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James Pritchard

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5 reasons Newly Qualified Solicitors should consider moving firms

The big question that faces all newly qualified solicitors is whether to stay at the firm they’ve trained with or move on to pastures new.

Some won’t have a choice; they will have been told they won’t be kept on and encouraged to find a new firm. For the majority, though, the last six months as a trainee solicitor is a period of uncertainty. Any satisfaction at qualifying will be tempered by concerns about what happens next.

Will their firm want to keep them and, if so, in which department? Do they even want to stay or should they take the next steps in their career elsewhere?

Even if you think you want to remain with your existing firm, it is worth considering your options.

Here are five reasons why newly qualified solicitors should think about moving when they qualify:

To specialise in your preferred practice area

The truth is that when you start your legal career you probably only have a vague idea about the type of work you want to do. You may think you are going to enjoy your seat in capital markets and hate the one in litigation but in fact, it turns out to be the other way round.

Your training contract is a two-year interview that goes both ways. One question at the end of it is: can this firm offer me the work I want to do? By the time you complete your training contract you will have a far better idea of the type of lawyer you are and the practice area you want to specialise in. If your firm can’t match your preference, it’s time to look elsewhere.

It may be that despite jockeying for position with the other trainees, the firm can’t offer you a place in your first-choice practice area. The reality is that moving departments post-qualification is very hard. If you really want to specialise in a particular field and the firm you trained with can’t satisfy that need, moving as an NQ is your only option.

To work with a particular partner or team, or move to a ‘better’ firm

If your current firm doesn’t match your ambition, it is perfectly valid to move to one that does. You may have identified a specific team or partner you want to work for because of their reputation or ranking in Chambers or The Legal 500. Or you may simply want to take a step up from a mid-sized City practice to a Magic Circle firm, for example.

A word of warning here. Some firms, particular US firms, prefer candidates who choose to move after being offered the chance to stay on. Even if you know you would like to switch firms, the sensible play may be to wait for an offer from the firm you are at before interviewing elsewhere.

For more money

It would be naive to think that money is not a motivating factor. You work hard enough, so you are entitled to be rewarded properly for your efforts. The benefit of a fatter pay check needs to be balanced though against all the other factors: the quality of work you’ll be doing, how much responsibility you will get, what your future prospects are, what additional training or mentoring you’ll get, and how many chargeable hours will be expected of you. Which brings us to the next reason to think about moving.

For a different work/life balance

No two firms are the same in terms of types of clients, working environment, work ethic, social life, age profile, etc. You may feel that your current firm isn’t quite the ‘fit’ you expected it to be and while you enjoy the work, the firm isn’t offering you much more.

Similarly, a decision to move could be motivated by something as simple as the desire for an easier commute or the chance to spend more time pursuing outside interests or with family.

For more responsibility or better training

Few trainee solicitors emerge from their training contract as fully formed lawyers. For most NQs, the first couple of years are a steep learning curve as they take on more responsibility and grow in confidence. How they evolve as lawyers during this period is important and can set the tone for the rest of their career.

So, you need to consider what your day-to-day role will be once you qualify. Will you run your own caseload, have close partner supervision or be a small cog in a large machine? Also, what ongoing training and mentoring will your firm offer you as you make the step up?

And some reasons not to move

There will also be reasons not to move. You’ll have made friends at the firm and built relationships with the partners. Plus, you’ll know how the firm operates, and be familiar with its clients and the way they work.

Like any situation, though, it is worth keeping your options open and seeing what else is out there before you commit to staying as a newly qualified solicitor.

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What is the legal profession doing to combat stress and how can you manage your own stress levels?

This is a stressful time for trainees qualifying in the autumn as they jostle for NQ places either in their own firm or at a new one. It comes at a time when mental health in law is high on the agenda. In this blog, we look at the current state of mental health in the profession and what steps trainees can take to control the stress of finding their first role post qualification.

