Qualifying in 2 months and offered a paralegal position

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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:

"I am currently a trainee solicitor for a medium size firm and am due to qualify in 2 months. My firm is not keeping me on as a solicitor but have offered me a paralegal position so that I would not be unemployed until I find a solicitor job. My experience in practice is mainly conveyancing and PI and with the current state of the job market is not very good for NQ considering I would ideally like to stay in Cardiff area. My question for you is - If I was offered a job in a small firm, in an area of law I have no experience in and am not particularly interested in - should I take it just for the sake of it being a solicitor job or stay with my current firm until something better comes along?"

and the response:

"We give the same advice every year - do not under any circumstances, unless it is easily glossed over on a CV without needing to refer to it, take a paralegal post on qualification as a solicitor.

Over the time I have been doing recruitment, the following two major issues have come up:

1. there are issues about doing fee earning work as a qualified solicitor without a practising certificate, and there have certainly been cases before the Disciplinary Tribunal where people have given advice without realising the implications.

2. people struggle to get a post again as a solicitor for quite a while afterwards, as firms often question it and wonder why you took a paralegal job and not a solicitor post. Recessions get forgotten within a few years..."

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.