Money, Money, Money! – Elizabeth Cruickshank and Penny Cooper
One of the main differences between being at Law School and working in a law firm is money. Not just the money that you earn for yourself but the money that you earn for the firm. One of the most difficult adjustments you will have to make is assessing how well you are working. It will no longer be calculated by the number of hours spent studying your law books but by the number of hours spent earning hard cash for the firm.
The external valuation of your work at Law School (as at university) is done in terms of percentage marks and final grades, where high numbers are good, low numbers are bad and nobody expects you to get 100% -- well, not too often anyway. Law firms are different. The result that is aimed for is 100% accuracy -- anything less could result in your client making the wrong decisions and your firm being sued.
Fill it for your firm Credit: kenteegardin
Law firms are businesses
Law firms don’t make chocolate bars or designer suits or even fill teeth, all of which are visible end-products. Their end-products are mainly legal advice, representation and negotiation.
At one level trainees are simply part of the tool kit used to provide these law firm products, so your firms needs to know what you are doing. Older lawyers may reminisce about the days when partners used to weigh files in their hands before plucking a figure out of the air which represented the amount of time spent on a matter and its “complexity” although it could be simply an estimate of what the client would bear. Those arcane practices have long since disappeared, along with would be solicitors paying substantial amounts of money to their principals and receiving little or no salary until they qualify.
Sweet Tweet? – Elizabeth Cruickshank and Penny Cooper
Social media: career suicide or career success in your hands?
We expect you have heard that good old fashioned advice about not sending letters written in anger until you have reviewed them the next day. Chances are you will bin them or at least tone them down. You could call this “the cold light of day” test.
Sending an irate letter requires a certain amount of effort on the part of the writer. Apart from the drafting there’s the printing, the envelope-filling, the stamping and the posting which are not demanded by more modern forms of communication. In fact the easier communication methods become, the more vigilant you should be about what you say.
Tweeting and booing
Easy to get hooked! Credit: carrotcreative
Online communication has morphed from email through the blogosphere to the latest forms of Twitter and Audio Boo, and the new freedom has made many of us a lot more casual about what we say. We forget that sending a tweet, post or audio boo into the world is the virtual equivalent of sending a letter in indelible ink.
We forget that tweeting, posting and audio booing weren’t exactly designed with serious and contemplative communication in mind. Some of the most successful tweeters (if you measure success by the number of followers) have their tweets read so intently precisely because they are immediate and informal. The followers get the scoop direct from the tweeter as it happens: from the movie star at the premier of her latest movie, from the rock star back stage at his concert, from the MP in the Commons -- or even from the lawyer at a hearing.
Good personal publicity
If you decide to boo, post or tweet, the upside can be good personal publicity, although possibly not as effective as some journalists have suggested. The Guardian reported recently that a law graduate had landed a training contract at a top City firm thanks in part to his tweeting. That law graduate was Ashley Connick who rather gave the lie to this piece of information by writing in his blog that he had had posted only one article prior to getting his contract – and that his interviewers had not been remotely interested in his writing.
Perhaps they should have been because his pieces are informative, well-crafted and sensible.
Gender Imbalance – Elizabeth Cruickshank and Penny Cooper
Credit:Elephant Gun Studios
In 1919 Parliament passed the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919, which permitted women to enter the professions and to serve on juries. In 1957, almost 40 years later the Law Society recorded that 356 women now held practising certificates; by contrast this qualification was held by 18, 244 men. Over the last decade the total number of women holding practising certificates has nearly doubled and now women account for 45.8% of solicitors holding practising certificates.
Massive progress has been made and it is now easier than ever for women to enter and progress in the legal professions. However, a glance at the proportion of women made up to partner in the major legal firms does not reflect this. Certainly not 45.8% of them are women. The general proportion is much nearer to 20% and in some City firms it is much less.
If you are a woman how can you maximise your chances of getting a training contract and then making progress through the ranks?
Like it or not, women are seen as being meticulous in their attention to detail, conscientious in their attitude to work and caring towards others.
Play to your strengths
Attend to the details in your CV and application letter. Make sure that they demonstrate your precision and excellent presentation skills. Make sure there are no sloppy spelling and grammatical errors – prove to your prospective employers that any advice that you give to clients will be not only be well thought out and accurate but also legible and easy to understand.
Demonstrate your conscientiousness by thoroughly researching the firm you are applying to and tailoring your application to the firm’s requirements. Don’t say that you are interested in Media Law if the firm does not offer that but specialises in Human Rights work and equally don’t trumpet your concerns for the downtrodden if you are applying to a major corporate firm – they may applaud your humanity, but give the contract to someone else. Remember that law firms are businesses and need to make a profit in their chosen areas of legal expertise.
