do a GDL and work towards a career in law. The problem is I have pretty average A Level results, B,C,D and a 2:1 in business from an ex-poly. (I think I have always been capable, just not really motivated during A Levels.). I really want…
Reading Time: < 1 minute1. Whatever you do – do not get drunk. This is about the worst thing that can happen (and the best if it happens to someone else!). 2. Do not sit next to someone who you don’t like and get drunk. This can result in fights, particularly if it is your boss. 3. Avoid mistletoe…
Reading Time: 2 minutesI have conducted career coaching sessions for a number of years for law students and lawyers, and once someone come to see me to ask what they needed to wear for a legal job interview. It almost seemed like the primary reason she had travelled over 200 miles to see me, and I am not…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteOne of the reasons that law firms struggle to recruit when they are looking for solicitors of between 3 and 10 years PQE is because when solicitors spend 3 years or more in private practice, they have either: a) got set on a career path to partnership with their current firm. b) seen the light…
Reading Time: 2 minutesSurviving a recession is a little like writing a blog – you have to constantly look at your save button to ensure you dont lose any work as I have just lost this article and am now retyping it! Top tips are: 1. Make sure you are invaluable to your firm. Even if you are…
Reading Time: < 1 minute This is the best content mangement system available on the internet. WordPress can be altered and bent into so many different styles, sizes, blogs, corporate websites, individual websites, video sites, shops, forums etc.. it is unbelievable. Recommended for solicitors firms as it can make your site look that much more user friendly and you can…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis is one of the best programmes ever to be released free of charge on the web. Open Source is truly one of the craziest ideas ever to come out of the internet! Filezilla is an FTP Transfer programme to get files from your computer onto your website. This programme enables you to adjust just…
Reading Time: < 1 minute Ah, those were the days. When computers made noise, things rattled, joysticks broke when attempting to break the world record on Daley Thompson’s Decathlon, televisions were still in black and white (they were in my house anyway!). Now you can relive those moments with a ZX Spectrum Emulator. Download one of these to suit your…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis piece of software is the Windows Media Player alternative. It is very powerful and much easier to use. It is open source software and free of charge to download. We first started to use it when we discovered that Windows Media Player needed a whole range of extra downloads to make it work with…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis software is becoming much more widely used. Open Source software can be found right across the web in a whole host of guises. This website has been built using Open Source software (WordPress) and a large number of plugins and extra bits have been added, again at no cost. Open Office is a huge…
Reading Time: 2 minutesTen-Percent Legal Recruitment Consultants have been at the forefront of online legal recruitment for over 15 years. We have used a range of technologies whilst recruiting, and this has included a number of pieces of software that have stood the test of time. Whilst Adobe Acrobat Reader is a great piece of free software with…
Reading Time: < 1 minute7 Zip is the free version of Winzip. We have been using it for years and it is very powerful Open Source software, which naturally is free of charge unlike Winzip who will eventually ask you for money to continue after an initial trial period of about 30 days. 7 Zip is great – it…
Reading Time: 2 minutesMay has been a busy month. Not as busy as previous years – at the height of the recession in 2008 we had our busiest month ever with over 60 interviews, albeit with less take up than hoped for! Recruitment has started to pick up after all the interruptions of the various bank holiday periods…
Reading Time: < 1 minute Winzip.com This is a Windows compression utility that enables you to send (amongst other things) large files via email in a fraction of the time it would normally take. It works by squashing the file down, and means that files can be saved and put on a CD or memory stick to transfer to another…
Reading Time: < 1 minuteThis used to be fairly popular (both ways), but as more lawyers realise that life is not that rosy on the other side, we find it less common. If you are about 2 years PQE (post-qualification experience) or above, in a field of law related to in house work – employment, company commercial, conveyancing, property,…
Reading Time: 2 minutesNot so long ago, we recruited for a firm looking for a candidate to work in Bermuda. Within one week of a Law Society Gazette advertisement, we received 75 applications, all from conveyancing solicitors. Normally when advertising in the Gazette we receive 2-3 enquiries from each advertisement, so this was quite a shock! Relocating abroad…