The Legal Job Market looked as if it was going to take off quite dramatically as December drew to a close. All the signs were there – firms wanting to interview over Christmas, indications of the recruitment freezes being lifted by some of the larger firms, lack of redundancies and a stop to the large numbers of CVs flooding the market through redundancy, and requests by law firms with posts. January has been a little bit slow as a result of the adverse weather conditions we have experienced, although vacancies have still picked up. We had people about to attend interviews two hundred miles away only to discover that not only was the firm they were going to see closed, but the partners they were due to meet being snowed in at their homes. One company had a whole days worth of interview cancelled with people travelling from all over the country to a central location in Derby. This makes it very difficult on the recruitment side as the work that a consultant puts in to set up one days worth of interviewing can take another week to get back on track, once partners have been tracked down, candidates have made travel arrangements etc.. It is all very time consuming and quite frustrating when adverse weather affects interviews. We are still seeing some rogue firms and candidates coming through, which has been a fairly common theme throughout the recession. We have had firms offering ridiculously low amounts of money to well qualified candidates and being surprised when they get turned down, candidates who get offered extremely good deals only to turn them down for spurious reasons and candidates who simply fail to turn up to interviews at all. All of these things have been very rare in legal recruitment during the time we have been involved in it, and thankfully are decreasing as the markets pick up. The other phenomenon is the non-existent law firm or job offer which usually involves a firm claiming to be starting up and with the money to provide a salary plus bonus scheme, only to get to the interview and find that the firm were wanting to see if the person coming to see them had their own following that a) they could potentially “use” and b) they could base their department on in order to pay the candidate to do the work rather than generating any new work. We have seen an increase in the number of non-contentious positions with Wills and Probate and conveyancing slowly starting to get back onto the market. In fact we have noticed in some areas that there is already a shortage of conveyancers with a particular level of experience and I expect this to start to become increasingly prevalent as the recruitment season progresses. The usual litigation positions are there as always although family appears to have died off again, after a surge last year. Perhaps this is a sign of the increased optimism in the economy, as I write this I hear that the country is now officially out of a recession which of course has an effect on people’s financial and personal decisions. The outlook for February is good and we hope that the snow stays off and firms start to look to recruit again. The back of the Law Society Gazette is always a good indication of the market and in recent weeks we have started to see a number of law firms and companies looking to expand departments and increase their teams and we hope that this continues for the foreseeable future.
Typing – Outsourcing – Digital Recorder Guide
Outsourcing some or all of your typing work in recent times has got quite popular. It is now possible via software to set up an online typing management system, with recordings being directly uploaded from your offices to home-based typists, and returned extremely quickly as required.
There are a whole host of companies out there selling a range of products, but one of the cheapest solutions remains the Olympus digital recorders, which come with the market-leading DSS Player software, and are compatible with the Express Dictate packages from NCH, an Australian company.
The recorders we recommend are as follows:
1. Olympus DS 2400
This is a very powerful machine that comes with the Olympus DSS Player. It enables you to do as much recording as you want as it comes with a memory card for recording onto rather than directly onto a hard drive. The cost is about £169 on Amazon at present:
Olympus DS-2400 Professional Digital Voice Recorder
2. Olympus DS 40
The cheaper option at £82 on Amazon, this still comes with the Olympus DSS Player, which makes it an option if you do not dictate more than about an hour at any one dictation session. It is compatible with the Express Dictate suite of software, and is a very inexpensive option for firms wanting to outsource and not spend considerable sums in doing so.
Olympus DS-40 Digital Voice Recorder with MP3/WMA Playback 512MB
These two machines are often superceded by other models, but Olympus make such good systems for dictation and transcription they are thoroughly recommended.
The Express Dictate system for sending your recordings to transcribers externally can be obtained through NCH systems in Australia for £48.48 per user (no ongoing costs), with a free trial as well. We have been using the software for over 6 years and it is thoroughly recommended.
http://www.uk-transcription.co.uk/ is a transcription company with over 10 years experience working on small to large contracts and one-off pieces of work for solicitors firms, universities, government bodies and research establishments, to name but a few. Unlike others in the market, the typing is undertaken by UK-based native English speaking secretaries working from home offices.
Legal Job Market Summary January 11th 2010
Legal Job Market Summary – 11th January 2010 As one would expect, December slowed down considerably in the run up to Christmas. However, again we have seen vacancies coming into us, including conveyancing, wills & probate, family, commercial litigation, crime and housing. These are not the usual emails from large firms with a multitude of parties being sent the same jobs, but actual vacancies from small and medium sized practices.
The geographical mix of vacancies shows that the regions are at present starting to pick up before London and the Home Counties. The majority of the posts have been spread across the UK, but because of the overspill of London into neighbouring areas the Home Counties are taking longer to get back up to speed.
Over Christmas, as candidates make New Year resolutions to move, we are seeing increasing numbers of grade A candidates registering with us, including for example a senior commercial property solicitor with a following and looking for a salary of about £120k. Employees are getting more comfortable with the idea of making moves, which has changed from previous months when on the whole most people very sensibly were making the decision to remain exactly where they were.
Family panel members and crime solicitors are still going strong in most areas, with firms looking to increase their departments following the delay of the LSC BVT arrangements.
Commercial and Civil Litigation are both gaining ground as clients start to realise that there are a number of outstanding debts available to go after and now have the funds to pursue these.
Commercial law firms still seem to be very cautious, with a considerably fewer number of positions coming on stream so far this year, although reports of large numbers of vacancies coming up for April 2010.
About Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment
Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment has a range of senior solicitors and executives looking for work as well as at a more junior level. We can introduce you to housing supervisors, crime duty solicitors, family law panel members, children panel members, immigration level 2 supervisors, mental health review tribunal panel members, personal injury panel members registered for work across the UK.
We have a database of candidates that you can view online, and assist with permanent and temporary recruitment. A good proportion of lawyers registered with us are passive jobseekers (ie they like to hear of new opportunities arising as opposed to actively looking for work). The company has about 7,000 solicitors registered at all levels, together with a large number of legal executives and paralegals/fee earners. We are called Ten-Percent because each year since 2000 we have donated 10% of our annual profits to a charitable trust called the Ten-Percent Foundation.
If you would like to use our services, please get in touch. You can view our Candidate Database online and register your vacancies either by emailing cv@ten-percent.co.uk or visiting
How to get work done in the office for very low cost
There are a number of different options here, but this month I am going to recommend a website we have used ourselves (and have no financial link to I hasten to add) called http://www.ifreelance.com/
Ifreelance.com is a website aimed at small to medium sized businesses who may have a particular project they need completing, and who may also want to consider low cost options or good quality work levels.
Sign up to the site for free, and post details of any particular projects free of charge as well. You will get a range of bids for the work from around the world. We have used consultants based in India, the USA, Australia and the UK so far.
We have sent at least 6 projects through the site, some of which would have cost £1000s through a conventional company. These have included data capture, website design, database manipulation, marketing and research. You can also use the site to identify outsourcing partners.
An example would be our need for an Excel spreadsheet process – how to get data out of our bespoke recruitment software and into a manipulative state so that we can post our candidates and vacancies online at low cost.
I spoke to our recruitment software company, who wanted £4,500 plus an ongoing maintenance contract of about £1,500 per year. I spoke to our online database supply company, who wanted about £1,200 to set up a piece of software.
I posted the project onto ifreelance.com and within 2 days had the project completed for £250. They set me up a range of macros in Excel plus additional add ons, that automatically converted the data, and meant that we did not need any ongoing maintenance. The consultant who carried out the work was based in the USA, and worked as a freelance IT consultant.
Tendering for Work in the Public Sector
Legal services tenders are increasingly getting posted onto the Supply2.gov.uk website. You need to sign-up to get started on the site and you can now search nationally for free in respect of contracts of less than £100,000. HOWEVER most councils have their own e-tendering/e-procurement portal so you may need to register several times in several places.
HOWEVER you will automatically be excluded from tenders if the value of the project you are bidding for would be more than 30% of your annual turnover. For some projects this can be 20% of turnover.
As all work over £10k has to be tendered for, this means if you can’t show accounts that prove your turnover is more than £50k, you won’t be able to get the work.
1. Look on the tender sites for notifications to tender to be part of a FRAMEWORK AGREEMENT, Framework Agreements are when a public body knows it will need to put work out to tender, but generally for amounts less than the £10k ceiling. What they will do is get a group of say printers, or graphic designers, or caterers together, and make them exclusively part of a framework agreement usually lasting for 3 to 4 years. If you aren’t in the framework agreement, you can’t bid for the work. if you are in the Framework you stand a good chance of getting one or more contracts.
2. Use http://www.skillfair.co.uk/ which is for small public and private sector contracts and tenders. Its about £150 for a year’s subscription – you can have a month’s free trial too.
3. Collaborate with other small businesses. And if you can’t find anyone to collaborate with, join something like http://www.venmanagement.com/ to get your business involved.
As this becomes a more and more common way to do business, with tenders being put out online and bids placed without identifying the end company to the organisation, it is important not to miss out, particularly with all the government and EU money currently being put into the public sector..
Paying for Referrals – 5 Ways to Avoid them
It has become a fact of life for most solicitors firms that sources of work now want some sort of recompense in most circumstances for their business. Some firms have all too readily agreed to paying these, particularly on the personal injury and conveyancing sides, and this has led to the current situation where I have noticed at times a dependency culture creeping in that was not there 10 years ago (mainly because referral fees were not in existence!).
Conveyancers have an achievement listed on their CV of creating new income streams for firms by signing up to an online referral agency to source work from, and others have spoken of how they have developed new work by agreeing referral fees with introducers.
There are clearly alternatives, and with some of the fees and the prices you will need to go down to in order to attract business through some of these sources, you may want to consider these.
1. Get into SEO
Search Engine Optimisation for the uninitiated – basically the idea that someone can see your site when they search for conveyancing on Google for example.
Cost: Nothing if you do it yourself, £175-600 per month for a professional company such as http://www.chesterwebmarketing.co.uk/ If you plan to do it yourself, there is a very good book by David Viney – Get to the Top on Google – thoroughly recommended.
2. Use Google AdWords
But do it effectively. Do not waste your time bidding on the keyword “Conveyancing” – you will find that your balance disappears as your competitors click through to see who you are, and the cost per click will be very high. Make sure you focus on your area, so if you are a firm in Northampton make sure that you bid on the keywords “Conveyancing in Northampton”, or if you have a special offer on will drafting “Will writing in Northampton” with your advert tailored to this, eg; “Buy a Will, get £5.00 donated to chosen charity.”
3. Set up your own Claims Management Company to generate Referrals
A number of firms have done this already, and have a separate business to generate work, which is then handled in house once the referral made and finance set up (if litigation).
4. Set up your own Estate Agency
And not a half-hearted “stick a few pictures of houses in our window” attempt either! You either have to go the whole way and put some effort in, or I probably wouldnt bother. You will almost certainly need an estate agent to run it for you.
5. Set up your own Referral Company
Why not? It does not take that much effort. Simply purchase an off the peg website, and get working on your SEO skills.