Career Guidance

How should you tell your training firm you are leaving? Who should you notify and when? We’re frequently asked these questions by NQs who have secured a new role on qualification and decided to leave.

Here’s a typical NQ scenario.

You’re about to qualify and have been offered a position as an associate at a firm other than your training firm. You want to accept.

Your training firm hasn’t yet notified you if they want to keep you on even though your qualification date is rapidly approaching. This has been a source of frustration for some months and has been a topic of endless discussion with your fellow trainees.

Part of you wants to tell your firm as soon as possible that you are leaving. But you feel guilty in a way, as if you are letting them down. You feel especially bad for one or two partners who have mentored you during your training contract.

Another part of you is annoyed that you are being taken for granted. If your existing firm has no qualms about waiting until the last minute to let you know, why should you not do the same to them?

Who should you tell, what should you say and when?

Before you do anything…

First of all, don’t say anything until you have a signed contract from your new firm. An offer is not enough, even if you have confirmed your acceptance. Sign on the dotted line before you do anything.

Also, if your training firm has paid your LPC fees or helped in another way towards your qualification, check that they are not entitled to claw money back if you leave upon qualification.

Now take a step back

You can do a lot worse at this stage than heed words of the famous Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, Marcus Aurelius: “If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.”

In brief, do and say the right thing. Remember, you are at the start of a career that you hope will be long and rewarding. Your reputation counts for a lot in law and once lost can be difficult to regain.

In practical terms, this means acting with responsibility and dignity.

So, tell your training partner and HR face-to-face as soon as possible. Be honest about your reasons. If it’s because you were fed up waiting to hear if you were being kept on, tell them. If it is to go to a more prestigious firm or do different work, explain this.

Don’t be under the illusion you are letting anyone down. Law firms are hard-nosed and commercial. People come and go for all sorts of reasons. They may be sorry to lose you (or at least say they are) but in all honesty they probably have far bigger concerns to worry about.

Whatever you do, don’t fall into the trap of thinking you are somehow getting your own back by waiting until they tell you if you are being kept on before informing them that you are leaving. This does you no favours and isn’t fair on other trainees. It will come across as petty.

There’s a comment in a post on one of the legal news websites where the person commenting (named ‘Anon’, not surprisingly) recounts a tale of revenge from when they qualified. Anon explains how their training firm had a practice of not telling trainees if they were being kept on until after they qualified. Anon secured an NQ role before qualification and to give them a taste of their own medicine, didn’t notify the firm they were leaving.  Anon simply failed to turn up for work the day they qualified on the basis that their contract had expired. Here’s the kicker though. Anon had arranged a mediation with a client in another city for the day they qualified. No one from the firm attended the mediation (which the client went ahead with anyway) and the client later sued the firm for negligence. 

This may have made Anon feel good and is an excellent story, but at what cost? No doubt the firm was arrogant and unprofessional, but it reflects equally poorly on Anon. If it didn’t, they would not have been reticent to put their name to the comment rather than remain anonymous. 

You should aim to keep on good terms with the firm and the people who work there as you never know what is around the corner. You may end up working with some of the same people again either because you later join the same firm or as a result of a merger. You might deal with them on the other side of a transaction, or they may become in house counsel for one of your clients. You could even end up going back to the firm later in your career.

In a nutshell, be diplomatic. And in being diplomatic, take heed of the wise words of Winston Churchill: “Diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions.”

In a sector where it’s easy to be pigeonholed at a very early stage in one’s career, what can junior lawyers do to keep their options open? We asked legal careers coach Paula McMullan to offer some pearls of wisdom.

With 25 years’ experience as both a lawyer and a coach, (most recently as Head of Recruitment at Slaughter and May and as the internal careers coach at Allen & Overy LLP), Paula now helps dissatisfied lawyers find balance and fulfilment in their career.

Congratulations! You’ve survived your training contract, successfully navigated qualification and your legal career is laid out ahead of you like the Yellow Brick Road. So far, so good.

Now what?

I speak to a lot of mid-level and senior associates who get to 5 or 6 PQE and suddenly realise that their work/life balance isn’t great, and that they’ve fallen out of love with the law, or with the type of law they’re now practising. Maybe they’ve become too specialised, or they’re not getting involved in the type of work they’re really interested in. Or perhaps they’ve already decided that partnership is akin to being the little man in the booth pretending to be the Wizard of Oz.