As part of last week’s Mental Health Awareness Week, Gowling WLG brought four dogs into its London office to help destress its staff. Apparently, it has been proved that petting animals can reduce anxiety.

We have no idea of the impact of Gowling’s initiative but one person who commented on the story in Legal Cheek was unconvinced: “So they’re trying to remedy a structural and systematic mental health epidemic in the legal profession with… a dog?”

Beneath the sarcasm, this comment raises some valid points. Is it fair to suggest that there is a crisis surrounding mental health in the legal profession?

Legal mental health charity LawCare believes so. It is setting up a new confidential online messenger service offering support to legal professionals. “More and more people in the legal community are reaching out to us for support every year so it is vital we expand our support service,” says CEO Elizabeth Rimmer. Last year, LawCare’s helpline received its highest ever number of calls.

The situation is especially acute for trainees and junior lawyers, the primary target of LawCare’s new service. A survey last year by the Law Society’s Junior Lawyers Division revealed that 39% of trainees reported suffering from mental health problems. More than 80% said they thought their employer could do more to provide help, guidance and support. (We doubt the opportunity to stroke a Labrador was high on their wish list.)

Yet, this comes at a time when firms say they are doing more than ever before to promote wellness and mental health. Nine firms recently signed up to the Mindful Business Charter, among them Freshfields, Ashurst and Hogan Lovells. The charter aims to promote a culture of “openness and mental wellbeing”.

Firms are increasingly conscious of their workplace culture, too. Earlier this month, Gowling WLG was recognised as one of the top ten best places to work in the UK by UK Best Workplaces. And legal website Roll on Friday recently posted its list of top firms for work/life balance, with Bristows and Mills & Reeve taking joint first place. One junior lawyer at Bristows said the firm “respected employees getting out of the office to meet life plans”.

Clearly, many firms are taking wellbeing seriously, although there needs to be a healthy dose of scepticism between what they say they do and what they actually do. At the end of last year, Legal Cheek ran an article about an unnamed top City firm that asked its trainees to pull an all-nighter days after publicly promising to support the mental wellbeing of its lawyers. A leaked email from one of the partners said trainees who declined to help would need to “provide evidence of their inability to help”.

A knee-jerk reaction when reading this type of story is to lay all the blame on firms for the stress suffered by their lawyers. But is this fair? In an article in The Lawyer, coaches Zita Tulyahikayo and James Pereira QC make the point that “part of the responsibility of an individual is to take care of themselves. You buy the appropriate clothes to do your job, and it follows that you do what is necessary to be fit for purpose. This is not to deny the role of employers in supporting wellbeing. It is simply to point out that the individual must also take some responsibility for themselves.”

They go on to say that “stress is not a mental health issue if one knows how to manage stress well. Most do not. What they have is a compromised ability to perform well, which is a wellbeing issue.”

So, what steps can trainees take to reduce their stress as they strive for their chosen NQ role? Stress often arises due to feeling a lack of control, so it makes sense to take control of as much of the process as you can. ‘Control the controllables’, as the saying goes. This includes:

1. Making a plan

Start the process early and decide exactly what you want to achieve. This may be as basic as making a clear choice about your preferred practice area or even whether you want to stay at your existing firm.

2. Doing your research

You’ve worked in law for two years now so use it to decide what you want from your career in terms of work/life balance, partnership prospects, quality of work, etc. Pick the brains of colleagues, friends and contacts about their experiences in the profession so you get as broad a view as possible.

3. Updating your CV

When you think about it, you have probably gained more experience than you initially think. Make sure you give a clear overview of what you have done and what you have learned during your training contract.

4. Preparing carefully for interviews

Do as much research as you can about the department or firm you are interviewing with and practise answers to questions. Remember too that the purpose of the interview is to find out as much as you can about the firm and if it is the type of role and environment that will suit you.

5. Not getting discouraged

If you don’t get the job you want, stay positive. Use every application and interview as a learning experience so that you present yourself in a better light next time around.

