Despite predictions earlier this year that training contract applications would soar as a result of the investment banking industry ­scaling back graduate recruitment programmes, many leading law firms said they received a similar ­number of applications in summer 2009 as in ­previous years, but that they expected a rise next year.

A graduate recruitment partner at a top 15 firm said: “We didn’t get the massive rise in applications we were expecting last year because I think people were put off due to the deferrals and increased competition.

“What we also noticed was many of the weaker candidates just didn’t ­bother applying this year.

“It’s a bit like a pressure cooker at the moment, and next year we’re going to see application numbers shoot up with the big backlog of students who’ve decided to delay their applications.”
A graduate recruitment manager at another firm said there could be a massive ­bottleneck of candidates.

She warned: “Conditions could potentially be a lot worse as gap-year students go head-to-head with ­penultimate- and final-year ­students against the ­backdrop of a contracting training contracts market.”

As a result firms are making students jump through more hoops, with extra ­testing and tougher ­selection procedures.

Herbert Smith is the ­latest firm to add an extra layer to its online application process after piloting a verbal reasoning test on its spring and summer ­vacation scheme candidates ­earlier this year.

Herbert Smith graduate recruitment manager Peter Chater said: “We get so many applications through nowadays that adding this online test will make sure that we’re picking from the best talent pool possible. We want ­quality not ­quantity.”

Berwin Leighton Paisner has added two new exercises to its selection procedure to test for ‘intellectual ­ability’, while LG is in the process of overhauling its entire recruitment process.

DLA Piper has introduced what it calls a “visual ­accuracy test”, whereby students who have successfully completed an assessment day are given a contract to correct for spelling and grammatical errors.

DLA Piper graduate recruitment officer Claire Evans said: “If a candidate’s prepared to jump through hoops like this then you know they’re much more dedicated to a career in the profession.”

Source : The Lawyer

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Partners in Lovells, the City law firm, and Hogan & Hartson, a leading American firm, have approved plans for a merger that will create the world’s ninth-biggest legal group by revenue.

The new firm, which will be known as Hogan Lovells, will have turnover of $1.8 billion (£1.1 billion) and around 2,500 lawyers, ranking it just behind Allen & Overy, the “magic circle” London firm in size.

Merger talks between the two firms were first revealed in October but required the approval of their respective partners, which was given yesterday. The combined firm will begin operating in May next year.

It is the biggest tie-up yet between a US and a British firm of comparable size but senior figures in the legal market said that several other big mergers are under discussion.

David Harris, Lovell’s managing partner, said: “Hogan Lovells presents a compelling proposition to our clients and to the market more generally.”

Lovells had fallen behind its “magic circle” rivals in recent years, with its turnover of £531 million last year less than half that of rivals such as Linklaters and Clifford Chance.

Hogan & Hartson, headquartered in Washington, is the 22nd-largest law firm in the US with revenue in 2008-09 of $922 million.

Source : The Times

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Two million unmarried couples need new legal rights to protect them from injustice if they separate, the new senior judge in charge of law reform has said.

In many cases long-term partners cannot be adequately protected by existing laws, according to Lord Justice Munby, chairman of the Law Commission. It was time that the law was brought up to date with changes in society. “It is a fact that the number of people marrying today is less than it has been for over 100 years,” he said.

The comments by Lord Justice Munby, who was giving his first interview since taking up the post, will boost the case for a reform of the law pending a decision expected next year from the Government.

The judge also indicated that there should be a review of the law on how a married couples’ finances are split on divorce. The Law Commission would soon be consulting on its next programme of work, he said, and the Court of Appeal had said that this area of law should be looked at.

Senior judges had consistently called for reform in this area after a series of “big money cases” with large awards and settlements. The Law Commission would therefore have to “think very carefully” and come up with good reasons for not doing it. Such cases have prompted accusations of unfairness, with wives taking large shares of their husband’s fortune.

It was unsatisfactory, he said, that there was a single set of criteria for dividing the wealth of all couples, however large the sum involved. “It might be an advantage having an approach for each.”

On unmarried couples, Lord Justice Munby said that a very significant proportion of children were conceived and born out of wedlock and the family unit was “very, very different from when I grew up”. Many children lived with step-siblings or others to whom they were not related, and were brought up by single mothers whose children were by different fathers.

“We cannot blind ourselves to the reality of this, particularly — and this has been the experience of judges — when the consequence of this, and the undying myth of the common law marriage, is that the lack of [legal arrangements] can cause serious injustice.” Couples “assume they will have some kind of protection,” he said.

“An astonishing number of people believe that there is something called common law marriage which will entitle them to a share of finances and property.”

He said that one way to tackle this myth was to educate people to understand the situation. But in his 35 years of professional practice such efforts had clearly had no effect — and “these injustices continue”.

The comments from Lord Justice Munby, who recently took up his three-year post in charge of the law reform watchdog, come as the Government awaits research findings from Scotland, where since 2006 unmarried couples have been granted legal rights on separation. The Law Commission of England and Wales, which he now heads, put forward proposals in 2007 for extending some legal rights where couples have children or would suffer hardship without a financial settlement.

Two months ago it put forward separate reforms under which unmarried couples would automatically inherit some of their partner’s estate on his or her death. Lord Justice Munby, a judge since 2000 in the family and administrative divisions of the High Court, said he did not believe that giving unmarried couples legal rights on separation as proposed by the Law Commission would undermine marriage.

