March 2010 has been a very good month and we are now not only optimistic of the market picking up, but also are aware that legal recruitment is back up and running at high speed. We have watched as vacancies are suddenly grinding to a halt in some areas, particularly for duty solicitors and family panel members, as there is a lack of fresh talent coming onto the market. In March we had 37 vacancies posted for a whole range of different areas including Conveyancing, Commercial Property, Wills & Probate, Crime (lots), Family (lots), Industrial Disease, Personal Injury, Agricultural Property, Housing, Child Care and Civil Litigation.
 
Commercial still seems to be running at a fairly slow speed. We could go down the route of other agencies and post the generic mailing lists with commercial posts in that some of the bigger firms send out to 100 recruiters and hope for the best, but generally we try to avoid these as inevitably they result in no quality responses from our candidates.
 
The market has turned, although there is still no sign of a major pick up in non-contentious work despite vacancies starting to materialise. The conveyancing and wills posts we have picked up have been for replacement partners or long term cover and tend to be from old clients who trust our skill & experience in assisting them rather than from new start ups or clients.
 
The new tax year will almost inevitably kick start the next round of recruitment, and we expect to be very busy now for the next 12 weeks until July 2010 when everything will slow down again.
 
The new Ten-Percent Unlimited Service has taken off in the last 4 weeks, and we are already assisting firms with expansion plans at very low cost to use our Candidate Database and recruit directly without agency involvement.
 
Recent vacancies in – Duty Solicitor – Preston, Personal Injury Solicitor – Bradford, Family Solicitor – Twickenham, Crime Duty Solicitor/Caseworkers – West London (Ten-Percent Unlimited), Civil Litigation – Plymouth, Senior Conveyancing Solicitor – North London, PSL – Bristol, Business Development Manager (Conveyancing) – London, Agricultural Property – Southampton.  www.ten-percent.co.uk for further information on any of these legal jobs.