Law firms are taking on more of their trainees but many pitfalls lie ahead for the would-be lawyer
Good news for those seeking lavishly remunerated photocopying careers: big law firms are discarding fewer of their young. Last week, City outfit Ashurst became the latest firm to give more than 90% of its trainees full-time jobs upon completion of their training contracts – an indication that the corporate legal profession is getting back to business as usual after a period when trainee retention rates dropped to 14%.
But it's not all heartwarming tales of carefree youth being snaffled up by multimillion-pound law firms. Retention rates at several firms are still at recession levels, with struggling pair CMS Cameron McKenna and Bircham Dyson Bell ditching more than a third of their would-be lawyers. How do trainees avoid getting tossed on to the scrapheap before they've even properly started?
Timing is everything
When last year's class of trainees at the now defunct corporate law firm Halliwells were applying for training contracts at the height of the boom in 2007, there was little inkling of what was to follow. When the firm went bust last summer, 45 of them were left jobless. "Timing is everything," reflects Neel Sachdev, a partner at the London office of US law firm Kirkland & Ellis, who was pleasantly surprised to find his training contract – which he performed at SJ Berwin around the turn of the millennium – coincide with the dotcom bubble. "It was glorious," he adds. "All the departments within the firm were fighting for us to choose to qualify with them. I was wined and dined by three different teams."
Spread the charm
Lawyers pride themselves on their objectivity, to the extent that many firms insist on putting their qualifying trainees through formal interviews to determine who will be retained. However, members of the profession caution trainees against spending two years ignoring conventional norms of behaviour while hoarding reserves of charm for that fateful interview day.
"The reality is that law is as much about networking and relationships as any other job," explains one junior solicitor, who, after her firm kept on only a minority of its trainees last year, secured a job as an in-house lawyer at a company through an acquaintance she had made during her training contract.
Look elsewhere for love
Attempting to forge a romantic connection during a training contract carries risk. "One trainee kept telling me how nice I smelt – he wasn't taken on," recalls an associate at a City firm. And even when olfactory-driven praise leads to love, problems may lie ahead, with law firms increasingly making permanent job offers that require relocation. For example, some new qualifier jobs at Pinsent Masons, which has eight offices across the UK, are advertised simply as "in London" or "out of London".
Stay mainstream
It is an open secret that trying to go into glamour areas such as corporate finance is riskier than settling for a lifetime of tax law – or to employ the official parlance, courtesy of Norton Rose's head of recruitment, Sarah Kelly: "Open-mindedness boosts trainees' chances of being retained."
But the real trick to getting taken on, according to Linklaters' trainee partner Simon Firth, is to target firms' core departments, which by virtue of their size have the most new qualifier places. "Many of our trainees are not retained because they aim to qualify into the employment team, which for us is a relatively small practice area. They would have been far better off training with one of the many employment-focused firms," he says.
And if all else fails…
Develop a new career, as Jennie Rooney did while training at Slaughter and May. Having come to the conclusion that the law wasn't for her, Rooney somehow managed to balance completing trainee dogsbody tasks with writing her first novel, Inside the Whale. She resigned soon after, having secured a deal for a second book, The Opposite of Falling.
"Loads of the trainee lawyers I knew found that they didn't really like the job and started to focus on a dream of doing something else," she recalls. "I just thought, if I don't start this now, I never will."
Alex Aldridge is contributing editor of Legal Week