Candidate Update April 10th – May 1st 2012
30041607 Billing Assistant, LSC experience, 2 years in practice, looking around London.
29041537 Family Paralegal, 5 years experience, looking in London.
29041511 Family Solicitor, Panel member, looking around South Lincs, North Leics and East Notts.
25041334 Wills & Probate STEP Solicitor locum – available for South West and South East assignments.
25041049 Private Client, Tax & Trusts Solicitor with business development and finance experience. 10 years PQE.
24042203 Property Solicitor Locum – residential and commercial – London and Berkshire. 8 years PQE. HNW experience.
24042123 Family Solicitor, looking for care work posts in South Kent. 0 years PQE.
24041622 Commercial Property Solicitor Locum, 20 years experience. Has worked in city firms and Legal 500 practices.
24041558 General Commercial Solicitor – Property, Commercial Contracts, M&A, Environmental, Com Litigation. 3 years PQE. Locum/Perm.
24041544 Employment Lawyer – available for locum work – UK coverage. £25 per hour.
24041253 Personal Injury Solicitor – claimant and defendant. 10 years PQE. Essex and Suffolk.
24041130 Costs Draftsman with over 2 years experience, looking in Manchester and the North West for a post.
23042029 Immigration Solicitor with own practice looking to bolt on or consultancy work. LSC supervisor. LSC funded immigration. London
22042313 Wills & Probate Solicitor looking for work 3 days per week. 10 years PQE. Locum or permanent, North London.
19041905 Personal Injury and Clinical Negligence Paralegal with Costs Drafting experience. Hull, Leeds and Doncaster.
19042013 Family LSC Supervisor looking to work as a consultant on a monthly retainer plus hourly rate. Anywhere.
19041607 Commercial Property Locum – high level of experience in good quality firms. London and Home Counties
19041430 Wills & Probate Solicitor with STEP qualification. 6 years PQE. Cardiff and surrounding areas.
19041225a Trademarks Paralegal, 10 years experience – ITMA qualified. £33k. London
19041225 Costs Draftsman looking in Bristol or Cardiff.
19041130 Litigation Solicitor, 25 years experience. Wide range of civil and commercial litigation. London and Home Counties.
19041048 Conveyancing Lawyer, 7 years residential and commercial property. Own network but salary sought. London.
13041254 Legal Cashier available for contract work in East Anglia and Essex.
18041422 Credit Controller looking in Leeds and West Yorkshire. £19k.
16041300 Contracts, Property and Litigation Solicitor, 5 years PQE. Milton Keynes and surrounds.
15042031 Conveyancing Lawyer – 4 years experience, relocating to Wrexham, Rhyl and Chester areas.
10041914 Conveyancing FILEX – looking around Merseyside and Lancashire. Available immediately.

To request a CV, please email us at cv@ten-percent.co.uk. Click here to register a vacancy and receive suitable CVs.

Duty Solicitors looking to move before the CDS12 deadline

RC – Duty Solicitor with higher rights looking in Manchester, Chester, Cheshire, Lancashire and Liverpool. 5 years PQE.
CT – Duty Solicitor, 5 years PQE, looking in the South West and South East excluding London.
BS – Duty Solicitor, 8 years PQE, looking in central London only. Salary levels £38k and above.
RH – Duty Solicitor looking for a monthly retainer for his slots from a London firm.
TP – Duty Solicitor looking in Bristol. Over 7 years PQE.
CB – Duty Solicitor looking for part time salaried posts in London or Birmingham.
MR – Duty Solicitor looking for a monthly retainer for her slots in Southampton or Portsmouth.
CC – Duty Solicitor looking around Cheltenham and Gloucester.
SS – Duty Solicitor relocating to Cornwall.
MC – Duty Solicitor looking for freelance roles in SW London. £1200 pcm plus 1st refusal on duty slots.
CR – Duty Solicitor looking for monthly retainer on posts in London.
CC – Duty Solicitor looking for freelance roles anywhere – South or London.
TR – Duty Solicitor looking around Leicestershire – salaried roles only.
BH – Duty Solicitor with HRA looking in London. Salaried role £40k+, VHCC experience.
MB – Duty Solicitor looking for monthly retainer roles on posts in London and the South East.
JA – Duty Solicitor looking for part time or consultancy roles in the West Midlands.
GJ – Duty Solicitor looking around the North West.
HP – Duty Solicitor looking for freelance posts in South East London and Kent.
RV – Duty Solicitor looking for freelance posts in the Midlands and the North West.
FS – Duty Solicitor looking for salaried posts in the East and West Midlands. Salary £36k+.
DR – Duty Solicitor looking for salaried posts in West Yorkshire. Salary £35k.
KZ – Duty Solicitor looking for monthly retainer posts with opportunity to do family law. Salary for family work.
DN – Duty Solicitor looking for freelance posts in London.
HA – Duty Solicitor looking for part time salaried posts in the West Midlands.
AS – Duty Solicitor looking for freelance/monthly retainer posts in the West Midlands or London.
SM – In House Counsel/HRA looking for salaried or fee split arrangement in London or Hertfordshire. Not duty.

We have others as well, plus VHCC members and police station accredited solicitors without duty status.

Current freelance/monthly retainer rates we have come across so far include £1,000 per month plus 75% callouts, £1,200 per month, plus 70-80% callout, 100% unsocial, PC paid.

To register a duty solicitor vacancy, please email us at cv@ten-percent.co.uk. It is always useful to know the salary range or freelance rates you are considering.

On Yer Bike – Just how Committed are Candidates to Finding Work?

I must have spent about 10% of my time as a legal recruitment consultant over the past 3 years talking to desperate lawyers, conveyancers in particular, who have either had to find alternative work or take drastic pay cuts in order to stay either in their posts or move to a new one. At times I have felt a little bit like a counsellor as opposed to a recruitment consultant because so many of these people have found themselves in desperate situations.

If you rewind the clock back about 7-10 years conveyancers were the kings of the high street. If we got a conveyancing candidate in we would immediately market them to as many different firms as possible because so many firms were keen to take on extra staff and there was a massive shortfall in the number of staff available. At times it felt as if we had to cajole people into positions and sell the benefits of joining an individual firm to them.

This all changed of course and the roles reversed exactly opposite. If we got a conveyancing job in over the last 3 to 4 years we would be selling candidates to firms in the hope of finding someone the firm liked as opposed to vice versa. However a recent phenomenon has occurred of vacancies coming in, but no candidates are bothered about applying.

A recent example would be a probably very well paid locum position up in the North West of England. This will last between 4 to 12 months and is at a fairly senior level of 5 years PQE or more. We have over 250 conveyancers based within commuting distance of this particular firm who have 5 years PQE or more and have expressed an interest in locum or longer term contracts or permanent roles. I sent this vacancy out to all of them a few days ago, and had precisely one response from a candidate who did not fully fit the job description. I know for a fact that at least 10 out of the 250 are unemployed and desperate for work (because they call us fairly regularly) and yet none of them bothered to get in touch.

I can almost guarantee their response if I phone them to ask if they are interested: “Sorry this is slightly too far away and I am only looking to work on Monday to Thursday and possibly alternate Wednesdays”.

It seems that so many people have got set in their ways with specific requirements to the way they work that they have lost touch with reality and the fact that they need money in order to survive. If a fairly lucrative contract comes up in a different area but maybe slightly inconvenient and not fit around a shopping trip or picking the kids up from the nursery then a lot of people simply won’t entertain that post. There are so many people in this recession who, it seems, still think that the world owes them a favour and that things need to be served up to them on a golden plate.

We see this with vacancies coming through when we get a good candidate who fits the vacancy and the vacancy fits them, but the good candidates suddenly decide that they are looking for something more and start to negotiate right at the end of the process. It seems to be almost that a culture exists of wanting to feel wanted yet at the same time wanting more than you can possibly expect and being surprised when that is not handed to you.

It seems to be right across the PQE range. I have a number of solicitor candidates registered with us who have taken jobs working as an administrative assistant, stacking shelves in Tescos and working in bars/pubs. The Jobcentre itself seems a very good employer of non-practising solicitors… These candidates will do what it takes to survive and apply just about anywhere in the UK. Similarly I know of plenty of other candidates who have just sat back and waited for work to come to them without making any effort at all to market themselves, get work of any kind or pull out all the stops to get by.

From the candidate’s perspective, a number of solicitors must be completely fed up with firms who waste their time by advertising vacancies that don’t exist, changing the spec to request a following, interview and then offer a commission-only post…..

Legal Job Market Report 1st May 2012
April 2012 was a very strange month in recruitment. It was affected by the Easter break, but we went very quiet mid-month and then very busy towards the end of the month. The shortfall in good quality candidates still exists, but we have had a range of very good quality candidates come on stream over the last month and we have also noticed some redundancies at larger practices.

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is now the preferred supplier to over 50 law firms, and they continued to post vacancies with us throughout April.

Locum posts have recently got very busy indeed, with commercial property positions picking up nicely – www.interimlawyers.co.uk is our specialist locum site for non-member firms.

Commercial posts are picking up through our specialist corporate/commercial and in house website – www.jonathanfagan.co.uk – recent vacancies have been in media law (in house), regulatory posts and general corporate commercial and commercial litigation.

On the high street side we have actually seen recruitment occur in conveyancing, which is good news, plus a wide range of work including family law, property litigation, crime (starting to get very busy this year) and personal injury.

In April we saw 159 new solicitor and legal executive registrations. Over 700 candidates applied for advertised vacancies through us.

Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. T: 0207 127 4343 or email: jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk
£60 Legal Recruitment Statistics
Our innovative new scheme offering all law firms the chance to cover their legal recruitment costs for just £60 per month for 5 years (and yes, we do mean all legal recruitment costs – there are no charges), enables you to control your recruitment budget whilst filling vacancies.

Some firms use us as sole suppliers, but others purchase the service as an add-on to their existing recruitment provision. After all, what have you got to lose? £60 per month to save thousands, potentially tens of thousands of pounds in recruitment costs? We estimate that since July 2011 firms using the scheme have already avoided recruitment agency fees totalling over £100,000.

55+ firms have now signed up.

We have over 8,750 qualified candidates registered with us. These include:

1,394 crime solicitors, police station reps and legal executives. Of these, at least 307 are duty solicitors and over 1,000 are 1+ year PQE solicitors.
1,988 conveyancing solicitors and legal executives. 1,205 of these have 3 years PQE or more.
891 wills & probate solicitors and legal executives. At least 100 of these are STEP.
702 commercial property solicitors. At least 490 of these are over 3 years PQE.
139 corporate finance solicitors.
126 legal cashiers.
935 personal injury solicitors, legal executives and fee earners.
627 corporate commercial solicitors. At least 360 of these are over 3 years PQE.
643 commercial litigation solicitors. At least 365 of these are over 3 years PQE.
237 solicitors and legal executives who describe themselves as professional locums (at least 500 locums on our books)
1188 civil litigation solicitors and legal executives
667 employment solicitors and legal executives
96 intellectual property solicitors
1,568 family solicitors and legal executives. At least 960 of our candidates have 3 years PQE or more in family law.

774 of our candidates are based in the North West
952 of our candidates are based in the Midlands
785 of our candidates are based in Yorkshire and the North East
1138 of our candidates are based in Anglia and Essex
422 of our candidates are based in the South West
279 of our candidates are based in Wales
1765 of our candidates are based in London
1037 of our candidates are based in the South Central region (Hampshire  to Oxfordshire)
939 of our candidates are based in the South East (Kent, Sussex and Surrey)

We cover all types of law, from high street through to commercial practice. Our member firms can recruit at all levels, whether permanent, locum, support staff or solicitors, fee earners and legal executives.  Each vacancy is sent out to all relevant candidates on our database, posted on a variety of job boards, and via social networking including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Our related site, www.tenpercentfinancial.co.uk can also assist with the recruitment of IFAs and accountancy staff (included in the monthly price).

Interested in finding out more? Reply to this email (cv@ten-percent.co.uk), call us on 0207 127 4343 or visit our website at www.ten-percent.co.uk

Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing

TP Online Transcription & Typing Service with offices in London and North Wales. We have a team of 20 UK based transcribers offering digital file and tape transcribing services worldwide. Established in 2001, the company has been handling bulk orders (including over 500 hour projects) and one-off assignments for legal and non-legal clients including a large number of UK Solicitors, B&Q, Endemol, the Office of Fair Trading, Sony, Dundee University, Cartridge World, University of Oxford, NHS Tayside, the British Medical Journal, Marie Curie and many more.

We provide ongoing typing contracts and also work on a one-off basis. Our transcribers are all based in the UK and we maintain a high standard of quality output. Our transcribers are experienced secretaries from the legal profesison, medicine or general business and some are educated to degree level and higher.

We can transcribe from all audio & digital files, whether WAV, WMA, DSS (Olympus) or MP3 (plus a host of other formats), CD or DVD, Standard Cassettes, Mini and Micro Cassettes and Video (VHS). We have FTP facilities. For legal work we are happy to take templates to transcribe into. Our main service for law firms is our capacity to free up ‘in office’ secretaries to undertake daily tasks whilst reducing the backlog of work or any large transcription jobs. For details of the service please visit http://www.tptranscription.co.uk/ call 01352 751945 or email pearl@uk-transcription.co.uk.

April 2012 Free Lawyer Salary Reviews

Ten-Percent Salary Reviews for April 2012 are now available. To view or download them, simply visit our website at www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services and click on the link to ‘Salary Reviews’ on the right hand side. You can also get personalised salary reviews in our careers shop (free to members).

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Formed in April 2000, Ten-Percent is an innovative recruitment membership service run online for law firms and employers across the UK and offshore, offering fixed monthly fee recruitment to members. Over 1,300 law firms and companies have used our services, and we have over 8,000 solicitors & legal executives registered for opportunities, as well as other fee earners and support staff. We donate 10% of our annual profits to charity. http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/

Please email us details of any vacancies to cv@ten-percent.co.uk or register the vacancy online on our website.

Legal Recruitment News
For older editions of the Legal Recruitment News, and free articles on recruitment, legal careers, training, SEO & Web Marketing, please visit http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/ . You can also visit the http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/ for over 200 articles on Legal Recruitment including advice for candidates.