Often more experienced lawyers find they have painted themselves into a corner and that it’s not as easy to transfer to an in-house role or another firm as they had imagined.

One thing is for sure…the future is uncertain. Whatever plans we may make now, it’s wise to build options for ourselves so that we’re well equipped to deal with change when it comes.

Before you get too far down the line with your legal career, here are three ways to give yourself more professional flexibility.

1. Develop your skills and knowledge with future roles in mind

When I ask lawyers what makes them unique and what they have to offer an employer, many find it difficult to talk about themselves. They give me underwhelming, generic answers, and they clearly have no idea of their value to a business or their ‘unique selling point’. If they can’t articulate this, what hope do they have of persuading a new employer?

It is therefore vital to develop your business skillset with one eye on future roles. For example, if you want to work in-house, what skills will you need to persuade a corporate to hire you out of private practice? How can you develop these while you are still working for a firm?

There are also a lot of flexible working opportunities for lawyers nowadays with outfits offering work on a contract basis. Does your specialism lend itself to working in this way? What skills and attributes do you have/want to develop that will enable you to flourish in that professional environment?

Lawyers tend to be quite detail-focused and they talk about their assets in isolation. Think, for example, about how your ability to analyse complex legal problems will benefit a corporate employer and put your skill into their context. How about saying you are used to assessing risks and advising on appropriate strategies to further your client’s business interests?

And be aware of the opportunities that may or may not be available to you once you are a few years into your legal career. What roles will a 4 PQE pensions lawyer or debt capital market specialist be suitable for?

A top tip from a recruitment consultant: if you’re thinking of a change in career direction, employers will want to see a commitment to that career change. So, if you want to move into learning and development, start designing and delivering seminars, read about learning strategies, find a mentor in L&D.

First steps? Find out what skills and experience will set you apart from the competition when you decide to go for another role. Work out who can help with finding out and then ask them!

2. Develop a sustainable approach to money

It can come as quite a shock to learn just how much of a drop in salary you may need to take to land your dream job outside private practice, or at least a stepping-stone role. The golden handcuffs that restrict many lawyers can seem unbreakable, so you need to change your approach to managing your financial resources.

It’s vital to work out your priorities – what’s most important to you right now? Maybe you are saving to buy your first property and you feel you need to keep going in your private practice role until that’s taken care of. Fair enough. But it’s also important to consider the downside of that strategy. What will the impact be on your mental health? Are you becoming even more specialised? If you get a large mortgage, will this compel you to keep your earnings at their current level?

Consider now the impact of different financial scenarios and develop a plan for tackling them. I knew when I was posted to Singapore, my ex-pat package would only last for a couple of years, so I lived on the same amount as I had in London and put the rest into my pension. When it came to leave, the resulting drop in salary wasn’t a shock. I didn’t need to recalibrate my lifestyle in line with my lower income.

First steps? Devise a sustainable financial plan. Talk to an independent financial adviser who can advise you on different ways to safeguard your assets and how to plan for a secure financial future while keeping your professional options open.

3. Separate your identity from your job

Have you noticed how, when asked what they do for a living, people often simply say “I’m a lawyer/doctor/architect/designer”? Our belief that “I am” a lawyer can get in the way if we become dissatisfied with our legal career because we can internalise that feeling as dissatisfaction with ourselves and our choices. This, in turn, can make it difficult to imagine ourselves as being able to do anything else, or being worthy of someone taking a chance on us.

Limiting beliefs like this can be quite deeply ingrained. You may have wanted to be a lawyer from an early age, maybe you have relatives who are successful lawyers and therefore feel that you should be too, or perhaps simply being surrounded by other lawyers day-in and day-out reinforces this belief. It served you well once because it got you to where you are today, but if you are no longer wedded to your career in its current form, then believing “I am a lawyer” can hold you back from realising your potential.

Think more in terms of what you do and the benefits you bring to your employer and your clients. Turn “I am a finance lawyer” into: “I help tech start-ups open up opportunities to develop by guiding them through successful negotiations with investors”.

First steps? Start noticing how you think about yourself professionally. How do you introduce yourself and talk about what you do? How can you reframe who you are into what you do?