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What lessons can NQs and junior solicitors learn from ‘no brown in town’ furore?

The legal profession hit the press for all the wrong reasons a couple of weeks ago when a partner at an international law firm suggested junior lawyers shouldn’t wear brown shoes with a blue suit. Whatever the merits of this argument (spoiler alert: there aren’t any), it raises an important point for candidates.

There’s a scene in the 1992 film My Cousin Vinny when the judge takes exception to the clothes worn by lawyer Vinny, memorably played by Joe Pesci. Pesci is attired in a black long-sleeve T-shirt tucked into black trousers for his first appearance before the bench. “A little informal, aren’t we?” Judge Haller observes.

Goodness knows what he would have said if Vinny had committed the even more egregious sartorial ‘sin’ of wearing a blue suit with brown shoes. We’ll never know. Perhaps the old adage, ‘No brown in town’ doesn’t apply in deepest Louisiana.

It seems that it very much does in London town though. A couple of weeks ago an unnamed partner in an international law firm caused quite a stir at a conference at the Hilton Tower Bridge when he advised trainee lawyers: “Don’t wear brown shoes with a blue suit.”

The quote was picked up by a journalist and posted on Twitter, where it was pounced on by lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Tweets in response included: “This is silly”, “The partner should get out of others’ wardrobes, or just get out more,” and “Brown shoes — of the right shade — are right for a blue suit.”

The story then appeared in Legal Cheek and the Telegraph, with the latter pointing out that “wearing brown shoes with a blue suit has long been the scorn of those who adhere to the ‘City dress code’”.

More importantly though, it highlighted the fact that candidates are often judged on their appearance rather than their abilities and seems to add weight to the results of a social mobility study carried out into recruitment in the banking industry.

“For men, the wearing of brown shoes with a business suit is generally, though not always, considered unacceptable by and for British bankers,” the report says. Echoing what many say about legal recruitment, it concludes that firms recruit from a tiny pool of elite universities usually on the basis of whether people ‘fit in’. The result is that poorer applicants can miss out even if they have the required skills because they don’t dress, speak and behave in the same way as other candidates. Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?

In fairness to the unnamed partner, his comment may have been taken out of context. Firms place a huge emphasis on ‘fit’ and stepping outside the norm can send a signal that a potential trainee isn’t suitable for that firm. I’m not saying this is right, as clearly it isn’t. But it is a fact of life. It’s hardly news that many in the legal profession are so hidebound that they judge people’s merits on the basis of what clothes they wear.

An article last year in the Law Society Gazette pointed out that many firms now have a more casual dress code, but this can be even more of a minefield.

One piece of advice in the article is “to look at what the client wears, then tone it down”. It helpfully continues: “Lawyers can be more casual around creative-industry clients and entrepreneurs. But it’s possible to go too far – architects favour extravagant glasses, but you don’t want them thinking you’re making fun of them by turning up one day sporting enormous red specs.”

There’s a serious point behind this and a similar one was made by one tweeter. “Here’s some advice from someone who chooses between large international law firms. Stop all dressing the same. You look like boring automatons. We don’t want drones, we want people.”

Presumably, the original comment about brown shoes and blue suits was directed mainly at men. Women have it far worse. In an article titled,The Minefield of Workwear for Women Lawyers, Kayleigh Zioli points out that “women in the corporate and professional setting still face additional societal judgement on their performance and leadership based on what they are wearing and how they present themselves”. Zioli concludes that some women spend an incredible amount of time and money on workwear, and view it as a huge area of stress.

My advice to candidates is to do your research. A firm’s dress code says a lot about its culture and it’s hugely important to find out if the firm is a ‘fit’ for you. Some people couldn’t care less about dress codes, others most certainly do. ‘Fit’ works both ways and it is not simply a question of learning to wear the right uniform.

For what it is worth, the view of the Telegraph’s Men’s Style Editor Stephen Doig is that “to assume that black shoes take priority over brown demonstrates a very stylistically uneducated viewpoint”. That lawyers have got it wrong when it comes to fashion comes as no surprise at all.