Legal Recruitment News and Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Email: cv@ten-percent.co.uk
Website: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ : http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/
Tel: 0207 127 4343

Contents:
Vacancy Update
Legal Job Market Report 1st March 2012
Recruitment Statistics
Application Forms for Legal Jobs – a waste of time?
A Perfect Interview – what would the questions be?
Training Secretaries to Sell You
How long should a CV be?
Dictation Outsourcing
How to write a good personal profile section for your CV

Legal Job Market Report 1st March 2012
February 2012 was again a very busy month in recruitment, but again vacancies are going up and down like a yo yo. One minute we are flat out, the next very quiet. Very different to recruitment of old, where there was a constant drip of vacancies and candidates coming into us. The main thing we are noticing is that there is starting to be a bit of a shortfall in numbers of applicants. I think some candidates have got a bit fed up of constantly applying for vacancies where the goalposts change or the firm decide not to recruit right at the last minute, and others have simply left the profession.

An example of the goalposts changing recently occurred with a firm in the South East who shall remain nameless. Firstly they advertised a vacancy – very simply this was for a solicitor to do a form of litigation. We sent this out to our candidates and sent over CVs. Next, they decided that they no longer needed a solicitor, it required the services of a legal executive. We sent out the vacancy and provided CVs. Thirdly, they decided that not only did they need a legal executive, they needed one who had a following. At this point we gave up, anticipating that if we found one with a following, no doubt the firm would require the candidate to own a private jet, live in the Seychelles and be able to speak Ukranian as well!

This is quite a common problem at the moment, and unfortunately certain law firms are creating a name for themselves in doing this repeatedly. There is a firm in central London where we will not get any candidates applying unless they are recently in to us, simply because the firm have such a bad reputation at changing the goalposts or not getting back to either us or the candidates about interviews. Very frustrating!

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is now the preferred supplier to over 50 law firms, and they continued to post vacancies with us throughout February.

Locum posts have recently dropped off.

Commercial posts are picking up through our specialist corporate/commercial and in house website – www.jonathanfagan.co.uk – recent vacancies have been in media law (in house), regulatory posts and general corporate commercial and commercial litigation.

On the high street side we have actually seen recruitment occur in conveyancing, which is good news, plus a wide range of work including family law, property litigation, crime (starting to get very busy this year) and personal injury.

In February we saw 97 new solicitor and legal executive registrations with us.

Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. T: 0207 127 4343 or email: jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk

Links:
Register Vacancies Online
About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
£60 Recruitment Service

Vacancy Update from Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment

Recent vacancies are as follows:

14529
Civil Litigation, Employment and Personal Injury Solicitor
Civil litigation, employment and claimant PI/clinical negligence solicitor sought by a Hounslow firm in a good location. They ideally seek a salaried solicitor but will also consider someone on a consultancy basis. Looking for someone able to assist in all three fields, or, at the very least, two of them.

14530
Conveyancing Assistant
VACANCY JUST IN – Conveyancing Assistant sought by a smaller size Northampton firm. The firm seek someone who is able to assist with the fee earning side on files (you will be doing tasks for the conveyancing partner), assist with the administration side of the work – keeping track of quotes given, filing, answering the phone, dealing with clients on a daily basis, handling matters post-completion, opening files etc. This is not just a fee earning role, but also an administrative role. The firm are small and the role encompasses a wide range of work. Salary levels are £17-20k. You will be dealing with elderly clients on a regular basis and hence need to be patient, confident and comfortable speaking on the telephone. Case management software experience very useful. Conveyancing experience is essential.

14527
Crime Solicitor Duty
Duty Solicitor sought by medium sized firm based in the North Nottinghamshire and South Yorkshire areas. Specialist litigation firm with a high street mix of work as well.

14526
Crime Solicitor – Freelance – Duty
Legal 500 Birmingham firm seek duty solicitors. Ideally seeking them on a freelance basis but similarly will look at salaried candidates as well. Offices in the Black Country and Birmingham.

14525
Wills & Probate Solicitor
Medium sized firm of solicitors based in Leeds seek a private client solicitor – 5yrs pqe + , salary at market rate, STEP qualified and confident in marketing and business development. Preferably already in the Leeds/West Yorkshire area.

14524
Crime Solicitor Duty
Duty Solicitor sought by firm based in the Leicester area. Salaried or freelance options considered. Medium sized practice.

14523
Paralegals for LSC funded work
Experienced paralegals to carry out legal aid work in the following areas of law:-
-Immigration (accredited case workers)
-Housing
-Family
-Prison law
The firm also require an admin person, preferably one who lives not too far from Sutton in Surrey.

14522
Associate Solicitor
Associates – Kent and Lincolnshire
Medium sized firm with commitment to both private and LSC funded work, are looking for solicitors and other senior fee earners, with a client following, who would wish to work on an Associate basis. You will be a commercially minded, client focused individual, with technical expertise and a commitment to the delivery of quality legal services. Ideally, you will also have management experience (either team or department supervision), although full training and development opportunities will be provided. Remuneration commensurate with experience and qualifications.

14520
Crime Solicitor Duty
Duty Solicitors sought on a freelance basis – monthly retainer plus hourly rate. This is a VHCC firm with a good mix of quality work and based in West London. Medium sized practice.

14519
Crime Duty Solicitor
Duty Solicitor sought by medium sized multi office firm in Reading. Seeking someone to work out of the Reading office. Salary up to £40k, dependent on experience.

14518
Industrial Disease Fee Earner
Our clients, a firm of solicitors based in Skegness, handle a broad spectrum of industrial disease work including, lung conditions, noise induced hearing loss, repetitive strain injuries, asthma and dermatitis.  Their team is rapidly expanding and we are looking for the right candidate with a minimum of 2 years experience of handling their own industrial disease caseload, in particular noise induced hearing loss claims.

14517
Crime Solicitor (Duty)
Duty Solicitor sought by leading Essex firm to join a team based in Chelmsford. Full range of work required – Magistrates Court, Crown Court preparation and police station. Larger sized practice with Legal 500 status.

14516
General Practice Lawyer
Medium sized firm seek candidates who can work on and off on cases on a part time basis. Upon cases coming in, the firm will recommend you and work on a percentage basis. Types of law will be Employment, Family Law, Conveyancing. Vacancies will suit persons who do not want to commit full time and looking for flexibility. The firm will award 40 – 50% of the income. The firm are based in South West London and happy to have preliminary discussions on a confidential basis.

14515
General Practice Solicitor
Small to medium sized firm looking for fee earners with their own case load and a following who are prepared to work on a self-employed 50-50 basis. The firm will also consider solicitors prepared to go out and find work on the same basis.

14514
Family Supervisor sought
Family Panel member sought to act as LSC supervisor for firm based in London SW2. You do not need to be locally based, but can be located remotely and act on a consultancy basis. Monthly retainer plus hourly rate available.

14512
Higher Court Advocate Crime with Duty Status
Firm in Bedford seek a replacement Higher Court Advocate with Duty solicitor status. The individual may be a Barrister provided they have duty status. Salary to reflect level of experience and potential. The post is located at Bedford and primarily will serve Luton, Northampton and Cambridge Crown Courts. However, there is potential to travel further afield to Oxford, Reading and Leicester. Salary is £45k+.

14510
Crime Solicitor Duty
Crime Duty Solicitors sought by a rapidly expanding Ashford firm in Kent. Looking to recruit solicitors on a salaried or consultancy basis. Part time hours are encouraged. Medium sized practice seeking to expand further.

14508
Family Solicitor
Specialist practice in East London seek a family solicitor and supervisor, preferably with housing supervisor status and/or housing law experience to join them on a full or part time basis. Family Panel membership or Resolution accreditation essential for this role.

14507
Associate Solicitor
Associates – Kent and Lincolnshire

Medium sized firm with commitment to both private and LSC funded work, are looking for solicitors and other senior fee earners, with a client following, who would wish to work on an Associate basis. You will be a commercially minded, client focused individual, with technical expertise and a commitment to the delivery of quality legal services. Ideally, you will also have management experience (either team or department supervision), although full training and development opportunities will be provided. Remuneration commensurate with experience and qualifications.

14506
Conveyancing Lawyer
Innovative and expanding firm, with offices in Kent and Lincolnshire, seek conveyancing fee earners to join their practice at the Kent office based in Herne Bay. The vacancies arise from expansion in terms of conveyancing work at the Kent offices, and the firm need to find solicitors or legal executives, who are commercially minded, client focused individuals, with technical expertise and a commitment to the delivery of quality legal services.Salary commensurate with experience and qualifications.

14505
Housing Law Supervisor
Housing law supervisor sought in Long Sutton (Lincolnshire). The firm is an innovative and expanding firm, with offices in Kent and Lincolnshire. Owing to their expansion and the grant of a new legal aid contract in housing law, they need to find a solicitor or legal executive, who is qualified to supervise this category of law for the purposes of the Legal Services Commission. The successful candidate will be a commercially minded, client focused individual, with technical expertise and a commitment to the delivery of legal services to the poorer members of society. Ideally, you will also have management experience (either team or department supervision), although full training and development opportunities will be provided. Salary commensurate with experience and qualifications.

14504
Family Solicitor and Panel Member
Family law supervisor sought in Long Sutton (Lincolnshire) – near Kings Lynn. National firm with vacancy locally.
The firm are an innovative and expanding practice, with offices in Kent and Lincolnshire. Owing to expansion at the office in terms of the services they offer, and the grant of a new legal aid contract in family law, they need to find a solicitor or legal executive, who is a panel member and therefore qualified to supervise this category of law for the purposes of the Legal Services Commission. The successful candidate will be a commercially minded, client focused individual, with technical expertise and a commitment to the delivery of legal services to the poorer members of society. Ideally, you will also have management experience (either team or department supervision), although full training and development opportunities will be provided. Salary commensurate with experience and qualifications.

14499
Legal Secretary x 2
Two secretaries sought by Dartford firm – looking for secretaries with experience in dealing with either family, employment or housing, but will consider secretaries coming from a high street law firm background. You MUST have legal experience in a law firm setting to be considered for this post.

14498
Debt, Welfare Benefits and Housing Lawyer
Debt and Welfare Benefits Lawyer sought by smaller sized Dartford firm – ideally someone with Housing law experience as well.

14497
Family Solicitor
Family Solicitor sought by small Dartford firm – looking for someone around the 2-3 years PQE mark in terms of salary and must be able to handle a mixed caseload of LSC funded and privately funded work.

14496
Crime Solicitor
Crime Solicitor sought by Lancashire firm. Looking to recruit a criminal defence duty solicitor to be based at their Kendal office providing cover at both Barrow and Kendal offices also on rota duties out office hours. The salary package is dependent upon experience.

14495
Housing. Welfare Benefit or Debt Supervisor
Housing, Welfare Benefit or Debt LSC Supervisor sought by firm based in SE2. This is a smaller sized practice with a commitment to LSC funded work. The firm need to replace a member of staff. Salaried or fee sharing role available – the firm are quite flexible. LSC Supervisor Status essential.

14492
Personal Injury Fee Earner
Personal Injury Fee Earner sought by Surrey/Hampshire border firm with a significant amount of RTA work coming in. Looking for someone able to stand on their own two feet and handle a caseload. Salary levels negotiable  – all levels of qualification considered. Claimant work.

14491
Mental Health Consultants
Mental Health Supervisors and Consultants sought by East London firm of medium size to work on a profit share basis. MHRT panel members probably most suited. Generous fee split arrangements.

Other vacancies in over the last 48 hours include a locum for 26-30 March in Wantage, Oxfordshire, a duty solicitor in Leicester, freelance duty roles in London, a mental health supervisor in East London and a conveyancing assistant in Northampton.

To enquire/apply about any of the above jobs, please email us at cv@ten-percent.co.uk

Spotlight on Gramdan Solicitors.
Gramdan Solicitors are a progressive practice based in central London and Birmingham. They have a unique model for recruitment, which is to encourage and nuture solicitors and caseworkers to join and benefit from their support.

They are looking to recruit as follows:
“We seek Solicitors, Caseworkers, Conveyancers, Legal Executives and Paralegals of all disciplines and areas of law with own privately funded client base and a willingness to work on commission basis only. It is important that you have your own client base with a constant flow of work or regular sources of work. Chosen candidates shall be provided professional training support including CPD costs; Indemnity cover, accounts and IT Support.  The option to work flexibly and/or from home for those that prefer this option is provided. Work shall be made available by the office to set candidates but it is important that they have a base. There are good career advancement prospects for the right candidates at our offices in both London and Birmingham.”
Interested? Please email cv@ten-percent.co.uk

Application Forms for Legal Jobs – waste of time?

As well as recruiting solicitors, we also coach solicitors on the careers side. I have recently been working with a number of entrants to the legal profession on their training contract applications to the larger city law firms. It is quite fascinating to see the application forms and the sheer length and complexity of them.

As a recruiter, I am starting to question why the process cannot be shortened somewhat for everyone concerned. I know it will put a few administration assistants out of a job, and ruin a few dinner party conversations amongst senior partners at some of the larger London law firms as to who has the longest form, but what about adopting the following strategy for recruitment at training contract and vacation placement level? Surely this will save time and costs?

1. Get each applicant to go online and fill out a form consisting of:
a. Their name, address, postcode, telephone number and email address.
b. Their A Level grades or equivalent.
c. Their degree class or anticipated class.
d. Nothing else.

2. At the closing date, use automated software to cull anyone who has not got a minimum of a 2.1 and AAA or ABB at A level. We think this happens anyway at most firms.
3. Send each remaining applicant a list of questions you want them to answer.
4. Give each applicant a ring and interview them for 5 minutes on the basis of these answers.
5. Select from the list of applicants remaining and call these candidates in for interview.

I would hazard a guess that no-one reads the long winded answers on these forms that students can spend literally days filling out. Furthermore, why do the firms need to know most of the information they ask for when the vast majority of applicants will get rejected on academic performance? It seems a total waste of time and quite demoralising for the armies of applicants currently out there looking to break into the city and spend 2 years working flat out! Recruitment can be speeded up so easily now with the advent of the internet. Its been around a while now, but I think it gets underused in situations like this….

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. You can comment on this article at www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com

Register Vacancies – Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

The Perfect Interview

If you could conduct the perfect interview how would it go? Here is our suggestion. If you have any others, let us know via www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com or our facebook account.