Don’t be a Space Invader – Elizabeth Cruickshank and Penny Cooper
Beware the space invader. Thanks to Xabi Gomez for the image.
The unwritten office manual
On your first day in most legal offices you will be handed a heavy folder called the Office Manual, which contains information on such things as health and safety, holidays and complaints procedures.
What you will not find in any Office Manual is information on the unwritten rules, otherwise known as “office etiquette”, on how you should behave towards your work colleagues. The word “etiquette” has connotations of a set of rigid social rules – think “Downton Abbey” for fastidious rules relating to cutlery placements or standing aside for someone regarded as a social superior.
Office, or business, etiquette on the other hand is essentially a set of rules based on the assumption that we want to make other people feel comfortable by showing them respect whatever their position in the office hierarchy, in the hope that they will accord us the same respect. If we follow these rules we have a better chance of rubbing along together in close proximity without causing offence. In modern parlance we are simply “respecting each other’s boundaries”. On the other hand, breaching them could make you very unpopular or even spell the end of your career at your firm. The difficulty with these rules is their unspoken nature.
What makes a recruiter tick? – Sue Lenkowski
In my final blog this year I have chosen to interview a recruiter to give you an insight into the other side.
I assume you are an expert at being interviewed –the perfect candidate? But have you ever made a mistake as a candidate?
Our author, Sue Lenkowski
I have made many interview mistakes; nerves cause us all to make a gaff. Two major ones spring to mind, telling an interviewer “I don’t know the answer and I’m not going to b**l S**t you” I was rejected unsurprisingly for swearing but I was unaware I had even said it until I received the feedback! And secondly telling a story about my dislike of children at an interview for a well known retailer of children’s wear .These anecdotes make the point that engaging mouth before brain is NEVER a good idea and over confidence and relaxing too much can be a big mistake. The best interviewers will put you at your ease and that’s where these mistakes can occur.
What’s the most bizarre thing you have seen a candidate do?
That’s an easy one and you may find this tale hard to believe but I swear it’s true!
Many years ago I was running an assessment centre. A young woman arrived late and was very loud and erratic telling other candidates that she had been out all night. Not a great first impression but it got worse. In the group exercise she proceeded to grab a glass of water and pour it over her head. I thought I was about to feature on “you’ve been framed” but Jeremy Beadle didn’t appear so I removed her from the group and her chance of a legal career at the firm was no more.
To this day I have no idea why she did this but I suspect she spent many hours regretting it.
Why “Ethics” is so much more than just a word – Elizabeth Cruickshank and Penny Cooper
“Having a strong sense of ethics is a fundamental part of being a lawyer.”
Someone will say that, or something very similar, to you during your time at Law School. “Ethics” has its origins in the Greek word for moral character. But what does it really mean in practice?
Basic honesty
Cross my heart..! Thanks to gorbould for image
Consider your own moral character and how it was formed. As you grew up you would have been confronted with many situations where you had the opportunity to “acquire” things which belonged to other people – perhaps it was the small change you “forgot” to give your mother after you did some shopping for her, the tennis racquet you found lying on a park bench and did not take to the police station or the extra £10 you were given because a shop assistant thought you had given her a £20 note rather than a £10 one.
All three actions could come within the legal definition of theft, although you might easily take the view that the second two were simply your “good luck”. You might also succeed in convincing yourself that your “crime” in the third example was victimless. But wait a bit...
A healthy functioning society relies on individuals being able to see beyond their own wishes and needs and acting fairly towards others most of the time. The tennis racquet could have been purchased with three months savings by a 13 year old who was just about to play in his first tournament. And now can’t do so. The shop assistant will be short on her takings and the shortage could well be taken out of her wages.
Work Placements: Pointless or Purposeful? – Dev Kumar Parmar
Almost every student or trainee searches for legal work placements, with good placements being regarded amongst students almost as highly as their degree grades.
The amount of time spent searching for, and subsequently applying for work placements often surpasses the amount of time students spend on coursework, study, and dare I say it, even clubbing…
The first work placement can often be pivotal; it can lead to open doors for further placements, or can put students off entirely. At an early stage in a students’ life, obtaining a legal work placement can almost feel like obtaining the Holy Grail.
But how do the organisations feel towards work placement interns?
Many of them are extremely welcoming, especially on face value. Placements are valuable in terms of meeting professionals and being exposed to legal practice. Such an impact at an early age, or at an early stage, can be vital to you.