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Freshfields and Linklaters: last two magic circle firms announce strong retention scores

Apart from one or two stragglers, most of the larger law firms have now released their spring retention scores. In this blog, we complete our seasonal NQ retention round up.

It may be a coincidence that the last two magic circle firms to announce their spring retentions have the lowest scores. Or it might not be. Either way, Freshfields’ 78% and Linklaters’ 80% trail behind the results of their magic circle rivals. Of these, Slaughter and May led the way with an almost flawless 97%, as you can read about in our first spring 2019 blog.

In fairness to Linklaters, it offers more training contracts than any other City firm (around 100 a year) and some fall-out is inevitable. Plus, 80% (41 out of 51) is a good score and consistent with its results of between 73% and 86% in the four most recent rounds.

Its NQs can earn up to £90,000 in their first year post qualification after taking into account performance-related bonuses. Linklaters’ trainee solicitor partner, Richard Hodgson, said he is “looking forward to seeing their careers progress as they embark on their roles as associates in a best in class and globally minded firm”.

Over in Fleet Street, Freshfields has retained 32 out of 41 trainees (78%). This is a slight dip on its score of 83% this time last year, but a marked improvement over the lowly 66% of two years ago. This spring’s newbies will start on £85,000 per annum.

Macfarlanes used news of its clean sweep of six from six to announce that it is offering future trainees £10,000 ‘financial support’ during their LPC. Plus, it will fund their LPC fees. This matches the recent financial uplift given to trainees-to-be by several other City firms, among them Herbert Smith Freehills, Hogan Lovells and Norton Rose Fulbright. The UK’s biggest financial supporter of student trainees is currently the London office of US-firm Sidley Austin, which pays £11,000.

Talking of Norton Rose Fulbright, it had an almost perfect 19 out of 20 result this spring (95%), with everyone who was offered an NQ role accepting. They will start on £77,000, level with DLA Piper and Baker & McKenzie. Baker & McKenzie itself announced a spring score of 71%, with 12 out of 17 trainees staying on.

International outfit Hogan Lovells has achieved an excellent 90% score with 26 out of 29 remaining with the firm. Most are going into the corporate team and all will be based in London. They will start on £78,000 per annum.

Reed Smith, meanwhile, is holding onto 11 of its 13 qualifiers (85%), one of whom is Dubai bound with the rest staying in London. No statement was made about their starting salary, but it is likely to pale beside that of White & Case’s 12 (out of 16) trainees who secured NQ positions with the firm.

They will begin life as an NQ on an eye-watering £105,000. London partner Melissa Butler said that the firm’s “combination of consistently high retention rates and a highly competitive salary and benefits package ensures that White & Case is a leading destination for talented, ambitious trainee lawyers”. Who are we to argue with that?

Overall, this is an impressive collection of results. It’s true that firms with poor results may be keen to avoid publicising them and so these are necessarily excluded from this round up.

Even so, the trend is that larger law firms are keeping on a high percentage of trainees this spring. Given that many of these retention decisions will have been made in the run up to the initial Brexit deadline of 29 March, this is encouraging news for trainees who are due to qualify in the autumn.

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Are we any clearer about the impact of SQE on firms and students?

It is fair to say that the overwhelming response from the legal profession to the new Solicitors Qualifying Exam (SQE) has been confusion. Neither the firms nor the students (or for that matter the training providers) have a clear idea of how it will operate and what it will mean for the profession (as you can read about in our previous blogs here and here). As we head towards SQE lift-off in 2021, we ask whether there are signs that the fog is clearing?

At the end of last month, Legal Cheek published the first of what we expect will be several SQE surveys aiming to establish law firms’ attitudes toward the new exam. For anyone who has been reading the press surrounding SQE closely, the results won’t come as much of a surprise. In a nutshell, there is no consensus about how firms are going to change their training processes.