1. Set up the interview room with the interviewee’s chair in an odd position.
2. Get one of your employees to sit in the waiting room and engage the interviewee in conversation about anything non-work related.
3. When greeting the interviewee, shake their hand for a minimum of 5 seconds.
4. See what they do with the chair.
5. Interview questions as follows:

a. If you were conducting this interview, what would you want to find out about yourself?
b. Tell me about yourself in 30 seconds.
c. Tell me about myself in 30 seconds.
d. If I was to go onto the internet and find out about you, what would I find?
e. If I was to tell you that there is no salary offered for this role and I want you to pay me to work here, what would you say?
f. Tell me a joke.
g. What is 24 x 67?
h. If man had three legs, what added benefits would there be to our lives?
i. As a bank manager, would you ever loan money to a solicitors firm who did not have a website or presence?
j. Five people are in a room. How do you determine which one is a leader?
k. Are you a leader or a team player? Do you want my job?
l. If we were to ask your office cleaner about you, what would they say?
m. Have a look at this file. Do you think we have done enough work on it or not enough?
n.  How do you streamline a business like ours?

I think this interview would last about 20 minutes and give you sufficient information about a candidate to know whether you would want to employ them or not.

Try it and let us know!

Comment on this interview at www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com

Register Vacancies – Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

How Long Should a CV be?

How long is a piece of string?  I get asked this question almost on a daily basis and hear a lot of different answers once I have given my response.
The usual or fairly common response is someone who has been told by a careers adviser when they were 14 that a CV should never be longer than 2 pages, or someone else who’s been told by a friend who is a lawyer and got a job with a good firm that their CV shouldn’t be longer than 1 page.

The correct answer is that for everyone not applying for a training contract or paralegal work and straight out of university is that a CV is as long as it needs to be. In some cases this can be 12 pages, in other cases this can be 1 page.

We normally recommend having a CV that is between about 2 pages and 7 pages long.

If you are applying for training contracts your CV should never be longer than 2 pages unless you have come from a previous career that is directly relevant to a legal career.

If you are a solicitor your CV should not fit onto 2 pages because you should have lots to say and therefore it should fit onto between about 3 and 6 pages. The more senior you are the lengthier the CV.

I have worked with a client a few days ago who had a CV that was 19 pages long. This was because they had included case examples at the end of the CV and so the actual CV was 9 pages long plus examples of cases they had worked on.

This is important because it means that someone can read the comfortably but then if they want further information about actual cases they can go on and explore these further without needing to contact the candidate again.

The most important part of a CV is the first third of the first page because this is the part that pops up onto your computer screen or comes out of an envelope and is checked.

There are specific techniques for making sure that your CV is quickly readable and catches the eye, and although you can read all about this on our various websites, blogs, article pages, you could also just cut to the chase and use our own CV preparation service or purchase our legal CV writing pack which contains hundreds of examples and templates. And yes – this is a shameless plug!

Jonathan Fagan, Managing Director of Ten Percent Legal Recruitment. Jonathan personally prepares and writes all the CVs for lawyers and law students who use our CV writing services. He has over 10 years’ experience and has worked with clients as diverse as District Judges through to law students. For details please visit our Legal Careers Shop.

How to Write a Good Personal Profile
The first thing to say about a personal profile section is that if you have nothing to say, the best personal profile section for you would be an empty one and the space used more effectively for something else.
You only need a personal profile section to explain about six points. These are

Your job title
The number of years’ experience you have
Any particular tempting assets for a prospective employer
The location you seek work
How much you want
When you are available.
An example of this in a legal career context would be :

“A conveyancing solicitor with 5 years PQE and a personal following worth £120k, looking for a suitable post in North West London. Salary levels £40-£50k, notice period 2 months”.

By including this information it makes it possible for anyone looking at the CV to immediately see who the person is, and whether or not they wish to continue to read the CV or move onto the next one. This section is one of the hardest to get right because if the personal profile is no good then it is highly likely that anyone looking at the CV will immediately form a negative perception of the writer.

The personal profile we have included above complies with the three second rule.

The three second rule is the theory that you have three seconds to impress the reader of your CV before they give up and move onto the next one or fail to take in exactly who you are and what you are looking for.

A personal profile that just contains a load of buzz words and subjective information is completely useless and a total waste of time and space.

An example of this would be

“A gregarious and outgoing law graduate with a can-do attitude to work. Possessing a sense of humour and an ability to achieve great things. Looking to progress career and demonstrate my great ability to any prospective employer”.
We see so many of these on CVs and it is sad to think that it is possible that someone somewhere is advising people to include this nonsense.  I would imagine that pretty much every employer would agree that this type of entry is a complete waste of time and effort and should be avoided like the plague.

If this is all you have to write on your CV leave the personal profile section off. Profiles are only really relevant if you have something specific to the post or type of firm you are applying to and if not then it is best to let the employer simply read what you have done to date in your work experience and your academic career.

Jonathan Fagan is MD of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – visit our careers shop for CV advice, career coaching and many more products.

Training your Secretaries to sell

This article may assist you at interview – for example if you want to demonstrate commercial awareness or your potential input to a firm at interview stage.

We are all quite bad at selling generally I think. I have to confess to having not really trained some of my colleagues in the various careers services that we offer. How many of my colleagues actually know what I charge to take a career coaching session in central London, or how much one of our interview training videos or training contract packs costs?

How do we do? I have checked a few times by cold calling our call centre staff and also the office. Most of the time we are OK, but the advice below relates specifically to law firms.

It is a very common bug bear about law firms that on the whole secretaries are not the best people to take initial first calls. One of the main issues about calling firms of solicitors is getting straight through to a fee earner who can assist there and then with any queries and demonstrate added value. Added value is a major sales issue and regularly crops up in marketing speak. As far as I can gather in recruitment it involves taking your clients to play golf regularly or reducing prices, but in law firms it is surely demonstrating that you know what you are talking about and you value the client enough to give them direct access to a knowledgeable employee.

When a potential new customer calls up, you should ensure they are put through as quickly as possible to a fee earner. Fee earners should be made to understand that new customers are the source of the cash paying their salaries.

Not only does this demonstrate added value, but also indicates the quality of your firm. So many times I call a law firm and get an extremely abrupt receptionist who knows nothing about me or why I have called. A few times I have called London firms and someone has picked up the phone and said “call back” before hanging up! What if that call had been from a customer with a case worth £30k?

The same applies with emails. Quite a few firms have auto responders for any queries and these are really important. They demonstrate that the firm have received the customer’s enquiry and will get back to them. Without an auto responder it is hard to know whether an email has actually arrived safely.

Secretaries need training in sales. There are no two ways about it. These are very often your sales team, whether you like it or not. What about incentivising them? Bonuses for positive feedback or increased take up following a certain length of call? You could ask customers about their first impressions of your secretaries/sales team and reward the secretaries accordingly. This could spice up your work place a little bit….

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment.

Register Vacancies – Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

£60 Legal Recruitment Statistics
Our innovative new scheme offering all law firms the chance to cover their legal recruitment costs for just £60 per month for 5 years (and yes, we do mean all legal recruitment costs – there are no charges), enables a firm to control their recruitment budget whilst filling vacancies. Some firms use us as sole suppliers, but others purchase the service as an add-on to their existing recruitment provision. We estimate that since July 2011 firms using the scheme have already avoided recruitment agency fees totalling over £100,000.

50+ firms have now signed up.

We have over 8,500 qualified candidates registered with us. These include:

1,394 crime solicitors, police station reps and legal executives. Of these, at least 307 are duty solicitors and over 1,000 are 1+ year PQE solicitors.
1,988 conveyancing solicitors and legal executives. 1,205 of these have 3 years PQE or more.
891 wills & probate solicitors and legal executives. At least 100 of these are STEP.
702 commercial property solicitors. At least 490 of these are over 3 years PQE.
139 corporate finance solicitors.
126 legal cashiers.
935 personal injury solicitors, legal executives and fee earners.
627 corporate commercial solicitors. At least 360 of these are over 3 years PQE.
643 commercial litigation solicitors. At least 365 of these are over 3 years PQE.
237 solicitors and legal executives who describe themselves as professional locums (at least 500 locums on our books)
1188 civil litigation solicitors and legal executives
667 employment solicitors and legal executives
96 intellectual property solicitors
1,568 family solicitors and legal executives. We recently managed to get LSC supervisors for over 90% of the supervisor vacancies on our books before the December 2011 deadlines and every member firm had a selection of LSC family supervisors from us to choose from. One firm even managed to recruit within an hour of the LSC deadline expiring after signing up with us minutes beforehand. At least 960 of our candidates have 3 years PQE or more in family law.

774 of our candidates are based in the North West
952 of our candidates are based in the Midlands
785 of our candidates are based in Yorkshire and the North East
1138 of our candidates are based in Anglia and Essex
422 of our candidates are based in the South West
279 of our candidates are based in Wales
1765 of our candidates are based in London
1037 of our candidates are based in the South Central region (Hampshire  to Oxfordshire)
939 of our candidates are based in the South East (Kent, Sussex and Surrey)

We cover all types of law, from high street through to commercial practice. Our member firms can recruit at all levels, whether permanent, locum, support staff or solicitors, fee earners and legal executives.  Each vacancy is sent out to all relevant candidates on our database, posted on a variety of job boards, and via social networking including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.
Click here to instantly register legal vacancies

Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing

TP Online Transcription & Typing Service with offices in London and North Wales. We have a team of 20 UK based transcribers offering digital file and tape transcribing services worldwide. Established in 2001, the company has been handling bulk orders (including over 500 hour projects) and one-off assignments for legal and non-legal clients including a large number of UK Solicitors, B&Q, Endemol, the Office of Fair Trading, Sony, Dundee University, Cartridge World, University of Oxford, NHS Tayside, the British Medical Journal, Marie Curie and many more.

We provide ongoing typing contracts and also work on a one-off basis. Our transcribers are all based in the UK and we maintain a high standard of quality output. Our transcribers are experienced secretaries from the legal profesison, medicine or general business and some are educated to degree level and higher.

We can transcribe from all audio & digital files, whether WAV, WMA, DSS (Olympus) or MP3 (plus a host of other formats), CD or DVD, Standard Cassettes, Mini and Micro Cassettes and Video (VHS). We have FTP facilities. For legal work we are happy to take templates to transcribe into. Our main service for law firms is our capacity to free up ‘in office’ secretaries to undertake daily tasks whilst reducing the backlog of work or any large transcription jobs. For details of the service please visit http://www.tptranscription.co.uk/ call 01352 751945 or email pearl@uk-transcription.co.uk.

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Formed in April 2000, Ten-Percent is an innovative recruitment membership service run online for law firms and employers across the UK and offshore, offering fixed monthly fee recruitment to members. Over 1,300 law firms and companies have used our services, and we have over 8,000 solicitors & legal executives registered for opportunities, as well as other fee earners and support staff. We donate 10% of our annual profits to charity. http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/

Please email us details of any vacancies to cv@ten-percent.co.uk or register the vacancy online on our website.

Legal Recruitment News
For older editions of the Legal Recruitment News, and free articles on recruitment, legal careers, training, SEO & Web Marketing, please visit http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/ . You can also visit the http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/ for over 200 articles on Legal Recruitment including advice for candidates.

Legal Recruitment News and Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Email: cv@ten-percent.co.uk
Website: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ : http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/
Tel: 0207 127 4343

Legal Recruitment Newsletter for Candidates March 2012

Sponsored by Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment

Contents:

Vacancy Update

Legal Job Market Report 1st March 2012
Recruitment Statistics

Application Forms for Legal Jobs – a waste of time?

A Perfect Interview – what would the questions be?

Training Secretaries to Sell You

How long should a CV be?

Dictation Outsourcing

How to write a good personal profile section for your CV

Legal Job Market Report 1st March 2012

February 2012 was again a very busy month in recruitment, but again vacancies are going up and down like a yo yo. One minute we are flat out, the next very quiet. Very different to recruitment of old, where there was a constant drip of vacancies and candidates coming into us. The main thing we are noticing is that there is starting to be a bit of a shortfall in numbers of applicants. I think some candidates have got a bit fed up of constantly applying for vacancies where the goalposts change or the firm decide not to recruit right at the last minute, and others have simply left the profession.

An example of the goalposts changing recently occurred with a firm in the South East who shall remain nameless. Firstly they advertised a vacancy – very simply this was for a solicitor to do a form of litigation. We sent this out to our candidates and sent over CVs. Next, they decided that they no longer needed a solicitor, it required the services of a legal executive. We sent out the vacancy and provided CVs. Thirdly, they decided that not only did they need a legal executive, they needed one who had a following. At this point we gave up, anticipating that if we found one with a following, no doubt the firm would require the candidate to own a private jet, live in the Seychelles and be able to speak Ukranian as well!

This is quite a common problem at the moment, and unfortunately certain law firms are creating a name for themselves in doing this repeatedly. There is a firm in central London where we will not get any candidates applying unless they are recently in to us, simply because the firm have such a bad reputation at changing the goalposts or not getting back to either us or the candidates about interviews. Very frustrating!

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is now the preferred supplier to over 50 law firms, and they continued to post vacancies with us throughout February.

Locum posts have recently dropped off.

Commercial posts are picking up through our specialist corporate/commercial and in house website – www.jonathanfagan.co.uk – recent vacancies have been in media law (in house), regulatory posts and general corporate commercial and commercial litigation.

On the high street side we have actually seen recruitment occur in conveyancing, which is good news, plus a wide range of work including family law, property litigation, crime (starting to get very busy this year) and personal injury.

In February we saw 97 new solicitor and legal executive registrations with us.
Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. T: 0207 127 4343 or email: jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk
Links:
Register Vacancies Online
About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
£60 Recruitment Service

Vacancy Update from Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment

Recent vacancies are as follows:

Other vacancies in over the last 48 hours include a locum for 26-30 March in Wantage, Oxfordshire, a duty solicitor in Leicester, freelance duty roles in London, a mental health supervisor in East London and a conveyancing assistant in Northampton.

To enquire/apply about any of the above jobs, please email us at cv@ten-percent.co.uk

Spotlight on Gramdan Solicitors.

Gramdan Solicitors are a progressive practice based in central London and Birmingham. They have a unique model for recruitment, which is to encourage and nuture solicitors and caseworkers to join and benefit from their support.