Practically however, most interns would be given little to do, and rightly so. Legal work requires legal expertise, and it would be detrimental to the client, not to mention just plain wrong, to make an intern responsible for complex casework. It would be unfair to place such a huge weight on their shoulders, no matter how keen they are. In some cases, predominately with the larger firms, interns may be given timed assessments throughout their placement, however the majority of cases will involve students doing pretty menial tasks.
Testing times ahead: Resolutions for 2011 (PT 1) – Sue Lenkowski
Happy New Year!
I hope you all enjoyed the break and have arrived back ready to face the testing times ahead.
If you followed my advice in November you will have made your focused and timely applications and be waiting eagerly for the emails and letters inviting you to take part in the range of tests and activities which firms have put in place to select their future stars.
The range of these is increasing year on year so much so that I am doing a blog on the topic in both January and February .
My focus this month and next is to help you predict what these might be and prepare yourself.
Online ability tests
These are commonly used these days as the first sift, generally you will face all or one of the following:
Verbal reasoning
Numerical reasoning
Critical thinking
And this year’s new entrant ......................Tests of Deductive/Inductive reasoning
So what's the bad news...?
These tests have been rigorously developed to ensure they measure an actual ability rather than something which can be improved by repeatedly taking the test as such you cannot substantially improve your score with practice. However I do have some tips which will help you show your true ability when doing these...
Are you ‘Non-Standard Issue’? – Elizabeth Cruickshank and Penny Cooper
If they are surrounded by people who are very much younger than themselves it can be all too easy for older students to feel that their non-standard entry age puts them at a disadvantage when it comes to applying for training contracts. Application forms often appear to be directed towards recent graduates and any intelligent application sifter could make a rough estimate of applicants’ ages by examining their academic and work credentials carefully.
But in reality age should not be a bar to entering the legal profession, provided that you apply the appropriate marketing techniques.
The balance sheet
There are pluses and minuses in most situations and preparing a personal “balance sheet” will help you not only to produce a persuasive application but will help you at the interview stage by prompting you beforehand to establish sound answers to awkward questions. Your balance sheet should list your assets on one side of the page and your liabilities on the other. Talk up your assets in your application but also prepare explanations for anything that could be considered as a liability just in case this comes up at interview. Try to look at your balance sheet through the eyes of your potential employer and ask yourself what he might be able to deduce from your CV. It might go something
like this:
Assets
A degree and/or some professional expertise that is relevant to one or more practice areas in the firm you are applying to. Read the firm’s brochures carefully to ascertain and expand on any qualifications that could be useful to them.
Work experience in certain areas such as the police (useful for criminal law), Government departments (especially related to business or Revenue & Customs), PR, or in specific industries such as oil and gas, music or retail - the firm might see this as useful back-up for marketing as well as for technical expertise. There is sometimes an inferred assumption that your connections could help them to gain new business, although you should not lead them to expect this if you cannot deliver.
Fairness? Jumping through more and more hoops, Law Fairs and work experience applications – Sue Lenkowski
Welcome to the first of my bi-monthly blogs.
In these I will try to look at the most important issues concerning law students as you try to find your way around the recruitment maze. As an ex top twenty law firm graduate recruiter I will give you my views and advice and no doubt put forward the odd controversial comment!
This month I want to start by looking at the concept of fairness.
Alongside the Lib Dem partners in the coalition striving to redefine fairness following the CSR review I hear more and more law students say the concept of fairness is no longer valid in their search for a training contract. Faced with a saturated market both law firms and now post graduate institutions (see the move by Kaplan towards admissions tests for the LPC) are adding more and more hoops through which students must jump.
Fairness like beauty is in the eye of the beholder and whilst to a student with decent academics ( a 2.2 is now almost the end of your legal career) the cumbersome application forms, work experience and raft of psychometric tests and exercises is unfair .To a graduate recruiter faced with in many cases this year a 50% increase in applications this is fair and the only way to differentiate between candidates who in the words of Lord Sugar in the first episode of this seasons Apprentice “all look good on paper but so do fish and chips!”
In this saturated market more firms are making their training contract offers from their work experience /vacation schemes. The opportunity to see a student in the work place over one or two weeks having put them through a range of activities and tests ultimately increases the chance that the recruitment decision has the has the best chance of success. The cost of making a poor recruitment decision is massive and from a commercial perspective graduate recruiters need to show their contribution to the bottom-line.
In my experience too many students leave their applications strategy too late. The 80 20 rule applies to the student application process 80% of students making their applications at the last minute despite the long lead in time and well published deadlines.
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