As you’re reading this, you may think that none of this applies to you because you’re enjoying having reached qualification after so much study and hard work, and you’re looking forward to the challenge of growing into a great technical lawyer. But this brings us back to the start – the future is uncertain so why not make sure you are ready for it?

NQ Solicitors’ Ian Roberts has advised thousands of applicants within the legal sector over the years and is in no doubt what factors make the difference between success and failure. In this blog, we set out Ian’s top 10 interview secrets for solicitors moving firms upon qualification.

You’re about to qualify as a solicitor after years of hard slog but all that effort could be in vain unless you can secure the right role at the right firm. The good news is you’ve got an interview at a firm you’d love to work for. Here are 10 tips that will help you dazzle your interviewers and get that all important offer.

1. First impressions count

According to various studies, you have c. 17 seconds to make a good first impression, so don’t waste them. The following are basics but shouldn’t be overlooked. Start with a good firm handshake, (but don’t do a Donald Trump). Make steady eye contact (but don’t stare), smile and say “pleased to meet you” in a confident and sincere tone and you’re off and running. The goal is to make a connection and start building a rapport with your interviewer(s).

2. Commit yourself

As Wayne Gretzky said: “You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.” Or, if you’d rather not take your inspiration from an ice hockey player, think of it this way. If you’re not totally committed to getting an offer, you may as well not show up for the interview. Firms want people who they can see are excited to work for them. If you’re dialing it in, they’ll see through you.

3. “So, why do you want to work here?”

This question is asked at almost every interview and the answer is so important, yet amazingly, this is the question that catches candidates out more than any other. Do your homework on the firm. Answer the question by reference to what you have learned and give specific examples. What it is about the work the firm does, its culture, its reputation and its story that appeal to you. Show why you would be a good fit and why you’re precisely what they’re looking for.

4. “Have you applied to stay with your current firm post qualification?”

The interviewers know how the NQ system works. They are more than likely to ask questions like the above and others along the same lines. “Where you are in the process?” “How many and what seats have you applied for?” “What would you do if they offered you a role?”

These can be tricky to answer. You may be waiting to hear from your training firm and would prefer to stay there if they make you an offer. If so, you won’t want to make it evident to the interviewer that they are a back up.

Alternatively, you may be pretty sure that your training firm doesn’t want to keep you on or may have decided that your future lies elsewhere. But you won’t want to say this if you feel it will shed you in a bad light.

Rule number one, don’t lie. First of all, it’s inappropriate for a solicitor and secondly, there’s a good chance you’ll get caught out. Remember, the legal world is a small one.

What you can say is that you’re aware that it’s a highly competitive process at your training firm and you would be foolish not to see what other opportunities are out there.

You may also give candid reasons why the firm you are interviewing with appeals to you in ways that your training firm doesn’t (without slagging them off). This may perhaps be because of its size, the work it does, its work/life balance, etc. Be subtle and frame all your answers positively.

5. Your CV got you here, but it won’t get you the job

Interviewers are interested in the person behind the CV, not the CV itself. The interview is about you as a person and, to a certain extent your technical knowledge, not your qualifications. What matters now is how you express yourself, how well you will fit in at the firm, what you’ve learned during your training contract and what your ambitions are.

6. Be prepared to talk about anything on your CV

We mean anything. If you say you like the theatre, then be prepared to tell your interviewers what the last three plays you saw were and when you saw them. Or, if you say you speak basic German, be prepared to answer “Warum möchtest du hier arbeiten?”. I’ve known candidates get grilled for 20 minutes or more on seemingly throwaway bits of information on their CVs leaving them wishing they hadn’t put them on there in the first place. It’s your CV, you have to own all of it.

7. Show you are at the right end of the NQ spectrum

We all know that some trainees ‘get it’ from day one. They understand how to run a file, deal with clients, get their work done without drama and are in tune with the firm’s ethos and commercial objectives. They may not be the trainees with the most impressive CVs, but they will make the best lawyers. Your interviewer knows this too and is digging to find out if you are one of these or one of the others. The lame ducks. A good CV but no grasp of what the job is all about. It’s a spectrum and you need to show you are at the right end.