They are looking to recruit as follows:

“We seek Solicitors, Caseworkers, Conveyancers, Legal Executives and Paralegals of all disciplines and areas of law with own privately funded client base and a willingness to work on commission basis only. It is important that you have your own client base with a constant flow of work or regular sources of work. Chosen candidates shall be provided professional training support including CPD costs; Indemnity cover, accounts and IT Support.  The option to work flexibly and/or from home for those that prefer this option is provided. Work shall be made available by the office to set candidates but it is important that they have a base. There are good career advancement prospects for the right candidates at our offices in both London and Birmingham.”

Interested? Please email cv@ten-percent.co.uk

Application Forms for Legal Jobs – waste of time?

As well as recruiting solicitors, we also coach solicitors on the careers side. I have recently been working with a number of entrants to the legal profession on their training contract applications to the larger city law firms. It is quite fascinating to see the application forms and the sheer length and complexity of them.

As a recruiter, I am starting to question why the process cannot be shortened somewhat for everyone concerned. I know it will put a few administration assistants out of a job, and ruin a few dinner party conversations amongst senior partners at some of the larger London law firms as to who has the longest form, but what about adopting the following strategy for recruitment at training contract and vacation placement level? Surely this will save time and costs?

1. Get each applicant to go online and fill out a form consisting of:

a. Their name, address, postcode, telephone number and email address.

b. Their A Level grades or equivalent.

c. Their degree class or anticipated class.

d. Nothing else.

2. At the closing date, use automated software to cull anyone who has not got a minimum of a 2.1 and AAA or ABB at A level. We think this happens anyway at most firms.

3. Send each remaining applicant a list of questions you want them to answer.

4. Give each applicant a ring and interview them for 5 minutes on the basis of these answers.

5. Select from the list of applicants remaining and call these candidates in for interview.

I would hazard a guess that no-one reads the long winded answers on these forms that students can spend literally days filling out. Furthermore, why do the firms need to know most of the information they ask for when the vast majority of applicants will get rejected on academic performance? It seems a total waste of time and quite demoralising for the armies of applicants currently out there looking to break into the city and spend 2 years working flat out! Recruitment can be speeded up so easily now with the advent of the internet. Its been around a while now, but I think it gets underused in situations like this….

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. You can comment on this article at www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com

Register Vacancies - Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

The Perfect Interview
If you could conduct the perfect interview how would it go? Here is our suggestion. If you have any others, let us know via www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com or our facebook account.

1. Set up the interview room with the interviewee’s chair in an odd position.

2. Get one of your employees to sit in the waiting room and engage the interviewee in conversation about anything non-work related.

3. When greeting the interviewee, shake their hand for a minimum of 5 seconds.

4. See what they do with the chair.

5. Interview questions as follows:

a. If you were conducting this interview, what would you want to find out about yourself?

b. Tell me about yourself in 30 seconds.

c. Tell me about myself in 30 seconds.

d. If I was to go onto the internet and find out about you, what would I find?

e. If I was to tell you that there is no salary offered for this role and I want you to pay me to work here, what would you say?

f. Tell me a joke.

g. What is 24 x 67?

h. If man had three legs, what added benefits would there be to our lives?

i. As a bank manager, would you ever loan money to a solicitors firm who did not have a website or presence?

j. Five people are in a room. How do you determine which one is a leader?

k. Are you a leader or a team player? Do you want my job?

l. If we were to ask your office cleaner about you, what would they say?

m. Have a look at this file. Do you think we have done enough work on it or not enough?

n.  How do you streamline a business like ours?

I think this interview would last about 20 minutes and give you sufficient information about a candidate to know whether you would want to employ them or not.

Try it and let us know!

Comment on this interview at www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com

Register Vacancies - Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

How Long Should a CV be?

How long is a piece of string?  I get asked this question almost on a daily basis and hear a lot of different answers once I have given my response.

The usual or fairly common response is someone who has been told by a careers adviser when they were 14 that a CV should never be longer than 2 pages, or someone else who’s been told by a friend who is a lawyer and got a job with a good firm that their CV shouldn’t be longer than 1 page.

The correct answer is that for everyone not applying for a training contract or paralegal work and straight out of university is that a CV is as long as it needs to be. In some cases this can be 12 pages, in other cases this can be 1 page.

We normally recommend having a CV that is between about 2 pages and 7 pages long.

If you are applying for training contracts your CV should never be longer than 2 pages unless you have come from a previous career that is directly relevant to a legal career.

If you are a solicitor your CV should not fit onto 2 pages because you should have lots to say and therefore it should fit onto between about 3 and 6 pages. The more senior you are the lengthier the CV.

I have worked with a client a few days ago who had a CV that was 19 pages long. This was because they had included case examples at the end of the CV and so the actual CV was 9 pages long plus examples of cases they had worked on.

This is important because it means that someone can read the comfortably but then if they want further information about actual cases they can go on and explore these further without needing to contact the candidate again.

The most important part of a CV is the first third of the first page because this is the part that pops up onto your computer screen or comes out of an envelope and is checked.

There are specific techniques for making sure that your CV is quickly readable and catches the eye, and although you can read all about this on our various websites, blogs, article pages, you could also just cut to the chase and use our own CV preparation service or purchase our legal CV writing pack which contains hundreds of examples and templates. And yes – this is a shameless plug!

Jonathan Fagan, Managing Director of Ten Percent Legal Recruitment. Jonathan personally prepares and writes all the CVs for lawyers and law students who use our CV writing services. He has over 10 years’ experience and has worked with clients as diverse as District Judges through to law students. For details please visit our Legal Careers Shop.

How to Write a Good Personal Profile

The first thing to say about a personal profile section is that if you have nothing to say, the best personal profile section for you would be an empty one and the space used more effectively for something else.

You only need a personal profile section to explain about six points. These are

1. Your job title
2. The number of years’ experience you have
3. Any particular tempting assets for a prospective employer
4. The location you seek work
5. How much you want
6. When you are available.

An example of this in a legal career context would be :

“A conveyancing solicitor with 5 years PQE and a personal following worth £120k, looking for a suitable post in North West London. Salary levels £40-£50k, notice period 2 months”.

By including this information it makes it possible for anyone looking at the CV to immediately see who the person is, and whether or not they wish to continue to read the CV or move onto the next one. This section is one of the hardest to get right because if the personal profile is no good then it is highly likely that anyone looking at the CV will immediately form a negative perception of the writer.

The personal profile we have included above complies with the three second rule.

The three second rule is the theory that you have three seconds to impress the reader of your CV before they give up and move onto the next one or fail to take in exactly who you are and what you are looking for.

A personal profile that just contains a load of buzz words and subjective information is completely useless and a total waste of time and space.

An example of this would be

“A gregarious and outgoing law graduate with a can-do attitude to work. Possessing a sense of humour and an ability to achieve great things. Looking to progress career and demonstrate my great ability to any prospective employer”.

We see so many of these on CVs and it is sad to think that it is possible that someone somewhere is advising people to include this nonsense.  I would imagine that pretty much every employer would agree that this type of entry is a complete waste of time and effort and should be avoided like the plague.

If this is all you have to write on your CV leave the personal profile section off. Profiles are only really relevant if you have something specific to the post or type of firm you are applying to and if not then it is best to let the employer simply read what you have done to date in your work experience and your academic career.

Jonathan Fagan is MD of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – visit our careers shop for CV advice, career coaching and many more products.

Training your Secretaries to sell

This article may assist you at interview – for example if you want to demonstrate commercial awareness or your potential input to a firm at interview stage.

We are all quite bad at selling generally I think. I have to confess to having not really trained some of my colleagues in the various careers services that we offer. How many of my colleagues actually know what I charge to take a career coaching session in central London, or how much one of our interview training videos or training contract packs costs?

How do we do? I have checked a few times by cold calling our call centre staff and also the office. Most of the time we are OK, but the advice below relates specifically to law firms.

It is a very common bug bear about law firms that on the whole secretaries are not the best people to take initial first calls. One of the main issues about calling firms of solicitors is getting straight through to a fee earner who can assist there and then with any queries and demonstrate added value. Added value is a major sales issue and regularly crops up in marketing speak. As far as I can gather in recruitment it involves taking your clients to play golf regularly or reducing prices, but in law firms it is surely demonstrating that you know what you are talking about and you value the client enough to give them direct access to a knowledgeable employee.

When a potential new customer calls up, you should ensure they are put through as quickly as possible to a fee earner. Fee earners should be made to understand that new customers are the source of the cash paying their salaries.

Not only does this demonstrate added value, but also indicates the quality of your firm. So many times I call a law firm and get an extremely abrupt receptionist who knows nothing about me or why I have called. A few times I have called London firms and someone has picked up the phone and said “call back” before hanging up! What if that call had been from a customer with a case worth £30k?

The same applies with emails. Quite a few firms have auto responders for any queries and these are really important. They demonstrate that the firm have received the customer’s enquiry and will get back to them. Without an auto responder it is hard to know whether an email has actually arrived safely.

Secretaries need training in sales. There are no two ways about it. These are very often your sales team, whether you like it or not. What about incentivising them? Bonuses for positive feedback or increased take up following a certain length of call? You could ask customers about their first impressions of your secretaries/sales team and reward the secretaries accordingly. This could spice up your work place a little bit….

Jonathan Fagan is Managing Director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment.

Register Vacancies - Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

£60 Legal Recruitment Statistics

Our innovative new scheme offering all law firms the chance to cover their legal recruitment costs for just £60 per month for 5 years (and yes, we do mean all legal recruitment costs – there are no charges), enables a firm to control their recruitment budget whilst filling vacancies. Some firms use us as sole suppliers, but others purchase the service as an add-on to their existing recruitment provision. We estimate that since July 2011 firms using the scheme have already avoided recruitment agency fees totalling over £100,000.

50+ firms have now signed up.

We have over 8,500 qualified candidates registered with us. These include:

1,394 crime solicitors, police station reps and legal executives. Of these, at least 307 are duty solicitors and over 1,000 are 1+ year PQE solicitors.

1,988 conveyancing solicitors and legal executives. 1,205 of these have 3 years PQE or more.

891 wills & probate solicitors and legal executives. At least 100 of these are STEP.

702 commercial property solicitors. At least 490 of these are over 3 years PQE.

139 corporate finance solicitors.

126 legal cashiers.

935 personal injury solicitors, legal executives and fee earners.

627 corporate commercial solicitors. At least 360 of these are over 3 years PQE.

643 commercial litigation solicitors. At least 365 of these are over 3 years PQE.

237 solicitors and legal executives who describe themselves as professional locums (at least 500 locums on our books)

1188 civil litigation solicitors and legal executives

667 employment solicitors and legal executives

96 intellectual property solicitors

1,568 family solicitors and legal executives. We recently managed to get LSC supervisors for over 90% of the supervisor vacancies on our books before the December 2011 deadlines and every member firm had a selection of LSC family supervisors from us to choose from. One firm even managed to recruit within an hour of the LSC deadline expiring after signing up with us minutes beforehand. At least 960 of our candidates have 3 years PQE or more in family law.

774 of our candidates are based in the North West

952 of our candidates are based in the Midlands

785 of our candidates are based in Yorkshire and the North East

1138 of our candidates are based in Anglia and Essex

422 of our candidates are based in the South West

279 of our candidates are based in Wales

1765 of our candidates are based in London

1037 of our candidates are based in the South Central region (Hampshire  to Oxfordshire)

939 of our candidates are based in the South East (Kent, Sussex and Surrey)

We cover all types of law, from high street through to commercial practice. Our member firms can recruit at all levels, whether permanent, locum, support staff or solicitors, fee earners and legal executives.  Each vacancy is sent out to all relevant candidates on our database, posted on a variety of job boards, and via social networking including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Click here to instantly register legal vacancies

Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing

TP Online Transcription & Typing Service with offices in London and North Wales. We have a team of 20 UK based transcribers offering digital file and tape transcribing services worldwide. Established in 2001, the company has been handling bulk orders (including over 500 hour projects) and one-off assignments for legal and non-legal clients including a large number of UK Solicitors, B&Q, Endemol, the Office of Fair Trading, Sony, Dundee University, Cartridge World, University of Oxford, NHS Tayside, the British Medical Journal, Marie Curie and many more.

We provide ongoing typing contracts and also work on a one-off basis. Our transcribers are all based in the UK and we maintain a high standard of quality output. Our transcribers are experienced secretaries from the legal profesison, medicine or general business and some are educated to degree level and higher.
We can transcribe from all audio & digital files, whether WAV, WMA, DSS (Olympus) or MP3 (plus a host of other formats), CD or DVD, Standard Cassettes, Mini and Micro Cassettes and Video (VHS). We have FTP facilities. For legal work we are happy to take templates to transcribe into. Our main service for law firms is our capacity to free up ‘in office’ secretaries to undertake daily tasks whilst reducing the backlog of work or any large transcription jobs. For details of the service please visit http://www.tptranscription.co.uk/ call 01352 751945 or email pearl@uk-transcription.co.uk.

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Formed in April 2000, Ten-Percent is an innovative recruitment membership service run online for law firms and employers across the UK and offshore, offering fixed monthly fee recruitment to members. Over 1,300 law firms and companies have used our services, and we have over 8,000 solicitors & legal executives registered for opportunities, as well as other fee earners and support staff. We donate 10% of our annual profits to charity. http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/

Please email us details of any vacancies to cv@ten-percent.co.uk or register the vacancy online on our website.
Legal Recruitment News
For older editions of the Legal Recruitment News, and free articles on recruitment, legal careers, training, SEO & Web Marketing, please visit http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/ . You can also visit the http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/ for over 200 articles on Legal Recruitment including advice for candidates.

Legal Recruitment News and Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Email: cv@ten-percent.co.uk
Website: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ : http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/
Tel: 0207 127 4343

Register Vacancies - Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

Register Vacancies - Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

Register Vacancies - Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing

Click here to register vacancies

Contents:
Legal Job Market Report 1st February 2012
£60 per month Legal Recruitment
A Day in Court – does the County Court system work?
Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing
Register Vacancies – Permanent or Locum, Qualified Lawyers or Support Staff

Legal Job Market Report 1st February 2012
January 2012 was a very busy month for Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment, but generally this was a strange time in recruitment. Firstly, although vacancies appear to be growing in number and even conveyancing posts have surfaced, candidates appear not to be responding in the same numbers as they were this time last year. We are getting plenty of new candidates, but a good proportion are outside the premium range of the 1-5 year PQE mark.

