Credit crunch worries

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Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment is an online legal recruitment agency for lawyers. The website has a vacancy database, a candidate database, over 100 pages of detailed information on careers, CVs, interviews, and advice on how to be recruited and interviewed by a good law firm. There is also a section on the recruitment and retention of staff for legal employers. The company donates 10% of its profits every year to charity - hence its name - and over 3,800 solicitors and legal executives have registered with them since 2000.

Each week, Ten-Percent Legal Recruitment will answer one of your randomly selected career questions. To ask a question, email your question to careers@traineesolicitor.co.uk.

Here's this week's question:

"There's been a lot of talk flying around about the credit crunch and its knock on effects. Last time something like this happened NQs had a really tough time of it.

I start my training contract at a medium sized City firm in September, qualifying in 2010, so what does this mean for me? Will it be harder to move around on qualification, or get a job at all? And will it only affect those going into corporate seats, or will my preferred area of private client suffer too?"

Response

It depends really. There have been instances in years gone by where firms have cancelled training contracts before they were due to start thanks to economic downturns, and also occasions when jobs on qualification have been hard to come by. However, on the whole in most fields the downturns shouldnt really affect you - I anticipate redundancies in conveyancing if the market hits a slump, but interest rates are so low that things shouldnt grind to too much of a halt overall...

Wills & Probate and other private client areas do not ever appear to suffer downturns, it tends to be things like commercial property, commercial litigation and residential development and conveyancing that have cycles..

Jonathan Fagan


Jonathan Fagan LLM MREC Cert RP is the Founder and Managing Director, and is a non-practising solicitor with over 7 years experience as a legal recruitment consultant. He has personally advised and prepared CVs for many 100's of solicitors and law graduates, and has assisted lawyers throughout their careers to date.