8. Give specific examples of what you have done

Don’t speak in generalities, be specific. Paint a picture, tell a story, put some meat on the bone (pick your own cliché if you like). The interviewer needs to be sitting there imagining you doing the things you’re talking about and picturing you doing the same for their firm. (Remember, while being highly specific is essential, be careful not to give away client confidentiality).

9. Always ask questions

Pick up on points they have mentioned during the interview to show you’ve been listening. Ask questions that demonstrate your interest in the firm, your understanding of the work they do, their culture and the types of clients they have. Check out the LinkedIn profiles of the people interviewing you (beforehand, not on your phone in the interview) and ask about their career path and anything especially interesting or relevant. Ask about future training to show your desire to become a well-rounded lawyer and what your prospects of rising through the firm would be if you do well.

10. Don’t play hard to get

At the risk of sounding like a Facebook meme, “Don’t play hard to get, play hard to forget”. Leave the interviewer in no doubt that you want the job. Be enthusiastic though not gushing. Be keen but don’t grovel. They hold most of the cards and want to employ someone who is genuinely motivated to work for them and do well. Show them you are.

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.

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!

There are no end of examples of people getting caught out by indiscreet social media posts or private messages that they thought would never see the light of day. With this in mind, we consider how concerned NQ candidates should be about their social media footprint.

Hill Dickinson revoked a student’s training contract earlier this year after conversations in a private WhatsApp group were leaked online. It followed screengrabs from a group called ‘Dodgy Blokes Soc’ being shared on Facebook by another student. The group comprised members of Exeter University’s Bracton Law Society and their exchanges included racist, sexist and homophobic messages.

Hill Dickinson said it was “deeply disturbed” by the messages, which they say did not represent the views of the firm.

Presumably, the news had students, trainees and junior lawyers across the country frantically scouring their messages and social media posts for potentially damaging content. If so, they were wise to do so. It has long been known that employers vet candidates’ social media posts. A report by recruitment firm CareerBuilder suggests that at least 70% of employers snoop on social media profiles.

Is it ethical or even legal for recruiters to do this? The new GDPR regulations impose strict rules on the collection of data but do not explicitly prohibit this type of behaviour.

Peter Church, a technology specialist at Linklaters, interviewed by the BBC on the topic last year, said: “The general rules are that employers should inform applicants if they are going to look at social media profiles and give them the opportunity to comment. The searches should also be proportionate to the job being applied for.”

An EU data protection working party has issued non-binding recommendations about the practice. It says that employers should require “legal grounds” before prying and suggests that any data collected must be relevant to the performance of the job.

So, where does that leave junior lawyers and NQs who may become candidates in the near future? How careful should they be?

I would suggest, very. They should work on the basis that anything they post on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter may be seen by a potential employer.

This is for two reasons. First, regardless of the rights and wrongs of employers checking candidate’s social media, in practice this is almost impossible to police. In our experience, employers do plenty of things that they are technically not supposed to do, such as approach somebody they know at a firm where a candidate used to work for an informal reference in the form of a nod or a wink.

Second, there is nothing to stop someone else (friend or foe) reposting something about you online and it subsequently going viral. It might come to an employer’s attention regardless of whether they have checked your posts. There’s a famous example of a publicist at media company IAC (owner of Tinder and the Daily Beast) tweeting the following before boarding a flight to South Africa: “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” The tweet went viral during her flight and by the time she landed she was at the centre of a worldwide Twitter storm. She was sacked shortly afterwards.

With LinkedIn, the position is even clearer. As LinkedIn is a work-related networking site your presence there is fair game. As we said in our recent post LinkedIn for Newly Qualified Solicitors: your FAQs answered, “it is important that you sound professional”.

We would also suggest that your concern should go beyond what you post online; it should extend to your behaviour. Smartphones mean you are only a photo or video clip away from notoriety if your behaviour falls below acceptable standards. In March, two students at Nottingham Trent University were arrested after another student tweeted a video of “vile” racist abuse taking place at the university.

For what it is worth, employers need to be as cautious as the candidates they are seeking to recruit. In August, Lucinda Nicholls tweeted details of an unpaid internship she was offering at her firm Nicholls & Nicholls. Cue a deluge of abuse from a number of lawyers and academics, and a series of online spats on the basis that she was seeking free labour. She disagreed, but whatever the rights and wrongs of her argument she has placed herself firmly in the public eye, for good or ill.