We are preferred suppliers to over 45 law firms, and they continued to post vacancies with us in the post-Christmas period. Recent vacancies include a receptionist post in Skegness, housing supervisor role in South London (over 5 applications from SQM LSC supervisors), Family Supervisor in East London, Duty Solicitor in SE London, Probate clerk and accounts manager in West Wales, private crime post in central London, family solicitors in Ashford and Dartford, mental health caseworkers in East London, child panel solicitor in Berkshire, locum conveyancing post in Reading, personal injury dept head in Hampshire, conveyancing in Bognor, family solicitor in Swindon.

The number of vacancies is picking up.

Reed, one of the national job boards we use for recruitment (included as part of the £60 service), have issued their employment market update today. Overall demand for staff increased in January, with a rise across the UK compared to December 2011. This is probably a fairly small increase, bearing in mind December tends to be the quietest month of the year for recruitment (apart from when a Royal Wedding occurs of course!). Month-on-month increases were seen in 20 of the 34 sectors analysed, with Charity & Voluntary, Estate Agency and Marketing performing best. Quite interestingly employer demand for Banking roles continues to decline, however, with a 76% drop in vacancies over 12 months.

Locum posts remain fairly active, although these have dropped off in recent months. The market is yet to get busy this year, despite my prediction in December that it would pick up.

The vast majority of the posts coming through to our recruitment agency services are now being posted by clients who have signed up to the £60 per month scheme for us to be their preferred suppliers.

In January  the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment £720 a Year Service had 148 new candidate registrations (solicitors, fee earners and legal support staff candidates).

Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. T: 0207 127 4343 or email: jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk

Links:
Register Vacancies Online
About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
£60 Recruitment Service

£60 Legal Recruitment Statistics

Our innovative new scheme offering all law firms the chance to cover their legal recruitment costs for just £60 per month for 5 years (and yes, we do mean all legal recruitment costs – there are no charges), enables you to control your recruitment budget whilst filling vacancies.

Some firms use us as sole suppliers, but others purchase the service as an add-on to their existing recruitment provision. After all, what have you got to lose? £60 per month to save thousands, potentially tens of thousands of pounds in recruitment costs? We estimate that since July 2011 firms using the scheme have already avoided recruitment agency fees totalling over £100,000.

We have over 8,500 qualified candidates registered with us. These include:

1,394 crime solicitors, police station reps and legal executives. Of these, at least 307 are duty solicitors and over 1,000 are 1+ year PQE solicitors.
1,988 conveyancing solicitors and legal executives. 1,205 of these have 3 years PQE or more.
891 wills & probate solicitors and legal executives. At least 100 of these are STEP.
702 commercial property solicitors. At least 490 of these are over 3 years PQE.
139 corporate finance solicitors.
126 legal cashiers.
935 personal injury solicitors, legal executives and fee earners.
627 corporate commercial solicitors. At least 360 of these are over 3 years PQE.
643 commercial litigation solicitors. At least 365 of these are over 3 years PQE.
237 solicitors and legal executives who describe themselves as professional locums (at least 500 locums on our books)
1188 civil litigation solicitors and legal executives
667 employment solicitors and legal executives
96 intellectual property solicitors
1,568 family solicitors and legal executives. We recently managed to get LSC supervisors for over 90% of the supervisor vacancies on our books before the December 2011 deadlines and every member firm had a selection of LSC family supervisors from us to choose from. One firm even managed to recruit within an hour of the LSC deadline expiring after signing up with us minutes beforehand. At least 960 of our candidates have 3 years PQE or more in family law.

774 of our candidates are based in the North West
952 of our candidates are based in the Midlands
785 of our candidates are based in Yorkshire and the North East
1138 of our candidates are based in Anglia and Essex
422 of our candidates are based in the South West
279 of our candidates are based in Wales
1765 of our candidates are based in London
1037 of our candidates are based in the South Central region (Hampshire  to Oxfordshire)
939 of our candidates are based in the South East (Kent, Sussex and Surrey)

We cover all types of law, from high street through to commercial practice. Our member firms can recruit at all levels, whether permanent, locum, support staff or solicitors, fee earners and legal executives.  Each vacancy is sent out to all relevant candidates on our database, posted on a variety of job boards, and via social networking including LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

Our related site, www.tenpercentfinancial.co.uk can also assist with the recruitment of IFAs and accountancy staff (included in the monthly price).

A full list of our member firms is available on our website. They include Kaim Todner in London, Morgans Solicitors in Cardiff, the Surrey Law Centre, Howells in Birmingham, Cavershams in Reading, Hodgkinsons in Skegness, Cleveland Solicitors in East London, Fosters in Kent and over 40 others.

Interested in finding out more? Reply to this email (cv@ten-percent.co.uk), call us on 0207 127 4343 or visit our website at www.ten-percent.co.uk

A Recent Day at  County Court – is the county court system broken beyond repair?

It is not often that I spend any time in Court these days. As a director of Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment (and the usual person responsible for suing errant clients who fail to pay) I have made regular forays into County Courts across the UK over the years. However I am involved in a larger case at the moment as a witness. The case is fast track and hence large enough to warrant the use of Barristers and Solicitors, although Ten Percent’s related case is a small claims matter.
I spent a frustrating day observing just how much better the County Court service could be operated. There does not appear to be much justice going on but rather simply an administrative procedure running out of control, without very much thought for the end result.

The Court I was attending, which shall remain nameless, is in the London/South East area.

For example, the case I am involved with is piggybacked onto another matter, which is a fast track matter worth a five figure sum. My own case is a four figure sum and as a result is in the small claims track. Approximately one year ago the trial Judge in the matter we are piggybacked onto gave a direction that our case was to follow on automatically at the end of the fast track matter.

The Court administration staff promptly lost my file and failed to list it for a hearing.

This meant that I had to get up at 4.45 am, drive to Crewe Train Station, park for £8, pay £93 single for a second class ticket and get to Court without actually knowing whether or not our case was going ahead. However, once I had arrived at Court it was pretty clear that the our connected Fast Track matter wasn’t going anywhere in a hurry either.

The Court staff had lost the bundles of documents. There is probably nothing particularly unusual in this.

However I learnt today that the County Court we were in has a policy of disposing of all bundles to do with any case between each Court hearing. This means that if you have a Court hearing that is adjourned the Court will immediately throw away your bundle and expect you to prepare another bundle in time for the next hearing.
The Claimant in the case I am linked to has to pay £500 after each adjournment simply to ensure that this happens. There are over 1,000 pages of evidence in his case, yet the Court Service see fit to throw these bundles away and pulp them after each hearing.

It gets worse. The for the Claimant in the fast track case were aware of the policy of throwing bundles in the bin. At the last trial hearing the case was adjourned through no fault of either party, and the Claimant’s solicitors obtained a Special Dispensation for the bundles to be kept and not thrown away.

However, so distrustful of the competence of the staff at this particular Court were the Claimant’s solicitors that they actually instructed an outdoor clerk to attend at the Court a few days before the hearing to check that the bundles had not been thrown away. This they did, at a cost of c£100. It was duly confirmed that the bundles had not been thrown away.

However, when we attended for the hearing today the Court Usher informed the Claimant that in fact the Court had no record of his bundles and they did not have a copy of them. The Claimant and his solicitor were informed of the Court Policy and told that it was not the court’s problem.

When the Claimant’s solicitor challenged this and said that a Clerk had been paid to come and view the files and check they were there, the Court staff informed him that the files were definitely not there and the one filing cabinet in the building where files were kept had been checked thoroughly (this is a huge Court with many hundreds of cases going on every week I should imagine) by two members of staff and the bundles were not there.

After much imploring and pleading by the Claimant’s Solicitor, the Court Usher walked up three flights of stairs to do a last check herself (bearing in mind this is the third check for these bundles which contain approximately 1,000 pages) and after about 20 minutes she returned with the files.

This may not seem a particularly important point, but the cost implication of this was a wasted 35-50 minutes of Court time, the cost of the Barristers for each side in the case, the cost of the Judge and his court room time waiting for the case to come through, and the potential cost to the Claimant if the bundles had not been there because it would have had to been reproduced and re-printed for later hearings (at a cost of £500). Furthermore, the limited court time available on the day because of this delay and others meant that there was insufficient time to deal with the case as a full hearing even if it did go ahead.

My impression of the staff at this particular County Court is that they appear to be from a generation of civil servants who find themselves in a very fast moving and changing environment without the knowledge, equipment, resources or training to keep up.

The barristers and the judge continually went on today about costs. I kept a note of the time and I think that the time spent by Counsel and the judge going on about costs probably cost more than the actual costs that were being argued about! If I was a lay person attending these hearings, I would be horrified at the thought that I was paying for my barrister to sit and wisecrack with the judge, or discuss their own costs, discuss their own arrangements for getting to court and to hear the Judge’s own personal thoughts on litigation and the costs of it these days.

Images of the Charles Dickens novel, Bleak House, kept going through my mind. Nothing appears to really have changed. I sense that the litigation may have moved more swiftly if two solicitors had been sat there. Whether this is a fair comment based on my own limited anecdotal evidence, I don’t know…

My Suggestions for Improving the Efficiency of the County Court

Remove Judges from Trial Hearings
The Judge in our case seems to have forgotten hearings he has attended before and almost starts again every time we’ve been to Court. For example he’d forgotten today that he’d given a Costs Order at his last hearing 4 months ago, and in fact this was re-opened and argued yet again because of this omission.
In these types of cases, would it not better to have independent arbitrators, appointed by the court, taking the place of the judge? The arbitrators could take depositions from each side, consider the legal points, and make recommendations to the court for disposal. The judge could then read the paperwork, read the recommendations, hear any additional evidence if required and make an informed decision.

Get Rid of Bundles
The very thought of preparing document bundles in today’s modern world just seems completely stark raving bonkers. There seems to be no conceivable reason at all why a Court service charging the fees they do for use by Claimants and Defendants do not have facility for bundles to be put into PDF format. These could be put on computer screens to be viewed by everyone in the Court Room. If this were the case then I suspect the cases could be dealt with so much more quickly. An example of the case today was when Counsel for the Claimant referred to particular points in the case that fell in three different bundles on three different pages. And the Judge was struggling to even open one of the bundles because the file containing the documents had got slightly dented and he couldn’t turn the page over. We spent 10 minutes swapping bundles and working out where these pages were for a point made by Counsel that lasted approximately 20 seconds. I am aware that there are large-scale redundancies going on in the Court Service and resources get less and less all the time.

However my own experience of Courts is that when they are run efficiently they can function well and Claimants and Defendants in cases can get communications through and cases can be progressed rapidly. In Courts like the one I was in today, this simply does not happen and I wonder whether these Courts need to be identified as failure and someone give them a good kick in the proverbial behind.

If trials could be set down to enable applications to be heard within a limited time before they start and then the trial takes place come what may then perhaps speedier justice could be meted out on behalf of Claimants and Defendants. Afterall, the reason parties delay in civil cases is often nothing to do with justice or the case at hand, it is to do with squirrelling away assets so that the other party cannot get their hands on them, if that particular party is unsuccessful in its applications.

I fear that the Court is aiding and abetting Claimants and Defendants in this by failing to ensure that cases are brought to a speedy conclusion and at minimal cost.
What do you think? Is this critique fair or completely misguided?

A full version of this article can be found at http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/2012/01/day-out-in-court.html

Click here to instantly register legal vacancies

Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing

TP Online Transcription & Typing Service with offices in London and North Wales. We have a team of 20 UK based transcribers offering digital file and tape transcribing services worldwide. Established in 2001, the company has been handling bulk orders (including over 500 hour projects) and one-off assignments for legal and non-legal clients including a large number of UK Solicitors, B&Q, Endemol, the Office of Fair Trading, Sony, Dundee University, Cartridge World, University of Oxford, NHS Tayside, the British Medical Journal, Marie Curie and many more.

We provide ongoing typing contracts and also work on a one-off basis. Our transcribers are all based in the UK and we maintain a high standard of quality output. Our transcribers are experienced secretaries from the legal profesison, medicine or general business and some are educated to degree level and higher.

We can transcribe from all audio & digital files, whether WAV, WMA, DSS (Olympus) or MP3 (plus a host of other formats), CD or DVD, Standard Cassettes, Mini and Micro Cassettes and Video (VHS). We have FTP facilities. For legal work we are happy to take templates to transcribe into. Our main service for law firms is our capacity to free up ‘in office’ secretaries to undertake daily tasks whilst reducing the backlog of work or any large transcription jobs. For details of the service please visit http://www.tptranscription.co.uk/ call 01352 751945 or email pearl@uk-transcription.co.uk.

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Formed in April 2000, Ten-Percent is an innovative recruitment membership service run online for law firms and employers across the UK and offshore, offering fixed monthly fee recruitment to members. Over 1,300 law firms and companies have used our services, and we have over 8,000 solicitors & legal executives registered for opportunities, as well as other fee earners and support staff. We donate 10% of our annual profits to charity. http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/

Please email us details of any vacancies to cv@ten-percent.co.uk or register the vacancy online on our website.

Legal Recruitment News
For older editions of the Legal Recruitment News, and free articles on recruitment, legal careers, training, SEO & Web Marketing, please visit http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/ . You can also visit the http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/ for over 200 articles on Legal Recruitment including advice for candidates.

Legal Recruitment News and Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Email: cv@ten-percent.co.uk
Website: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ : http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/
Tel: 0207 127 4343

Legal Job Market Report 3rd January 2012

November was a very busy month for Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. We had over 20 firms sign up to our £60 per month service from 1st November to December 20th and post over 50 vacancies between them. Part of this growth was fuelled by the need to recruit LSC family supervisors for the new contracts. There appear to have been a large number of new providers awarded a contract by the LSC and I wonder how many medium and larger sized firms have pulled out of LSC funded family work in recent years to allow such rapid expansion to occur…
December is always very quiet, although thanks to two of the LSC deadlines falling in the month we did not slow down until the 3rd week.
We are seeing a large increase in the numbers of firms looking to either replace staff or expand by using profit share or fee split schemes with any new recruits. Whilst this is a good way for expansion to occur without risking the overheads, I suspect it will continue to contribute to the exodus from the profession of solicitors in certain fields of law.
Locum posts remain fairly active, although these have dropped off in recent months. I suspect the market will get very busy in January.
Recent vacancies across all fronts have included: Personal Injury – senior and junior levels, Mental Health, Compliance Manager, Family, Immigration, Housing, Employment, Education/Employment, Commercial Contracts and Crime.
The vast majority of the posts coming through to our job board are now being posted by clients who have signed up to the £60 per month scheme.
In December the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment £720 a Year Service had 101 new candidate registrations (solicitors, fee earners and legal support staff candidates). The majority of our clients now interview and recruit directly (through our new service), so we no longer have an accurate record of interview numbers. A number of new firms and existing clients have now signed up to the new £60 a month scheme.

Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. T: 0207 127 4343 or email: jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk

Candidates Registered December and January 2012 – A Selection

0301121 Locum Family Solicitor – Surrey and Hampshire. 6 years PQE. £20+ per hour.
0301122 Private Immigration Solicitor – London. Salaried. NQ.
0201121 Insurance Solicitor, Leeds or Manchester. £30k salary.
0201122 Prison Law Supervisor, London. JR experience.
0201123 Compliance & Regulatory Manager, Cardiff. 10 years experience.
0101121 Private Family and Wills & Probate Solicitor. West Yorkshire and Mancs.
3112111 Police Station Accredited Rep and Court Clerk. Telford and surrounds.
3112112 Commercial and Construction Solicitor, Guildford or London mid-sized firm.
3012111 Duty Solicitor, Crime. All locations. Salary from £32,000.
2912111 Family Solicitor with online operation experience. Swindon and surrounds.
2912112 Duty Solicitor with HCA, looking for a central London firm. Salary but may consider consultancy.
2912113 Family Solicitor with panel membership looking in the North East.
2812111 Personal Injury Solicitor looking to join a firm as marketing manager or consultant.
2812112 Crime Solicitor or Regulatory. Duty Solicitor. Exeter or further afield. £30-35k.
2812113 Conveyancing Lawyer, looking around Bath.
2212111 Crime Solicitor, Duty status, relocating from Manchester to central London. £30k min.
2212111 Commercial Contracts Solicitor, looking around the Home Counties. 15 years experience.
This is just a sample of the candidates registered in the last few weeks. Member firms get full access to our candidate database by paying just £60 a month.
To access the 8,500+ Candidate Database, please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services

Predictions for 2011 – we rate the experts – how accurate were they?

Each year we see predictions for the coming year from the ‘experts’. It is rare to see an article tracing back and looking at how accurate they were, so this year we have included our own predictions and those of a few experts for you to see how accurate they actually were.

Ten-Percent Predictions – from our Jan 2011 newsletter:
1. The job market is going to heat up, with demand particularly strong for experienced career paralegals, support staff and legal cashiers. The reason for this is that a lot of firms are finding the need to take on more staff but feel that they do not necessarily need to recruit solicitors to undertake fairly straightforward transactional work and instead can get paralegals and unqualified executives for a lot less money.
Verdict: Sort of! The job market did heat up and start to go absolutely crazy in March/April/May, but unfortunately it went downhill again as the year progressed! Non-qualified demand has remained the same and our prediction re the lack of recruitment of qualified staff has not materialised.

2. Salary levels are going to stay low for solicitors. I do not see any improvement on salaries within the next 2-3 years.
Verdict: Correct! Salary levels have remained extremely low. In fact for some types of roles there are no salaries paid anymore.

3. The majority of experienced unemployed non-qualified fee earners will find work very quickly, and as this happens more firms will then have to look at recruiting solicitors again.
Verdict: See 1. Not really!

4. We think that by the middle of 2011 legal recruitment will be at similar levels to 2007-2008 and a lot of firms will be struggling to recruit good quality candidates in most areas, apart from NQ level in and around the South East and London.
Verdict: Wrong! Recruitment levels according to the various job boards who monitor this have increased back to 2007-2008 levels, but not for the legal profession.
5. The Legal Services Commission random changes will continue to affect legal aid fields, but we still expect to see a very busy period in April and October when the duty solicitor rota deadlines come up.
Verdict: Half right! Random changes have indeed occurred and seismic changes are possible in 2012, but hasnt this been the case for about
6. On the commercial side it will remain fairly busy but only at 2-7 years PQE. Anything too junior and too senior is not going to attract very much interest.
Verdict: Wrong! Commercial law has been very, very quiet this year and redundancies have continued.

7. Hotspots for 2011 will be: London, Kent, Yorkshire, South Wales and East Midlands. Coldspots: North West (especially Manchester), South West, East Anglia
Verdict: Half right! Yorkshire and South Wales have been very slow. East Midlands has not been much better. London and Kent have been our busiest areas. The South West, North West and East Anglia have been cold, but the North East continues to be suffering from a mini ice age!
Expert Predictions for 2011 – how accurate were they?
The CBI
The CBI forecasts two per cent growth in 2011.
Verdict: Wrong! 0.6 percent growth in 3rd quarter, 0.1 percent growth in 2nd quarter and 0.5% in 1st quarter.

The REC (Recruitment and Employers Confederation)
“Our market assessment for 2011 is that the recruitment sector will start to grow again following the 30% reduction between 2008 and 2010. We think the market will recover slowly driven by two factors the desire of individuals to change job – a factor which we know has been suppressed during the recession and secondly – many employers not just replacing those leaving but hiring to help meet increased demand from customers.”
Verdict: Correct. Shame this did not occur in the legal profession, but other sectors have grown dramatically – IT and Finance being the two main areas.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (CEBR)
1) Another eurozone crisis – Spain and Italy have to refinance a combined €400bn of bonds by Spring, which could be the catalyst for the break-up of the Euro. “If the euro doesn’t break up, this could be the year when it weakens substantially towards parity with the dollar,” according to the CEBR.
Verdict: Spot on!
2) Slower economic growth – a double dip recession is unlikely on a global scale because of the strength of emerging markets. However, fiscal retrenchment in the UK will cause a significant drag on economic growth.
Verdict: Correct!

3) Germany will be the Western economic superstar – The CEBR believes German performance will be ‘stunning’ in 2011 due to the fact it is ‘in some senses subsidised by the Euro,’ and therefore well-placed to ‘set the pace in Europe.’
Verdict: Completely wrong! Not sure why the CEBR predicted this when in 1. they predicted a eurozone crisis!

4) A serious economic crisis in Japan – Japanese debt now stands at 200% of GDP. The need for fiscal retrenchment, a slow down in the growth of the Asian export market and an aging population paint a disturbing picture for Japan.
Verdict: Not really.
5) Inflation will be lower than expected – a curb on the price of commodities, and the reluctance of the US, the eurozone and the UK to raise interest rates will keep inflation in check.
Verdict: Wrong! Interest rates have not been increased in the UK – mainly because of the political backlash when 1000s of homeowners are repossessed?

6) A tough year for consumers – consumer spending will be flat at best thanks to a rise in VAT, depressed earnings and falling employment.
Verdict: Correct!

7) Two new technologies will rise to the fore – ‘cloud computing,’ which in effect is renting access to your server, and ‘telepresence’ whereby conferences are held in high definition and are so realistic you never have to leave the office.
Verdict: Hmm. Not really…

UK banks to start lending again – after successfully recapitalising, UK banks will start lending again in earnest in 2011 in part due to pressure from the government.
Verdict: Wrong!
9) A year of two halves for the housing market – weak disposable income will mean a weak housing market in the first half. In the second half, though, lending will become cheaper as competition to provide mortgages heats up. Prices will be broadly flat by the end of the year.
Verdict: Hmm.. not really!

10) Manchester United will win the league (Correct), New Zealand will beat Australia in the final day of the rugby (Wrong), Real Madrid will win the Champions League (Wrong) and India will win the cricket World Cup (Correct).
Verdict: Not bad!

New £720 a year Recruitment Service
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is now a service for member firms and employers. A good percentage of our clients are high street firms, sole practitioners and firms with less than 5 partners. £720 a year covers all your locum, permanent, temporary and contract employment, legal support staff, qualified or unqualified fee earners. You get full access to our CV database and a range of job boards as part of the service. Further details by return email or on our website at www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services.

6 reasons given in December for moving firms
Our anecdotal evidence for staff remaining with firms or moving on is usually fairly simple, and not necessarily financially motivated. In a nutshell, if you have contented and motivated staff, they tend to stop with their firm for long periods of time, whereas if you don’t, they tend to move on. So what does this mean in practice? Our recent candidate registrations have had the following reasons for upping sticks:
1.       Redundancy or threat of redundancy. Still the main reason for looking for a move. Some candidates perceive the threat when there isn’t one.
2.       No prospects of career advancement or possible partnership – this can be a real issue for someone 4-7 years PQE.
3.       Distance commuting to their place of work – it may be that this person only took their post as a stopgap..
4.       Opportunity to cover a different angle in their legal field.
5.       Salary levels increase – existing firm should have been aware of this before the solicitor considered options.
6.       Personality issues with one of the partners – basically the candidate didn’t like the way they were being treated.
Apart from the move to a different approach to the law (ie private practice to government), the others can be avoided. Firms sometimes forget that that the cost of recruiting a new solicitor whether through legal recruitment consultants or the Law Society Gazette is at least £4,000 in time spent interviewing, training and the start up period… Certainly makes interesting reading. I am sure that often every employer takes their employees for granted (myself included), and this can have an effect on their attitude towards them over time.
Locuming as an alternative career for solicitors
At 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 lower role within the organisation. Locum work is something of a legend in law. It is said that locums can be millionaires, and that they are constantly in demand, jumping from one post to another, generating vast amounts of income on a £60 per hour rate. The reality of the situation is somewhat different, although there is some truth that locum work is quite rewarding financially.

Most locums I come across fall into one of the following categories:
a) they want to find a permanent job, but havent been able to.
b) they are professional locums, just taking assignments to book up their year as wanted.
c) they have other interests – eg wanting to ski for 4 months each year, and work the other 8 months to pay for this.

Every year as well we get enquiries from candidates and sole practitioners who have got a bit despondent in their current post/set up, and then speak to a locum as above, finding out the vast rewards available to them. Usually on the high streets of England and Wales the locum rates fall between £18 per hour and £45 per hour, dependent on the length of assignment, the type of law and level of seniority. If an assignment has the potential of going permanent the salary is usually a lot lower, and also if it is long term – eg 6, 9 or 12 months, the money tends to be less.
Short term assignments tend to attract higher monetary reward, as they usually mean a firm is desperate for someone to cover so it is more of a suppliers market. Most of the professional locums work on a rule of thumb that they will probably get about 8 months locum work in every 12 months, although in recent years this has probably dropped to around 6 months. Locums have to be a certain type of person – there is no security in the work – and sometimes what is billed as a 12 month assignment ends up a 3 day contract due to other factors. Locums get no notice, and have been known to leave firms at lunchtime because the senior partner has changed his mind on their appointment. If you want to have a regular income and be able to pay your mortgage and outgoings every month from a set amount, this particular career path is definitely not for you.

How to save money on advertising – online and offline
This article is from one of our sister companies – http://www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk/ – SEO and Digital Marketing Consultants for firms across the UK and overseas.
Firstly, try to get away from adwords. We see so many law firms using adwords to get themselves onto Google, but probably 60-80% of their clicks are going to be from competitors curious to see their website, or job seekers looking for work. The cost is tremendous, and you will probably be throwing money around for no apparent reason. Particular examples include low cost conveyancing, when the profit margins are slim anyway, or crime firms advertising for clients.
Secondly, watch your advertising in hard copy. Yellow Pages ads are vital to any law firm, and generate constant traffic. Do you really need a full page ad to attract in customers? Would you be better redesigning your current advert and including more content, making it look more professional and checking your keywords? There are countless examples of large high street firms with full page ads that look like a work experience student has designed them.
Thirdly, think about ways of advertising that cost next to nothing. The most important two of these are Blogging and Press Releases. In our local paper, one of the local solicitors firms seems to issue a press release if so much as a spider crawls across the floor in the office. The local paper is so desperate for cheap news, they print almost anything, and as a result the firm get infinite amounts of free publicity for their various services!
Blogging can cost very little. Invite work experience students in to the office to shadow you for a week, and in return ask them to prepare two articles for your online blog. Make sure the articles are relevant and based on keywords – eg if you are a firm in Littlehampton, you could get them to write an article on the law firms in Littlehampton, or even the nightlife.
These last two tips alone could save your company a lot of money and generate new business in ways you never imagined possible.
Contact http://www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk/ for details of how we can assist you with the above and your organic search listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. For evidence of our service in practice type “locum solicitor” or “solicitor recruitment” into Google, and see where Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and our Legal Recruitment BlogSpot sites are ranked (hopefully!).
Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing

TP Online Transcription & Typing Service with offices in London and North Wales. We have a team of 20 UK based transcribers offering digital file and tape transcribing services worldwide. Established in 2001, the company has been handling bulk orders (including over 500 hour projects) and one-off assignments for legal and non-legal clients including a large number of UK Solicitors, B&Q, Endemol, the Office of Fair Trading, Sony, Dundee University, Cartridge World, University of Oxford, NHS Tayside, the British Medical Journal, Marie Curie and many more.

We provide ongoing typing contracts and also work on a one-off basis. Our transcribers are all based in the UK and we maintain a high standard of quality output. Our transcribers are experienced secretaries from the legal profesison, medicine or general business and some are educated to degree level and higher.

We can transcribe from all audio & digital files, whether WAV, WMA, DSS (Olympus) or MP3 (plus a host of other formats), CD or DVD, Standard Cassettes, Mini and Micro Cassettes and Video (VHS). We have FTP facilities. For legal work we are happy to take templates to transcribe into. Our main service for law firms is our capacity to free up ‘in office’ secretaries to undertake daily tasks whilst reducing the backlog of work or any large transcription jobs. For details of the service please visit http://www.tptranscription.co.uk/ call 01352 751945 or email pearl@uk-transcription.co.uk.
Salary Reviews – Individual Advisory Service
We now offer individual salary reviews. Order online at www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop (follow the Salary Review link) and within 24 hours receive a full breakdown of salary for an individual employee or staff member, based on our own experience, your area and field of law.

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Formed in April 2000, Ten-Percent is an innovative recruitment membership service run online for law firms and employers across the UK and offshore offering free recruitment to members. Over 1,300 law firms and companies have used our services, and we have over 8,000 solicitors & legal executives registered for opportunities, as well as other fee earners and support staff. We donate 10% of our annual profits to charity. http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/
Please email us details of any vacancies to cv@ten-percent.co.uk or register the vacancy online on our website.

