Articles From the Team
Hot Property – who’s hot this week?
The legal profession can be a funny old place to be and a frustrating landscape in which to reliably advance your career. Sometimes you can’t get a conveyancing job to save your life and you have to diversify into landscape gardening or work in a call centre and then next minute, there’s a property boom on and you’re getting headhunted out of retirement. The music stops and its all change.
Of course, there are the predictable practice areas that (barring a major global crash….ahem) don’t seem to take more than a dent in their armour – commercial, corporate, commercial litigation etc but not everyone falls into one of those boxes.
Lawyers aren’t always known for their spontaneity and love of change but change can be good, and can bring opportunities.
Take the recent reversal of the Employment Tribunal Fees decision by the Supreme Court. After being somewhat in the doldrums for the last few years after the previous decision, we’re already starting to see more employment roles coming through, mainly at the junior end, with teams who are starting to feel rather under pressure with the increase in instructions, and this is only likely to increase. The teams that will come out best in this will be those who are prepared to be open and flexible about who they recruit, invest properly in training & development, and so grow along with their workflow, rather than sitting tight and waiting for that perfect candidate from a top tier who doesn’t exist in the market, whilst watching their own team members jump ship to somewhere less uncomfortably pressured.
If you ended up in a smaller firm doing mainly claimant employment but have always wanted to work on the respondent side with a larger commercial firm, and you’ve got strong academics to back you up, this is your moment! At least one top tier firm in Leeds will welcome your application right now and my guess is that there will be more following suit, in the top tiers and mid tiers, before too long. Seize the day!
And then there’s the GDPR…. Never have data protection lawyers been so in demand. If you have managed to build up even a modicum of experience in this area and are looking for a step up and a specialist role, this is your moment too! Word of warning – make sure the firm you join has a long term plan for their wider data protection capability that extends beyond next May when all the clients have been through their GDPR audits and you’ve helped them become compliant.
If you’d like to talk through your options in the market at the moment, please give Juliet Lawson at BCL Legal a call on 0113 323 6146 or drop her an email julietlawson@bcllegal.com.