When are firms likely to take students on?

Let’s look first at when firms intend taking students on under the new rules.

Thirty-nine percent of firms said they would take on future trainees after completing the first part of the new exam and nine percent said they would do so before they had started SQE at all.

In the latter case, this would mean taking on graduates who had completed either non-law degrees or law degrees that did not cover SQE1 as part of their course. This seems surprising but indicates we may be moving to a qualification process similar to that for accountants where the firm puts the student through the whole process.

Meanwhile, almost a third of firms said they would only take on students after they had completed both parts of the new exam. If this becomes widespread it will go against one of the stated aims of SQE, which is to ensure students don’t waste time and money in passing the exams without any guarantee they will qualify as solicitors.

Twenty-two percent of respondents said they still hadn’t decided when they will take on students. It is possible that this figure under-represents the true position and we would conjecture that many firms polled did not respond to the survey as they still have no clue what they are going to do once SQE comes in.

Will firms provide training that goes beyond SQE?

Another survey question asked whether firms were considering additional training beyond that required by SQE. Sixty-three percent of firms said that they were. In addition, 41% of firms said they were thinking about developing their own SQE course, with 15% saying they might do so as part of a consortium.

These results give credence to our suggestion that we could be heading to a split between “trainees who have benefited from additional training in specialist areas (either in house or on an external course) and those who have simply completed the basic SQE1 and SQE2 requirements”. It is difficult to reconcile this with the SRAs goal of driving up standards and removing barriers to entry. Will we end up with the ‘haves’ who have received additional training beyond SQE (and are therefore more attractive to future employees) and the ‘have nots’, who have had the bare minimum training (making them less attractive)?

Is SQE going to be fit for purpose?

A bigger issue that this alludes to is the extent to which SQE is fit for purpose for the lawyers of the future. As we wrote about recently, AI and technology is changing the profession beyond recognition. This has led many to question whether law firms should rethink their traditional approach of recruiting certain types of students who have typically studied either law or a liberal arts degree.

Dani McCormick, director of solutions at LexisNexis, is quoted as saying that we should change the way we educate lawyers and believes firms must take the lead on this: “We need to teach things like service design and how tech could be applied to firms. In the future the job will be more than simply providing legal advice; it will be advising customers on how they can deploy technology in their legal solutions.”

Clifford Chance is one firm leading the way on this. Its Ignite scheme is taking on five trainees in 2021 and putting them through a programme focusing on legal technology.

In a similar vein, Manchester University has recently launched the UK’s first legal tech module, after developing it with input from law firms. Professor Claire Mcgourlay says of the course: “We aren’t equipping our students to go into the jobs that are becoming available. It’s not about expecting them to learn to code or to be computer science students, but to give them an awareness of what it is they are going to be facing.”

With this in mind, is there a danger that the SQE will be out of date even before it starts rolling out its first graduates?

In fairness to the SRA, it still has two years to get things right. Hopefully, by then the pea-souper around SQE will have lifted to reveal clear blue skies.

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What got you to level 1 won’t get you to level 2

Following on from her hugely popular guest blog The top 5 mistakes to avoid as a junior lawyer, Katherine Cousins, associate at Addleshaw Goddard and author of “Successful Solicitor: Get Ahead of the Game as a Junior Corporate Lawyer”, shares her insights into making the step up from trainee to NQ solicitor.

Our March NQ’s will be just settling in to their new roles this week, possibly at new firms, too. It’s a strange thing to leave work on Friday as a trainee and start on Monday an Associate. We used to call it the ‘weekend of knowledge’, as if somehow in those three nights of sleep all the information necessary for your change in status would be downloaded from the firm matrix to your brain. Which is sadly untrue. What is true is that there will be a change in the expectations your team will have of you and that you should have of yourself. Qualification is an ideal time to take stock of where you are and where you’d like to be in a year’s time. It’s not as cut and dry as ‘trainee’ and ‘associate’. I prefer to think instead in terms of levels of skill:

Zero to One

Level 1 is about doing your job. Learning your basics. This level encompasses all the things that no one will thank a law firm for, but everyone will complain about if they aren’t in order. No one is really paying you for a perfectly formatted note, they’re paying for the advice it contains. But if that formatting is off, if it looks sloppy, then the client won’t feel as secure about the advice it contains. They’re paying for a professional service and that includes the little things, like perfect spelling and a quick response to their emails.