Legal Recruitment News
For older editions of the Legal Recruitment News, and free articles on recruitment, legal careers, training, SEO & Web Marketing, please visit http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/ . You can also visit the http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/ for over 200 articles on Legal Recruitment including advice for candidates.

Welcome to the November Careers Newsletter from Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. We have included a number of articles that might be of interest to anyone looking to start a career in the legal profession. There are hundreds of similar articles available on our website to read through. www.ten-percent.co.uk

Our careers shop is currently offering The Ultimate Training Contract Pack for just £49.99. For details please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop.

NB: We have had a few pieces of work come through our Legal Work Experience scheme in recent months. An LPC graduate got 2 weeks of employment tribunal experience through this and a graduate is due to be going to work in house for a couple of months in the North West very shortly. You have received this newsletter because you are already signed up for this.

The company also offers paid legal careers services – for details please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop or www.ten-percent.co.uk/career-coaching

——————————————————–
November 16th – Legal Career Coaching Day in London We have a couple of slots available on November 16th in central London for career coaching. For further details please email us at cv@ten-percent.co.uk or request a quote at www.ten-percent.co.uk/career-coaching

——————————————————-
Legal Job Market Report 3rd November 2011

October has been a very busy month in legal recruitment. Traditionally the Autumn is the busiest time of year for recruitment, tailing off as we get towards Christmas. During October the job advertisement levels in the Law Society Gazette have reflected the level of business we have been doing. Some weeks the Gazette has been full of adverts and other weeks it has been quite quiet. Overall though business is up.  Conveyancing and Wills and Probate vacancies appear to be trickling back onto the market and we are getting wind of a number of these.

As we approach November 14th and the Duty Solicitor deadlines a good number of firms have been trying to increase their Duty Solicitor numbers within firms. It has to be said that this is a lot less during this year. Part of this I think is related to the fact that business through duty slots is considerably down on previous years.

I can be fairly confident of this because one of the large legal recruitment companies has decided to become an expert in duty solicitors in recent times and have been plastering the Law Society Gazette with adverts for freelance duty solicitors across the UK for a couple of large law firms.  I suspect that these firms are attempting to capture a significant proportion of the market so that when competitive tendering comes in the bigger companies will be in a good position to take a considerable chunk of the work at a low price per case.  I can see a time when the likes of Serco and Capita get involved in the crime solicitor market and one of the big players gets taken over and turned into a call centre operation with freelance advocates being paid a low hourly rate.

Freelance Duty Solicitors are strongly advised to think carefully before staying on a freelance basis unless they are picking up substantial work off their duty slots. There have been a number of instances in the last 12 months when freelancers have made very little money and therefore have accepted salaried posts as low as £27,000 to £30,000 as their freelance work has netted them so little over the past 6-12 months. Other fields have been busy.  We have picked up posts as varied as environmental law consultancy work in the Midlands, mental health, welfare benefit posts (very rare these days), corporate commercial, taxation and commercial property.

The vast majority of the posts coming through to our job board are now being posted by clients who have signed up to the £60 per month scheme. This means that all candidates are guaranteed consideration by the law firm they have applied to, provided they are suitable, and recruitment on the whole tends to occur after the vacancies have been advertised. Over the past 3 years we have had a large number of firms toying with the idea of recruitment and decided the last minute to pull out, wasting everyone’s time and money.  We hope the new scheme has erased this and that when a vacancy is placed recruitment occurs.

In October the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment £720 a Year Service had over 120 new candidate registrations (solicitors, fee earners and legal support staff candidates). The majority of our clients now interview and recruit directly (through our new service), so we no longer have an accurate record of interview numbers. A number of new firms and existing clients have now signed up to the new £60 a month scheme.

———————————————————-
Legal Careers Question – I have a 3rd Class Degree from the University of Ife in Nigeria.  I have no legal work experience in the UK and I am not qualified.  What are my prospects of finding work?

Answer:

I think that your chances of finding work are just above zero per cent. A 3rd Class Degree in Law virtually guarantees that you will not manage to qualify as a solicitor or barrister without a herculean effort and lots of extremely hard work.  Most people either give up or attempt to do something legally related but not as a qualified lawyer. Factor in the overseas qualification and you have reduced your chances yet further, coupled with the fact that you have no work experience, just about writes off any chance you have at all.

However, it is not the end of the world.  There are lots of options for you to consider and in the first instance if you are going to go into the legal profession you need to get work experience. I would say that the best way of progressing your career would be to go and get secretarial or administrative work.  One of the easiest ways to do this is to go and attempt to get temping work as a secretary with one of the high street agencies such as Office Angels or Pertemps.  This will give you the opportunity to get some practical work experience and see whether or not the legal profession is for you.

Your best way to progress a career if at all is to go down the Legal Executive route. This will enable you to work and get experience whilst you are studying and is a cheaper option, despite the ILEX (Institute of Legal Executives) becoming more commercialised these days and charging considerably more than they used to.

I think you need to accept that your legal career is going to be very much based on how much effort you put into it. It may also take you a long time to get any kind of progression in place.

If you persevere you may succeed in getting to your goal of qualifying, but this is going to take considerable effort.

Think carefully!

———————————————————————-
Personal Profile or Summary Sections on a CV – Are they necessary?

The first thing to say about a personal profile section is that if you have nothing to say, the best personal profile section for you would be an empty one and the space used more effectively for something else.

You only need a personal profile section to explain about six points. These are

1. Your job title

2. The number of years’ experience you have

3. Any particular tempting assets for a prospective employer

4. The location you seek work

5. How much you want

6. When you are available.

An example of this in a legal career context would be :

“A conveyancing solicitor with 5 years PQE and a personal following worth £120k, looking for a suitable post in North West London. Salary levels £40-£50k, notice period 2 months”.

By including this information it makes it possible for anyone looking at the CV to immediately see who the person is, and whether or not they wish to continue to read the CV or move onto the next one.

This section is one of the hardest to get right because if the personal profile is no good then it is highly likely that anyone looking at the CV will immediately form a negative perception of the writer.

The personal profile we have included above complies with the three second rule.

The three second rule is the theory that you have three seconds to impress the reader of your CV before they give up and move onto the next one or fail to take in exactly who you are and what you are looking for.

A personal profile that just contains a load of buzz words and subjective information is completely useless and a total waste of time and space.

An example of this would be

“A gregarious and outgoing law graduate with a can-do attitude to work. Possessing a sense of humour and an ability to achieve great things. Looking to progress career and demonstrate my great ability to any prospective employer”.

We see so many of these on CVs and it is sad to think that it is possible that someone somewhere is advising people to include this nonsense.  I would imagine that pretty much every employer would agree that this type of entry is a complete waste of time and effort and should be avoided like the plague.

If this is all you have to write on your CV leave the personal profile section off. Profiles are only really relevant if you have something specific to the post or type of firm you are applying to and if not then it is best to let the employer simply read what you have done to date in your work experience and your academic career.

—————————————————–
How should I send a legal CV to law firms?

If you are making an application for a legal job or speculatively approaching a law firm for any type of position including solicitor work or paralegal/work experience, you need to make a decision on how you send your details over. Do you need to handwrite a covering letter, send a covering email or print out a covering letter to send with the CV? Is it better to post, email, fax or turn up in person? The answer to this is that it probably depends on the employer in question.

Howsoever, as a rule of thumb we would recommend sending your CV by email wherever possible. This is because it is easier to circulate in the office and to file, instead of posted copies which will just go in a pile or be thrown in the bin.

Attach your CV to the email and actually write the covering letter in the email. Do not attach the covering letter as it is unlikely anyone will read it and instead simply go for the CV directly.  This is particularly important if you have specific circumstances that need attention and you draw attention to those circumstances in the covering letter.

There is plenty of advice on this website as to how to write covering letters but in a nutshell keep it to 4 paragraphs maximum and don’t spend the time telling the employer about what a good opportunity it will be for you to join them. Instead spend the time telling the employer what the benefits are for the firm employing you.

Do not simply send the CV and then ignore the fact that you have sent it. Always follow up your CV with a chasing email followed by a telephone call within 7 days.

The telephone call is the hardest bit of looking for work and something the majority of law students find very hard indeed. In fact law students find this so hard most of them do not bother doing it.

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment – recruiting for the legal profession since 2000, donating 10% of profits to charity. Visit our website for details of our integrated recruitment service <http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services>  for law firms and in house departments, our Vacancy Database <http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/vacancies> , our Legal Careers Forum <http://ten-percent.co.uk/legalcareers/>  and our Legal Careers Shop <http://ten-percent.co.uk/careersshop/> .

Head Office:
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Nant
Village Road
Llanferres
CH7 5LU

London Office:
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
2nd Floor
145-157 St John Street
London
EC1V 4PY

Although ten-percent.co.uk limited believes that this e-mail and any attachments do not contain any viruses or other defects which may affect your computer, it is the responsibility of the recipient to ensure that it does not contain viruses and ten-percent.co.uk limited does not accept any responsibility for any loss or damage arising in any way from its use.

Ten-Percent.co.uk Limited, registered in England and Wales, reg. no.3985515. Registered under the Data Protection Act.

Legal Job Market Report 3rd November 2011

October has been a very busy month in legal recruitment. Traditionally the Autumn is the busiest time of year for recruitment, tailing off as we get towards Christmas. During October the job advertisement levels in the Law Society Gazette have reflected the level of business we have been doing. Some weeks the Gazette has been full of adverts and other weeks it has been quite quiet. Overall though business is up.  Conveyancing and Wills and Probate vacancies appear to be trickling back onto the market and we are getting wind of a number of these.

As we approach November 14th and the Duty Solicitor deadlines a good number of firms have been trying to increase their Duty Solicitor numbers within firms. It has to be said that this is a lot less during this year. Part of this I think is related to the fact that business through duty slots is considerably down on previous years.

I can be fairly confident of this because one of the large legal recruitment companies has decided to become an expert in duty solicitors in recent times and have been plastering the Law Society Gazette with adverts for freelance duty solicitors across the UK for a couple of large law firms.  I suspect that these firms are attempting to capture a significant proportion of the market so that when competitive tendering comes in the bigger companies will be in a good position to take a considerable chunk of the work at a low price per case.  I can see a time when the likes of Serco and Capita get involved in the crime solicitor market and one of the big players gets taken over and turned into a call centre operation with freelance advocates being paid a low hourly rate.

Freelance Duty Solicitors are strongly advised to think carefully before staying on a freelance basis unless they are picking up substantial work off their duty slots. There have been a number of instances in the last 12 months when freelancers have made very little money and therefore have accepted salaried posts as low as £27,000 to £30,000 as their freelance work has netted them so little over the past 6-12 months. Other fields have been busy.  We have picked up posts as varied as environmental law consultancy work in the Midlands, mental health, welfare benefit posts (very rare these days), corporate commercial, taxation and commercial property.

The vast majority of the posts coming through to our job board are now being posted by clients who have signed up to the £60 per month scheme. This means that all candidates are guaranteed consideration by the law firm they have applied to, provided they are suitable, and recruitment on the whole tends to occur after the vacancies have been advertised. Over the past 3 years we have had a large number of firms toying with the idea of recruitment and decided the last minute to pull out, wasting everyone’s time and money.  We hope the new scheme has erased this and that when a vacancy is placed recruitment occurs.

In October the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment £720 a Year Service had over 120 new candidate registrations (solicitors, fee earners and legal support staff candidates). The majority of our clients now interview and recruit directly (through our new service), so we no longer have an accurate record of interview numbers. A number of new firms and existing clients have now signed up to the new £60 a month scheme.

Legal Career Coaching Day – Wednesday November 16th – Central London

Do you have a particular problem or issue with your career that you would like to discuss with Jonathan Fagan, experienced legal career coach, solicitor and recruitment consultant? Jonathan is holding another career day in London on November 16th. For details please email jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk. For details of our career coaching service, please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/career-coaching

Vacancy Update – vacancies registered 1st October – 4th November

Legal Job Market Report 1st November 2011

October has been a very busy month in legal recruitment. Traditionally the Autumn is the busiest time of year for recruitment, tailing off as we get towards Christmas. During October the job advertisement levels in the Law Society Gazette have reflected the level of business we have been doing. Some weeks the Gazette has been full of adverts and other weeks it has been quite quiet. Overall though business is up. Conveyancing and Wills and Probate vacancies appear to be trickling back onto the market and we are getting wind of a number of these.

As we approach November 14th and the Duty Solicitor deadlines a good number of firms have been trying to increase their Duty Solicitor numbers within firms. It has to be said that this is a lot less during this year. Part of this I think is related to the fact that business through duty slots is considerably down on previous years.

I can be fairly confident of this because one of the large legal recruitment companies has decided to become an expert in duty solicitors in recent times and have been plastering the Law Society Gazette with adverts for freelance duty solicitors across the UK for a couple of large law firms. I suspect that these firms are attempting to capture a significant proportion of the market so that when competitive tendering comes in the bigger companies will be in a good position to take a considerable chunk of the work at a low price per case. I can see a time when the likes of Serco and Capita get involved in the crime solicitor market and one of the big players gets taken over and turned into a call centre operation with freelance advocates being paid a low hourly rate. Freelance Duty Solicitors are strongly advised to think carefully before staying on a freelance basis unless they are picking up substantial work off their duty slots. There have been a number of instances in the last 12 months when freelancers have made very little money and therefore have accepted salaried posts as low as £27,000 to £30,000 as their freelance work has netted them so little over the past 6-12 months.
Other fields have been busy. We have picked up posts as varied as environmental law consultancy work in the Midlands, mental health, welfare benefit posts (very rare these days), corporate commercial, taxation and commercial property.

The vast majority of the posts coming through to our job board are now being posted by clients who have signed up to the £60 per month scheme. This means that all candidates are guaranteed consideration by the law firm they have applied to, provided they are suitable, and recruitment on the whole tends to occur after the vacancies have been advertised. Over the past 3 years we have had a large number of firms toying with the idea of recruitment and decided the last minute to pull out, wasting everyone’s time and money. We hope the new scheme has erased this and that when a vacancy is placed recruitment occurs.

In October the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment £720 a Year Service had over 120 new candidate registrations (solicitors, fee earners and legal support staff candidates). The majority of our clients now interview and recruit directly (through our new service), so we no longer have an accurate record of interview numbers. A number of new firms and existing clients have now signed up to the new £60 a month scheme.