“I don’t believe [they do],” he said. “Lawyers — and I would have thought it was the same for the Law Commission — have to have regard to the society in which we live; and it is a fact that our society has changed in some respects immensely, even in the time I have been a practising lawyer.”

Lord Justice Munby said that the days had long since gone when the business of judges was to enforce morality.

Although ultimately such changes were for Parliament, that did not mean the Law Commission should wash its hands. It had to recognise realities and come up with suggestions for reform, if the law created injustice.

He added that the Law Commission would shortly announce a “very exciting project consultation on adult social care”, or all the law relating to the care that people can receive in their own homes, from meals on wheels to help with washing and dressing. The reforms would save millions in bureaucracy and red tape, he said.

View Simply Law Jobs latest Family Law Jobs.

Source : The Times

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BPP had become the fashionable place for high-flying lawyers to do their one-year vocational training as solicitors or barristers.

The College of Law, its main rival, attracted greater numbers and had the high ground as a charitable trust. But the privately run BPP had the glitz and had positioned itself as the must-go place.

This summer it opened a £5 million business school in the heart of the City next to Norman Foster’s iconic “Gherkin” building, alongside its four law schools: two in London and centres in Leeds and Manchester. It plans centres in Bristol and Birmingham.

Originally, BPP trained accountants, moving into the rapidly growing legal training market about ten years ago. Now it trains 5,500 students, with a turnover of more than £50 million. A deal in 2001 with Nottingham Law School, to run a tailor-made course for the trainees of five top City law firms, put the school on the legal training map.

The College of Law bounced back, securing a similar deal with three other big City firms, including the global giant Clifford Chance. Since then, The College of Law has become the first law training college to be granted degree-awarding powers. It is said to nurture plans to become a full-blown university. But it will have to weather the present storm before that is back on the agenda.

Source : The Times

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As many as 5,000 lawyers could find themselves out of work next year as City law firms undergo a new round of job cuts, bankers close to the profession have predicted.
Royal Bank of Scotland, which handles the corporate bank accounts of 80 of Britain’s top 100 law firms, believes that the slump in demand for legal services will continue through next year, leading to further drastic cutbacks.
In a report obtained by The Times, RBS’s legal practices group said that the legal market would need to shrink by another 5 to 10 per cent next year if it was to return to the levels of profitability that existed before the financial crisis began.
A host of big firms have slashed their junior ranks this year, led by three of the City’s biggest firms.
Allen & Overy cut 450 staff worldwide, while rivals Clifford Chance and Linklaters made more than 200 employees redundant in London alone. Headcount across the sector fell by about 15 per cent in 2008-09, RBS said.
Many firms failed to react quickly enough to the downturn, perhaps underestimating its length and severity. Another wave of job losses is now likely as those firms adjust their headcount in line with lower work levels, RBS said.
That will lead to a fresh dent in profits at many firms. Partners’ earnings at the firms worst affected by the crisis plunged by up to 50 per cent last year.
Jeremy Black, associate partner in the professional practices group at Deloitte, which audits many of the top law firms, said that profits would fall again at many firms next year.
“The majority of law firms have found the last quarter very tough,” Mr Black said.
RBS is forecasting that the legal market will remain sluggish until at least the end of next year.
Britain’s 100 biggest law firms employ about 49,000 lawyers.

The Times

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Lawyers face having to return more than £25 million paid to them by mistake because of mismanagement in the running of the legal aid scheme.

Lord Bach, the Minister for Legal Aid, said that he had put in place an action plan to recover the amounts after a report by the National Audit Office last month found evidence of inaccurate payments. He said that measures were being taken to ensure that claims were more effectively scrutinised.

The move comes after a report today concludes that taxpayers are receiving a poor deal from the £1.2 billion a year spent on criminal legal aid.

The audit office says that the way that the scheme has been both administered and procured in England and Wales “presents risks to the value for money provided to the taxpayer, as well as to the sustainability of the service”. It says that the Legal Services Commission, which spends £125 million a year on running the scheme, fails to collate data centrally and, therefore, cannot determine whether it is paying a fair price to lawyers.

Despite introducing “significant market reforms” in recent years, the commission has not always piloted these or evaluated their impact.

Other findings by the spending watchdog include that there are tensions in the relationship between the profession and the Legal Services Commission.

More than one in three solicitors surveyed found the commission “unhelpful” and nearly one in three did not believe that it fully understood the legal system.

Dominic Grieve, Shadow Justice Secretary, said: “This is a savage indictment of this Government’s mismanagement of the legal aid budget.

“The Government doesn’t understand the market for legal services and consistently fails to spend money effectively.”

Edward Leigh, chairman of the Commons Committee of Public Accounts, said: “Criminal legal aid is a cornerstone of our legal system. It means that all defendants can get highly professional, legal representation when in a police station or a court of law.

“If only that high professionalism were matched in the Legal Services Commission’s administration of criminal legal aid.

“Unfortunately that is not so. The data the Commission uses to make payments for legal aid services is inaccurate and incomplete and the commission does not have a good enough understanding of the market from which it is buying these services.

“Without getting these basics right, how do they expect to get a good deal? Which of us would buy blind in this way if it were our own money?”

In 2008-09 legal aid spending was £2.09 billion: £1.18 billion on criminal legal aid and £0.91 billion on civil legal aid, covering 1.6 million and 1.3 million acts of advice respectively.

The Legal Services Commission spent another £125 million on the administration of civil and criminal legal aid.

England and Wales spend more per capita on legal aid than any other comparable nation except Northern Ireland. This is partly because of a higher level of prosecutions than in many other countries, the report says.

Source : The Times

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