Some trainee and even NQ basics will include making binders for court, or managing the document system in a transaction. They might feel menial and small but they’re the foundation on which everything else is built. You might not feel it at the time, as you’re trying to fix a jammed photocopier at midnight, or proofreading a memo for the billionth time, but everyone higher up the chain is counting on you to be their foundation. I had no idea how important this was until I had to trust that the intern on my matter had done her job, so that I could do mine. There wasn’t time for me to do hers, too. Saving a document to the system feels like nothing, but everyone working on the wrong version because the last copy wasn’t saved correctly could be catastrophic and at the very least an avoidable mega nuisance. Costing the client an extra £350 because a partner was correcting your formatting errors is not okay. That’s no longer their job; it’s yours.

Level 1 is getting these basics down. It takes time. Maybe longer than you’d like it to. It took me longer than I liked it to!

Level 1 to Level 2

Now it’s time to do the work. The real work. Now you know how to format a memo and save a document, prepare an index and take a note of a call, you can start being truly indispensable. My first mentor said to me in our final meeting, ‘Don’t lose your personality. That’s what will make client’s hire you. Everyone expects that a firm of this calibre will get the law right. Client’s will stay with you because they like you.’ I would go one step further and say that this is why a firm will hire you and keep you and promote you.

Level 2 is getting the law right, but more than that, it’s getting it right and giving it to the client in the most helpful way you can. When you’re just starting out you get props for essentially not screwing up. Now not screwing up does not earn a gold star. It’s simply expected. Instead gold stars are earned for doing the little things no one will remember to tell you to do. For me this often takes the form of digging in a little deeper than I would have thought to before. Reading a new client’s annual reports, finding some academic papers or reports on their industry, building up my background knowledge. It’s time spent at the front end that will pay dividends down the road when you can really understand what’s motivating their actions or concerns.

Level 2 is asking why you’re doing what you’re doing, what the end goal will be. For instance, why are you preparing this note of advice. Practically, who is it going to be sent to or where will the information be used? If it’s the general counsel, but she is then expected to disseminate the information to her commercial colleagues, then make the body of the note technical, but give her a business friendly top end she can copy paste into her email to them. Think, what can I do to make their life easier? This goes for junior associates with senior associates/partners, too. Anything you can take off their plate, do. For instance:

Send advice notes alongside a draft cover email that they can use to send it to the client.

When you’re managing a long project or research tasks, send updates regularly so they don’t have to worry whether things are progressing.

Set reminders of deadlines either internal or client ones and don’t be afraid to nudge the instructing partner as they approach. Things do fall through the cracks sometimes. They’ll feel better knowing you have their back.

Rather than ask, ‘What do you need me to do?’ say, ‘I suggest we do this, do you agree?’

Level 3 and Beyond

I hesitate to sound like too much of an expert at this point, because I am only wobbling along this boundary myself. But it’s here I’m learning to lead as well as be lead. And boy does that ever make it clear where my knowledge gaps lie! At this point it’s about finding your weaknesses and conquering them one by one. It’s about becoming self-reliant. I get asked a question and don’t know the answer – well let’s go away and find out. One more gap filled. This is also a time for finding the people you admire and learning about them. How did they get where they are? What makes them so great? What can you apply to your work? Level 3 to me will be this cycle over and over – spot a gap, learn how to fill it, embed this skill, find another gap, learn to fill it, embed the skill. And repeat. And repeat.

Good luck to all who have qualified this March!

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