Jonathan Fagan, MD Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment. T: 0207 127 4343 or email: jbfagan@ten-percent.co.uk

Candidates Registered 26th Oct – 1st Nov – A Selection

311011 Duty Solicitor – 30 miles from Stoke. £30k salary and upwards.
311011 Family Solicitor 2 years PQE. Potentially has 60 files to come with her. London
311011 Family Solicitor 2 years PQE. Workington and surrounding areas.
311011 Crime Solicitor, police station accredited. Anywhere in London. £23k salary.
311011 Family Solicitor 10 years PQE. Surrey and Central London. High net worth and LSC experience.
281011 Family Solicitor 1 year PQE. Ashford, Kent and further East.
311011 FILEX Commercial and Residential Conveyancing. Plymouth and South Coast areas.
311011 Accredited Police Station Rep – central London.
311011 In House Legal Counsel – Energy sector. City trained. Salary levels £120k plus bens.
311011 In House Legal Counsel – general areas. £70k.
281011 FILEX Conveyancing Lawyer. 10 years experience. Portsmouth area.
271011 Commercial Property Solicitor – Cheshire, North West and Shropshire. 3 years PQE.
271011 Crime Solicitor Duty – looking around South Midlands and Midlands. Relocating from Berkshire.
271011 Legal Cashier – 10 years experience. Surrey or London. £28k. Range of packages used. ILFM member.

This is just a sample of the 120 candidates registered in the last few weeks. Member firms get full access to our candidate database by paying just £720 a year.

To access the 8,500+ Candidate Database, please visit www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services
New £720 a year Recruitment Service

Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is now a service for member firms and employers. We aim to have 100 legal employers signed up to the service by Christmas 2011 and are well on the way to achieving this. A good percentage of our clients are sole practitioners and firms with less than 5 partners. £720 a year covers all your locum, permanent, temporary and contract employment, legal support staff, qualified or unqualified fee earners. You get full access to our CV database and a range of job boards as part of the service. Further details by return email or on our website at www.ten-percent.co.uk/membership-services.

Click here to instantly register legal vacancies

Guide to Interviewing for Employers.
When interviewing potential employees, particularly in a law firm setting, it is important to remember the following advice:

1. HR managers have been trained in specific techniques designed to apply psychology and test a candidate’s personality, but are usually unable to determine someone who you personally would feel comfortable working with. Make sure the person you are employing is someone that you could work with and get on with well in a work setting as well as a social one or an interview environment.

2. Be sure that the person you are employing is technically capable of doing the job. Ask a couple of technical questions during the interview and gauge the response.

3. Write down all the answers that the candidate gives you because if you are interviewing 20 potential employees in one day you are almost certainly going to forget half, if not three quarters of what is said.

4. Refrain from taking over the interview and not giving the candidate an opportunity to speak. A lot of interviews are conducted by interviewers who have not really understood the idea or concept behind interviewing, which is for you to determine that the person you are interviewing is suitable for your company or firm. If you do not allow them to speak, you will never know this. Indeed, the person will go away wondering whether or not you are the slightest bit interested in them when all you have done is spend the time talking about yourself. There is a law firm in Nottingham where the senior partner is very well known for doing this and offering jobs to people at the end of the interview without them actually having uttered a word.

5. Do not be defensive to any questions that are asked by the candidate. Some candidates like to see how you will react as an employer in a situation where you may have been put on the spot or under a stressful situation. They may wish to see how you would react to them asking them, for example. An example of this would be a question such as, “What do you do if you get angry with your employees? Have you ever thrown a book at them?” It may sound a silly question, but if they have come from a firm or company where their former employer was slightly deranged and undertook such exercises on a regular basis, it may be something they feel very concerned about.

6. Smile in the interview. Do not glare at the candidates, and if interviewing as part of a panel try and avoid the situation where one of you acts as good cop and one of you acts as bad cop. This does not work on the whole, unless interviewing very junior members of staff who are desperate for work and may just annoy anyone with a bit of experience in the work place.

7. Think about using a mystery shopper to sit in reception with the candidate when they come in. This can be very interesting. You may find the person is reading your literature or may find them sat reading the paper but you will see them in a more relaxed state than they would have been in the interview. Ask your receptionist or secretary to keep an eye on them as well and to give you their feedback on their greeting to them and the way that they spoke to them when they first came into the building.

8. Avoid asking too many questions which are waffly or require lots and lots of business speak. Anyone can do business talk if they have been on the right courses, but it does not determine whether that person will be any use to your business or firm or gauge how hard working they are.

9. Do try to ask questions that put the candidates on the ropes and make them work hard with their responses. It will give you an idea as to how they react in a difficult situation at work.

10. Don’t forget to ask a moral question and see how they react to it. Such examples would include whether they would report a fellow employee they saw taking paper clips out of the stationery cupboard, or observing a potential criminal act taking place that required police intervention.

11. Finally, remember that the person you will be interviewing could be someone that is going to work with for a long, long time and if you give off an bad impression in an interview, this can last throughout your relationship as employer/employee. It does not necessarily follow that because a potential employee does not like you, they will not want to work for your company, as firstly money talks, and secondly they may see your company or business as an ideal career opportunity as opposed to needing to fit in well with you.

How to save money on advertising – online and offline

This article is from one of our sister companies – http://www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk/ – SEO and Digital Marketing Consultants for firms across the UK and overseas.

Firstly, try to get away from adwords. We see so many law firms using adwords to get themselves onto Google, but probably 60-80% of their clicks are going to be from competitors curious to see their website, or job seekers looking for work. The cost is tremendous, and you will probably be throwing money around for no apparent reason. Particular examples include low cost conveyancing, when the profit margins are slim anyway, or crime firms advertising for clients.

Secondly, watch your advertising in hard copy. Yellow Pages ads are vital to any law firm, and generate constant traffic. Do you really need a full page ad to attract in customers? Would you be better redesigning your current advert and including more content, making it look more professional and checking your keywords? There are countless examples of large high street firms with full page ads that look like a work experience student has designed them.

Thirdly, think about ways of advertising that cost next to nothing. The most important two of these are Blogging and Press Releases. In our local paper, one of the local solicitors firms seems to issue a press release if so much as a spider crawls across the floor in the office. The local paper is so desperate for cheap news, they print almost anything, and as a result the firm get infinite amounts of free publicity for their various services!

Blogging can cost very little. Invite work experience students in to the office to shadow you for a week, and in return ask them to prepare two articles for your online blog. Make sure the articles are relevant and based on keywords – eg if you are a firm in Littlehampton, you could get them to write an article on the law firms in Littlehampton, or even the nightlife.

These last two tips alone could save your company a lot of money and generate new business in ways you never imagined possible.

Contact http://www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk/ for details of how we can assist you with the above and your organic search listings on Google, Yahoo and MSN. For evidence of our service in practice type “locum solicitor” into Google, and see where Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment and our Legal Recruitment BlogSpot sites are ranked.

Passive Income Streams

This is a relatively new concept for a lot of law firms, although there have been some notable exceptions. It is the idea of developing services that pay you money whilst you sleep. A quick example of this is the Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment website – most of our free careers pages have a Google Adsense account linked to them, with adverts somewhere on the page. Every month we get a cheque from Google for click through payments generated by these pages. This is not substantial, but it certainly nice to see a cheque for something that we have not had to do a lot of work to generate. Another example is a divorce guide online. If you were to write a guide to getting divorced online, and generate publicity for this via your blog and website, you could give a basic outline free of charge, and advertise the remainder being downloadable for say £40. You sign up to Paypal or Google Checkout, include a link to your site, and sit back and watch money come in whenever anyone clicks through. The guide probably would not cost you a lot to prepare (you could again get work experience students to put the basic elements of it together), and again is passive income. There are lots more possibilities out there…

Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing
TP Online Transcription & Typing Service with offices in London and North Wales. We have a team of 20 UK based transcribers offering digital file and tape transcribing services worldwide. Established in 2001, the company has been handling bulk orders (including over 500 hour projects) and one-off assignments for legal and non-legal clients including a large number of UK Solicitors, B&Q, Endemol, the Office of Fair Trading, Sony, Dundee University, Cartridge World, University of Oxford, NHS Tayside, the British Medical Journal, Marie Curie and many more.

We provide ongoing typing contracts and also work on a one-off basis. Our transcribers are all based in the UK and we maintain a high standard of quality output. Our transcribers are experienced secretaries from the legal profesison, medicine or general business and some are educated to degree level and higher.

We can transcribe from all audio & digital files, whether WAV, WMA, DSS (Olympus) or MP3 (plus a host of other formats), CD or DVD, Standard Cassettes, Mini and Micro Cassettes and Video (VHS). We have FTP facilities. For legal work we are happy to take templates to transcribe into. Our main service for law firms is our capacity to free up ‘in office’ secretaries to undertake daily tasks whilst reducing the backlog of work or any large transcription jobs. For details of the service please visit http://www.tptranscription.co.uk/ call 01352 751945 or email pearl@uk-transcription.co.uk.

Salary Review Update
The Ten-Percent Legal Salary Survey is available online – Click the link below to view the surveys, which are broken down into geographical areas: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/salary-reviews-for-lawyers-ten-percent-legal-recruitment.html

Our most recent Crime Solicitor salary list is available on our blog at http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/

About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Formed in April 2000, Ten-Percent is an innovative recruitment membership service run online for law firms and employers across the UK and offshore offering free recruitment to members. Over 1,300 law firms and companies have used our services, and we have over 8,000 solicitors & legal executives registered for opportunities, as well as other fee earners and support staff. We donate 10% of our annual profits to charity. http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/

Please email us details of any vacancies to cv@ten-percent.co.uk or register the vacancy online on our website.

Legal Recruitment News
For older editions of the Legal Recruitment News, and free articles on recruitment, legal careers, training, SEO & Web Marketing, please visit http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/ . You can also visit the http://www.legalrecruitment.blogspot.com/ for over 200 articles on Legal Recruitment including advice for candidates.

Legal Recruitment News and Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Email: cv@ten-percent.co.uk
Website: http://www.ten-percent.co.uk/ : http://www.legal-recruitment.co.uk/
Tel: 0207 127 4343

One of the main areas in recent weeks has been Family Law. The Legal Services Commission have yet again put out some sort of tender document and firms yet again are making a decision to apply for these, despite knowing that doing this public funded work is almost certainly going to be an almighty headache. No doubt the somewhat (allegedly) incompetent Legal Services Commission yet again will change the criteria, reduce the funding or make the checks even more strict than they currently are.

As the structure of Ten Percent has changed, so has the way we source vacancies.  About 60% of our vacancies now come through our member firms, with the other 40% being advertised on the basis that firms want to consider using our service but are not quite sure and therefore want to see what we can do before they commit.

We have endured a couple of frustrating vacancies where we have located suitable candidates at the right price who are interested in firms. The firms have opted instead either not to recruit or to spend money on full priced agencies and advertising in other sources.  We have even had one instance where a firm had decided not to use us and subsequently approached one of our candidates through an agency who charge 20% at the very least. The saving they could have made through signing up with our £60 service compared with what they will end up paying is astronomical.  Our service is now so unbelievably cheap a few HR managers and senior partners cannot get over the unbelievable bit and are hesitant to commit!

We anticipate the market continuing to get even more busy and frenetic than it currently is. Another bumper month in October is expected with increased numbers of vacancies. We will see the inevitable drop off in work from November onwards that always happens as we approach Christmas. Now is a very good time to be recruiting. There are plenty of candidates looking, any 3 month notice period will take you up to Christmas which makes a good start in January and if you are a medium to large size firm the chances are some of your staff will be handing in their notice very shortly because they are on the market looking elsewhere.

Commercial fields still seem to be very quiet and we have seen a whole host of very high quality candidates from good firms registering because of redundancies in their practices. Whether this is because their firm’s expansion has been linked too closely to the public sector and this has affected overall business we do not know.

New £720 a year Recruitment Service

It has become a recent trend in the legal profession for solicitors to start forming brand names and franchises. In the last 2 years we have seen Quality Solicitors, the High Street Lawyer brand and now a new version called Face to Face.  All of these appear to charge their members to become the local representative of the brand, promising advertising and increased work in return and forming large groups of firms able to compete in the national marketplace.

Franchising, which is what this model appears to be, has been around for many years. You can purchase franchises in anything including Costa Coffee, McDonalds, Burger King, health and fitness clubs, estate agents, and many more.  Most of the time these franchises are simply a way for large businesses to spread their operations and ensure other people take on the risks involved.  I imagine that for the majority of time most companies are better off not being franchised and instead using the money they would have spent on the franchise to market their own business and brand name. Consider for example the firm in Liverpool who advertise on Classic FM with a Joanna Lumley ‘soundalike’ across the country for Personal Injury matters.

Some of these brand names just sound as if a new business has opened up and do not really explain in their titles very much about the benefit you get as a consumer. I appreciate that “Quality Solicitors” indicates quality, but is there really a marked difference between this and “Smith & Co, established 1834″?

I particularly admire the latest attempts to franchise with an upfront fee of £25,000 and 8% of profits shared with the parent company. What difference would it make if a consumer is looking for a solicitor in Stoke on Trent that one of the solicitors’ firms is called Quality Solicitors, the other is called Face to Face and the final one called High Street Solicitor when they could go to firms who have been there for many years and perhaps have an established brand known to a good proportion of the population?

Look at accountancy. Many years ago a new brand came onto the scene called Tax Assist.  There seemed to be quite a lot of firms who signed up for this brand, but if you phoned round for a quote the Tax Assist Companies were actually more expensive than the competing businesses. It was not clear what the advantage was that a customer got from going through a company called Tax Assist as opposed to going through a company called Smith & Co Accountants.

Anyone who uses Facebook as their main source of advertising must bear this in mind. Consumers will talk about your products on there if there is something exciting and interesting and probably relevant to anyone under the age of 20, but for business to business and for products that are specialist, we do not think Facebook is the place to be. It is suitable really only for youth products, sporting goods or anything that needs to be trendy to sell.

Low Cost Digital Dictation Outsourcing

Support staff posts continue to come in steadily. Ten-Percent has been developing a niche in legal cashiers for some time and we see plenty of vacancies coming on stream.

New £720 a year Recruitment Service